Tag Archives: Court

News

Woman who strangled newborn baby given suspended sentence with probation

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Scheming unborn baby wants to be a judge when he grows up
Scheming unborn baby contemplates becoming a judge

From Yahoo News. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

An Alberta woman won’t be going to prison for strangling her newborn baby with her thong underwear.

Katrina Effert, 25, wiped away tears as an Edmonton judge ruled Friday she can serve a three-year suspended sentence with probation.

Effert was 19 when she secretly gave birth in her parent’s basement in Wetaskiwin, south of Edmonton, in April 2005. She then tossed the baby’s corpse over a fence into a neighbour’s backyard.

Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Joanne Veit said the public naturally grieves for the dead baby boy.

“But Canadians also grieve for the mother,” she said. “This is a classic infanticide case — killing a newborn after a hidden pregnancy by a mother who was alone and unsupported.”

Effert was twice convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 10 years. But the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled earlier this year that the murder conviction was unreasonable and substituted one of infanticide.

Medical experts testified Effert had a disturbed mind when she killed her baby.

The Crown has already asked the Supreme Court of Canada to review the case.

Prosecutor John Laluk said Effert deserved four years in prison because she showed no remorse for her crime by lying to police and initially blaming her boyfriend for the killing.

The maximum sentence for infanticide is five years, but Veit said prison time is rarely handed out for such offences. She said the wildly inconsistent stories Effert gave police were actually “painful evidence” of her mental imbalance at the time.

As part of her probation, Effert must notify officials if she becomes pregnant again so she can receive assistance and counselling.

Veit described Effert as a person of good character with no prior criminal record who spent nearly six years living under restrictive bail conditions.

More from the judge from Life News.

Excerpt:

But part of the ruling that also has pro-life advocates troubled is Judge Veit’s decision that Canada’s acceptance of legalized abortion entitled Effert to kill her child. Judge Veit ruled, according to multiple media reports, that because Canada allows abortions it reflects how “while many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support.”

“Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother,” said Veit, who said that, while what Effert did was “very grave,” there were no aggravating factors. Prosecutors said the aggravating factors included how Effert initially lied to police about whether she was a virgin and how she initially tried to blame the father of the child for her actions.

“I am of the view that those actions, along with the action of throwing her baby’s body over her back fence, are painful evidence of Ms. Effert’s irrational behavior as a result of her disturbed mind,”the judge said, according to the Sun News Network. “In summary, this is a classic infanticide case – the killing of a newborn or a justborn after a hidden pregnancy by a mother who was alone and unsupported.”

Ultimately, the judge rejected prosecutors’ call for a four-year prison term, saying the suspended sentence is “just” in the case.

At times like this, I think that it is a good thing for us to consider what it takes to make a judge like this, to see whether it might be possible to make one by having a plan. That way, instead of having a judge who opposes protecting unborn on the bench, we can have one who supports protecting the unborn instead. So how do we make our own judges?

How to make a judge

Let’s take a look at the judge’s credentials and see why she was picked to be a judge.

Details:

Born September 9, 1942 at Brantford, Ontario. Education at University of Ottawa; London School of Economics. Chair, Alberta Securities Commission 1977-81. Appointed judge of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench, and ex officio member of the Alberta Court of Appeal, June, 1981. Appointed deputy judge of the Superior Court of the Northwest Territories, August 21, 1991. Appointed judge of the Court Martial Appeal Court of Canada June 7, 1990.

Wow, she is a smart lady – she has a good resume, too. I don’t think that too many people have qualifications like hers. Making a good twin of her would be pretty tough to do, and there are no guarantees of success.

Here are some steps that I would recommend to Christian parents if they wanted to have a better than average chance to make a judge like this judge.

  1. The Christian man, when single, should study in a tough field, even if he hates it, like computer science.
  2. The Christian woman, when single, should study in a tough field, even if she hates it, like computer science.
  3. Both of them should work at jobs that pay well, even if they hate them, and save their money in preparation for their marriage.
  4. They should get married, and then she should stay at home to homeschool several children.
  5. They should try to be as frugal as possible so they can afford homeschooling, private schools and college tuition.
  6. They should teach their children about all the different areas in the world where the truth of Christianity or Christian values are being attacked by different ideologies and speculations, in this case, by feminism and abortion.
  7. They should analyze the skills and talents of each of their children, and try to lead them towards fields where they can have an influence on the world for truth and for goodness. The main criteria is not what the child wants, but what the child can do well, and what serves God the most. What the child wants is a factor, but not the main factor.
  8. One of the children might go on to become a judge.

Might this work? It seems to me that it is more likely to produce the judge than the alternative view, which is not studying hard topics, not taking hard jobs, not being frugal, not having a stay-at-home homeschooling mom, and not saving up college tuition. I don’t think it would be fun or easy, but it is the good and loving thing to do, if we care about what happens to little babies.

I remember taking second year calculus back when I was doing my undergraduate degree in computer science, (I also have the Masters degree in computer science), and I was crying because it was so hard for me to understand it. I failed my first calculus test in that class, and ended up with a B as a final grade. I remember that my Dad felt very badly about how hard it was for me, and he would keep bringing me tea and snacks and he would try to encourage me and drive me to my night classes and pick me up afterwards – even though he hated driving at night.

I graduated with highest honors. I was the first one in my family – a family of immigrants – to go on to graduate school, and graduated with a 3.9 GPA. But when I was crying, and there was no one to help me, I felt very sad about it. You do what you have to do, not what you want to do. And as a result of that suffering, I now have the money I need to pay for Christian scholars to come out to churches and universities where my friends have organized lectures and debates for people to see.

UPDATE: My buddy Justin tells me to link to this post at the Canadian bioethics site Unmasking Choice.

News

Gay activist explains how same-sex marriage will change marriage

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From THE ADVOCATE, the leading gay newspaper. (Note: This article contains vulgar language)

The URL is here: [http://www.advocate.com/printArticle.aspx?id=211497]

Excerpt:

We often protest when homophobes insist that same sex marriage will change marriage for straight people too. But in some ways, they’re right. Here’s how gay relationships will change the institution—but for the better.

[…]Anti-equality right-wingers have long insisted that allowing gays to marry will destroy the sanctity of “traditional marriage,” and, of course, the logical, liberal party-line response has long been “No, it won’t.” But what if—for once—the sanctimonious crazies are right? Could the gay male tradition of open relationships actually alter marriage as we know it? And would that be such a bad thing? With divorce rates at an all-time high and news reports full of famous marriages crumbling at the hand of flagrant infidelities (see: Schwarzenegger, Arnold), perhaps now is the perfect time for the gays to conduct a little marriage makeover.

[…]Even many gay male couples, who [Dan] Savage describes as having “perfected nonmonogamy,” fear disclosing that their relationship is anything but one-on-one. Gary (not his real name) is out in every area of his life, and his family is completely supportive. “But I don’t tell my family, even my brother—who I’m incredibly close with—that I have sex outside of the relationship with Ben,” his partner of 14 years, he says. “I have never said that to him.”

Gary and Ben, who live in Los Angeles, won’t reveal their real names because Ben has a high-profile career in television. “We have too much to lose,” Gary says. “But we also don’t want people passing judgment on us.” Which is why they don’t even tell most of their friends.

Sex therapist Timaree Schmit says she can understand gay couples’ desire to conform—at least outwardly—to the kind of conventional relationship that society deems “deserving” of marriage rights. “It’s been a big part of campaigning for marriage equality to repeatedly prove the ‘normalcy’ and stability of same-sex couples. People may feel pressure to make their relationship fit into a more acceptable box.”

Blake Spears and Lanz Lowen recently completed The Couples Study (TheCouplesStudy.com), an examination of nonmonogamy among 86 gay couples. A long-term gay couple themselves (36 years), they had found that little research had been conducted on how gay men navigate this terrain, so they embarked on an admittedly limited and self-selective study (they found many long-term couples who fit the bill, but relatively few who were willing to participate), but one that gives a view of the diversity of experiences. In fact, the thing they found most striking is that while nonmonogamy seems to be fairly pervasive among gay couples (though they did not hear from the many monogamous pairs), there is surprisingly little support within the gay population for such relationships.

Spears and Lowen were also surprised to discover such a wide range of kinds of nonmonogamy. “We thought we might find some models that we could slot some couples into,” says Spears, “but people had such a wide variety of approaches to nonmonogamy. And I think it spoke to the amount of creativity in the gay community.” They did identify some key characteristics and outlined the various ways in which couples live out their agreements, including having sex beyond the couple (12% do so together; 56% do it both together and separately; 32% play only independently — stats that seem to shift as relationships evolve), degrees of talking about their experiences together (40% had full disclosure; 40% had varying degrees of it; 20% took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach…), and kinds of outside sexual contact (34% will only have no-strings, anonymous encounters; 40% have friends with benefits; and some couples in both the aforementioned categories have differing preferences, meaning one likes it anonymous and the partner likes to have sex with friends). Seventy-five percent of the study’s participants put some rules on what constitutes their commitment and what will violate it.

Forty-two percent of the study’s participants agreed to open up within the first three months of their relationship, while 20% agreed on nonmonogamy only after a period of turmoil in which one partner was caught having cheated.

This article dovetails nicely with the research I had written about showing that gay unions are nothing like traditional married couples. And the differences matter when children are brought into the mix. It seems to me that this is nothing like traditional male-female marriage, where two opposite sex people join tightly in an exclusive, life-long, love relationship in order to provide a stable environment for the children they create – whom they are both bonded to by blood. Children growing up with two opposite-sex parents bonded to each other for life will learn a very different view of love, marriage and self-sacrifice than will children being raised by gay couples.

The article seems to argue that the distinctive characteristics of same-sex unions would come to influence society’s perception of what marriage is, if same-sex marriage were to be viewed as being equal to marriage in the eyes of the law. A very good article to read about this is Dennis Prager’s article, entitled “California Decision Will Radically Change Society“.

Public schools are part of the plan

In a related article, New Jersey public schools are pulling gay erotic literature out of the hands of children in response to parent complaints.

Excerpt:

A New Jersey school district has apologized to parents after requiring high school students to read books that include graphic depictions of lesbian sex and a homosexual orgy.

The books were on a required summer reading list for middle school and high school students. The district decided to pull the book off the list, with the start of school just days away.

[…]One book, “Norwegian Wood,” was on a list for incoming sophomores in an honors English class. The book includes a graphic depiction of a lesbian sex scene between a 31-year-old woman and a 13-year old girl, according to a report first published in the Gloucester County Times.

“I don’t think that’s relevant for any teenager,” parent Robin Myers told the newspaper. Her daughter was assigned to read the book. “I was just kind of in shock,” she said.

The other book in question was “Tweak (Growing up on Methamphetamines).” That book included depictions of drug usage and a homosexual orgy.

[…]Peter Sprigg, with the Family Research Council, said he’s not surprised by the controversy surrounding the books.

“Here we see the intersection of parental values being offended, the hyper-sexualization of our youth and the homosexual agenda being pushed,” Sprigg told Fox News Radio. “This just illustrates why a lot of American parents are not willing to entrust their children to the public schools anymore.”

So whose idea was it to put books featuring explicit sex scenes on a summer reading list for teenagers?

[Public school superintendent] Earling said the school district’s summer reading list was prepared by a committee made up of teachers, librarians and school administrators. The board of education ultimately approved the list.

Recall that Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” Kevin Jennings promoted child pornography to children.

This New Jersey story also shows what public schools want to do with your children. It’s not an unusual story. Here is my recent story about how teacher unions deliberately try to evade parental oversight. Public schools are paid by taxpayers through compulsory taxes, regardless of the quality of education they provide to children. They aren’t responsive to the needs of parents and children – because they aren’t private companies in competition. Public schools are a monopoly, and they have enormous influence in politics. They don’t have to care about parents and kids, because you have to pay for them regardless of how they perform. And a lot of their initiatives have no parental opt-out. Because they not only want to force you to pay, but to force you to agree with their views.

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