Robert Love, who occasionally comments here, has launched a website along with his friend Hamoon Fruzesh-Far. The website is called The Noble Lie. Check it out!

According to the Globe and Mail today:

The Conservative government is planning measures, including a Defence of Religions Act, to allow public officials, such as Justices of the Peace, to refuse to perform same-sex marriages.

The measures are also intended to protect the free-speech rights of religious leaders and others who criticize homosexual behaviour or refuse to do business with gay-rights organizations, The Globe and Mail has learned.

Any legislation would be brought forward only if the government loses the motion this fall to reopen the debate on same-sex marriage.

Although the former Liberal government claimed “existing laws and court rulings already protect the rights of religious groups not to be compelled to perform same-sex marriage”, there is “acknowledged uncertainty about the rights of individuals to publicly criticize homosexual behaviour” such as “advertisements that quote scripture demanding that homosexuals be put to death”, according to the Globe.

This law ranks among the most cynical ever proposed in Canada and clearly demonstrates the Conservatives’ determination to subvert the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Its title, “The Defense of Religions Act”, is absurd. Clearly chosen to appeal to religious people on a gut level, it narrowly and incorrectly frames the issue of gay rights as a war against religion.

If anyone needs defending, however, it is homosexuals. I can’t think of many cases where a Christian was attacked by a group of gays and beaten to death. I can’t recall the last time a Gay Pride parade turned nasty and ended with a Christian tied to a truck, getting dragged down a road.

This would seem like an extreme analogy if it wasn’t for the idea that we need to examine whether or not ads quoting doctrines that advocate murder are okay. Short answer: they’re not.

Less severe than calls for their murder, but far more pervasive, is discrimination against gays who are seeking employment or housing. But Harper believes the real concern is the persecution of religious Canadians, a vulnerable minority comprising 84% of the population in 2001.

Harper’s Conservatives are seeking to shore up support among their Christian base, but they are also seeking support from religious groups that are not among the Conservatives’ typical supporters, like Jews and Muslims.

Since the Act will “defend” the beliefs of these religious groups as well, will it be lawful for Jewish or Muslim extremists to take out ads advocating attacks on Christians or on each other?

Will it be lawful for a Muslim clerk at city hall to refuse to issue a marriage license to a Muslim and a non-Muslim who wish to marry, on the grounds that interfaith marriages are against his religion?

Many great evils have been committed in the name of religion. Rather than defend these evils, we should defend against them.

[tags]gay rights, gay marriage, homosexuality, religion[/tags]

The Liberal Party of Canada has granted 30% of its leadership convention delegates to candidate Michael Ignatieff. The delegates are heading to the party’s leadership convention this December.

This is nothing close to a victory, and it probably says little about Iggy as a political leader. What does this number tell us? For starters, it tells us that 30% of Liberals just don’t get it.

Iggy may win a Liberal leadership convention, but he will not win the next federal election. You can swoon all you want about his intellect, his worldliness, his looks, and his shoe size. It does not make a difference. He will not win.

The fact that Iggy has lived most of his life somewhere other than Canada is a big deal. Some Liberal insiders, drunk by the prospect of his candidacy, are willing to tell you otherwise, but they are wrong. It will be a very big deal for many Canadians. What’s worse is that Iggy’s supporters have to try and create an answer to this little problem.

A friend of mine is supporting Iggy. She knows some of the spin-doctors and Liberal champs in Iggy’s backroom. I told her what I thought: “Many Canadians won’t vote for a Prime Minister who has lived most of his life outside of Canada.”

She answered, “Yes, but I also think many Canadians realize that, if you want to be successful, you have to leave Canada at some point in your life.”

Wow. This rebuttal has absolutely no appeal to me. It is as cynical as it is ironic. Could you imagine a candidate for Prime Minster campaigning, even vaguely, on that notion? If that’s what Iggy’s supporters have come up with, then they are in more trouble than I thought.

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This post was written by alevo.

[tags]politics, Canada, liberals, liberal leadership, ignatieff[/tags]

The United States congress and senate have now passed Bush’s Military Commissions Act and in doing so have taken a firm step towards tyranny in the United States.

Strong language, I know. But judge for yourself.

The New York Times: Rushing Off a Cliff:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret – there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Yes, the enemy combatants portion of this bill means that you or I, as Canadians, could travel to the United States, get arrested, be declared enemy combatants, and then be locked away indefinitely (perhaps forever) with no right to challenge our detention in court (habeas corpus). Kind of like what happened to Maher Arar, except now it’s legal.

Worse for Americans, some interpretations of this bill indicate this could also happen to American citizens.

Los Angeles Times: The White House Warden:

Buried in the complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops “during an armed conflict,” it also allows him to seize anybody who has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

[…]

We are not dealing with hypothetical abuses. The president has already subjected a citizen to military confinement. Consider the case of Jose Padilla. A few months after 9/11, he was seized by the Bush administration as an “enemy combatant” upon his arrival at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. He was wearing civilian clothes and had no weapons. Despite his American citizenship, he was held for more than three years in a military brig, without any chance to challenge his detention before a military or civilian tribunal. After a federal appellate court upheld the president’s extraordinary action, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, handing the administration’s lawyers a terrible precedent.

The bill also allows the Bush administration to define what constitutes torture, enabling it to continue to use favoured techniques of the Khmer Rouge like forced hypothermia and stress positions. It does not require the administration to reveal which techniques it advocates, opening up yet another loophole for the administration.

And it also retroactively prevents Americans from being prosecuted for war crimes committed in the war on terror. This is especially important for Bush now, because recent Supreme Court rulings made it clear that he had, in fact, committed war crimes by authorizing illegal imprisonment and indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” and US citizens, as well as the “outrages upon human dignity” prohibited in the Geneva Conventions, which were, until now, also American law.

All in all, it’s about time to say, Good Luck America, have fun.

[tags]politics, torture, human rights, tyranny[/tags]

The United States has started live-ammunition training drills on the Great Lakes “to prepare officers to combat terrorists flooding across the border from Canada by boat”, reports the Globe and Mail.

The automatic-weapon drills started earlier this year but came to light only in the past two weeks after information about the Coast Guard’s move to create 34 permanent live-fire training zones in the Great Lakes was published in the U.S. federal register.

Since the beginning of the year, the Coast Guard have conducted 24 drills, each time firing about 3,000 rounds of lead bullets about a third of the size of a fishing-line sinker from light-weight machine guns in waters at least eight kilometres from the Canadian border and U.S. shores. Two more target practices are scheduled for this year.

The high-powered drills have stunned environmentalists, boaters and mayors in cities dotting the lakes in both countries who are outraged that the U.S. government would jeopardize the safety of pleasure boaters and commercial fishermen who could stray into the line of fire. Just as infuriating, they say, is the risk of lead exposure to fish and the more than 40 million people who draw drinking water from the Great Lakes.

I can picture it already: blissfully relaxing by the pool at my in-laws’ house on the shore of Lake Ontario, sipping my beer and listening to the gentle crackle of machine-gun fire and the rumble of high-powered Coast Guard vessels.

For a dash of added excitement, perhaps the occasional stray round will shatter a nearby window or richochet off the barbecue.

This should also be wonderful for tourism. “Welcome to the Great Lakes Region, where straying into the line of fire makes every vacation memorable.” It also represents a great business opportunity for the first company that invents a bulletproof life vest.

In fact, this seems like such a positive development all around that maybe Canada should get into the game too. I suggest we designate the 34 US live-fire training zones as live-fire bombing zones for our air force. And if our bombing runs just happen to coincide with their training exercises? Hey, there’s nothing like realism when you’re training top-quality personnel!