Despite Parliament debating whether to figure out when human life begins, the sky failed to rain down on Canadians’ heads in savage blue chunks. Who saw that coming? Click here to read the rest.
On hearing that American soldiers had burned some Korans, Afghans erupted into randomly murderous rage. In the ensuing stone-throwing, tire- and flag-burning and infidel-denouncing by Friday some 14 people had been killed, mostly Muslim Afghans. What’s that about? Click here to read the rest.
Ottawa atheists are crying censorship, the Citizen reports, because OC Transpo won't run their ads on buses. Must one point out once again that freedom of speech means not that you have a right to an audience, or a publisher, but only that if you find both the government will not forcibly intervene to silence you? If they claimed instead that they'd been denied equal treatment before the law (because public buses run some people's ads but not theirs) I'd be a bit more sympathetic. Only a bit, because governments quite properly tend to regulate public spaces not so everyone can say whatever they want but so everyone must avoid highly provocative or offensive displays in the street. But at least the atheists would not be putting forward a blatantly silly and petulant pseudo-constitutional argument which, among its other flaws, makes me doubt that their ads would impress me if I did see them.
Is it not curious that Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, should have a series of cabinet appointees in trouble over laws they didn't bother to obey? It seems paradoxical that those most eager to make rules for other people should be so casual about following rules themselves, especially when the new President campaigned so aggressively on improving ethics in Washington... unless of course they think they're a genuinely superior type of person liberated by their awesome responsibilities and talents from the tiresome, mundane moral standards that apply to ordinary folks.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders faces criminal charges for being rude about a religion. As for what he said, well, you don't need to hear it, do you? The government says he's a bad man and should go away and not be heard. And that's good enough, isn't it? I mean, who could disagree with the state over something like that? Especially when it can put you in jail for saying stuff it doesn't like.
Another liberated woman weighs in... in favour of polygamy. Kate Hartfield in today's Ottawa Citizen takes a very dim view of the mores and habits of the people in Bountiful, B.C. and suggests that they might be in violation of a variety of sections of the Criminal Code, but ridicules the law against polygamy as
rooted in the notion that certain kinds of sexual behaviour should be against the law -- even between consenting adults. That's exactly the ideology that Canada divested itself of 40 years ago.
She explains that the current law seems also to forbid a ménage à trois or having a mistress and adds "No one is arguing (for the moment anyway) that the state should recognize polygamous relationships as ‘marriages’ or accord them any rights under the law."
But what happens when they do start arguing it? For as J. Budziszewski warns, people are that logical... slowly.
Apparently the answer to Thursday's question is yes, and partly. In today's Globe and Mail the "director of the Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University" weighs in with a piece defending "the lifestyle adopted by some in Bountiful" using the classic feminist trope that the women there are smart, funny and down to earth, and work outside the home, use e-mail, go to college and use contraception without their husband's or husbands' knowledge. However she has nothing to say in the piece about the implications for this case with respect to fundamentalist Islam in Canada because she... um... say, why is that?
For the first time ever a blogger will be embedded with Canadian forces in Afghanistan. It's Damian Brooks of "The Torch" and if you'd like to offer him encouragement, especially of the pecuniary sort, I know it would be appreciated.