US House Speaker John Boehner urged Iran on Wednesday to spare the life of an Iranian pastor reportedly facing execution for refusing to recant his Christian faith and return to Islam.
“I urge Iran?s leaders to abandon this dark path, spare Yusef Nadarkhani’s life, and grant him a full and unconditional release,” Boehner, a Republican and the number-three US elected official, said in a statement.
Nadarkhani, now in his early 30s, converted from Islam to Christianity at the age of 19 and became a pastor of a small evangelical community called the Church of Iran.
He was arrested in October 2009 and condemned to death for apostasy under Iran’s Islamic Sharia laws, which however allow for such verdicts to be overturned if the convicted person “repents” and renounces his conversion.
After his conviction was upheld by an appeal court in Gilan province in September 2010, Nadarkhani turned to the supreme court. His wife, who was initially sentenced to life imprisonment, was released on appeal.
In July, Nadarkhani’s lawyer told AFP that Iran’s supreme court and overturned the death sentence and sent the case back to the court in his hometown of Rasht — but fresh media reports this week said a provincial court in Gilan had again sentenced him to death.
“Religious freedom is a universal human right,” Boehner declared, saying the prospects Nadarkhani could be executed “unless he disavows his Christian faith are distressing for people of every country and creed.
“While Iran’s government claims to promote tolerance, it continues to imprison many of its people because of their faith. This goes beyond the law to an issue of fundamental respect for human dignity,” said Boehner.
He’s the top Republican, so his voice carries weight.
A New Brunswick father who was convicted of assault for spanking his 6-year-old son in 2009 has been granted a re-trial by the New Brunswick Court of Appeal.
The court found that the original trial judge was too “subjective” in determining the severity of the spanking, and pointed out that Canadian law allows corporal punishment as long as the child is between two and 12 years old and only reasonable force is used.
In the original trial, the father told the court that he, his wife and their three children were driving from their home in Durham Bridge to a museum in Fredericton in August 2009 when his 6-year-old son became unruly. The court heard that the boy was screaming in the back seat, kicking the front seats, throwing things and unbuckling his seatbelt. The father said he repeatedly tried to calm the boy down and threatened to spank him if the bad behavior continued.
The mother eventually stopped the car and the father spanked the boy three times on the clothed buttocks, according to his testimony, adding that he slapped his own leg several times to warn the boy before administering the spanking.
Millicent Boldon, who testified at the original trial as a witness of the event, told the court she called the police after seeing the man slap the boy “at least ten times,” and heard the child yelling, “You’re beating me senseless. Stop. You’re hurting me.”
Another witness, Jim Burns, said he couldn’t tell if the father was striking the boy or not, as their backs were turned to him, but testified that he saw 18 “blows” delivered.
But Justice Richard Bell and Justice Wallace Turnbull said in their decision that they overturned the original conviction because the original judge, who is not named in the appeal ruling, erred in giving more credence to witnesses whose testimony was inconsistent than to the father, stating the original judge “applied a subjective standard when she said ‘no spanking should go on and on to the point that strangers pick up the phone and call the police.’”
According to Justice Bell, “In this case the trial judge’s sole basis for convicting the appellant flowed from the duration of the punishment. In my view she applied a subjective standard by delegating to an onlooker the determination of guilt or innocence.”
The disturbing thing about this situation is that the husband and wife did not make any mistake. Normally, I can blame the man for marrying a feminist who opposes moral judgment and discipline of any kind. But in this case, it’s not the wife who is to blame. It’s some other woman who calls the police. I think it’s significant that the caller in question is female and that the judge was female. It’s similar to the other case from Quebec in which a daughter and mother got a female lawyer and went to a female judge in order to get the father’s grounding of the daughter overturned. This case is much worse than that case, because there was nothing that could be done by the husband and wife to prevent it.
Why would any man get married in a society in which men are not respected as providers or the protectors in the family? Where men don’t have the right to try to form the character the children will have, (instead of the public schools, where a huge majority of the teachers are female)? What is the point of marriage for a man if he is just going to be a sperm donor and ATM? Do men have any role in disciplining children who behave in an abusive and selfish manner – especially to their own mothers? If not, then why should a man bother marrying at all, if he is just going to produce children who start out their lives by not respecting their own mothers? Do people not realize that boys who are raised without fathers are exactly the men who are more likely to treat women badly? No man should get involved in a family if all he is going to do is pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce children who lack self-control and responsibility. What is the point of that?
By the way, I think it would be very ironic if the woman who made the call were pro-abortion, which is quite likely to be the case, in Canada.
Advocates for the unemployed have cheered a push by the Obama administration to ban discrimination against the jobless. But business groups and their allies are calling the effort unnecessary and counterproductive.
[…]Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have introduced similar measures. Obama said recently that discrimination against the unemployed makes “absolutely no sense,” especially because many people find themselves out of work through no fault of their own.
[…]Lawrence Lorber, a labor law specialist who represents employers, told the paper the president’s proposal “opens another avenue of employment litigation and nuisance lawsuits.”
Louie Gohmert, a Republican representative from Texas, went further. He told the Times that the proposal would send the following message: “If you’re unemployed and you go to apply for a job, and you’re not hired for that job, see a lawyer. You may be able to file a claim because you got discriminated against because you were unemployed.”
Now the question I have for you is this: will this law encourage companies to post more open positions? Or will it discourage companies from posting any new jobs? It seems to me that companies will hire fewer people, since trying to hire people will now carry the treat of a lawsuit from each of the people who does not get the job. Why would a business expose themselves to a lawsuit? They will instead just ship their jobs overseas where they can hire people without being sued.
So it turns out that I was exactly right about how Obama names his bills according to the exact opposite of what they will actually do. The “job creation bill” will destroy jobs. Period.
And I think that sheds light on the policies of this administration. This is why we have double the unemployment rate that we had under George W. Bush. Because we are being governed by people who don’t understand the first thing about business or economics. They have been borrowing massive amounts of cash from future generations and lowering interest rates in order to artificially “goose” the economy. It hasn’t worked, but they haven’t learned their lesson. They want to make policy that sounds good – policy that gets them applause from their special interest groups – but those people (e.g. – Hollywood celebrities) don’t understand how jobs are created. So why make policy based on their applause? Instead, we should be making laws that tax and regulate businesses less. That’s what makes them hire more people.
