Tag Archives: Jail

News

Two women imprisoned in Iran for converting to Christianity get their day in court

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The story is here. (H/T Reasonable Faith)

Excerpt:

In a dramatic session before the revolutionary court today in Tehran, Maryam Rustampoor (27) and Marzieh Amirizadeh (30) were told to recant their faith in Christ. Though great pressure was put on them, both women declared that they would not deny their faith. Maryam and Marzieh were originally arrested on March 5, 2009 and have suffered greatly while in prison, suffering ill health, solitary confinement and interrogations for many hours while blindfolded.

[…]Mr. Haddad, asked the two women if they were Christians. “We love Jesus,” they replied. He repeated his question and they said, “Yes, we are Christians.”

Mr. Haddad then said, “You were Muslims and now you have become Christians.”

“We were born in Muslim families, but we were not Muslims,” was their reply.

Mr. Haddad’s questioning continued and he asked them if they regretted becoming Christians, to which they replied, “We have no regrets.”

Then he stated emphatically, “You should renounce your faith verbally and in written form.” They stood firm and replied, “We will not deny our faith.”

During one tense moment in the questioning, Maryam and Marzieh made reference to their belief that God had convicted them through the Holy Spirit. Mr. Haddad told them, “It is impossible for God to speak with humans.”

Marzieh asked him in return, “Are you questioning whether God is Almighty?”

Mr. Haddad then replied, “You are not worthy for God to speak to you.”

Marzieh said, “It is God, and not you, who determines if I am worthy.”

Mr. Haddad told the women to return to prison and think about the options they were given and come back to him when they are ready (to comply). Maryam and Marzieh said, “We have already done our thinking.”

Read the whole thing. Please pray for these two brave women, and consider sending a donation to Answering Muslims.

Commentary

Why are sentences for domestic violence committed by women so lenient?

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ECM sent me this article by Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

I feel terrible about how unfairly men are treated when they are victims of domestic violence. I think that a lot of men are going to be put off of marriage  when stories like the ones in the article become widely known.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Mothers who kill their children often serve little jail time. Gender stereotypes lead people to believe that any woman who kills her kid must have done so as a result of duress or insanity. Andrea Yates ultimately escaped punishment after methodically drowning her five children one by one in a bathtub. A Prince William County woman guilty of stabbing her five daughters received less than three years in jail (after her lawyer ridiculously claimed the children should not be deprived of their mother!).

A woman who used poison to paralyze her daughter, enabling her husband to then kick her conscious-but-immobilized daughter to death, escaped penalty by pleading “battered woman syndrome.”

[…]Battered woman syndrome has become an excuse to kill not only children, but also innocent non-relatives. A California woman got her lover to kill an innocent man by falsely telling him that the man was her paramour. She then had her murder conviction overturned by the California Court of Appeal. How? She claimed that “battered women’s syndrome” made her do it.

[…]According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ study of large urban counties, wives who kill their husbands without provocation get only seven years in prison, on average, compared to a more reasonable 17 years in prison for husbands who kill their wives without provocation.

[…]For a glaring example of gender bias in the courts (and the media), you need look no further than The Washington Post story by Tamara Jones, in which she commiserates with convicted felon Teressa Turner-Schaefer, who spent a mere 11 months in jail for killing her husband after an argument.

Now Turner-Schaefer gets to collect $400,000 in life insurance for killing her husband. In a plea bargain, she pleaded guilty to the crime of involuntary manslaughter, which, amazingly enough, doesn’t bar you from collecting life insurance taken out on the person you killed.

There are many more horrible stories in the article about children and men being assaulted and murdered by women. The crimes are not being punished fairly. It discourages me greatly that most women don’t seem to be up in arms defending men when injustices like this happen. Actually, the man is usually blamed for the violence committed against him by the woman.

I think it is particularly shocking how Christians have nothing to say about this.

News

Obama’s appointee supports regulating free speech on the Internet

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Consider this article by Kyle Smith. (H/T Jihad Watch)

Excerpt:

When it comes to the First Amendment, Team Obama believes in Global Chilling.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor who has been appointed to a shadowy post that will grant him powers that are merely mind-boggling, explicitly supports using the courts to impose a “chilling effect” on speech that might hurt someone’s feelings. He thinks that the bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them.

…Sunstein is President Obama’s choice to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Cass Sunstein’s new book explains how he would like to regulate free speech.

Sunstein questions the current libel standard – which requires proving “actual malice” against those who write about public figures, including celebrities. Mere “negligence” isn’t libelous, but Sunstein wonders, “Is it so important to provide breathing space for damaging falsehoods about entertainers?”

Recall my previous post about the Democrat bill that would criminalize blogging.

Excerpt:

Under a recently-introduced bill, H.R. 1966, bloggers would face up to two years in prison if they “harass” public figures by criticizing them in a “severe, repeated, and hostile” manner, and thereby cause them “substantial emotional distress.”

This makes me think also about my previous post about the Democrat Speaker of the House in California who said that dissenting speech is terrorism.

The Road to Serfdom

The greatest economics book of the 20th century was F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom“, which is analyzes the history of socialism and fascism in Nazi Germany and Russia. This book is #1 on Human Events’ Top 10 books every Republican should read.

Human Events writes:

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) was an Austrian economist awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974. He defended capitalism and individual liberty against collectivism. In “The Road to Serfdom,” he describes how government planning of the economy leads to tyranny. President Reagan cited Hayek as one of his favorite economists. “To decentralize power is to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man,” wrote Hayek. “Who can seriously doubt that the power which a millionaire, who may be my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest bureaucrat possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends how I am allowed to live and work?”

I have a friend who is a Democrat, and every time I run these steps toward fascism by him, he never objects to them. There is a powerful impulse on the left towards controlling people’s choices to reproduce, earn, spend and work. Democrats believe that they are enlightened, so enslaving others is permissible for them. People today are willing to trade their liberty for a government handout, such as socialized health care.