Baby Joseph Maraachli is not allowed to die at home

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One year old baby Joseph Maraachli is going to die; his parents want him to die at home. In order for that to happen, Joseph needs a tracheotomy to allow him to breath. The hospital refused and will remove his breathing tube Monday, which will cause him to choke to death. The hospital’s reason  for not doing the tracheotomy – which the courts upheld? It could cause infection or pneumonia.

R.I.P. Canadian health care, judicial sanity and baby Joseph.

From here:

With all of their legal avenues exhausted, the family will have to say goodbye to Joseph Monday morning — on Family Day — when his breathing tube will be removed.

“I do my best for my baby. My son is not a criminal . . . to just let him die,” dad Moe Maraachli said through tears.

“They are taking my baby away from me . . . Where is the humanity?”

He said he didn’t know how to break the news to his wife Sana Nader, who was too upset to sit through the day’s court proceedings, or explain to their seven-year-old son Ali what’s going to happen to his little brother.

Maraachli and Nader fought to bring Joseph home to Windsor so he could spend his last days surrounded by loved ones. Joseph suffers from a severe and deteriorating neurological condition that has left him in a persistent vegetative state, according to specialists in London, Ont., who’ve examined him. He’s been at the Victoria Hospital, part of London Health Sciences Centre, since October.

Nine years ago, Maraachli and Nader lost a daughter who suffered from health complications nearly identical to Joseph’s.

Although the couple has accepted their baby boy’s inevitable death, they insisted that it occur peacefully at home and not by removing his breathing tube, which will cause him to choke since he can’t swallow or breathe on his own. The parents asked for a tracheotomy, which would open up a direct airway through an incision in Joseph’s trachea and make it possible to bring the baby home.

But doctors refused to perform the procedure, citing serious risks of infection, pneumonia and other possible complications.

A church shares its building with Muslims

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Heartsong Church in Cordova, Tennessee has invited local Muslims to share its building.

From here:

One of the most troubling components in the current dialogue about relationships between Jesus followers and Muslims is the charge that Muslims do not worship the one true God, indeed that they are idolaters. I wonder if people who say that would make the same charge against Jews who also do not accept Jesus as the Messiah. The Muslims with whom I share relationships of love and trust tell me they worship the same God I do and the Jews do. According to my faith, they cannot do it to the fullest because Jesus is the full revelation of God—God in flesh and blood. But who am I to say that they do not worship the one true God according to their understanding? Jesus reserved his sternest warnings for those who would dare take the place of God and pass judgment on the heart of another. Heartsong and I do not dare do this. Be careful, sisters and brothers, that you also do not.

The problem with arguing that Muslims worship the same God as Christians simply because they say they do, is that it can be said by anyone who worships anything that falls roughly into the category of “a god” – Gaia, Anuflac and Gorgastriaum included.

As the author of the above article acknowledges, if Christians are right, Jesus is the highest revelation of God to humanity and insofar as a religion doesn’t acknowledge that, it has things wrong and is worshipping, at best, something less than God, and, at worst, something opposed to God.

So should a church share its building with Muslms? Only if it’s to encourage them to convert to Christianity.

Toronto bishops don’t want more prisons

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From here:

Dear Mr. Harper,

Our diocese, which represents 300,000 Anglicans in southern Ontario, [a little exaggeration: there are only 320,00 church attending Anglicans in all of Canada] is committed to building communities of compassion and hope through nurturing healthy, vibrant congregations. We are deeply concerned that in a time of economic downturn the government is proposing to build more prisons rather than fund lower cost alternatives that enhance community health and build restorative relationships and stability………..

The Canadian government has regrettably embraced a belief in punishment-for-crime that first requires us to isolate and separate the offender from the rest of us. That separation makes what happens later easier to ignore: by increasing the number of people in jail for lengthier sentences you are decreasing their chance of success upon release into the community.

So if criminals are not to be separated “from the rest of us”, where will they go? As the Anglican Church of Canada drives Christians out of its denomination, it finds itself with a growing number of empty church buildings: if the bishops really meant what they said, they could rehabilitate criminals by housing them in empty churches. The bishops could be in “relationship” with the offenders, fostering “healing and community building”; I get warm and sentimental just thinking about it.

This could be the result:

Canada hacked

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From here:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper assured Canadians on Thursday that the government does have a strategy in place to protect computer networks, following the revelation that at least three key departments had their systems compromised by hackers.

Harper would not comment specifically on unprecedented attacks that targeted the Finance Department, the Treasury Board, and Defence Research and Development Canada.

But he said at a press conference in Toronto that he recognized cybersecurity was “a growing issue of importance, not just in this country, but across the world.”

He added that in anticipating potential cyberattacks, “we have a strategy in place to try and evolve our systems as those who would attack them become more sophisticated.”

There is good news: Canadian apologists for Julian Assange will be dancing in the streets to express their support for free access to all government documents as their tax records appear on the Internet for everyone to peruse.

Kairos wants more transparency

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From here:

The revelation that cabinet minister Bev Oda ordered the doctoring of a document on foreign-aid funding “raises pretty serious concerns” about the transparency and accountability of the federal government’s government decision-making, the ecumenical justice group, Kairos, has said.

Oda, the Minister for International Cooperation, admitted on Feb. 7 that she had instructed the word “not” be inserted in a 2009 recommendation by Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) officials that approved a $7.1 million grant for Kairos.  Last December, Oda told the House of Commons that when she signed the document, it had not contained the word “not.” She said that she did not add the word, nor did she know who did.

The problem that Bev Oda has is not so much the “not” but that she lied about the “not”. A bit like Bill Clinton lying about having sex with his intern, not to mention his innovative interpretation of “sex” and “is”. Bill Clinton got away with it; I doubt that Oda will – which just goes to show that it’s easier for a man to redefine “is” than a woman to redefine “not”.

Of course, if every politician who lied had to resign, we would be left without politicians – a state that might not be so bad. As it is, only politicians caught lying have to resign – other than Bill Clinton – which does have the advantage of weeding out the irredeemably stupid specimens.

Kairos likes to demand transparency but is more hesitant about adopting for itself what it wishes to thrust upon others. In December 2009 Kairos, removed the anti-Israel remarks and links from its website – and then lied about it.

So it’s one rule for a sex-crazed Clinton and a crypto-anti-Semitic, faux-Christian aid group grasping for more tax dollars, and an entirely different one for the rest of us.

The prospect of SunTV News still provokes wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left

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My friends at Avaaz.org keep sending emails exhorting me to sign a petition to prevent the SunTV news channel from polluting Canadian airwaves with “false news”, “poisonous propaganda” and “outright lying”:

Dear friends across Canada,

In 48 hours, public protections against false news coverage could be destroyed. The CRTC may pass a huge loophole to the “fair and balanced” rule that currently prevents media from outright lying to the public.

Canada’s broadcast journalism standards are an impediment to the new “Fox News North” (Sun TV) network being set up by Prime Minister Harper’s cronies, which promises to mimic Fox News — the poisonous US propaganda network. The CRTC rule change, which allows false news to be blasted across Canadian airwaves, comes just as SunTV is about to launch.

We can stop this — last year, we prevented Harper cronies from pressing the CRTC to fund “Fox News North” with public money. Now, we have just two days to raise another national outcry to save the standards of Canadian journalism, and our democracy.

It’s difficult to believe that anyone would fall for such tripe but – they do. To summarise:

  • The sky is falling
  • A SunTV news channel will be the end of democracy in Canada – just as Fox News brought down democracy in the US.
  • Fox News is a poisonous propaganda network. That’s why it’s so popular.
  • We have to save the standards of Canadian journalism. That’s why the CRTC permitted the usually anti-American and frequently anti-Semitic Al Jazeera news network to start broadcasting in Canada.
  • It’s a devious plot concocted by Harper cronies.
  • The sky really is falling.

That all sounds fair and balanced.

What is the real problem? The left hates competition from the right because it knows that the right makes more sense.

UK: Same-sex marriages to be permitted in Anglican churches

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From here:

Ministers are expected to publish plans to enable same-sex couples to “marry” in church, the BBC has learned.

Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone is to propose lifting the ban on civil partnerships taking place in religious settings in England and Wales.

There are no plans to compel religious organisations to hold ceremonies and the Church of England has said it would not allow its churches to be used.

Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said the change was “long overdue”.

Civil partnership ceremonies are currently entirely secular.

What next for the Church of England, one wonders. This, perhaps:

RUNCORN – England – Under new Coalition rules spearheaded by Nick Clegg, all churches in England and Wales will now be forced to include gay bath houses in the religious buildings.

The new initiative pushed through by Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, will involve massive renovations to all the churches in the British Isles.

Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone is to propose pushing through the gay bath house bill making it compulsory to include bath houses in all religious settings in England and Wales.

“We’ll have bath houses where the men and priests can congregate and even a viewing gallery where Coalition church bath house inspectors can ensure that the gay orgies within the churches are conducted in a gay enough manner,” Arch Deacon of the Bristol Diocese, Henry Felcher, told the BBC.

Already, there has been interest from some celebrities like George Michael and Sir Elton John.

“We’ll be going to church a lot more often in England now. I’ll bring the baby with me to tell him about the bees and the bees,” Sir Elton John told the Los Angeles Times.

International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda had Kairos document altered

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From here:

International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda told Parliament Monday that she was the person who directed that a recommendation from her staff be altered to deny funding to a church-backed aid group.

The minister was backtracking on previous statements in which she said Kairos had lost its funding because the group’s work no longer fit with the Canadian International Development Agency’s objectives — suggesting she was acting on her department’s recommendation.

What can one say?

Bev Oda for Prime Minister – after a decent interval of ritual shaming.