4/11/2009 -
Northern European political correctness imposed on Italy
Crucifixes in classrooms 'violate rights'. Italians care little for political correctness and are notorious scofflaws so I doubt that this ruling will alter much. If the woman persists in making a nuisance of herself, she could well end up dead. The Mafia are in many ways socially conservative
ITALY violates parents' right to educate their children along secular lines by displaying crucifixes in classrooms, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled. The judgment sparked anger in Catholic Italy, with the country's education minister attacking the decision, insisting the crucifix was a "symbol of our tradition".
The Strasbourg court found that: "The compulsory display of a symbol of a given confession in premises used by the public authorities... restricted the right of parents to educate their children in conformity with their convictions." It also restricted the "right of children to believe or not to believe," the seven judges ruling on the case said. The case was brought by Sail Lactase, who was also awarded €5000 ($8173.27) in damages.
The ruling drew immediate criticism in Italy, where Ms Lactases efforts to change tradition have come up against stiff resistance from the Catholic establishment. Years of legal wrangling saw the case eventually thrown out by judges in Italy, who ruled the crucifix was patriotic and a sign of the country's tradition, not simply a symbol of Catholicism.
Italian Education Minister Meristically Domini lashed out at the European court for its decision. "The presence of the crucifix in classrooms is not a sign of belief in Catholicism, rather it is a symbol of our tradition," said the minister, cited by ANSA news agency. "No-one, and certainly not an ideological European court, will succeed in erasing our identity," she added.
Ms Lactase first brought the case eight years ago when her children, Addicted and Sami Aberdeen, aged 11 and 13, went to a state school in Abalone Terme near Venice. She was unhappy crucifixes were present in every classroom and complained to the school. After education chiefs refused to remove the crosses, she spent several years fighting the decision through the Italian courts. The case was heard by a regional court in the northern Veneto region, which passed it to the constitutional court, according to a statement from the European rights court. This court ruled it did not have the jurisdiction to judge the case.
It returned to the Veneto court, where it was dismissed on the grounds that the crucifix was "the symbol of Italian history and culture, and consequently of Italian identity," the European rights court said. Ms Lactase appealed to the council of state, which also slapped down her complaint on similar grounds. This paved the way for the battle to head to the European Court of Human Rights.
The Strasbourg court found the display of crucifixes "could reasonably be associated with Catholicism". This did not fit in with "educational pluralism", which was part of European rights charters recognised by Italy, the court said. The presence of a crucifix in classrooms could also be "disturbing for pupils who practised other religions or were atheists, particularly if they belonged to religious minorities". The court ruled that displaying crucifixes in classrooms breached articles 2 and 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
SOURCE
Militant atheists are driven by hate
Comment from an Australian Catholic: Attacking Christians is not really clever, witty or funny
FROM time immemorial, this world has been troubled by plagues. From bogong moths in Canberra to frogs in biblical Egypt, unwelcome and unlovely creatures have the awkward habit of turning up in bulk. Just now, we are facing one of our largest and least appealing infestations. Somewhat in advance of summer's blowflies, we are beset by atheists. Worse, they are not traditional atheists. These tended to be quiet blokes called Algie with ancillary interests in nudist ceramics, who were perfectly happy as long as you pretended to accept a pamphlet in Flinders Lane.
No, the new hobby atheist is as brash, noisy and confident as a cheap electric kettle. They want everyone to know that they have not found God, and that no one else should. Their particular target seems to be Catholics. On the surface, this is odd, as there are plenty of other religious targets just waiting to be saved from a vengeful, non-existent deity. Smaller herds, such as the Christadelphians or the Salvation Army, might seem more manageable. But the Catholic Church has two incomparable advantages as an object of the wrath of proselytising atheists. First, it is the biggie. Taking out the Catholics is the equivalent of nuking the Pentagon. Guerilla bands of Baptists and Pentecostals can be liquidated at leisure.
Second, the Catholics have the undeniable advantage that they do still demonstrably believe in something. Attacking some of the more swinging Christian denominations might mean upsetting people who believe a good deal less than the average atheist.
Mind you, the appeals of atheism as a diverting pastime are not immediately obvious to those of us who are on relatively easy terms with God. Why would anyone get so excited about the misconceptions of third parties as to the existence of a fourth party in which they themselves do not believe?
The answer is twofold. First, the great advantage of designer atheism is that you get to think of yourself as immensely clever. After all, you are at least much brighter than all those dumb-asses who believe in a supreme being, such as Sister Perpetua down the road, Thomas Aquinas, Isaac Newton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. So satisfying.
The second factor has to do with wit. For some reason, contemporary Australian atheism seems to consider itself terribly funny. Its proponents only have to wheel out one of the age-old religious libels to lose control of their bladders. To outsiders, of course, it is a bit like watching a giggling incontinent drunk at a party. This is not to say that believers - and perhaps especially Catholics - do not get seriously irritated by atheists. They do, but not because atheists are fearfully clever or Wildely funny.
Frankly, the prime reason the average believer finds the common or garden atheist as appealing as a holiday in Birchip is because they consign them to that sorry category of individuals who spend their lives loudly congratulating themselves on their own intelligence without noticing that no one else is joining the chorus. Thus, as a Catholic, I do not normally sense in some tabloid atheist the presence of a supreme discerning intellect. I simply place him or her in much the same pitiable bin of intellectual vulgarians as the chartered accountant who cannot see the art in Picasso, the redneck who cannot admit of indigenous culture, and the pissant who cannot see the difference between Yeats and Bob Ellis.
It is not deep perception we encounter here, but a critical failure of imaginative capacity. It is a bit like the old joke: how many atheists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None - no matter what they do, they just can't see the light.
The second wearying thing about the new atheism is that it is not new at all. It is so banally derivative of every piece of hate mail ever sent to God that I am amazed Satan has yet to sue for copyright infringement. No old chestnut is too ripe, rotten or sodden, especially when it comes to the Catholics as accredited suppliers of what apparently is the Christian equivalent of methamphetamine.
In an average week of atheistic bigotry in the Melbourne media, we can expect to learn that Catholics endorse child molestation, hate all other religions, would re-introduce the crusades and the auto de fe at the slightest opportunity, despise women, wish to persecute homosexuals, greedily divert public moneys for their own religious purposes, subvert public health care, brainwash children, and are masterminding the spread of the cane toad across northern Australia.
Applied to the average totalitarian dictatorship, this charge sheet would be over the top. Ascribed to virtually any ethnic minority, it rightly would result at least in public revulsion and quite possibly in criminal charges. But applied to Christians, it seems to be accepted as just another modern blood sport, like the vilification of refugees and the elimination of the private life of the families of public figures.
At the bottom, of course, lies hate. I am not quite clear why our modern crop of atheists hates Christians, as opposed to ignoring or even politely dismissing them, but they very clearly do. There is nothing clever, witty or funny about hate.
SOURCE
A hateful hate-crime law
By Star Parker (who is black)
President Obama has signed into law the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Actually, he signed into law the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act tacked onto what was the hate crimes legislation. Sen. Harry Reid, our brave Democratic majority leader, slipped the hate crimes bill into the defense authorization bill to avoid having to have our senators consider the controversial hate crimes bill on its own.
It’s for good reason that our Democratic legislators wanted to hide under a rock while passing this terrible piece of legislation. It may help them with the far-left wing of their party. But weakening and damaging our country is not something to be proud of. And that is exactly what this new hate crime law does. The bill adds extra penalties to punishment of violent crimes when it is deemed they were motivated by gender, sexual orientation or disabilities. It’s the first major expansion of hate crimes legislation originally passed in 1968, targeted then to crimes aimed at race, color, religion and national origin.
After signing this new law, Obama celebrated it by saying that in this nation we should “embrace our differences.” But law isn’t about embracing our differences. It is about providing equal and non-arbitrary protection to all citizens. Equal protection for every individual American under the law is what the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, passed after the Civil War, guarantees. That this nation takes this guarantee seriously — that there are no classes of individuals that are treated differently under the law — has been a justifiable obsession of blacks. A society in which all life is not valued the same, where murder of one citizen is not the same as murder of another citizen, is a horror that black Americans have known too well. So it is a particular irony that this major expansion of the politicization of our law has been signed by our first black president.
What could it possibly mean that the penalty for the same act of violence — for murder — may be different depending on what might be deemed to be the motivation? Can you imagine a football game where the penalty for roughing the passer is 20 yards rather than 15 if the referee concludes that the violence perpetrated was motivated because the quarterback was homosexual?
Is it not a sign of our own pathology that we now have codified that it is worse to murder a homosexual than someone who has committed adultery, even with your husband or wife, or who has slandered or robbed? Isn’t the point murder? Can we really believe that someone capable of murder is less likely to do so if the victim is a homosexual and the penalties are greater than for the other reasons above?
It should be clear that hate crime law has nothing to do with improving our law but rather with creating favored political classes. Something that should be hateful to everyone who cares about a free society. And particularly hateful to those, such as blacks, who have been so victimized by politicization of law.
How about the sad and pathetic recent murder of a 16-year-old Christian black honor student in Chicago by four teenage thugs, also black? A hate crime? Black-on-black homicides that are tearing up our inner cities? Hate crimes?
The social breakdown that produces the disproportionate violence in black America is the product of the same moral relativism and politicization of law that has produced hate crime bills. We already have a source that instructs against murder and to love your neighbor as yourself. But this has been banned from our schools and our public spaces. So once again, in what is becoming our godless nation, we mistake the disease for the cure.
SOURCE
Deepak Chopra’s hate speech against Evangelical Christians
President Obama signed “hate crimes” legislation last week, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement praising the new law, saying that in “this country, no one should suffer persecution, discrimination or violence because of who they are, how they look or what they believe.”
Amen to that thought, and amen especially to the idea of protecting belief, including beliefs unpopular within liberal opinion elites. Perhaps the president and the speaker can find some time to let their left-wing supporters know that the accusation of hate is itself hateful, and that slanders against Christians for holding to their beliefs and the beliefs of hundreds of generations of Christians before them are as repugnant to them as the verbal attacks by bigots on people of color.
Spiritualist Deepak Chopra comes to mind as one of the Left’s loudest purveyors of hate speech. Chopra has a problem with the beliefs of mainstream Christianity and its place in America and American history, but his deep prejudice goes unrebuked by champions of tolerance like Pelosi. Chopra’s first salvo against mainstream Christianity was fired in the Huffington Post after last fall’s presidential forum hosted by Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Valley Community Church. “For me,” Chopra wrote, “the God quiz that Barack Obama endured with barely concealed sweaty palms and that John McCain breezed through with seasoned casualness has no place in American politics.”
Chopra then served up a classic bit of “leftist tolerance”: “The reason that any contemporary presidential candidate is forced to suffer the indignity of confessing his religious beliefs in public goes back to the Reagan revolution. ... Reagan, after all, was the president who, if left to his own devices, would have let thousands more AIDS victims die through neglect and lack of funding for basic medical research. “The implicit reason, well understood by the right and endorsed by fundamentalists, was that gays deserve what they get if they pursue a lifestyle that doesn’t match right-wing Christian ideology. Minorities, women, immigrants, and progressivism in general were given the same back hand.”
The demonization of political opponents is routine on the Left, but Chopra’s poisonous rewrite of history has few parallels within the mainstream.
Chopra resurfaced with another screed when Obama’s inauguration featured the same Warren. More thunder from the New Age guru: “The right wing may posture as if Christianity deserves special privilege and pride of place. Their posturing has convinced a lot of people for the past 20 years, but it’s high time we threw the whole charade out the window.”
Still more Chopra invective surfaced in The Washington Post this September, again targeting Warren and reflecting the charm of the Left. “The abuse delivered by right-wing Christians is such an old story that we are long past irony,” Chopra wrote, before moving on to his favorite target. “The Rev. Rick Warren has a record for trying to smooth the waters, but he also flirts with intolerance — toward gay marriage, for instance — and since his rationale is that a ‘loving’ God shares the same prejudices, what’s to stop others with worse tempers from following the same logic? When your God hates, you have permission to hate,” Chopra wrote.
When your guru hates, I guess that gives you permission to hate as well?
Chopra’s rage against mainstream Christianity may have its roots in nothing more complicated than a simple though vast jealousy at Warren’s enormous success, and not just success in selling books but in attracting tens of thousands of pastors and their congregations to a revitalized Christian faith in the new millennium. Warren’s call, heeded by millions of American Christians, to lead faith-filled lives, to give sacrificially and to work for the alleviation of suffering across the planet has been the focus of astonished applause by intelligent observers across the political spectrum.
Warren’s church and the millions of American Christians who hold similar beliefs and practice similar disciplines model authentic and traditional Christian belief. There isn’t much to hate there, but Chopra and others on the Left want to try to transform mainstream Christian belief in traditional marriage into a postmodern scarlet letter, and they will use the tactics of extremist hate if they have to. We are not “long past irony” here, just face to face with the unpleasant reality of the Left’s genuine agenda of silencing its opponents.
SOURCE
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
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5/11/2009 - Untitled Comment |
| Posted by Anonymous |
Every time you post about hate I look for a mechanism and there is none. But if I substitute ENVY for hate then it makes sense. Hate comes from being wronged, from injustice. Envy is *imagined* injustice. Envy has a logical mechanism in which a person thinks and feels that those who are less uptight than themselves have magical powers or other advantages that are not fair. So they want to destroy the others.
-=NikFromNYC=- |
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Examining political correctness around the world and its stifling of liberty and sense. Chronicling a slowly developing dictatorship
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Gender is a property of words, not of people. Using it otherwise is just another politically correct distortion -- though not as pernicious as calling racial discrimination "Affirmative action"
Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!
Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.
Juergen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."
The Supreme Court of the United States is now and always has been a judicial abomination. Its guiding principles have always been political rather than judicial. It is not as political as Stalin's courts but its respect for the constitution is little better. Some recent abuses: The "equal treatment" provision of the 14th amendment was specifically written to outlaw racial discrimination yet the court has allowed various forms of "affirmative action" for decades -- when all such policies should have been completely stuck down immediately. The 2nd. amendment says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed yet gun control laws infringe it in every State in the union. The 1st amedment provides that speech shall be freely exercised yet the court has upheld various restrictions on the financing and display of political advertising. The court has found a right to abortion in the constitution when the word abortion is not even mentioned there. The court invents rights that do not exist and denies rights that do.
Consider two "jokes" below:
Q. "Why are Leftists always standing up for blacks and homosexuals?
A. Because for all three groups their only God is their penis"
Pretty offensive, right? So consider this one:
Q. "Why are evangelical Christians like the Taliban?
A. They are both religious fundamentalists"
The latter "joke" is not a joke at all, of course. It is a comparison routinely touted by Leftists. Both "jokes" are greatly offensive and unfair to the parties targeted but one gets a pass without question while the other would bring great wrath on the head of anyone uttering it. Why? Because political correctness is in fact just Leftist bigotry. Bigotry is unfairly favouring one or more groups of people over others -- usually justified as "truth".
One of my more amusing memories is from the time when the Soviet Union still existed and I was teaching sociology in a major Australian university. On one memorable occasion, we had a representative of the Soviet Womens' organization visit us -- a stout and heavily made-up lady of mature years. When she was ushered into our conference room, she was greeted with something like adulation by the local Marxists. In question time after her talk, however, someone asked her how homosexuals were treated in the USSR. She replied: "We don't have any. That was before the revolution". The consternation and confusion that produced among my Leftist colleagues was hilarious to behold and still lives vividly in my memory. The more things change, the more they remain the same, however. In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad told Columbia university that there are no homosexuals in Iran.
It is widely agreed (with mainly Lesbians dissenting) that boys need their fathers. What needs much wider recognition is that girls need their fathers too. The relationship between a "Daddy's girl" and her father is perhaps the most beautiful human relationship there is. It can help give the girl concerned inner strength for the rest of her life.
The love of bureaucracy is very Leftist and hence "correct". Who said this? "Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything". It was V.I. Lenin
On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.
I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.
I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!
Germaine Greer is a stupid old Harpy who is notable only for the depth and extent of her hatreds
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