Quotulatiousness

July 16, 2013

The authoritarian wing of the same-sex marriage campaign

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:28

A. Barton Hinkle wonders if gay couples can live and let live:

It was a great day when the Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and threw out a California case that could have undermined gay marriage in the Golden State. On that day, gay and lesbian citizens won something profoundly important: acknowledgment of the right to live as they choose, without interference from others who think they know better.

Now the question is: Will gay and lesbian citizens acknowledge that everybody else has the same right? Some certainly will. But others are challenging the notion – and thereby undermining the case for their own hard-won victory.

David Mullins and Charlie Craig, for instance. The gay Colorado couple have filed a discrimination complaint against the owners of Masterpiece Cakeshop, who declined for religious reasons to make them a wedding cake. The Colorado attorney general’s office has taken their side. So, regrettably, has the ACLU.

And they have company: Similar complaints have been brought against bakeries in Oregon, Indianapolis, and Iowa; a Hawaiian bed-and-breakfast; a Vermont inn; a Washington florist; a Kentucky T-shirt company; and more. As gay marriage gains ground, cases such as these likely will flourish.

As they do, they will lend credence to the otherwise ludicrous assertion by social conservatives that there is a “homosexual agenda.” It will remain absurd to suggest gay people are trying to turn straight people gay. Changing other people’s sexual orientation has always been a conservative project, not a liberal one. But it will cease being absurd to suggest that requests for tolerance are actually demands for approval – and that those who claim to celebrate diversity actually insist upon ideological uniformity.

Invisible witches preying on sleeping Zambian teachers

Filed under: Africa, Education, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Yep, it’s back to the weird news season apparently:

The week has barely begun and already the gods have served us up a fresh piece of crazy. It seems that teachers at the Nashongo and Makaba primary schools in Siavonga, Zambia have threatened to abandon their posts after a rash of indecent incidents involving invisible witches. According to Chief Sinadambwe of the Tonga-speaking people, the saucy sorcerers have been projecting their spirits into the teachers’ bedrooms and molesting them. And they don’t even have the decency to call in the morning.

[. . .]

I could check my privilege and acknowledge that fear of incubi and succubi was also once common in Europe, or else write sensitively about a foreign culture still rooted in cultural tradition. But Zambia is a country on the move (with a growth rate of around 6.5 per cent, it’s outstripping the UK) and it’s not unreasonable to say that invisible sex attacks should not still be happening anywhere in the world in the 21st century — especially when they are reported by teachers, who one hopes would be educated to a point of thinking such things are a Medieval fairy tale.

Alas, it seems that randy psychic witches are still regarded as quite common in modern Zambia. Back in May, the Mbala District Commissioner also felt compelled to ask local “wizards” to stop molesting teachers and pupils at Chipoka Primary School — the second of such incidents in nine years. What’s worrying about these stories is that a) they represent a sort of sexual abuse in themselves, either because they foster mass delusion or else disguise genuine incidents of physical rape, and b) they encourage violence against so-called witches. Just this month, an elderly Zambian couple was accused of black magic, beaten and burned to death. How strange it is that we live in an age of science and light and yet some of the people that we share the planet with still exist in a state of superstitious darkness. If what they believe is preposterous, we should have no shame is stating it — especially if it also potentially dangerous.

Paul Wells summarizes Harper’s cabinet shuffle

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:29

State of play in the surveillance state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

If you’re just getting back from an extended vacation with no access to the news, “George Washington” at Zero Hedge has a cheat-sheet on spying that you might want to have a look at:

Lots more at Zero Hedge.

QotD: American justice

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The defining characteristic of English law is its distribution of power between prosecutor, judge, and jury. This delicate balance has been utterly corrupted in the United States to the point where today at the federal level there is a conviction rate of over 90 percent — which would impress Mubarak and the House of Saud, if not quite, yet, Kim Jong Un. American prosecutors have an unhealthy and disreputable addiction to what I called, at the conclusion of the trial of my old boss Conrad Black six years ago, “countless counts.” In Conrad’s case, he was charged originally with 17 crimes, three of which were dropped by the opening of the trial and another halfway through, leaving 13 for the jury, nine of which they found the defendant not guilty of, bringing it down to four, one of which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional and the remaining three of which they vacated, only to have two of them reinstated by the lower appeals court. In other words, the prosecution lost 88 percent of the case, but the 12 percent they won was enough to destroy Conrad Black’s life.

Multiple charges tend, through sheer weight of numbers, to favor a result in which the jury convict on some and acquit on others and then tell themselves that they’ve reached a “moderate” “compromise” as befits the reasonable persons they assuredly are. It is, of course, not reasonable. Indeed, the notion of a “compromise” between conviction and acquittal is a dagger at the heart of justice. It’s the repugnant “plea bargain” in reverse, but this time to bargain with the jury: Okay, we threw the book at him and it went nowhere, so why don’t we all agree to settle? In Sanford, the state’s second closing “argument” to the strange, shrunken semi-jury of strikingly unrepresentative peers — facts, shmacts, who really knows? vote with your hearts — brilliantly dispenses with the need for a “case” at all.

Mark Steyn, “A Dagger at the Heart of Justice”, National Review, 2013-07-15

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