Friday, March 12, 2004
A cover-up of biblical proportions
A copy of the Ten Commandments hanging in a North Carolina courtroom has been covered up after the attorneys for an admitted killer on trial claimed the Sixth Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," might sway jurors against their client.
Andre Edwards is on trial for killing a young mother, Ginger Hayes, and has admitted to the crime, reported WTVD-TV in Durham, N.C. His lawyers convinced Judge Clinton Sumner to put a beige cloth over a plaque of the Decalogue that hangs in the courtroom. According to the report, the attorneys argued the prohibition against killing might prejudice the jurors toward giving Edwards the death penalty.
A copy of the Ten Commandments hanging in a North Carolina courtroom has been covered up after the attorneys for an admitted killer on trial claimed the Sixth Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," might sway jurors against their client.
Andre Edwards is on trial for killing a young mother, Ginger Hayes, and has admitted to the crime, reported WTVD-TV in Durham, N.C. His lawyers convinced Judge Clinton Sumner to put a beige cloth over a plaque of the Decalogue that hangs in the courtroom. According to the report, the attorneys argued the prohibition against killing might prejudice the jurors toward giving Edwards the death penalty.
SanFran same-sex marriage rush halted
The California Supreme Court issued an order today blocking San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom from issuing same-sex marriage licences.
The decision came as Massachusetts lawmakers gave preliminary approval to a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage but allowing civil unions, which grant nearly all the rights and benefits of marriage.
San Francisco, under Newsom's order, issued the first officially sanctioned marriage licences to same-sex couples in American history on February 12. More than 3,700 ceremonies have been conducted since then. A week later, New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid intervened to stop a clerk in Bernalillo, N.M., who began issuing licences to same-sex couples. These developments and others came after the Massachusetts high court struck down a ban on same-sex marriage in November in a ruling to be implemented in mid-May.
The Florida-based Liberty Counsel on behalf of Campaign for California Families filed suit against Mayor Newsom last month with the State Superior Court in a case scheduled to be heard on March 29. The California Supreme Court has stayed that hearing, however.
CCF contends Newsom violated nine state civil laws, a statewide voter initiative known as Proposition 22 and a criminal law.
One fears this is only a minor hiccup in plans by homosexual activists to get civil unions and/or homosexual marriage regularised worldwide. But it might give pro-marriage advocates a breathing space to gather more support to stem the tide.
The California Supreme Court issued an order today blocking San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom from issuing same-sex marriage licences.
The decision came as Massachusetts lawmakers gave preliminary approval to a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage but allowing civil unions, which grant nearly all the rights and benefits of marriage.
San Francisco, under Newsom's order, issued the first officially sanctioned marriage licences to same-sex couples in American history on February 12. More than 3,700 ceremonies have been conducted since then. A week later, New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid intervened to stop a clerk in Bernalillo, N.M., who began issuing licences to same-sex couples. These developments and others came after the Massachusetts high court struck down a ban on same-sex marriage in November in a ruling to be implemented in mid-May.
The Florida-based Liberty Counsel on behalf of Campaign for California Families filed suit against Mayor Newsom last month with the State Superior Court in a case scheduled to be heard on March 29. The California Supreme Court has stayed that hearing, however.
CCF contends Newsom violated nine state civil laws, a statewide voter initiative known as Proposition 22 and a criminal law.
One fears this is only a minor hiccup in plans by homosexual activists to get civil unions and/or homosexual marriage regularised worldwide. But it might give pro-marriage advocates a breathing space to gather more support to stem the tide.
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Farcical new UK law on sexual identity
The UK is about to bring into being a farcical new law determining sexual identity. In the process, people will be able to falsify their real sex, and it will make criminals out of people who tell the truth about it.
The moves are contained in the Gender Recognition Bill, which gives rights to transsexuals — people who believe they belong to the opposite sex.
Melanie Phillips writes in the Daily Mail that the predicament of transsexuals, who experience untold anguish from their conviction that they are trapped in the wrong sex, deserves much compassion. No-one disputes that they should be free to assume the lifestyle of the opposite sex, even to the extent of enduring surgical and hormonal alteration.
Nevertheless, the problem from which they suffer is not a physical but a psychological disorder. Yet this bill effectively denies the biological facts of sexual identity, replacing them as the basis of law by psychologically disordered feelings instead.
The bill says transsexuals must have rights in their chosen sex to marry and to claim benefits. The most fundamental —and disturbing — right of all, however, is to a new birth certificate. This will claim that the person’s sex at birth was whatever he or she now deems it to be, as agreed by a panel of experts. The actual sex in which he or she was born will not be recorded. In other words, the birth certificate — the most basic guarantee that we are who we say we are —will be a lie. It means that someone who was born a man, married as a man and fathered children as a man will have a birth certificate which says he was born a female if he so chooses.
Worse still, a wide variety of people will be prosecuted if they make known the truth. Suppose a fitness club advertises for a personal trainer and takes up a reference at another gym for an applicant named Barbara. If that gym’s owner employed this person as Barry, it will be a criminal offence for him to say so. So he may be forced to tell misleading half-truths about ‘Barbara’s’ performance.
This Orwellian situation is to come about because sexual identity will cease to be a biological given, and become instead a matter of whatever a panel of experts decides it to be.
Moreover, the criteria by which this panel will make such judgments are extraordinarily flaky. The person wanting ‘gender reassignment’ won’t even need to have had sex-change surgery, only a statement by two doctors that the person has suffered from ‘gender dysphoria’ for two years, that he or she assumes the opposite sex and that the intention to do so is permanent.
So biological facts are to be replaced by the fantasies of feelings. Feeling like a member of the opposite sex does not make it true. Even after surgical or hormonal treatment, people still remain chromosomally a man or a woman, a biologically unalterable fact.
Indeed, in a number of tragic cases the transsexual has sought to reverse the treatment and return to his original sex. Are we really to believe that such a man becomes a woman and then turns back into being a man? Isn’t this rather a man with a distressing psychological problem? And will his birth certificate keep changing, along with his mind?
The practical effect of the bill will inevitably be same-sex ‘marriage’. The meaning of marriage as a union between a man and a woman will be destroyed, because ‘man’ and ‘woman’ will no longer mean anything other than whether someone feels like a man or a woman.
As a result, priests may unwittingly marry people of the same sex. The bill allows them to refuse to do so ( an exemption not provided for registrars at civil weddings) — but how will they know whether half of the happy couple has had ‘gender reassignment’?
Even if they ask, they will have no way of checking since the birth certificate may be a lie. And when a priest asks if anyone knows of an impediment to the marriage, if an employer, public official or voluntary worker replies: ‘Actually, the bride is a bloke’ they may find themselves under arrest for a criminal offence.
Ludicrously, the bill says that if a woman becomes a man, ‘he’ remains the mother of her (his?) children. Similarly, a man remains the father of his children and therefore still liable for child support — even though his birth certificate might say he was born female.
More profoundly, this bill continues the systematic attack being mounted upon all moral and social norms, to the extent of challenging what it is to be a human being. It illustrates how our society is unravelling, through the substitution of irrational feelings for demonstrable facts. The general silence and acquiescence in the face of this are simply astonishing. It’s as if the nation is anaesthetised. The outcome will be a sexual identity free-for-all, and a further descent into a moral vacuum.
The UK is about to bring into being a farcical new law determining sexual identity. In the process, people will be able to falsify their real sex, and it will make criminals out of people who tell the truth about it.
The moves are contained in the Gender Recognition Bill, which gives rights to transsexuals — people who believe they belong to the opposite sex.
Melanie Phillips writes in the Daily Mail that the predicament of transsexuals, who experience untold anguish from their conviction that they are trapped in the wrong sex, deserves much compassion. No-one disputes that they should be free to assume the lifestyle of the opposite sex, even to the extent of enduring surgical and hormonal alteration.
Nevertheless, the problem from which they suffer is not a physical but a psychological disorder. Yet this bill effectively denies the biological facts of sexual identity, replacing them as the basis of law by psychologically disordered feelings instead.
The bill says transsexuals must have rights in their chosen sex to marry and to claim benefits. The most fundamental —and disturbing — right of all, however, is to a new birth certificate. This will claim that the person’s sex at birth was whatever he or she now deems it to be, as agreed by a panel of experts. The actual sex in which he or she was born will not be recorded. In other words, the birth certificate — the most basic guarantee that we are who we say we are —will be a lie. It means that someone who was born a man, married as a man and fathered children as a man will have a birth certificate which says he was born a female if he so chooses.
Worse still, a wide variety of people will be prosecuted if they make known the truth. Suppose a fitness club advertises for a personal trainer and takes up a reference at another gym for an applicant named Barbara. If that gym’s owner employed this person as Barry, it will be a criminal offence for him to say so. So he may be forced to tell misleading half-truths about ‘Barbara’s’ performance.
This Orwellian situation is to come about because sexual identity will cease to be a biological given, and become instead a matter of whatever a panel of experts decides it to be.
Moreover, the criteria by which this panel will make such judgments are extraordinarily flaky. The person wanting ‘gender reassignment’ won’t even need to have had sex-change surgery, only a statement by two doctors that the person has suffered from ‘gender dysphoria’ for two years, that he or she assumes the opposite sex and that the intention to do so is permanent.
So biological facts are to be replaced by the fantasies of feelings. Feeling like a member of the opposite sex does not make it true. Even after surgical or hormonal treatment, people still remain chromosomally a man or a woman, a biologically unalterable fact.
Indeed, in a number of tragic cases the transsexual has sought to reverse the treatment and return to his original sex. Are we really to believe that such a man becomes a woman and then turns back into being a man? Isn’t this rather a man with a distressing psychological problem? And will his birth certificate keep changing, along with his mind?
The practical effect of the bill will inevitably be same-sex ‘marriage’. The meaning of marriage as a union between a man and a woman will be destroyed, because ‘man’ and ‘woman’ will no longer mean anything other than whether someone feels like a man or a woman.
As a result, priests may unwittingly marry people of the same sex. The bill allows them to refuse to do so ( an exemption not provided for registrars at civil weddings) — but how will they know whether half of the happy couple has had ‘gender reassignment’?
Even if they ask, they will have no way of checking since the birth certificate may be a lie. And when a priest asks if anyone knows of an impediment to the marriage, if an employer, public official or voluntary worker replies: ‘Actually, the bride is a bloke’ they may find themselves under arrest for a criminal offence.
Ludicrously, the bill says that if a woman becomes a man, ‘he’ remains the mother of her (his?) children. Similarly, a man remains the father of his children and therefore still liable for child support — even though his birth certificate might say he was born female.
More profoundly, this bill continues the systematic attack being mounted upon all moral and social norms, to the extent of challenging what it is to be a human being. It illustrates how our society is unravelling, through the substitution of irrational feelings for demonstrable facts. The general silence and acquiescence in the face of this are simply astonishing. It’s as if the nation is anaesthetised. The outcome will be a sexual identity free-for-all, and a further descent into a moral vacuum.
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Global warming disaster claim is rubbished
A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to an article in the magazine Nature which predicted global warming will cause between 15 and 37 percent of the Earth’s species to go extinct by the middle of this century unless immediate and drastic action is taken. After studying a sample of plants and animals around the globe, and then using computer programs to predict twenty-first century global warming, the authors claimed more than a million species will disappear by the year 2050. However, some serious flaws in the article have now been pointed out.
“There are a massive number of glaring problems� with the study, observed Virginia state climatologist Patrick Michaels, who is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels says theories on global warming have had a troubled career, starting with an article in Nature itself.
“In 1996, conveniently a day before the U.N. conference that gave birth to the Kyoto Protocol, Nature published a paper purporting to match observed temperature with computer models of disastrous warming. It used weather balloon data from 1963 through 1987. The actual record, however, extended (then) from 1958 through 1995, and when all the data were used, the troubling numbers disappeared.
“Since that famous incident, people have been very leery of what major scientific journals publish on global warming. The Thomas extinction paper only throws more fuel on an already roaring inferno.�
Michaels points out many specific flaws with the article’s methodology and basic assumptions. Among them:
~ The article’s best-case scenario projects warming of 0.8º C in the next 50 years and produces an extinction of roughly 20 percent of the sampled species. But surface temperatures already have risen this amount in the past 100 years ... and there is no evidence of massive climate-related extinctions.
~ Global climate models, in general, predict a warmer surface and an increased rate of rainfall. That scenario leads to expansion of global rainforests, where the greatest number and most diversity of species exist. Trading virtually lifeless polar ice sheets for expanding tropical rainforests creates a future climate with a general character that is more, not less, hospitable for biodiversity.
~ Temperatures have been bouncing up and down a lot more than 0.8ºC during the past several hundred thousand years. The Nature article’s published methodology implies there are large extinctions for each and every increment of change, whether the temperature goes up or down. Applying that method to all the temperature changes that have taken place would suggest just about every species on Earth should be extinct.
A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to an article in the magazine Nature which predicted global warming will cause between 15 and 37 percent of the Earth’s species to go extinct by the middle of this century unless immediate and drastic action is taken. After studying a sample of plants and animals around the globe, and then using computer programs to predict twenty-first century global warming, the authors claimed more than a million species will disappear by the year 2050. However, some serious flaws in the article have now been pointed out.
“There are a massive number of glaring problems� with the study, observed Virginia state climatologist Patrick Michaels, who is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels says theories on global warming have had a troubled career, starting with an article in Nature itself.
“In 1996, conveniently a day before the U.N. conference that gave birth to the Kyoto Protocol, Nature published a paper purporting to match observed temperature with computer models of disastrous warming. It used weather balloon data from 1963 through 1987. The actual record, however, extended (then) from 1958 through 1995, and when all the data were used, the troubling numbers disappeared.
“Since that famous incident, people have been very leery of what major scientific journals publish on global warming. The Thomas extinction paper only throws more fuel on an already roaring inferno.�
Michaels points out many specific flaws with the article’s methodology and basic assumptions. Among them:
~ The article’s best-case scenario projects warming of 0.8º C in the next 50 years and produces an extinction of roughly 20 percent of the sampled species. But surface temperatures already have risen this amount in the past 100 years ... and there is no evidence of massive climate-related extinctions.
~ Global climate models, in general, predict a warmer surface and an increased rate of rainfall. That scenario leads to expansion of global rainforests, where the greatest number and most diversity of species exist. Trading virtually lifeless polar ice sheets for expanding tropical rainforests creates a future climate with a general character that is more, not less, hospitable for biodiversity.
~ Temperatures have been bouncing up and down a lot more than 0.8ºC during the past several hundred thousand years. The Nature article’s published methodology implies there are large extinctions for each and every increment of change, whether the temperature goes up or down. Applying that method to all the temperature changes that have taken place would suggest just about every species on Earth should be extinct.
