Grandmother loses custody of her granddaughter to sex offending father

More here.

This is obviously, in a literal sense, a diabolical mess – one which the judge has made worse. As Blaise Pascal said in his Pensees:

Our magistrates have known well this mystery. Their red robes, the ermine in which they wrap themselves like furry cats, the courts in which they administer justice, the fleurs-de-lis, and all such august apparel were necessary; if the physicians had not their cassocks and their mules, if the doctors had not their square caps and their robes four times too wide, they would never have duped the world, which cannot resist so original an appearance. If magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps; the majesty of these sciences would of itself be venerable enough. But having only imaginary knowledge, they must employ those silly tools that strike the imagination with which they have to deal; and thereby in fact they inspire respect. Soldiers alone are not disguised in this manner, because indeed their part is the most essential; they establish themselves by force, the others by show.

To put it in today’s parlance: judges are frequently blithering idiots.

Political cowardice on abortion

From here:

Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak appeared to shy away from his previous anti-abortion position Monday, saying he doesn’t plan to re-open the issue if he wins the Oct. 6 provincial election.

When he was running for the PC leadership in 2009, Hudak’s representatives told the Association for Reformed Political Action he is pro-life and had signed a petition calling for the defunding of abortions and to support doctors who don’t want to perform the procedures.

But Hudak seemed reluctant to confirm he had signed a petition when asked about it by reporters Monday.

“I may have signed a petition from my riding in that respect, but listen, let me be clear: we are not reopening this debate,” said Hudak. “Just like the federal Parliament, we would not be reopening that issue.”

By not reopening that issue, Hudak has placed political expediency – the will to power – above confronting the greatest evil present today in Canadian society.

In the struggle to preserve civilisation, that puts Canada somewhere behind Russia.

Pathetic.

Richard Dawkins deserves a Darwin Award

There aren’t many men daft enough to publicly attack feminists, but Richard Dawkins has gone where male angels fear to tread and done just that.

I nominate Dawkins for a Darwin Award: his genes have just been deselected.

Read it all here, where you will find Dawkins described as the worst villain a person can be in class warfare – a “wealthy old heterosexual white man”.

What will Dawkins do to exonerate himself?: Have a gay fling? Take sensitivity awareness training for atheists? Give all his money to an atheist charity – even though there aren’t any? Have a sex change along with skin pigmentation enhancements?

One thing he won’t do is apologise, because being an atheist means you never have to say you’re sorry: after all, atheists rely on science so they are always right.

A collector’s item for those of impeccable taste

I imagine it’s a common experience for those of my generation, but when I was a small child my grandmother always used to give me socks and underpants for Christmas. My cynicism began early, so I quickly concluded that her perverse indifference to my desire for a remote controlled motor boat was a result of her desire to curry favour with my mother who always seemed to approve of such “sensible” gifts. In defence of my mother, I learned later that she thought they were just as daft as I did.

Over the years I have come to realise that the giving of a White Elephant is an art form –  not that my grandmother indulged in such frivolity, she just loved socks and underpants. So I am considering a bid on these, in anticipation that I will, at some point, find someone with a sufficiently well developed lack of taste to truly appreciate their splendour.

 

Sebastian goes to church

My dog paid a visit to St. Hilda’s this evening to see if it would meet his spiritual needs.

 

He tells me he is spiritual, not religious, wants to know if the church will bless something he has going on with the male Chihuahua who lives next door, and would like to know if he could bring him next week as they journey together along their path of deepening spirituality.

I suggested he sniff out a Diocese of Niagara parish.

Church of England will be dead in 20 years

In spite of this optimistic prognostication, I remain convinced that the Church of England is already dead: in 20 years, its corpse, having spent the last few decades marinating in ecclesiastical gas, will become a pickled artefact fit only to be put on display for the entertainment of curious historians in generations to come.

From here:

The Church of England will cease to exist in 20 years as the current generation of elderly worshippers dies, Anglican leaders warned yesterday.

The average age of its members is now 61 and by 2020 a “crisis” of “natural wastage” will lead to their numbers falling “through the floor”, the Church’s national assembly was told.

The Church was compared to a company “impeccably” managing itself into failure, during exchanges at the General Synod in York.

The warnings follow an internal report calling for an urgent national recruitment drive to attract more members.

In the past 40 years, the number of adult churchgoers has halved, while the number of children attending regular worship has declined by four fifths.

The reason for the decline was not discussed but becomes transparently obvious when we read later on in the article that the Bishop of Southwell is concerned that maths lessons are too “capitalist” and should be reformed to promote Christian values.

The Church of England is full of bishops who are convinced they are concentrating on the real problem while, in actual fact, they are living their vacuous lives in a barmy, utopian Marxist cuckoo land full of anti-capitalist arithmetic conceived by flamboyantly gay clerics.

Why does anyone want the Church of England to survive?

 

New York clerk resigns over gay marriage

There was a time when an employer regarded the existence of principle in an employee as a demonstration of worth. In the ‘60s I remember a pacifist friend applying for a job with IBM telling his interviewers that his conscience wouldn’t permit him to work on any military projects. He was employed anyway, on the grounds that IBM likes to hire people with principle. I’m not sure if his resolve was ever put to the test and I doubt that today’s IBM values any principle other than an employee’s desire to help it make a profit.

We live in an age pseudo-tolerance: everyone is tolerated whose ideas do not depart from the dictates of the zeitgeist: thus a New York clerk whose conscience will not permit her to marry a same sex couple has been forced to resign.

From here:

Reacting to the news that the first New York State town clerk has resigned rather than sign her name on a same-sex “marriage” license, Gov. Andrew Cuomo insisted Tuesday that “the law is the law.”

“When you enforce the laws of the state, you don’t get to pick and choose which laws,” he said, according to the NY Daily News.  “You don’t get to say, ‘I like this law and I’ll enforce this law, or I don’t like this law and I won’t enforce this law’ – you can’t do that.”

“So if you can’t enforce the law, then you shouldn’t be in that position,” he added.

From a purely practical perspective, since the clerk has not mounted a campaign to dissuade other clerks from marrying same sex couples, she is not in any way hampering the enforcement of the law. The law, miserable as it is in this case, is in no danger of floundering for a lack of willing clerks.

Laura Fotusky is a person whose conscience is not aligned to contemporary mores: this is an affront to the gatekeepers of conventional morality and they will not rest content until she and any other dissenters have their thoughts conformed into the narrow confines of fashionable dogma.

We are, after all, a broad minded-society