Eideard

Christians who want to be exempt from equality legislation are like Muslims trying to impose sharia on Britain, Trevor Phillips, the human rights watchdog, has declared.

Religious rules should end “at the door of the temple” and give way to the “public law” laid down by Parliament, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission said. He argued that Roman Catholic adoption agencies and other faith groups providing public services must choose between their religion and obeying the law when their beliefs conflict with the will of the state.

Mr Phillips singled out the adoption agencies that fought a long legal battle to avoid being forced to accept homosexual couples under equality laws. Last year, following a High Court case, the Charity Commission ruled against an exemption for Catholic Care, an adoption agency operating in Leeds.

Speaking at a debate in London on diverse societies, Mr Phillips backed the new laws, which led to the closure of all Catholic adoption agencies in England. “You can’t say because we decide we’re different then we need a different set of laws,” he said, in comments reported by The Tablet, the Catholic newspaper.

“To me there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work.”

He added that religious groups should be free to follow their own rules within their own settings but not outside. “Once you start to provide public services that have to be run under public rules, for example child protection, then it has to go with public law,” he said.
“Institutions have to make a decision whether they want to do that or they don’t want to do that…”

Mr Phillips has been outspoken in his defence of human rights law even when they conflict with religious beliefs.

He has accused some Christian groups of being more militant than Muslims. During the debate, he praised both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches for their work in inner cities, particularly through faith schools, but accused some religious groups of growing intolerance.

“There is something rather odd that is happening amongst what I call the righteous brigade, that is people of good will and so on,” Mr Phillips said. “And that is that if you don’t agree 100 per cent with them and excoriate people who have a different point of view actually somehow you are joining a bad bunch of people.”

Keith Porteous Wood, director of the National Secular Society, said Mr Phillips was “absolutely right…If society has decided that it wants to ensure by law that every citizen of this country has equal rights, then there cannot be endless exemptions for religious bodies or anyone else,” he said.

“There is no such thing as partial equality, and every time an exemption is made, someone else’s rights are compromised.”

Sound familiar? Except that Trevor Phillips has more backbone than Barack Obama when it comes to confronting civil rights, the validity of civil law over religious belief in a constitutional democracy. Confronting sharia-style precepts, Muslim or Catholic or whichever fundamentalist source requires the courage to maintain constitutional protections via civil law. Maybe he’ll be invited sometime to drop in and give lessons at the White House.

But, don’t hold your breath waiting.

 
Demba Ba and Papiss Cisse are two of my favorite footballers – even if they play for Newcastle United. Demba Ba in particular has a shot like a cannon.

But, I got to thinking about the difference in sophistication likely between the UK and the US. Americans get all woo-hoo over Tim Tebow and his Christian prayer pose. That’s just as common among athletes in Europe. Except oftimes those athletes aren’t Christian – they’re Muslim. Their celebration means as much to them as do the poses of Christian athletes.

So – you think there aren’t any Muslims in the NFL? Think, again. Do you think maybe it’s been suggested that for their own safety they shouldn’t kneel and face in the direction of Mecca when they score a touchdown? Tell us what you think would happen?

Villagers have reacted with fury after being ordered to move their cars so that police can escort an extra wide mobile home to an “illegal” travellers’ site.

They have been told to move their cars off the road so that the 15 foot wide mobile home can be delivered to the site which has been ruled illegal but which is subject to a planning appeal. The wide load will be accompanied by a police motorcyclist and Land Rover and any cars blocking the path face being removed.

Two caravans have occupied Three-Cornered Piece, in East Harting, West Sussex, since 2009 after self-proclaimed “travellers” from a village 15 miles away moved in on a Bank Holiday weekend.

Now villagers in South Harting, are up in arms that they risk having their vehicles towed away by police if they don’t remove them from one of the two main village streets. Two days ago they found a notice on their car windscreens saying: “Will owners of vehicles please make sure that there (sic) vehicles are removed from these roads until after the abnormal load has passed, which should hopefully be by 2pm Friday.

“Any vehicle that is obstructing this movement will be towed away at the owners’ expense.”

The occupation led to a planning inspector’s inquiry, but Eric Pickles’s Local Government department stepped in to rule the land agricultural…

The caravanners are claiming that the mobile home is a “replacement” for one of the other much smaller caravans. A concrete base for it is already laid, even though a retrospective planning application for that and a septic tank has yet to be considered.

A spokesman for Sussex Police said: “At the moment, this is not an illegal site. The court case is pending. We’re blind to the wider sensitivities of the case.

In my peaceful neighborhood, someone attempting to do something like might be met with the neighborhood lying in the road to halt the procession. The saddest part – as I’m certain everyone in East Harting already realizes – is that the local coppers are “blind to the wider sensitivities” of an illegal act.

Hogwash. Lazy coppers. Incompetent roads administration. Politicians with the testicles of a fruit fly.

 
Zoe Thomson, an eight-year-old British schoolgirl whose guitar skills have made her a global internet sensation, has stunned musicians with a video of her performing a Stratovarius track.

Zoe, from Thatcham, Berks, plays in a child group called Mini Band which was catapulted to fame last year with a cover of Metallica’s Enter Sandman. But the youngster’s latest offering has won her hundreds of thousands more fans, showing her shredding her way through the solo of the Stratovarius’s Stratosphere…

Miss Thomson has been playing the guitar ever since she was able to hold the instrument and the latest video charts her meteoric progress since she began recording her performances two years ago.

Earlier this month, she was signed up to the guitar company Daisy Rock’s artist roster.

Zoe’s mother Collette said: “Zoe is really excited; she is overjoyed. For someone of her age to get an endorsement is a massive achievement…

Keep on rocking, Zoe!

A plan by the education secretary, Michael Gove, to send a copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country – each including a personal inscription from him – has run into trouble after government sources reported he has been told to find private funding for the project.

Sources said David Cameron told Gove that while he supported the idea, the education secretary should avoid using taxpayers’ money for it. But Gove has yet to find a private philanthropic sponsor for the enterprise, and some Whitehall sources said he has been told he cannot distribute the book until he does so, leaving thousands of copies in a warehouse abroad…

…But Whitehall sources said Gove was told at the highest levels that it would be wrong to spend nearly £400,000 on the project at a time when the government was in negotiations with teaching unions over cuts to their pension entitlement…Wow! I’m surprised the Tories were that perceptive.

The 400th anniversary of the publication of the Bible was in 2011.

This is the same dweeb who wanted British taxpayers to pop for £60 million for a new yacht for the Queen. Phew.

The first international drug treaty was signed a century ago this week. So what was the war on drugs like in 1912?

Today it is taken for granted that governments will co-operate in the fight against the heroin and cocaine trade. But 100 years ago, narcotics passed from country to country with minimal interference from the authorities. That all changed with the 1912 International Opium Convention, which committed countries to stopping the trade in opium, morphine and cocaine.

Then, as now, the US stood in the vanguard against narcotics. While the UK’s position is unequivocal today, a century ago it was an unenthusiastic signatory, says Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century.

The real concern a century ago was over alcohol, he argues. “There was a big debate over intoxication as there was concern about the heavy, heavy drinking culture of the 19th Century…”

And opium use was viewed in the mid-19th Century in a very different way from modern beliefs about drug use. It was possible to walk into a chemist and buy not only opium and cocaine, but even arsenic…

“There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

But the fashion in drugs was changing from the “downer” of opium to the “upper” of cocaine – hence Arthur Conan Doyle making Sherlock Holmes a cocaine injector…

But in the US, cocaine came to be associated with street gangs, alongside racist propaganda that the drug sent black men insane and put white women at risk…So these domestic concerns helped drive the international agreement in the form of the 1912 treaty. But while it tackled the trade, in the UK at least, the authorities were slow to crack down on individual users…

In reality, there was no “drug scene” in Britain back then, says Jay. What existed was confined to a few streets in Soho and a handful of dealers in Limehouse. And once the drug laws came in banning cocaine and opium, the problem was easily contained by the police…

“The baby boomers were the first generation in history to become real global consumers. People were suddenly going to Morocco to smoke hash, or hitching with lorry drivers who were using amphetamines.”

So the floodgates opened. Where once the authorities were fighting relatively small groups of offenders in a tiny drugs subculture, now they must fight millions of users and powerful international cartels.

RTFA for an understanding of laws and “wars” on drugs in the time when the community of users was small, coppers ruled the streets – instead of gangbangers – and profit hadn’t yet driven drugs into a global economy.

Not that today’s governments seem to be any more capable of understanding changing circumstances.

Scientists have improved the sight of two people who were almost blind by injecting their eyes with stem cells from embryos.

The two women, both registered as blind, saw their vision improve in a matter of weeks after being given the embryo-derived cells in the US safety trial.

The breakthrough holds out the hope of a cure in the future for age-related macular degeneration, which currently affects some 500,000 people in Britain…

This is the first peer-reviewed scientific report showing that cells derived from human embryonic stem cells can be transplanted safely into a patient with no sign of complications…

“Although the study is limited to safety considerations, very small in scope, and at a very early stage, this is nonetheless a ground breaking moment for embryonic stem cell therapies” said Professor Daniel Brison.

Meanwhile, a British man has become the first European to be treated with embryonic stem cells, at the Moorfield Eye Hospital in London, which is running a parallel trial.

Both the women in the US study arm suffer from forms of macular degeneration – worsening central vision – that are caused by retinal cells dying…

Each patient had a single eye injected with about 50,000 retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells that had been derived from embryonic stem cells. In this way, vision in one eye could be compared against vision in the other…

“While this is primarily a safety trial, we will have the opportunity to monitor engraftment of retinal cells and to assess any impact on sight.”

The use of embryonic stem cells, which can develop into any type of cell, is controversial because it requires the destruction of human embryos…which frightens religious moralists.

President George W Bush stopped federal funding of such research, but this ban was lifted by President Obama in 2009.

RTFA for a fair amount of detail. Certainly it’s early days and trials designed solely to test the safety of the procedure. But, don’t spend too much time telling the volunteers they’re being immoral as they experience improvement in their vision.

Science that provides qualitative and immediate medical benefits won’t find too many religious foot soldiers lining up to prevent continuing trials — excepting among seriously sectarian fanatics.

Looks like the Brits – and especially the Tories – are getting worried about for-real devolution, this time. This is a fiery topic with old mates of mine in Progressive politics in the UK coming down on both sides of the question. As a “child” of the Highland Clearances, I’m a supporter of sovereignty for Scotland. Causes more pub rows than an Auld Firm derby.

A baby born to a Muslim couple having an affair had to be adopted to save it from being murdered by its mother’s family in a so-called honour killing, senior judges have ruled.

The unmarried woman was said to have told the married father of her child that it had died to keep him away, and wore loose clothes and visited a hospital far from her home so relatives would not learn she was pregnant.

The father got hold of the baby girl’s birth certificate and tried to get legal rights to visiting her, even though he had by then had a newborn with his own wife. But a judge ruled that the love child should stay with its adoptive parents, and not meet its father, because of the danger that its mother’s family would kill it, and her, because of the shame of their secret relationship…

“As soon as [the baby] was born, she was relinquished for adoption because [the mother] genuinely feared for [the baby's] safety should [the grandfather] become aware of or be forced to acknowledge her existence.

“[The mother's] evidence, supported as it was by her actions and the evidence of [the father] and an experienced police officer, drove the judge to conclude that refusal of the order would carry with it a significant risk of physical harm. In our judgment this conclusion cannot be criticised.”

The judgement, in which all of the parties are kept anonymous for their safety, tells how the baby’s parents are both Muslims from foreign countries “but their cultures differ”…

The woman later told social services she wanted to have the baby adopted because she was “scared” that her father “would hurt her and the family would reject her”.

After the birth, her mother was quickly discharged from hospital and a year ago her daughter was placed with another Muslim couple…

In July a High Court Family Division judge, Mrs Justice Parker, ruled that the baby would be at “very significant risk” if it were placed with its natural father and his wife, while it might “provoke action to preserve the family’s honour” if the mother’s relatives found out about the child…

The judge concluded that the baby had had a “very unfortunate start in life” and that consideration of its lifelong welfare required its adoption.

Why – oh, why – must a soap opera court trial about adoption and parental rights have to include the likelihood of murder and infanticide. This is not about honour. This is about demented people stuck into a barbaric belief.

Possible in any number of backwards religious sects. None the less barbaric.

The burial site near Huddersfield
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A father who attacked his fiancée with a Taser gun before burying her alive in a cardboard box because he was “bored” with her was facing jail today after being found guilty of attempted murder.

Marcin Kasprzak attacked Michelina Lewandowska, 27, the mother of his young son, with the electric shock device at their home and then bound and gagged her with tape. He stuffed her into a cardboard box and later buried in a wood near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, leaving her to suffocate.

The 25-year-old launched the attack because their relationship had ended and he feared she would take their three-year-old son Jakub back to their native Poland, the court heard.

Despite being trapped in a hole, beneath a pile of earth and the branch of a tree, Miss Lewandowska managed to escape by using her engagement ring to cut herself out of the box.

She was later found in a distressed state at the side of a road after flagging down a passing motorist.

Kasprzak denied attempted murder but was found guilty by a jury at Leeds Crown Court today after three days of deliberation…

Miss Lewandowska described how she feared she would die inside the box and still has nightmares about her ordeal. She said the thought of her young son gave her the strength to save herself…

Meanwhile, her former fiancé took her bank card and withdrew £500 before returning to his accomplice’s home, where they were arrested about nine hours later…

Jonathan Sharp, prosecuting, had told the jury that the case was about a young man who had become “bored” with his partner, and had “decided to get rid of her”.

Throw away the key!