News

Taxpayer-funded polygamy in the UK, France and Canada

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From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

When a Muslim woman was fined late last month in Nantes, France for driving while wearing a full face veil, the issue of polygamy burst into the spotlight when it was revealed that her husband had three other “wives.”

The incident has re-opened the debate in Europe over the dilemma faced by European governments with, on the one hand, aging native populations and below-replacement birth rates, and, on the other, burgeoning Muslim immigrant populations with customs incompatible with existing laws.

Objections to his alleged polygamy were answered by the woman’s husband, Lies Hebbadj, an Algerian-born Muslim, who pointed out that, in accordance with modern French customs, he does not have four wives but one wife and four mistresses, plus 12 children between them.

“If one can be stripped of one’s French nationality for having mistresses, then many French could lose theirs,” Mr. Hebbadj, a halal butcher, said after consulting his legal counsel. “As far as I know, mistresses are not forbidden, neither in France, nor in Islam.”

Hebbadj reportedly became a naturalized French citizen after he married Anne, his French wife. But French Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, has said that Hebbadj could have his citizenship revoked if he his found to be practicing polygamy. Authorities are investigating whether he was legally married to the other women in civil ceremonies, and whether he was profiting from single mother welfare benefits the other women may have been receiving fraudulently.

The same thing is also happening in Canada and the UK.

Excerpt:

It was a rude awakening for British and Canadian taxpayers when news emerged this week to confirm that their tax dollars were being used to support polygamous marriages.

[…]British legislation from 2003 opened the door to the current situation by allowing multiple wives to inherit assets from a deceased husband. More recently, the government investigated claims that polygamists were taking advantage of the welfare system. It should have led to fines and legal crackdowns on abusers; instead it led to the creation of a new set of rules that allow polygamists to claim welfare benefits for more than one wife.

The government obviously wasn’t that proud of its innovative actions, since it acted quietly and without public consultation in agreeing to pay polygamists subsidies for additional housing and to grant additional tax benefits. Worse still, all payments bypass the wives and are given directly to the husband.

British citizens only found out about these changes when a newspaper broke the story last week.

At the same time, Canadian Muslim leaders admitted that hundreds of Muslim men in Ontario are now claiming welfare and social benefits for their multiple wives. This is welfare fraud. The system is supposed to prevent applicants from claiming welfare for more than one spouse, but the fraud works because they don’t check for independent applications from multiple spouses in the same household.

Under Muslim (Sharia) law, men are permitted to have up to four wives. If the paperwork is handled properly, that can put taxpayers on the hook for a huge monthly payment of social benefits.

I know that governments waste a lot of money, but this seems to me to be a particularly egregious example of the perverse incentives created by the welfare state. I have friends in Canada who are married with TWO children and are paying 50% of their income in taxes. Is this what they are paying for? It’s very frustrating to contemplate that traditional Christians are subsidizing polygamy. And abortion, too!

I believe in life-long married love between one man and one woman, because that is the best for the children. What do children who are raised in a polygamous marriage believe about women? Will they see romantic love being modeled in their own homes? It just wounds my heart. What is good for a man is to be in love with a woman and more than the feeling is the act of loving her alone, to the exclusion of all others.

The state should not be paying weak, cowardly men to degrade women like this. And with taxpayer money.

My view of love

My view of love and marriage is explained in the related posts. I’m a Christian, so I believe in chastity and romantic love. Notice how different that is from the secular and Islamic traditions. Christianity invented chivalry – romantic love is a Christian ideal. When Christianity declines, romantic love declines.

Related posts on chastity, chivalry, courtship and marriage

News

How much does it cost to enforce immigration law?

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Story here from Byron York. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

On April 19, the same day the Arizona Legislature passed the immigration measure, the state’s two Republican senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl, unveiled a new plan to secure the U.S. border with Mexico. It’s a combination of completing and improving the border fence, adding new Border Patrol agents, expanding a policy of briefly jailing illegal border crossers, and several other programs already in existence. Although there is not yet an estimate of how much it would cost, the price would be vastly less than the sums going to bailouts, the stimulus, and the planned national health care system.

[…]Start with the fence. The Secure Fence Act, passed by Congress in 2006, specified 700 miles of the Southwest border to be secured with double-layered, reinforced fencing and other physical barriers.

[…]How much would it cost? Given that much of the basic structure already exists, perhaps $1 million per mile. Revamp the whole 700 miles and it’s $700 million.

[…]Kyl and McCain would add 3,000 new Border Patrol agents. A back-of-the-envelope cost estimate is about $100 million per 1,000 new agents, so the plan would cost about $300 million. The proposal also calls for hiring more U.S. marshals, clerks, and administrative staff, which would mean more costs.

[…]Then there is the jailing program, called Operation Streamline, which sends all illegal crossers to jail for a period of 15 to 60 days. When it has been tried selected areas, it has caused the illegal crossing rates to plummet.

[…]There are other expenses. For example, McCain and Kyl want to send a few thousand National Guard troops to the border. When this was done in 2007 and 2008, it cost a total of $1 billion.

The article is a nice little primer on border security measures and associated costs. Don’t forget that illegal immigration actually costs states money for things like increased emergency room usage, increased education costs, increased crime, increased prisons, etc.

We can recover a lot of the costs for border security measures by opening up the country to highly-skilled immigrant workers who pay more in taxes than they use in services, since they are (I think) not even eligible for unemployment, medicare, medicaid or social security – they have to leave when their work term ends.

It’s a national security issue. We have enemies, we need a secure border. Particularly with a naive, weak President whose policies of moral equivalence and appeasement have encourage several attacks on US soil in the past few months.

Podcasts

Doug Axe publishes a new peer-reviewed paper on protein folding

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A new podcast from ID the Future is worth listening to.

Participants

  • Jay Richards, Director of Research at the CRSC, (Discovery Institute)
  • Doug Axe, Director of the Biologic Institute

The MP3 file is here.

Topics

  • the new BIO-Complexity peer-reviewed journal
  • new peer-reviewed paper challenges Darwinian account of protein folding
  • proteins are found in every living system
  • a protein is a chain of parts called amino acids
  • there are 20 amino acids used in living systems
  • it’s like a 20-letter alphabet used to make sentences (proteins)
  • if the sequence is just right, it folds up and has a function
  • the information about the functional sequences is in the genome
  • the “protein fold” is the 3D shape that a functional protein takes on
  • the folding problem is good because you can TEST Darwinian mechanisms
  • the problem is simple enough to be tested rigorously in a lab
  • Question: how easy is it to create a sequence that folds?
  • English is a good analogy to the problem of protein folding
  • you have a long string of characters (e.g. – 200 letters)
  • each “letter” can be one of 20 amino acids
  • if you assign the letters randomly, you almost always get gibberish
  • there are tons of possible sequences of different letters
  • it’s like a 200 digit slot machine with each digit having 20 possibilities!
  • the number of sequences that would actually make sense is tiny
  • protein folding is the same
  • Doug’s paper assesses how many “tries” could have been attempted
  • Doug’s paper calculates the total number of possibilities
  • cells have arrived a large number of functional sequences
  • but only a small number of the total possibilities could have been tried
  • this is called the “sampling problem”
  • there isn’t enough time to test all of the possibilities (see previous paper below)
  • how did living systems arrive at the functional sequences so quickly?
  • there are some possible naturalistic scenarios for solving the problem
  • Doug’s new paper shows that none of the naturalistic explanations work
  • the only explanation left is that an intelligence sequenced the amino acids
  • it is identical to the way that I can sequence letters to make this post

A picture is worth a thousand words

Here’s a video clip from the DVD Darwin’s Dilemma showing the process:

If you would like to know more about Darwin’s Dilemma, you can read Brian Auten’s review of Darwin’s Dilemma.

Who are these guys?

I wrote a post before on Doug Axe’s previous publications in the Journal of Molecular Biology, where he researched how many of the possible sequences of amino acids have biological function. His PhD is from Caltech, and his post-doctoral research on proteins was conducted at Cambridge University.

Jay Richards is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute and a Contributing Editor of The American at the American Enterprise Institute. In recent years he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute. His PhD is from Princeton University.

Related posts