Tag Archives: Political Correctness

News

Lesbian complains about Muslim barber to Human Rights Commission

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This story from the Calgary Sun is from free speech warrior Ezra Levant. He’s talking about the Canadian Human Rights Commissions, which exist to censor offensive thoughts and offensive speech.

Excerpt:

Faith McGregor is the lesbian who doesn’t like the girly cuts that they do at a salon. She wants the boy’s hairdo.

Omar Mahrouk is the owner of the Terminal Barber Shop in Toronto. He follows Shariah law, so he thinks women have cooties. As Mahrouk and the other barbers there say, they don’t believe in touching women other than their own wives.

But that’s what multiculturalism and unlimited immigration from illiberal countries means. A central pillar of many immigrant cultures is the second-class citizenship of women and gays.

So if we now believe in multiculturalism, and that our Canadian culture of tolerance isn’t any better than the Shariah culture of sex crimes and gender apartheid, who are we to complain when Omar Mahrouk takes us up on our promise that he can continue to practise his culture — lesbian haircuts be damned?

He’s not the one who passed the Multiculturalism Act, and invited in hundreds of thousands of immigrants with medieval attitudes towards women and gays and Jews, etc. We did.

Mahrouk’s view is illiberal. But in Canada we believe in property rights and freedom of association — and in this case, freedom of religion, too.

But McGregor ran to the Human Rights Tribunal and demanded that Mahrouk give her a haircut.

In the past, human rights commissions have been a great ally to gay activists. Because, traditionally, gay activists have complained against Christians. And white Christians are the one ethnic identity group that human rights commissions don’t value, and that multiculturalism doesn’t include.

In recent years, Canadian human rights commissions have weighed a complaint about a women’s-only health club that refused a pre-operative transsexual male who wanted to change in the locker rooms.

They’ve ordered bed and breakfasts owned by Christian families to take in gay couples. They’ve censored pastors and priests who have criticized gay marriage. Gays win, because it’s a test of who is most outraged and offended.

But in the case of the Muslim barbers, the gay activists have met their match. If the test is who can be the most offended or most politically correct, a lesbian’s just not going to cut it.

Oh, McGregor is politically correct. But just not politically correct enough. It’s like poker.

A white, Christian male has the lowest hand — it’s like he’s got just one high card, maybe an ace. So almost everyone trumps him.

A white woman is just a bit higher — like a pair of twos. Enough to beat a white man, but not much more.

A gay man is like having two pairs in poker.

A gay woman — a lesbian like McGregor — is like having three of a kind.

A black lesbian is a full house — pretty tough to beat.

Unless she’s also in a wheelchair, which means she’s pretty much a straight flush.

The only person who could trump that would be a royal flush. If the late Sammy Davis Jr. — who was black, Jewish and half-blind — were to convert to Islam and discover he was 1/64th Aboriginal.

So which is a better hand: A lesbian who wants a haircut or a Muslim who doesn’t want to give it to her?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t support all the speech and thoughts that the Human Rights Commission finds offensive. But I wouldn’t use the power of the government to suppress ideas and speech that I disagree with. I’m not a fascist. I don’t like forcing other people to do things that they don’t want to do with the force of government.

News

What if Obama is re-elected and he legalizes gay marriage in his second term?

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Canada has already legalized same-sex marriage, so let’s see what things are like up there. (H/T Commenter Scott)

Excerpt:

The formal effect of the judicial decisions (and subsequent legislation) establishing same-sex civil marriage in Canada was simply that persons of the same-sex could now have the government recognize their relationships as marriages. But the legal and cultural effect was much broader. What transpired was the adoption of a new orthodoxy: that same-sex relationships are, in every way, the equivalent of traditional marriage, and that same-sex marriage must therefore be treated identically to traditional marriage in law and public life.

A corollary is that anyone who rejects the new orthodoxy must be acting on the basis of bigotry and animus toward gays and lesbians. Any statement of disagreement with same-sex civil marriage is thus considered a straightforward manifestation of hatred toward a minority sexual group. Any reasoned explanation (for example, those that were offered in legal arguments that same-sex marriage is incompatible with a conception of marriage that responds to the needs of the children of the marriage for stability, fidelity, and permanence—what is sometimes called the conjugal conception of marriage), is dismissed right away as mere pretext.

When one understands opposition to same-sex marriage as a manifestation of sheer bigotry and hatred, it becomes very hard to tolerate continued dissent. Thus it was in Canada that the terms of participation in public life changed very quickly. Civil marriage commissioners were the first to feel the hard edge of the new orthodoxy; several provinces refused to allow commissioners a right of conscience to refuse to preside over same-sex weddings, and demanded their resignations. At the same time, religious organizations, such as the Knights of Columbus, were fined for refusing to rent their facilities for post-wedding celebrations.

[…]The new orthodoxy’s impact has not been limited to the relatively small number of persons at risk of being coerced into supporting or celebrating a same-sex marriage. The change has widely affected persons—including clergy—who wish to make public arguments about human sexuality.

Much speech that was permitted before same-sex marriage now carries risks. Many of those who have persisted in voicing their dissent have been subjected to investigations by human rights commissions and (in some cases) proceedings before human rights tribunals. Those who are poor, poorly educated, and without institutional affiliation have been particularly easy targets—anti-discrimination laws are not always applied evenly.  Some have been ordered to pay fines, make apologies, and undertake never to speak publicly on such matters again. Targets have included individuals writing letters to the editors of local newspapers, and ministers of small congregations of Christians. A Catholic bishop faced two complaints—both eventually withdrawn—prompted by comments he made in a pastoral letter about marriage.

[…][[T]he financial cost of fighting the human rights machine remains enormous… hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, none of which is recoverable from the commissions, tribunals, or complainants. And these cases can take up to a decade to resolve. An ordinary person with few resources who has drawn the attention of a human rights commission has no hope of appealing to the courts for relief; such a person can only accept the admonition of the commission, pay a (comparatively) small fine, and then observe the directive to remain forever silent. As long as these tools remain at the disposal of the commissions—for whom the new orthodoxy gives no theoretical basis to tolerate dissent—to engage in public discussion about same-sex marriage is to court ruin.

[…]Institutionalizing same-sex marriage has subtly but pervasively changed parental rights in public education. The debate over how to cast same-sex marriage in the classroom is much like the debate over the place of sex education in schools, and of governmental pretensions to exercise primary authority over children. But sex education has always been a discrete matter, in the sense that by its nature it cannot permeate the entirety of the curriculum. Same-sex marriage is on a different footing.

Since one of the tenets of the new orthodoxy is that same-sex relationships deserve the same respect that we give marriage, its proponents have been remarkably successful in demanding that same-sex marriage be depicted positively in the classroom. Curriculum reforms in jurisdictions such as British Columbia now prevent parents from exercising their long-held veto power over contentious educational practices.

The new curricula are permeated by positive references to same-sex marriage, not just in one discipline but in all. Faced with this strategy of diffusion, the only parental defense is to remove one’s children from the public school system entirely. Courts have been unsympathetic to parental objections: if parents are clinging to outdated bigotries, then children must bear the burden of “cognitive dissonance”—they must absorb conflicting things from home and school while school tries to win out.

Note that all of these enemies, the court system, the human rights commissions and the public school system – are all taxpayer-funded. Christians and other social conservatives are literally paying the socialist welfare state to persecute them and to indoctrinate their children. I should note that abortions, sex changes and IVF are also taxpayer-funded in parts of Canada, because health care is run by the government. We really need to keep the government out of as much of our lives as possible if we expect to keep our freedoms. Let’s not imitate the Canadians by legalizing same-sex marriage.

News

Durham University professor calls the “Jesus had a wife” manuscript fragment a forgery

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The radically left-wing UK Guardian has the story.

Excerpt:

A New Testament scholar claims to have found evidence suggesting that the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife is a modern forgery.

Professor Francis Watson, of Durham University, says the papyrus fragment, which caused a worldwide sensation when it appeared earlier this week because it appeared to refer to Jesus’s wife, is a patchwork of texts from the genuine Coptic-language Gospel of Thomas, which have been copied and reassembled out of order to make a suggestive new whole.

In a paper published online, Watson argues that all of the sentence fragments found on the papyrus fragment have been copied, sometimes with small alterations, from printed editions of the Gospel of Thomas.

The discovery has already sparked fierce debate among academics, but Watson believes his new research may prove conclusive.

“I think it is more or less indisputable that I have shown how the thing was composed,” he said. “I would be very surprised if it were not a modern forgery, although it is possible that it was composed in this way in the fourth century.”

His paper claims the work was assembled by someone who was not a native speaker of Coptic, which is a polite way of saying that it is modern.

He does not directly criticise Professor Karen King, of Harvard, who presented the fragment at a conference in Rome this week. He says she has done a very good job of presenting the evidence and images of the disputed fragment. He believes the papyrus itself may well date from the fourth century, but the words, he says, clearly show the influence of modern printed books.

In particular, there is a line break in the middle of one word that appears to have been lifted directly from modern editions of the Gospel of Thomas, a genuine Gnostic or early Christian text.

It is common for words to be broken in the middle in ancient scripts, like Coptic, which were written without hyphens, he says. But it is most uncommon for the same break to appear in the same work in two different manuscripts.

You can read an introduction to the find by Dr. Watson on Mark Goodacre’s web site.

Excerpt:

On 18 September, Dr Karen King of Harvard University announced the discovery of a controversial new gospel-fragment at a Vatican-sponsored conference in Rome. Dr King believes that the papyrus fragment comes from a 4th century copy of an unknown gospel that may itself go back to the 2nd century. While only a few incomplete lines have survived, the fragment has become instantly famous on account of line 4, where we read: And Jesus said to them, “My wife…” This gives the text its proposed title: The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife (GJW). According to Dr King, the reference to Jesus’ marital status is probably not an item of genuine historical information; rather, it takes us into the world of his later followers and their debates about issues of sexuality and gender.

The GJW fragment is written in Coptic, a later form of the language of ancient Egypt. In translation it runs as follows:

1 “… [can]not be my [disciple]. My mother gave me life…”
2 … The disciples said to Jesus, “…
3 … deny. Mary is not worthy of it…
4 …” Jesus said to them, “My wife…
5 … she can be my disciple…
6 … Let the evil man swell up…
7 … I am with her, so as to…
8 … an image…”

On the reverse side of the papyrus fragment, only a few individual words and letters have been preserved.

The papyrus fragment itself may well be very old. The question is whether the ink is also old. If chemical tests are carried out to establish the composition of the ink, these might show that a modern ink has been used and so prove the text to be a modern forgery. Whether tests could reliably show that an ink compatible with ancient origin is actually ancient is less certain. Meanwhile, it’s important to look very closely at the text itself – and especially to investigate how it was put together.

In my article, I argue that the GJW fragment may be a modern fake. Most of its individual phrases are taken directly from the Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas – the best-known and most complete of the ancient gospel texts that have come to light over the past century or so. The author has used a kind of “collage” technique to assemble the items selected from Thomas into a new composition. While this seems an unlikely way for an ancient author to compose a text, it’s what might be expected of a modern forger with limited facility in the Coptic language.

Basically, Dr. Francis Watson is looking at which works the fragment seems to quote from in order to date it and judge its historical reliability. If it quotes from the late Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, then it’s not early, and not reliable. But if it includes line breaking from the modern translations of the Gospel of Thomas, then it’s a fraud. I would say that right now, it looks like a fraud, and we will just have to wait for the dating on the materials (ink and papyrus) to be sure.

In fact, Harvard University is making the publication of the find conditional on this sort of scientific testing.

Excerpt:

Harvard University says it hasn’t committed to publishing research that purportedly shows some early Christians believed Jesus had a wife even though its divinity school touted the research during a publicity blitz this week.

The research centers on a fourth-century papyrus fragment containing Coptic text in which Jesus uses the words “my wife.” On Tuesday, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King announced at an international conference that the fragment was the only existing ancient text in which Jesus explicitly talks of having a wife.

Harvard also said King’s research was scheduled to be published in the Harvard Theological Review in January and noted the journal was peer-reviewed, which implied the research had been fully vetted.

But on Friday, the review’s co-editor Kevin Madigan said he and his co-editor had only “provisionally” committed to a January publication, pending the results of the ongoing studies. In an email, Madigan said the added studies include “scientific dating and further reports from Coptic papyrologists and grammarians.”

After Tuesday’s announcement, The Associated Press raised questions about the fragment’s authenticity and provenance, quoting scholars at the international congress on Coptic studies in Rome, where King delivered the paper. The scholars said the fragment’s grammar, form and content raised several red flags. Alin Suciu, a papyrologist at the University of Hamburg, flatly called it a “forgery.”

Boston University archaeologist Ricardo Elia said Friday that the Harvard Theological Review should delay publication until the fragment’s owner and origins are more clearly documented.

You can also check out this 6-page report by Dr. Watson, featuring a line-by-line analysis of the Coptic phrases. Mark Goodacre is a tenured professor of New Testament at Duke University, which has one of the best New Testament programs, in my opinion. So don’t be put off by the site that is hosting it.

Hoaxes and political agendas

Dr. Watson notes in the 6-page report that this is not the first time that fake manuscripts have surfaced that promote left-wing politics. Morton Smith, a homosexual, passed of a forged gospel called the “Secret Gospel of Mark” which promoted a homosexual view of Jesus. This 20th century hoax was accepted by the gullible mainstream media, until it was disproved as a forgery in the peer-reviewed literature, and in academic books. The debunking of Secret Gospel of Mark is so thorough that it is even accept by Robert M. Price, who is on the far left fringe of New Testament scholarship. It should be noted that Karen King is a member of the liberal naturalistic Jesus Seminar. They presuppose atheism and their politics are hard left – that’s what they assume before they begin doing scholarship. Karen King specializes in “women’s roles in the church” and Gnosticism. I expect that she would be very happy if this Jesus-had-a-wife fragment were used to bash traditional notions of women’s roles in the church.

The mainstream media

Now why isn’t the mainstream media taking a cautious approach to this find? Here’s my answer – they want as many people as possible to avoid Christianity. The more they can get people to avoid acting like Christians and voting like Christians, the fewer moral restrictions there will be on their desires. For example, people on the secular left are particularly fascinated with recreational sex followed by abortion, as well as the undermining of chastity and traditional marriage, and even fiscal policies like the free market and private property. All of this is offensive to them. So whenever they get the chance to bash Christianity with hoaxes, they will do it. Media bias has been well-documented by a number of published studies from top universities. It’s a bad thing to let personal immorality cause you to lie to others so that they miss their chance of knowing God and entering into fellowship with him. But that’s what the mainstream news media does every day.

Further study

J. W. Wartick has linked to a whole bunch of responses on his blog. He’s got Daniel Wallace, Darrell Bock and other well-known New Testament scholars. But I think that the response by Dr. Watson is decisive, and should be your first stop.