felix hominum

quote of the day - Dr Henry Morgentaler

I'm not going to debate whether he should have gotten the award.  What caught my eye was a quote in the Globe and Mail:

"The fact that some people are opposed on religious grounds mainly, well, that doesn't bother me as long as they're not allowed to influence other people by force or by whatever other means," he said.

Globe and Mail
(emphasis added)

I'll gladly give him the "force" thing. 

But "by whatever other means"?  Really?  Seriously?  This has got to be a case of a truncated quote, or missing context, or bad reporting, because otherwise....ummmm... you are against something like this:

Technological advances in fetal screening are presenting parents, and doctors, with enormous ethical, psychological and social dilemmas. Vulnerable, and with limited, biased, information, more than 90% of prospective parents in Canada choose termination if their fetus is determined in prenatal screening to have Down
Syndrome. They may never know there is a world of resources, possibilities and support out there. In spite of tireless efforts from support groups their information rarely reach prospective parents at the time they need it most.

In Canada the recent recommended expansion of screening protocols called for by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Canada has not been accompanied by a call for the expansion of the provision of non prejudicial information which outlines not just the potential medical conditions sometimes associated with Down syndrome but also about the richly rewarding lives possible for citizens with developmental disabilities in Canada. The United States recently called for the re-introduction a Prenatal Diagnosed Condition Awareness Act.

The CDSS acknowledges that in Canada women have the legal right to make decisions about the progression of their pregnancies; the CDSS insists that each individual family be given, without prejudice, information that accurately reflects the realities of a life with Down syndrome and other developmental disabilities.

Canadian Down Syndrome Society

So to live by Dr Morgentaler's quoted code of ethics, if someone comes up and says to me:  "Hey, I am thinking of abortion, because we just found out that there might be some sort of genetic thing happening with the fetus, and we hear that kids with Down Syndrome are awful and suffer a lot and all that stuff  - well, it's just better to have the abortion now",  I should simply keep silent?  I, being a "religeous" person should not be "allowed to influence other people" by "whatever other means", such as giving them information as presented by the CDSS?

Well, I'll have to think more about this.

 

Persians, Canadians and Barbarians

The Persians were barbarians, the Greeks thought, not because they were weak (they were mighty) or stupid (they were clever) or rustic (they built lavish cities).  They were barbarians because they were not free.  Or, to put it more precisely, they had become accustomed to living under despotism; they lacked the will to rise up against their overlords and govern themselves, city by city, by the use of their own minds and strong arms.  The barbarian may arouse pity, if he can no longer conceive of what it would be to stand tall and speak candidly; by this definition, the lowlier of the Calormenes in Lewis' Chronicles are pitiable barbarians.  Or he may arouse a kind of half-comic aversion, as do the Cyclopses in the Odyssey, who gather in no assemblies, pass no laws, unite for no large-scale industry or agriculture, and do not give homage to the politically organized gods of Olympus, but mind their own petty business, each of them ignoring his neighbors -- as the bleeding oaf Polyphemus finds to his discomfiture.  Or the barbarian may be one of the privileged few who cause others to truckle to his will, like the semisavage tyrants of Sicity (Agathocles, Hiero, Dionysus).

     Whatever the case, the barbarian is missing something central to being human: living as a free man with duties and responsibilities in a community, taking part in spirited debate, and not having to duck and scrape when some big shot from a distant Persepolis descends with the imperial decree.  The free man is both a dutiful son of his country and a father for it; the city commands his allegiance, but it is also in part his creation, his patrimony, which he will pass along to his descendants in turn.  The Greeks claim that when this political liberty -- it is not the radical individualism of a Cyclops in his cave -- is lacking, that itself is barbaric, regardless of whether the people possess sweet and gentle manners.  My family and I are preparing to go north for the summer, where the people of Canada have had the liberties of their small communities snatched from them by a bad constitution and a tyrannical court.  They are, as one defender of liberty has put it, a Nation of Bastards, wards of the state.  This novel kind of barbarism does overgo the barbarism of Persia, though, because the ancient Persians were willing enough to grant their outlands a measure of home rule; witness Cyrus's humane returning of the Jews to their homeland.  Chief Justice McLachlin of Canada will not allow such local variations for a Calgary or a Thunder Bay.  When it comes to detaching Canadians from the very culture that gave rise to Canada in the first place, only a mockery of debate is allowed.  And only the shreds and patches of political opposition, too.  Approach the presence, Clayton, Terence, Angus.  Bow with awful reverence prone, flat as the Canadian shield.  I'm not gloating over you, my friends of the permafrost.  We in America will soon be leaving our nose-prints in the dirt, too.

Anthony Esolen, in Mere Comments

Speaking of things which deal with Classics, I've been re-reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire over the last 2 weeks.  It is fascinating stuff.

 

understatement headline...

Zimbabwe opposition fears vote-rigging

Zimbabwe's election commission today began releasing a trickle of results from Saturday's presidential and parliamentary elections as the opposition voiced fears that the count was being manipulated in favour of the president, Robert Mugabe.

The Guardian

Rex Murphy on the Osgoode 4 & the case against Maclean's

Human Rights Gone Awry

What I do not associate with this deep and noble concept is getting ticked off by something you read in a magazine - or for that matter hear on television - and then scampering off to a handful - well, three - of Canada's proliferate human rights commissions - seeking to score off the magazine: this is what four Osgoode Hall law students and graduates --- a very definition of the 'marginalized' --- under the banner of the Canadian Islamic Congress have done after reading an excerpt from Mark Steyn's America Alone in Maclean’s. The complainants read the article as “flagrantly islamophobic”.

Maclean’s magazine? Well, we all know what a hotbed of radical bigotry and vile prejudice Maclean’s magazine has been. Go away … for what seems like a century Maclean’s was no more "offensive" (that is the can’t term of choice these days) than a down comforter on a cold day and if Mark Steyn's article offended them: so what? Not every article in every magazine of newspaper is meant to be a valentine card addressed to every reader's self-esteem. Maclean’s published a bushel of letters following the article's appearance: some praised it: others scorned it. That's freedom of speech: that's democracy: that's the messy business we call the exchange of ideas and opinions.

full text here

And Daniel Simard, one of the complainants, has this to say, although the comments are closed...

Moving on, as I’m sure you are all are aware, I am party to a human rights complaint waged against Maclean’s magazine for the publication of an article written by Mark Steyn. Because of this, I have been one of the hot topics in the blogging world, and as a result of this and some of my posts, I have subjected our site and staff to increased scrutiny, censure and attack.

I want you all to know that I had no intention of dragging lawiscool into my personal disputes. Admittedly, I underestimated the unscrupulousness of my frantic foes and lacked the foresight necessary to obviate lawiscool’s subjection. I am grateful that you all are bearing with me and supporting me in my right and privilege to convey my messages through our blog. I also want you all to know that I grappled with the thought of excluding posts related to my dispute, but, rather than accede defeat to my crazed critics I decided it would be unjust to restrict the publication of fair and reasonable commentary.

Muslims Against Sharia has a post on the topic as well:

By now, most people living in Canada and a great many living in the US will know that a group of students at Osgoode Hall Law School have decided to take the Canadian weekly newsmagazine, Macleans, before several provincial incarnations of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Their charge? The Canadian Islamic Congress is offended by passages from Mark Steyn's book, America Alone, which were published in an issue of MacLeans, the most offensive of which, is a quote from a Danish Muslim cleric (see second page), which the students seem not to have grasped (and what does that say about the standards at that once great, grand old institution, Osgoode Hall?).

And some reflections from the Canadian Islamic Congress site, highlighting thoughts from a 2006 strategy meeting:

II - Short-Term Action Plan

1  Rejecting media-imposed calls for Muslim "extremist/moderate" discourse.
2  Having more Muslim community media.
3  Sending more letters to editors and/or using Press Councils, etc etc as means to address frequent anti-Islam bias in the media.
4  Inviting more guests of other faiths to attend Friday prayers to make them more aware of Islam and Muslims.
5  Making a greater effort to defend and advocate for Muslim rights and responsibilities.
6  Encouraging greater participation in elections at all levels (federal, provincial, and municipal) and on government and professional boards.
7  Establishing a legal defense fund.
8  Training more Muslim representatives/spokespersons in how to use Canadian media effectively.
9  Enhancing Da’wa (education) efforts among Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Benazir Bhutto assassinated

Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide attack.
Ms Bhutto had just addressed an election rally in Rawalpindi when she was shot in the neck by a gunman who then set off a bomb.

At least 16 other people died in the attack and several more were injured.

from the BBC

update on "law is cool", steyn & all that jazz

Update: The Canadian Islamic Congress has a pdf on their site entitled: 

MACLEANS MAGAZINE: A CASE STUDY OF
MEDIA-PROPAGATED ISLAMOPHOBIA
Prepared by:
Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Skeikh, Naseem Mithoowani
LLB (Osgoode Hall Law School – 2007)
Ali Ahmed
LLB Candidate (Osgoode Hall Law School - 2008)
Daniel Simard
LLB Candidate (Osgoode Hall Law School - 2009)

The Canadian Islamic Congress and 4 law students from Osgoode have requested proceedings in our Human Rights Commissions against Maclean's magazine for publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn's recent book.

Further research into the legal issues was conducted over the Christmas season.  This consisted mostly of several glasses of port in front of a roaring fire at the home of the local paterfamilias. He recently retired from the bench, and has more than a passing interest in the variety of issues involved in this case.  Apart from all the interesting conversation around justice, multiculturalism, freedom of expression, I also discovered (i think after the 3rd glass) that he has, tucked away in the library, a document signed by Sir John A himself.  Great-great Granddad was sworn into judicial office by Canada's first Prime Minister.  I wonder what he would make of the case...

Posts at LawisCool are here and here.

Mark Steyn has comments here., and links to the text of the complaints can be found on this page.

In addition, there is this story about a Catholic journal being brought under the same body, for publishing stuff which, well, appears to be the teaching of the Catholic Church:

Today, Catholic Insight magazine has also become a victim of the new anti-religion. We, too, have been denounced to the Canadian Human Rights Commission in Ottawa for speaking out against the activists who agitated for adding so-called sexual orientation to the Hate Crimes Act in 2003 and the legalization of same-sex “marriage” in 2005. The politically correct activists brook no opposition. See the article ”Catholic Insight under human rights attack”, page 10; and David Warren,“Suing for silence”, page 17.

from here

"Suing for silence" - has a nice ring, no?

related post:  an interesting article or two on the Mark Steyn affair

Goodbye Oscar.

Food for thought.  Commenting at CBC on the death of Aqsa Parvez,  the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress (the same person bringing the complaints) had this to say:

"I don't want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue," said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. "It is a teenager issue."

an interesting article or two on the Mark Steyn affair

Update:  the interwebs are interesting...

One of the folks involved in the complaint appears connected to the group blog "Law is Cool".  It is by a group of law students.  Go figure.  There has been some, err, discussion around that blog.  I'll get all the links up later.

a comment left at Magicstats:

Canadian dude

This almost seems comical; none of you actually address the substantive content of the blog in question.

And looking at the other posts on this blog and the others in his fan base, the contents are as bad and at times worse than Steyn’s.

You guys are a bunch of scary people down there in the U.S. Keep your notions of freedom on that side of the border, we don’t want it.

a comment left at Jay Currie's blog:

Canadian dude

This almost seems comical; none of you actually address the substantive content of the blog in question.

And looking at the other posts on this blog and the others in his fan base, the contents are as bad and at times worse than Steyn’s.

You guys are a bunch of scary people down there in the U.S. Keep your notions of freedom on that side of the border, we don’t want it.

Magicstats' observations? 

In like manner, because of Canadian dude’s lack of knowledge about the internet and blogging, his claim to have read "other posts on this blog" is proven false and his true origin exposed. By consulting my StatCounter service, I discovered that Canadian dude is a Law Is Cool blogger and visited only one post at my blog, namely, the one he commented on.

The administrator's comment page at my blog identifies Canadian dude's IP address as 99.243.245.229.  Tracking down that IP address at StatCounter's "Recent Pageload Activity" log brought up the Visitor Analysis, the Navigation Path from which is posted below.  (Sorry about the small size of the graphic.  Clicking on the image will bring up a full-size view.)

From the London Free Press:

In a flagrant attack on freedom of the press, the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) has filed three human rights complaints against Maclean's magazine and its editor-in-chief, Kenneth Whyte, accusing them of spreading "hatred and contempt" for Muslims, by publishing an article by Mark Steyn on Oct. 23, 2006, entitled The Future Belongs to Islam.

The article in dispute is an excerpt from Steyn's bestselling book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Consider the implications: By the logic of the CIC's attack on Maclean's magazine, the owners and operators of Canadian libraries and bookstores could also be charged with violating the human rights of Muslims by making not just Steyn's article but also his entire book widely available to Canadians throughout the country.

from the same article, this is worth pondering:

Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, underlined the danger last year after the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada filed a human rights complaint against the Western Standard for republishing a set of Danish cartoons that many Muslims found offensive. In an article in the Calgary Herald, Borovoy wrote: "During the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create (human rights) commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech."

And from Naseem Mithoowani, Khurrum Awan , Muneeza Sheikh and Daniel Simard, an article in the National Post:

What we did ask for, however, was an opportunity for the Muslim community to participate in the "free marketplace" of ideas. It is our belief that in its truest form, freedom of expression results in a lively debate among all interested parties -- not just among those who play by their own exclusionary rules. If Maclean's wants to publish articles alleging that many Muslims are "hot for jihad," it has to provide an opportunity to respond.

This issue isn't about attacking journalists or stifling free expression. It's about ensuring that our media outlets provide a forum for open debate and argument.

ps. if you don't know much about this issue, I think you should.

Christians disappearing from West Bank

The Palestinian Christian population has dipped to 1.5 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, down from at least 15% a half century ago, according to some estimates.

No one city in the Holy Land is more indicative of the great exodus of Christians than Bethlehem, which fell under full Palestinian control last decade as part of the Oslo Accords.

The town of 30,000 is now less than 20% Christian, after decades when Christians were the majority. Elsewhere in the Palestinian territories, only about 3,000 Christians, mostly Greek Orthodox, live in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, out of a strongly conservative Muslim population of 1.4 million.

"In a society where Arab Christians have no voice and no protection it is no surprise that they are leaving," he said.

In his address, Weiner pointedly downplayed the effects that Israeli security measures, such as the security barrier being built between Israel and the West Bank, have had on the Christian Arabs living in the West Bank.

The barrier, which is especially conspicuous at the entrance to Bethlehem where it is a concrete wall, is an issue which many Palestinian Christian clerics have pointed to, along with the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as a central cause of Christian emigration.

Weiner argued there was a "180 degree difference" between the public statements coming out of the mainstream Christian leadership in the Holy Land - who "sing the PA's tune" and blame Israel for all the Christian Arabs' ills - and people's experience on the ground.

"The truth is beginning to come out," he said. "The question is what is being done with the truth."

His comments come just months after a prominent Christian activist, Rami Khader Ayyad, 32, was killed in Gaza.

from the Jerusalem post

quote: John Howard Yoder & post-critical reading

I have been called both "fundamentalist" and "pietist" by unsympathetic readers, since they put me in an already-closed slot in their minds, to which they had relegated the use of the Bible.  They did not read me carefully enough to be aware that my reading of the scriptural texts was post- and not pre- critical.

John Howard Yoder
"The Politics of Jesus Revisited"
unpublished lecture delivered in 1997, Can Mennonite Center, full text here (pdf) from Notre Dame archive

Well, that's just it, isn't it?

Budziszewski on Francis Schaeffer: A Christian Manifesto

I was in high school when Francis Schaeffer published A Christian Manifesto in 1981.  By the time I was an undergrad a few years later, I had been introduced to Schaeffer by association with IVCF.  Well, actually, it was by association with a particular student who was involved in IVCF.  I was rather partial at the time to a rather more liturgical form of Christian piety.  In those days they served sherry after High Mass on Thursdays.  But I digress.

In "Evangelicals in the Public Square", Budziszewski claims "it was Schaeffer who first made evangelicals aware of the culture war, an odd sort of war in which, he complained, so far only the other side had shown up to fight [73].  In response to what he saw as a growing systemic program of secular humanism, Schaeffer claimed that Christians have been negligent because they "have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals". (Manifesto, rev. ed.; Wheaton: Crossway, 1982, p 17).

Budziszewski examines several of Schaeffer's points.  First is the gradual replacement of a "vaguely Christian" worldview (Manifesto, 17) with the worldview of secular humanism.  In great part Schaeffer blames lawyers and liberal theologians [Budziszewski, 74-75].  What has happened, Schaeffer argued, is that Christian pietism has allowed for a compartmentalization of faith - Christians "have acted as though nothing more were at stake than a few particular truths, like Christ's virgin birth..." [75]  Budziszewski see in this a bit of a swipe at the Fundamentalist movement.  While the "secularists" have seen things in terms of transforming a whole society, Christians have been involved in only "bits and pieces".

Authority and the State: aside

Schaeffer was concerned with the removal of moral absolutes.  The overall result of the secularizing tendency, particularly in the state, is to eliminate any basis for authority beyond the state.  The flip side of course is that there is then no limiting of the state:  it is the state which can grant rights, and therefore the state can remove them.  There is no grounding of authority in anything higher than the collective.

Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:

It is interesting to stop at this point and consider the preamble to our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  Why does our Charter recognize "the supremacy of God" and the "rule of law" - in that order?  It is argued by some that such concepts and language have no place in the state.  But what are the implications of removing any notion of an authority higher than the state? And what are the implications for a state which recognizes no authority, no "supremacy", greater than its own collective?

To be continued:  laundry calls...

related posts:

• J. Budziszewski: Evangelicals in the Public Square 
• Budziszewski on Carl FH Henry, Evangelical Politics and The Uneasy Conscience
• Coffee and the Charter of Rights