Saturday, August 21, 2010


Nazism is not dead among British Leftists

Hitlerian forced eugenics not dead in England! The council involved is not named but Midlands councils are commonly Labour Party controlled

A judge has criticised a council for trying to have contraception forced upon a woman with a low IQ, warning that the move had “shades of social engineering”. Mr Justice Bodey said it would not be “acceptable” for police to take the married woman from her home before doctors sedated her and imposed birth control on her, against her will. He said the local authority’s plan, to stop the 29 year-old having more children, “would raise profound questions about state intervention in private and family life”.

However the judge agreed that she lacked the mental capacity to make important decisions about her medical treatment, paving the way for the council to make a further request for force to be used.

It is the latest in a series of rulings published by the Court of Protection, which until recently always kept its judgements secret, that highlight the power that town halls and judges have over people with learning difficulties or dementia.

Earlier this year a High Court judge sitting in the Court ruled that a woman suffering from cancer, who has a phobia of hospitals and needles, should be forced against her wishes to undergo life-saving treatment.

The Court, which was given the power to decide on personal welfare cases under the Mental Capacity Act 2005, can also order the withdrawal of life-support from patients as well as making them have abortions or undergo “innovative treatment”.

In the latest case, a council in the Midlands initially wanted to force contraception on a married woman who has an IQ of 53. None of those involved can be named. She has already had two babies, both of whom were taken away from her at birth by social services and put up for adoption over fears she would not be able to look after them.

The woman, known in the judgement as Mrs A, is now married to a man with an IQ of 65, and attends college as well as taking part in voluntary work.

A year ago social workers feared that she was suffering violence at the hands of her husband, and also that he had forced her to stop taking contraception because he wanted a baby, so the council began Court of Protection proceedings to “protect her interests”.

Solicitors, doctors and psychiatrists interviewed Mrs A in order to find out whether she understood the choices she had regarding birth control, and their implications.

The council argued that she was unable to understand the consequences of not using contraception such as the Pill or a coil, or to envisage what is involved in raising a child. But the Official Solicitor, representing the woman, argued that such a wide approach would mean many first-time mothers would appear to lack capacity.

The judge agreed that deciding whether a woman “understood enough about the practical realities of parenthood” would veer into a “paternalistic approach”.

On the narrower medical issue, he agreed that Mrs A lacked the capacity to decide whether to have contraceptive treatment. The judge said her decision to stop taking birth control was “not the product of her own free will” because of the “coercive pressure” placed upon her by her husband.

However he said that the council’s application was no longer for “force and restraint” to be used “so that contraception could be urgently administered”.

The judge said Mrs A’s social worker admitted “there would need to be police involvement” and it would be a “horrendous prospect” for her to be “physically removed from the family home and taken to have contraception under restraint and anaesthesia”.

He declined to make an order as to her best interests, leaving it for the council to assess the couple’s parenting abilities if she did become pregnant and then take “appropriate” steps. The council said it “reserves the right” to argue that force should be authorised in the future.

But the judge said: “It is obvious on the facts of this case, that any step towards long-term court imposed contraception by way of physical coercion, with its affinity to enforced sterilisation and shades of social engineering, would raise profound questions about state intervention in private and family life. Whilst the issue of the use of force has not been argued out at this hearing I cannot, on these facts, presently see how it could be acceptable.”

David Hewitt, a specialist in mental health law at Weightmans, said: “It seems from the judgment that, at least at the outset, the council thought it might need to have the police enforce an order that the woman take her contraceptive medication. That seems quite striking, yet because of the route the judge chose to take, it's still in prospect.”

SOURCE






Nothing will budge Muslim hatred

FIVE YEARS AGO THIS WEEK, the Gaza Strip was forcibly purged of its Jews. In the largest non-combat operation in the history of the Israeli Defense Forces, 50,000 troops were deployed to expel some 9,000 residents and destroy the 21 pioneering communities in which some of them had lived for nearly four decades. (Four communities in northern Samaria on the West Bank were also evacuated.)

The name given to this expulsion by Israel's government, then headed by Ariel Sharon, was "disengagement." The name implied, and a majority of Israelis appeared to believe, that by totally withdrawing from Gaza they would no longer be trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with Gaza's hostile and sometimes violent Arabs.

"What will we have gained by destroying thriving communities, dividing Israeli society, and embittering some of our most idealistic citizens?" one thoughtful Israeli commentator, Yossi Klein Halevi, wrote at the time in The Jerusalem Post. "The most obvious . . . gain is what we will lose: We will be freeing ourselves from more than a million Palestinians."

Many Israelis -- and many supporters of Israel internationally -- bought this argument, persuaded, perhaps, by the Sharon government's sweeping vision of the blessings that would flow from so radical an act of ethnic self-cleansing. "It will be good for us and will be good for the Palestinians," forecast then-Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who was to succeed Sharon a few months later. "It will bring more security, greater safety, much more prosperity, and a lot of joy for all the people that live in the Middle East." Olmert prayed that with disengagement, "a new morning of great hope will emerge in our part of the world," and that Israelis and Palestinians together would make the Middle East "what it was destined to be from the outset, a paradise for all the world."

Had any of this actually come to pass, the trauma and destruction of the Gaza expulsion might have been justifiable. In fact, disengagement was a staggering failure, a disaster in every respect. It was seen by most Palestinians not as a courageous act of goodwill and an invitation to peace, but as a retreat under fire, much like the Israeli flight from southern Lebanon five years earlier. It led therefore not to less terrorism but to more, as Palestinian militants vastly expanded their arsenal of rockets, guns, and explosives, and launched thousands of attacks over the border into Israel.

Far from encouraging Palestinian moderation, disengagement energized Gaza's most extreme and hateful irredentists. Five months after the Jewish residents left, Hamas swept to victory in the Palestinian Authority elections; a year later, it seized total control in Gaza, routing Fatah in a savage civil war.

The fruit of disengagement was not the "new morning of great hope" that Sharon and Olmert -- and their countless enablers in the West -- envisioned. Instead, it was an erosion of respect for Israeli strength and deterrence. It was the Second Lebanon War of 2006 and the three-week Israel-Hamas war that began at the end of 2008. It was the entrenchment of Iran, via Hamas and Hezbollah, on Israel's northern and southern borders. It was the burning of Gaza's synagogues and the trashing of its famous greenhouses. It was the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, who has been a hostage in Gaza for more than four of the five years since Israel abandoned the territory to its enemies. It was the further blackening of Israel's international reputation. It was the immiseration of Gaza's Palestinians under a fundamentalist Hamas dictatorship.

Most Israelis who supported disengagement now express regret. But too many of them remain in the grip of the "peace process" delusion -- the Oslo chimera that peace with the Palestinians is achievable through diplomacy, concessions, and transfers of land. It isn't, and Israel and its friends must start saying so. Rather than endlessly professing its willingness to negotiate and its appetite for a "two-state solution," Israel should tell the truth: Peace will never be possible with "partners" that refuse to accept the permanent legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East.

Disengagement was an abomination for a lot of reasons, but for one above all: It began from the premise that any future Palestinian state must be wiped clean of Jews. Did Israel really need to learn the hard way that peace will never lie down that road?

SOURCE




The U.S. judiciary's Culturally Sanctioned Allergy to Christianity Flourishes

Does anyone find it ironic that the very people who protest so loudly over supposed affronts to Islamic religious expression are often so hostile to the slightest Christian religious expressions -- even incidental expressions?

The left is going bonkers over opposition to the ground zero mosque in the name of religious freedom, but the left's assault on Christian liberties proceeds unabated. One very recent example is the ruling by a three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that memorial crosses erected and displayed along Utah public roads to honor fallen state highway troopers must be removed as unconstitutional.

In case you are wondering how highway crosses could remotely be considered to have violated any constitutional provision, the court tells us: "We hold that these memorials have the impermissible effect of conveying to the reasonable observer the message that the state prefers or otherwise endorses a certain religion."

So here we go again. Our politically correct-intoxicated culture is so allergic to expressions and symbols of Christianity that our courts leap to absurd conclusions to cordon off the chief allergen: Christianity.

To fully appreciate the outrageousness of the court's decision, you must understand that the memorial crosses were placed along Utah public roads by a private -- not public -- organization, the Utah Highway Patrol Association, which also maintains the crosses.

The egregious constitutional infraction here is not that the government put up the signs, which it didn't, but that the memorials were placed along public roads. Thus, "reasonable" passing motorists -- as opposed, I guess, to those afflicted with anti-Christian road rage -- might well assume that the government is endorsing the Christian religion. Horror of horrors. My gosh, what would the largely Christian Founders think?

Since the court is invoking the reasonable-man standard, let me just challenge its fundamental assertion right off the bat. I don't think it's a reasonable inference at all that the government is making a religious statement by permitting the placement of these memorials along the public highway. On the other hand, I think the government would be (and is) making a statement against Christianity by denying this group access because of its paranoia about going into Christian-spawned anaphylactic shock.

Let's go through the constitutional analysis briefly again. The First Amendment includes two religion clauses: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion (the establishment clause), or prohibiting the free exercise thereof (the free exercise clause)." These so-called church-state separation cases usually involve the establishment clause, which has been so expanded by the courts over the years as to be nearly unrecognizable in some cases.

According to many courts, the state doesn't have to establish a national church to run afoul of the establishment clause. It only has to be deemed to have endorsed (or even slightly favored) a particular religion -- as you can see from the court's language above. This is absurd, but it's nevertheless the position many courts are purporting to edict.

Our judiciary has become so obsessed with preventing any hint of a nod toward Christianity (it doesn't exhibit similar concerns about favoritism toward other religions or faith-based secular themes) that it has thwarted the driving purpose of the establishment clause.

You see, the ultimate purpose of the establishment clause, just as it was with the free exercise clause, was to promote religious liberty. The Framers knew that if there were a national church, there would be substantially less religious liberty. But under the ludicrously expansive interpretations of this clause, the courts are diminishing religious liberty in the name of protecting it.

If, for example, a high-school administration forbids a valedictorian from referring to her faith in Christ during her valedictory address under the convoluted reasoning that a single student's voluntarily expressing her faith somehow constitutes an endorsement by the school administration -- and thus the state -- it is prohibiting her freedom of religious expression and her free exercise rights. But given the dominance of secular forces in our culture, such concerns don't even occur to the courts.

It would be ridiculous enough for a court to hold that a permissive display on a public road of a cross erected and maintained by a private group with the express purpose of proselytizing constituted an impermissible state endorsement of the Christian religion. But it's insultingly offensive for this court to hold that such a permissive display of a cross whose primary purpose is to honor the fallen -- not to endorse Christianity -- is unconstitutional.

And don't tell me the court is erring on the side of caution here. No, its ruling is affirmatively hurting people and violating their real rights in the name of rights that don't exist, and it's shameful and unacceptable.

SOURCE





Child care’s debtors prison

And women wonder why men won't "commit"!

How many real “Deadbeat Dads” are there? Is it the same number of those divorced fathers who have been put into a debtor’s prison that has been created in order to supposedly catch the deadbeats?

Let’s say for example that you are a fellow who is divorced and you paid your child care. But you lost your job during the Great Recession and you have fallen behind on your payments. Does that make you a deadbeat? And let’s also say for example that your ex-wife works at a decent job where she doesn’t need the extra income to take care of the kids. Should she be able to get a bonus off the sweat of your brow? Or better yet, let’s say she gets remarried to a fellow who has a decent job as well. Do they need to squeeze more money out of the “deadbeat” when they don’t need it?

The changes in the economy have created more and more situations like the aforementioned—and more and more such divorced fathers who are anchored in debt because of either job loss, prison time (where you can be put if you don’t make your payments), or the fact that pay scale for unskilled labor has been dramatically shrunk over the years by immigration and globalization.

Even if the fellow does work, his wages are often garnished to the point where he can barely make ends meet on his own part. Or states can do nasty tricks like suspend driver’s licenses for non-payment, which also continues the cycle. And if the fellow remarried to a woman with children, there’s a family that’s going to have a hard time making it, given all the previous debt on top of what families typically owe for homes, cars and credit cards.

The stereotype of the impoverished single mother and the divorced dad driving around town in a sports car with the new girlfriend who doesn’t see his kids is still a powerful one, enough to basically keep the debtor’s prison of the child care system in place without anyone challenging it.

But the question of fairness, justice and the fact that there are and will eventually be lots of males in this predicament, makes this situation a sleeper political issue. It’s there waiting to be picked up by an enterprising politician who could ride a reform wave a long, long way.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). 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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