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Wednesday, September 14, 2005

They're Doing It Again

Every once in a while the bloggers just get in a frenzy and start spitting out reams of good stuff.

This morning Howard of Oraculations makes a darned good point about the connection between Able Danger and the Katrina effort. Everyone should be thinking about these issues, because they are what matters. I am not sure that I think the president should ever have the authority to send in federal troops solely on his own authority, but I do expect Congress to make some such moves. This is a good suggestion:
...a spy op conducted by the DoD that inadvertantly catches U.S. Citizens or protected Green Cards who are acting to harm the U.S. must somehow be authorized. A quick visit to a judge in such a case can fix it. If a judge decides that the operation violates the Constitution then it gets shut down. Period. But not until a judge rules.
But you are missing some trademark Howard rhetoric if you don't read his post.

SC&A launches into an incredibly acute story about a confrontation between the American system and the European system:
Europe, we said, never got over the fact that, unleashed, those 'wretched refuse' and 'huddled masses'- their very own- went on to build success not only for themselves, but for their adopted country as well. We said that these unwanted masses of people understood what the elite and intellectuals of Europe never understood for themselves-- that given the opportunity, they were perfectly able to fend for themselves, succeed and even excel. Thus, the European 'refuse' become proud and worthy pillars in the community. Their worth and contributions to the American mosaic was far more than what the Europeans had exploited them for. Europe had made a mistake by sending off its most abundant natural resource, it's own sons and daughters. All had been willing to work- and then some, had they been given the chance. Europe had squandered its best and most precious resource- a population ready to do it's best, in exchange for equal opportunity.
So true. And Ilona at True Grit points out that what is happening in Canada can happen here. What is happening in Canada is that the Muslims wanted to set up Sharia courts and there was an outcry against it. So the idea was nixed, but now in an attempt to be "fair" Canada is abolishing all the other similar systems. The Jewish courts have been around for over a century! Ilona quotes from an article which includes the following:
The move shows that liberal tolerance is baseless and aimless, and it typically fails to recognise that one cannot tolerate all things. And what is more, the contemporary liberal theory of tolerance seems less and less able to demonstrate why some things ought to be tolerated and others not. Such stand would require a defined set of beliefs other than liberal ideology, and alas, McGuinty cannot provide it.
Freedom is composed of a careful balancing act, and when a society loses the idea that it stands on fundamental principles (for us, those in the Constitution), it loses its ability to be a free society. Canada has a different system than we do, but the same underlying culture, so it is an apt warning for us.

Darcey and his partners in well-nigh criminally free speech over at Dust My Broom have been doing a wonderful job of chronicling the slow dissolution of a nation. What is happening to the First Nations in Canada is just a forecast of what will happen in all of Canada if this continues. When the state becomes almighty the people always suffer. Good intentions are not enough. Rationality and realism is required as well.


Comments:
but for us to allow one religious court, such as a Kahal but not a Sharia court would be unconstitutional. You can't endorse one religion while restricting another. It is pretty much all or nothing.
 
Dingo - this is Canada, remember? A whole different question which has absolutely nothing to do with our Constitution.

There are private courts in the USA, but the people have to consent to them. They don't have legal weight.

There are arbitration courts as well, and some of those have been abused to defraud consumers.
 
We've seen in other issues where the clamor to be fair and tolerant on the religious issue somehow gets turned to clamoring for the suffocating of religion and the dominance of secular sway over religious matters. Actually this happened in the court case that gutted our religious freedoms. In that case it wasn't Muslim religion, but a peyote based native religion. There are other tests, but the prevailing opinion is to control religion.

I don't know Canadian government, but the point was made that previous to the demands of Islam, the other religions had worked harmoniously with state interests.

Beth, over on SC&A, had said something -with lots of pathos- about how Muslims are instrumental in robbing us of our freedoms. I wanted to try to write something dissuasive, but I couldn't. I couldn't honestly make a case that that was wrong. Along with this case in Canada it has me thinking - we are being swept along and we aren't really sure of where we are going with some of these causes we take up.

I just wonder, Dingo, are we really so ironclad in our determination to keep our freedom of religion... or is it changing into just freedom from religion?

MoM, just want to say thanks for the way you fight the good fight for Freedom, keeping the dialogue out there in the face of the public. You do just a stand up job.
 
Ilona, you wrote:
"We've seen in other issues where the clamor to be fair and tolerant on the religious issue somehow gets turned to clamoring for the suffocating of religion and the dominance of secular sway over religious matters."

Yes, exactly! And I wonder if the traditional system couldn't have been preserved by simply requiring affirmative registrations of consent to such judgments before a regular judge. It is at least possible that interests used this pretext to wipe out the whole system because those interests disliked it.

Remember, this is the country in which it was proposed to require all ministers and/or priests to be certified by the state. This is the country in which people have been fined for quoting texts from the Bible.

As for the fight about freedom, Ilona, so many of those born in this country think that this is just the way it is. I am close enough to those in my family who arrived here as refugees to know what an exceptional thing we really have, and to know that we must defend it or we will lose it.
 
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