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News

Round-up of stories from around the world

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United Kingdom

Here’s an article from the BBC News from reader Steven about the suppression of the rights of medical personnel by secular humanists. This time, we get some good news.

Excerpt:

Doctors are demanding that NHS staff be given a right to discuss spiritual issues with patients as well as being allowed to offer to pray for them.

Medics will tell the British Medical Association conference this week that staff should not be disciplined as long as they handle the issue sensitively.

The doctors said recent cases where health workers had got into trouble were making people fearful.

But atheists said it was wrong to mix religion and health care.

I also noticed this related article on LifeSiteNews linked by Binks in his latest round-up. Another Christian nurse gets flak from the atheistic fascists for daring to not behave as an atheist in public.

Excerpt:

Nurse Slatter was told by her employer, the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, that the 1-inch gold necklace could “harbour and spread infections” or be used as weapon. She refused the hospital’s suggestion that she carry the necklace in her pocket and has resigned, saying she would not choose between her job and her religion.

…Many of these clashes have been the result of action by homosexual activists and the help of the Labour government’s “anti-discrimination” laws. Most recently, the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) has issued draft “guidance” for schools that say teachers must hide their religion from students and colleagues. They must “promote equality and value diversity” by keeping their religious beliefs to themselves it said.

You can listen to a debate here that shows how naturally atheism leads to fascism in places like the UK. Or you can read my exchange with a British fascist here. (Fascism is the system of government in which individual rights, such as the right to free speech, are curtailed by the state)

India

You might remember that I blogged about the persecution of Christians in the eastern state of Orissa when I covered the recent Indian election.

Orissa is one of the states where Christians are really in the minority and there are Hindu schools teaching the Hindu-nationalist doctrine of Hindutva, which is extremely hostile to Christianity.

Well, Shalini sent me some good news about the situation in Orissa:

Excerpt:

Home Minister P Chidambaram, who is on a two-day visit to Orissa, visited one of the relief camps in riot-hit Kandhmal district on Friday.

While speaking to the victims, he apologised for the conditions they had to face in the wake of a series of communal clashes following the killing of 85-year-old VHP leader Swami Laxmananda Saraswati in August 2008.

…Condemning the incident, Chidambaram asked them to start life afresh, build the churches and practice their religion.

“Whatever happened was wrong. Build your churches and practice your dharma,” he said.

When some refugees spoke of fear of RSS and Bajrang Dal, the Home Minister assured then that the guilty will be “prosecuted and punished.”

I hope that this is a sign of better things to come for Indian Christians. I must admit that I spoke to a few Indian Hindus here in the USA, and they were not supportive of the rights of Christians to evangelize or to exercise freedom of religious expression in India.

Australia

Looks like Australia is considering implementing Human Rights Commissions, exactly like the ones that Canada has. Story from Life Site News. (H/T Free Canuckistan)

Excerpt:

Australian life and family advocates are deeply concerned with plans by a government agency to institute new “human rights” legislation modelled on that of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Endeavour Forum, a national pro-life and pro-family advocacy group, has submitted a brief to a consultative committee, warning that since the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has “consistently failed” to protect the Christian values of the majority of Australians, “its probable recommendations will diminish, not enhance, our freedom.”

The AHRC is conducting national consultations on a proposed Human Rights Charter that is supported by the Attorney General, Robert McClelland, who has argued that since other countries, such as Canada, have such documents, Australia should follow suit.

And to think there was a time when I wanted to move to Queensland! Ha!

Canada

A Quebec court will hear from a Catholic school that is resisting the anti-Christian curriculum that is being pushed by the province. The article is from LifeSiteNews courtesy of Binks.

Excerpt:

Loyola Catholic High School has finished presenting its case in court against Quebec’s mandatory Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) program. The case was launched after the Department of Education refused to allow the school to continue teaching its own Catholic-centered religion course.

The private Catholic boys’ school objects to the province’s mandatory course on the grounds that it conflicts with the school’s Catholic character and presents a relativistic world-view of religion.

…Quebec Education Minister Michelle Courchesne has denied all applications for exemption from the ERC and has made it clear that any religious education program that promotes one religion over any other is not acceptable.

Quebec is the most secular, left-wing province in Canada.

Pakistan

I spotted this story over at The Lambeth Walk blog. It recounts the details of some anti-Christian crimes in Muslim-dominated Pakistan.

Excerpt:

Recently two very disturbing cases have emerged from Pakistan which give some insight into the risks which non-Muslims face in Muslim countries, particularly if they fail to pay the jizya.

The first concerns a Christian man who was sexually abused, raped and murdered for refusing to convert to Islam…

The second case involves the police torturing a Christian man and then denying him medical treatment…

Here’s another one from Weasel Zippers, also via Binks.

Excerpt from the linked BosNewsLife article:

Two Pakistani Christians remained detained Thursday, June 25, on false charges of “blasphemy” and “robbery”, advocacy groups said.

Asia Bibi, 37, was reportedly detained by police on allegations of blasphemy in the village of Ittanwali in Punjab province on June 19, following heated discussions about Islam with Muslim women who work with her on a farm.

“Bibi told them that Christ died on the cross for their sins and asked them what Mohammed had done for them,”said Voice Of the Martyrs Canada (VOMC), which monitored the case. “Our Christ is the true prophet of God and yours is not true,” Bibi reportedly said.

Something to pray about, and there’s no time like the present for prayer.

Mauritania

Al-Qaeda kills an American missionary in Mauritania. Story from Jihad Watch, via Binks.

Excerpt from the linked AFP story:

The man was shot several times in the head from close range after he resisted an apparent kidnap attempt, a witness told AFP, after the shooting outside a private language and computer school run by the American.

“A foreigner has been shot dead, apparently by youths who fled. We are investigating the case,” police said, while the interior ministry identified the man as Christopher Logest and said he also worked for a charity, Noura.

Mauritania is in northwest Africa.

News

How educrats sacrifice academic excellence for self-esteem

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UPDATE: Welcome Post-Darwinist readers! Thanks for the link Denyse! For more on the failures of educrats to focus on teaching young people instead of building up their self-esteem, please see Denyse’s post on the subject.

UPDATE: Welcome visitors from Blazing Cat Fur! One of my favorite Canadian blogs! Please take a look around, as I cover a number of issues of importance to Canadians, including health care, education, free trade, tax policy and of course FREE SPEECH! The Wintery Knight is a HUGE fan of PM Stephen Harper, MP Maurice Vellacott, MP Jason Kenney, Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn and MPP Lisa MacLeod.

My friend Richard sent me this:

Apparently, it has come to the point where students may not be given a zero grade for handing in assignments late, or a zero for not showing up the remake test/assignment. Below is a link to a petition a HS teacher in Ottawa has set up to reassess this policy. Please sign it. The last thing we need is to raise a generation of kids that have no concept of deadlines and consequences. That would be the end of our workforce.

The petition is here.

Excerpt from the petition content:

According to the Ontario Ministry of Education policies, if a student misses a test (whether they skip class or are sick) or if they cheat then the evaluation is not valid and they must not be given a zero. The student must have an opportunity to be re-evaluated on the material. Assignments can have a due date but if the student does not hand it in on the due date a zero cannot be assigned. The student must be allowed to hand in the assignment late without being penalized.

In the past teachers would go out of their way to make sure they evaluated students, but when given an opportunity to be re-evaluated, the student had to turn up. Now you can offer the student a chance to be re-evaluated, and if they don’t turn up they still cannot get a zero. Assignments can be handed in at any time during the year. If the whole class is doing the same assignment, the teacher can receive the finished assignments any time between the due date and the end of the year. If the teacher marks the assignments as he/she gets them and returns them as they are marked, then anyone who has not handed in an assignment can, if they are so inclined, copy an assignment that has been marked and turn it in as their own work. The only way around this is not returning the assignments until all of the students have submitted their work, but this delays essential feedback to the students. Teachers have to be able to indicate to students that a zero may given on missed evaluations and give penalty marks for work not done on time.

We cannot succeed in a global economy when those in charge of educating our children fail to teach them the kinds of skills they will need to take on the demanding jobs of the future. This is just another area of life where things have gotten so politically correct that we have forgotten the purpose of school: to gain knowledge! I urge you to consider signing the petition.

UPDATE: I found this story featuring Caroline Orchard in the Ottawa Citizen. And a panel discussion transcript. MP3 audio of an interview with Caroline Orchard from 580 CFRA, the news talk radio station in Ottawa.

News

Conservatives in Ontario defend free speech

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Political Map of Canada
Political Map of Canada

BC isn’t the only province where conservatives are fighting back against progressive threats to fundamental rights. Ontario, (contains Toronto and Ottawa), has one of the other really bad provincial Human Rights Commissions, and provincial representatives Lisa MacLeod and Randy Hillier on the case in that benighted province.

Here’s an assessment of MacLeod and Hillier from free-speech superhero Ezra Levant: (H/T The Western Standard)

Hillier, along with fellow PC MPP Lisa Macleod, have been leading the charge to reform Ontario’s HRCs. They were the ones who pressed for public hearings at which Tribunal appointees would be grilled — which led to some scary revelations about the censorious instincts of that panel. And he also was part of the team (led by Macleod) who brought Mark Steyn to Queen’s Park to testify about the kangaroo court nature of the OHRC.

Levant is referring to her questioning of Mark Steyn regarding the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. The full transcript is here, courtesy of Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs. This is about as strong a defense of free speech as you’ll ever see, folks. And it’s a warning to the consequences of electing progressives who do not trust you to exercise your own free will, lest you hurt someone’s feelings.

Here is a little of Mark Steyn’s opening speech from the hearing:

Mr. Mark Steyn: The present Ontario human rights regime is incompatible with a free society. It is useless on real human rights issues that we face today and, in the course of such pseudo human rights, as the human right to smoke marijuana on someone else’s property or the human right to a transsexual labioplasty, in the course of those pseudo-rights it tramples on real human rights including property rights, free speech, the right to due process and the presumption of innocence. Far from reducing racism or sexism, the Ontario human rights regime explicitly institutionalizes racism and sexism through its inability to view any dispute except through the narrow prism of identity politics. It’s at odds not just with eight centuries of this province’s legal inheritance, but with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Canada likes that one so much, it sticks it on the back of the $50 bill, even though Ontario’s human rights regime is in sustained, systemic breach of article 6, article 7, articles 8 to 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 21 and 27 of the UN declaration. The good news is that Ontario’s not in violation of as many articles as Sudan or North Korea.

All are equal before the law and are entitled, without any discrimination, to equal protection of the law. That’s article 7. It’s not true in Ontario. Last year, the Ontario Human Rights Commission effectively gave Maclean’s and myself a driveby verdict. They couldn’t be bothered taking us to trial but they decided to pronounce us guilty anyway. That neglects the most basic principle of justice: Audi alteram partem, hear the other side. Chief commissar Barbara Hall didn’t bother hearing the other side; she simply declared us guilty. That is the very defining act of a police state: an apparatchik announcing that a citizen is guilty of dissent from state orthodoxy.

But here’s the point: Maclean’s and I have no fear of Barbara Hall, the commission or the tribunal. You’re welcome to try and do your worst to us. We have deep pockets, we pushed back and we filled the newspapers with stories about all these wacky cases that Barbara Hall and others are so obsessed about. Like all tinpot bullies, the commission couldn’t take the heat and backed down. But if you’re just a fellow who happens to own a restaurant in Burlington, the Ontario human rights regime will destroy your savings, your business, your life for no good reason. The verdict’s irrelevant; the process is the punishment.

He is saying this about a tribunal run by fascist progressive inquisitors hell-bent on ramming their values down the throats of individuals. And here is an excerpt from MacLeod’s questioning of Steyn:

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Welcome to our committee Mr. Steyn. During the summer, this committee convened to interview and review the 22 vice-chairs and the 22 members of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal and throughout that process your case, Maclean’s vs. the Ontario Human Rights Commission, as well as what happened in British Columbia to you as well as what happened federally to you was front and centre on our minds. Consistently throughout that process I asked questions of the deputants, those seeking to be appointed to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, if they believed free press trumped discrimination or vice versa. One of the deputants actually responded. Today, earlier, I asked the same question to the chair of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. He responded and said that neither trumps either. I would like your view on that, because it follows sort of a logical set of questions that I have which are next with respect to freedom of expression and freedom of speech.

Mr. Mark Steyn: With respect to the witness this morning, that has become a standard equivocation at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. Whenever tribunal judges take away individual human rights they do so under the guise of what they call balancing competing rights. So for example, going back to the Scott Brockie case, they claim to be balancing his right to freedom of religion with the right of the gay people seeking printed materials to be free from discrimination. In practice they almost never balance those rights. They always defer to collective rights, group rights in favour of individual rights. I’m an absolutist on this. I agree with the view that the ultimate minority is the individual and classically, historically, common law has been entirely antipathetic to group rights, because who can speak for a group? Who can speak for a group? The notion of group rights should be an abomination to a settled democracy as old as this province.

As an aside, Lisa MacLeod is also fighting polygamy in Ontario. (H/T Blue Like You)

I hope that the Canadian conservatives at every level of government turn this into an election issue, in order to draw libertarians away from the other parties. These Human Rights Commissions are the darlings of secular left-wing politically correct fascists, and they can’t stand the idea of their totalitarian censorship seeing the light of day.

This article is a follow-up to yesterday’s article about free speech efforts in British Columbia.