Tag Archives: Fascism

News

British Columbia law society votes against accrediting evangelical law school

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Map of Canada
Map of Canada

Global News reports.

Excerpt:

The Law Society of British Columbia has voted against accrediting a proposed law school at Trinity Western University.

In a binding decision, 74 per cent of lawyers voted against TWU’s program, with 8,039 ballots cast in total – more than 60 per cent of all lawyers eligible to vote.

The society says the decision means that “the proposed law school at Trinity Western University is not an approved faculty of law for the purpose of the Law Society’s admission program.”

The vote was conducted by mail and required a two-thirds majority, with a turnout more than 33.3 per cent.

CBC has the reaction from Trinity:

The president of Trinity Western University says he is uncertain if the new law school will open as scheduled in 2016 following the recent vote by the B.C. Law Society members to reject the faith-based institution.

TWU president Bob Kuhn expressed his frustration with the recent vote as he left a ratification meeting at the law society on Friday morning.

“They had to choose between the principles upon which they made the initial decision and the popularity of that decision among lawyers in the province,” says Kuhn.

“We’re disappointed of course they chose the latter. But that’s the reality of people in an elected position.”

British Columbia is now the third province, after Ontario and Nova Scotia, to officially reject the university’s law school.

Kuhn says it’s not clear whether the Christian university will move ahead with its 2016 opening date, and the school will decide in the coming weeks whether to file a judicial review.

The board members of the B.C. Law Society voted 25 to one with four abstentions to ratify the results of a referendum announced yesterday rejecting the accreditation of a Trinity Western University’s law school.

More than 8,000 of the society’s 13,530 members voted earlier this month in a special referendum to overturn the board’s decision earlier this year to accredit the faith-based law school.

Critics oppose the new law school’s accreditation because Trinity Western students must sign a Christian covenant that states sexual relations are to be confined within the bounds of a marriage between a man and a woman.

Trinity Western Law School has a rule that says that students are expect not to engage in extramarital sex – regardless of sexual orientation, which is in keeping with what the Bible teaches. And the law society has decided that this teaching should disqualify a person from practicing law. What is objectionable about this rule? Well, the people who voted against it would be condemned by it. And so they seek to remove the influence of anyone who believes in that rule. Times change, but human nature doesn’t change. If you don’t want God, you try to silence anyone who reminds you of that fact. It’s also a reminded that secularism isn’t based in anything that science tells us or history tells us or any kind of evidence. It’s about morality. It’s about denying the authority of the moral law. That’s why people reject God, and intimidate those who don’t reject God.

I think this is a good reminder to Christian parents in the United States about why it is important to have some sort of vision for your children. If we don’t get advanced degrees, then we leave these decisions to the secular bigots. We are either going to take having an influence seriously or we are going to lose the power to have an influence. Do you have a plan to counter this?

News

Democrats spied on journalist who reported on gunrunning and Benghazi cover-up

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Ex-CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson
Ex-CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson

I blogged about this before in May 2013, but this time it’s in the New York Post.

Excerpt:

A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light says she was spied on by a “government-related entity” that planted classified documents on her computer.

In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.

“This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn’t have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America,” Attkisson quotes the source saying.

She speculates that the motive was to lay the groundwork for possible charges against her or her sources.

Attkisson says the source, who’s “connected to government three-letter agencies,” told her the computer was hacked into by “a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.”

The breach was accomplished through an “otherwise innocuous e-mail” that Attkisson says she got in February 2012, then twice “redone” and “refreshed” through a satellite hookup and a Wi-Fi connection at a Ritz-Carlton hotel.

The spyware included programs that Attkisson says monitored her every keystroke and gave the snoops access to all her e-mails and the passwords to her financial accounts.

“The intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a listening tool,” she wrote in “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.”

Attkisson says her source — identified only as “Number One” — told her the spying was most likely not court-authorized because it went on far longer than most legal taps.

But the most shocking finding, she says, was the discovery of three classified documents that Number One told her were “buried deep in your operating system. In a place that, unless you’re a some kind of computer whiz specialist, you wouldn’t even know exists.”

“They probably planted them to be able to accuse you of having classified documents if they ever needed to do that at some point,” Number One added.

In her book, Attkisson says CBS lost interest in her coverage of the deadly attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, and killed her stories of the federal “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal.

Both CBS and the White House declined to comment.

Investors Business Daily has more on some of the other things they and her former employer CBS News did to her to get her to shut up. The funny thing about her is that I remember her going after the Bush-43 administration hard when Bush was in power. So she is basically doing her thing whether there’s a Republican or a Democrat administration in power. The problem is her bosses – they were willing to let her report on Republican scandals, but when it was a Democrat administration, it all had to be hushed up.

News

California orders churches to fund abortions, or face sanctions

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This is from The Federalist.

Excerpt:

California’s Department of Managed Health Care has ordered all insurance plans in the state to immediately begin covering elective abortion. Not Plan B. Not contraceptives. Elective surgical dismemberment abortion.

At the insistence of the American Civil Liberties Union, the DMHC concluded that a 40-year-old state law requiring health plans to cover “basic health services” had been misinterpreted all these decades. Every plan in the state was immediately ordered, effective August 22, to cover elective abortion. California had not even applied this test to its own state employee health plans (which covered only “medically necessary” abortions). But this novel reading was nevertheless quietly imposed on every plan in the state by fiat.

The news has slowly leaked out as insurers grappling with this change have begun quietly informing employers of this sudden change in the terms of their policy. This is how Kaiser Permanente broke the news to one California church that its insurance policy for its pastors and staff would now include elective abortion coverage:

I want to formally share with you that on August 22, 2014, the Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) notified Kaiser Permanente and other affected health plans in writing regarding group contracts that exclude ‘voluntary termination of pregnancy.’

This letter made clear that the DMHC considered health care services related to the termination of pregnancies – whether or not a voluntary termination – a medically necessary basic health care service for which all health care services plans must provide coverage under the Knox-Keene Health Care Service Plan Act.  You may recall that at the request of some employer groups with religious affiliations, Kaiser Permanente submitted a regulatory filing in May 2012 properly notifying the DMHC of a benefit plan option that excluded coverage of voluntary terminations of pregnancies. The DMHC did not object to this filing, permitting Kaiser Permanente to offer such a coverage contract to large group purchasers that requested it. The DMHC acknowledged that it previously permitted these contract exclusions, but now is requiring health care service plans to provide coverage of all terminations of pregnancies, effective immediately.  To that end, the DMHC requires Kaiser Permanente and similar health care service plans to initiate steps to modify their plan contracts accordingly.

Effective August 22, Kaiser Permanente will comply with this regulatory mandate.

This is the kind of story that really justifies my suspicions about secular people’s ability to be “moral”. It seems to me that even if a person did not believe in God, that they would be respectful of those who do. But when you give up God, it does make a difference to whether you think that other people have these sorts of natural rights. How could you possibly ground natural rights in a materialist universe? And this does have an impact on how they act.