Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Religious Hate-Speech Proposal Appears Doomed in Britain. The British government is expected to drop a contentious proposal to outlaw religious incitement, having failed to get the legislation through the House of Lords quickly enough to avoid running out of parliamentary time.
But the news is not so good elsewhere. Melanie Phillips has some sobering evidence on what happens when "tolerance" infects the law. "Tolerance now means tolerating the intolerable when practised by a designated victim group. Not to tolerate it is racist.This crazy and sinister thinking, which makes victims out of law-breakers and bigots out of the true victims of crime, has become the orthodoxy throughout the public services, including the police. Once the thin blue line defending a society’s fundamental values, the police have now grotesquely turned into a weapon against them. Rather than upholding justice and order, they have become the enforcement arm of a culture which thinks that prejudice and discrimination are the worst crimes that can be committed."
And Dr Chris Kempling received a standing ovation for this address delivered on March 4, 2005 in New York City at a United Nations Commission on Human Rights Delegate Briefing. In it, he details how hate speech laws are being used in Canada to shut down religious freedom.
The terrorist attacks in September 2001 reawakened among American intellectuals the theory that religious faith makes people violent. A new book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris, is getting a lot of media attention. In it, Harris says that in order to save ourselves from imminent destruction we should take all steps possible to abolish religion: "Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal', or they will unmake our world." Matthew Simpson presents an excellent critique of the book, with good arguments to counter it.
Should the religious right be allowed to have a say in making law, asks Hugh Hewitt? Countering the critics, he says: "All of these charges--from the most incoherent to the most measured--arrive without definition as to what "the religious right" is, and without argument as to why the agenda of this ill-defined group is less legitimate than the pro-gay marriage, pro-cloning, pro-partial-birth abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda of other political actors. a strain of thought is developing that the political objectives of people of faith have second-class status when compared to those of, say, religiously secular elites."
Polls indicate a majority of French voters plan to reject the European Union constitution in a referendum on May 29, raising the prospect of France rejecting the charter and plunging the EU into crisis. The treaty requires the support of all 25 member states to go into force.
British bioethicist John Harris has again plunged into controversy by arguing that medical research is so important that people should sometimes be forced to participate. In an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, he balances the rights of the subject against the society's need for medical advances, which he compares to taxation, jury duty or wearing seat belts. Professor Harris acknowledges that his idea would shake long-established conventions. Normally, competent individuals should be preferred as research subjects, but in extreme cases, it might be necessary to enlist the incompetent. Children and incompetent people, such as patients who are demented or in a permanent vegetative state, should also be forced to participate, if necessary, says Professor Harris. "The presumption should surely be that [children] would have wished to behave decently and would not have wished to be free riders" who benefit from research but do not contribute, he contends.
In the first successful "wrongful life" suit in the Netherlands, a severely disabled Dutch child has been awarded damages for having been born. Before Kelly Molenaar, now 11, was born, her parents knew that there was a risk of birth defects and asked a midwife at Leiden University Medical Centre whether tests were needed. They were told No and they proceeded with the birth. Had they known of Kelly's disability, they would have aborted her. The Dutch Supreme Court has ruled that Kelly was entitled to compensation for emotional damage because she had been born. Joep Hubben, a professor of health law at Groningen University, says that the judgement makes the Netherlands a "legal island". "Almost nowhere else in the world would this claim be allowed."
The governor of the US state of Illinois has used emergency powers to force a pharmacy to sell contraceptives. The state government will also charge it with "failure to provide pharmaceutical care" and "unprofessional conduct" after a pharmacist declined to dispense contraceptives to two women in February. The incident highlights the increasing number of American pharmacists who are refusing to fill prescriptions for contraceptives or the morning-after pill because it violates their moral or religious beliefs.
And now we have "Fertility Tourism". Americans are saving money by going abroad for in-vitro treatments and having a holiday at the same time.
But the news is not so good elsewhere. Melanie Phillips has some sobering evidence on what happens when "tolerance" infects the law. "Tolerance now means tolerating the intolerable when practised by a designated victim group. Not to tolerate it is racist.This crazy and sinister thinking, which makes victims out of law-breakers and bigots out of the true victims of crime, has become the orthodoxy throughout the public services, including the police. Once the thin blue line defending a society’s fundamental values, the police have now grotesquely turned into a weapon against them. Rather than upholding justice and order, they have become the enforcement arm of a culture which thinks that prejudice and discrimination are the worst crimes that can be committed."
And Dr Chris Kempling received a standing ovation for this address delivered on March 4, 2005 in New York City at a United Nations Commission on Human Rights Delegate Briefing. In it, he details how hate speech laws are being used in Canada to shut down religious freedom.
The terrorist attacks in September 2001 reawakened among American intellectuals the theory that religious faith makes people violent. A new book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris, is getting a lot of media attention. In it, Harris says that in order to save ourselves from imminent destruction we should take all steps possible to abolish religion: "Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal', or they will unmake our world." Matthew Simpson presents an excellent critique of the book, with good arguments to counter it.
Should the religious right be allowed to have a say in making law, asks Hugh Hewitt? Countering the critics, he says: "All of these charges--from the most incoherent to the most measured--arrive without definition as to what "the religious right" is, and without argument as to why the agenda of this ill-defined group is less legitimate than the pro-gay marriage, pro-cloning, pro-partial-birth abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda of other political actors. a strain of thought is developing that the political objectives of people of faith have second-class status when compared to those of, say, religiously secular elites."
Polls indicate a majority of French voters plan to reject the European Union constitution in a referendum on May 29, raising the prospect of France rejecting the charter and plunging the EU into crisis. The treaty requires the support of all 25 member states to go into force.
British bioethicist John Harris has again plunged into controversy by arguing that medical research is so important that people should sometimes be forced to participate. In an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, he balances the rights of the subject against the society's need for medical advances, which he compares to taxation, jury duty or wearing seat belts. Professor Harris acknowledges that his idea would shake long-established conventions. Normally, competent individuals should be preferred as research subjects, but in extreme cases, it might be necessary to enlist the incompetent. Children and incompetent people, such as patients who are demented or in a permanent vegetative state, should also be forced to participate, if necessary, says Professor Harris. "The presumption should surely be that [children] would have wished to behave decently and would not have wished to be free riders" who benefit from research but do not contribute, he contends.
In the first successful "wrongful life" suit in the Netherlands, a severely disabled Dutch child has been awarded damages for having been born. Before Kelly Molenaar, now 11, was born, her parents knew that there was a risk of birth defects and asked a midwife at Leiden University Medical Centre whether tests were needed. They were told No and they proceeded with the birth. Had they known of Kelly's disability, they would have aborted her. The Dutch Supreme Court has ruled that Kelly was entitled to compensation for emotional damage because she had been born. Joep Hubben, a professor of health law at Groningen University, says that the judgement makes the Netherlands a "legal island". "Almost nowhere else in the world would this claim be allowed."
The governor of the US state of Illinois has used emergency powers to force a pharmacy to sell contraceptives. The state government will also charge it with "failure to provide pharmaceutical care" and "unprofessional conduct" after a pharmacist declined to dispense contraceptives to two women in February. The incident highlights the increasing number of American pharmacists who are refusing to fill prescriptions for contraceptives or the morning-after pill because it violates their moral or religious beliefs.
And now we have "Fertility Tourism". Americans are saving money by going abroad for in-vitro treatments and having a holiday at the same time.
