Time Immortal

Canadians will go to the polls on October 14th.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will visit Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean early Sunday morning and ask her to dissolve the 39th Parliament, Canwest News Service has learned. Canadians will vote Oct. 14, after the shortest campaign permitted by law.

Harper will begin campaigning immediately after leaving the Governor General’s residence at Rideau Hall, touching down in at least two cities and possibly three before day’s end Sunday.

The general election will supersede four scheduled byelections — two each in Quebec and Ontario. Voters in three of those ridings were set to vote Monday.

Harper’s decision to ask for a general election ends one of the longest minority Parliaments in the country’s history.

So…majority this time ’round?

I noticed this in my visitor logs from yesterday…

Number of Entries: 6
Entry Page Time: 2nd June 2008 13:33:16
Visit Length: 18 hours 50 mins 43 secs
Browser: MSIE 6.0
OS: Windows XP
Resolution: 1024×768

Returning Visits: 0
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Hostname: alpha.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca (205.193.97.2)
Entry Page: http://www.timeimmortal.net/2008/06/02/rehmatpedia-returns/
Exit Page: http://www.timeimmortal.net/2008/06/02/rehmatpedia-returns/
Referring URL: No referring link

It seems that someone from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is taking an interest in a certain internet personality that I periodically make mention of.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

The guy just seems to get it, as evidenced by his response to the latest outrageous decision by a Canadian HRC (this time in Quebec).

The Quebec human rights commission has asked members of the Saguenay city council to stop praying before its meetings.

In a May 15 release, the commission said the city contravened its obligation to be neutral by starting its public meetings with the recitation of a prayer.

“The members of a municipal council are the representatives of the state,” said M. Gaetan Cousineau, commission president.

“They have the right to their personal beliefs, but, during the exercise of their public functions, they do not have the right to favour or give the impression of favouring one Religion more than any other.”

But Saguenay Mayor Jean Tremblay said he had no intention of stopping the practice.

“For me, God is much more important than the commission. When I arrive on the other side, maybe in 10 years, 20 years, they won’t ask me if I follow the commission, they will ask me if I follow God,” Tremblay told CBC News May 15.

Jason Kenney, federal secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, found the order surprising.

“Freedom of religion is a foundational principle in Canada and communities, in my view, have every right to exercise it as they see fit,” Kenney said May 15.

“Elected local politicians are accountable to their voters, not to some unaccountable commission with quasi-judicial powers that doesn’t even have due process.”

That’s the sort of hardball position that we need to see the Canadian government take, at all levels, especially from the Prime Minister’s office. ’s government enjoys a not-entirely deserved swell of popularity at the moment, against which the Liberals struggle to compete — it’s as close to an ideal time as one could possibly imagine for the government of Canada to take the human rights commissions to task, and hard.

Jason Kenney, I think, gets that. One would hope that the person occupying the PM’s office would also get that. If not, perhaps someone who does understand should be given occupancy of that office.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

So it appears that, at a cost of $5 million taxpayer dollars, Quebec has determined that the Islamic hijab is “no real threat to Quebec values,” despite acknowledging that it sometimes “signifies submission and oppression, pure and simple.”

Meanwhile, over in Ireland, people are a bit more sane:

If Muslim men are so keen on seeing their headscarf introduced into Irish society, they should wear it as well as their women. Let them cover up, too.

Otherwise there must be no place for the hijab in civic life here. Not in banks, hospitals or libraries, not in the guards or civil service and most definitely not in schools.

…

Here’s what banning the headscarf is about: the State demonstrating our belief in gender equality. It’s about removing a symbol of repression and submission. Showing we don’t condone marks of separation — either between men and women, Muslim and Christian, or native born and immigrant.

…

Today the hijab which covers the hair and shoulders, tomorrow the niqab or full-face veil, the day after the burqa hiding everything from tip to toe — described as a mobile prison by women obliged to wear it.

You can bet your bottom dollar Islam will complain about discrimination. That’s fine, we allow freedom of protest unlike many Islamic counties. But it is not discriminatory to ban the hijab in a country that is culturally Christian.

Conclusion: don’t move to Quebec. Move to Ireland.

Quebec residents should pay $25 for every visit to a doctor, a provincial task force on medicare said Tuesday.

The Castonguay task force’s much-anticipated report also called for an increase of up to one percentage point in the Quebec sales tax to help pay for medicare.

And over in the UK, in order to reduce waiting room times they’re holding patients outdoors in the ambulance they arrived in. Which incidentally makes the ambulance/waiting room unavailable to go get anyone who is in urgent need of transport to the ER.

Universal, free is three lies for the price of one.

(Source)

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)

So apparently the Senate, already being expert in the field of national governance, have expanded their knowledge base to include cutting-edge theology. Or perhaps “bleeding heart Theology” — I can’t really tell anymore.

My respect for Senator Anne Cools has gone up a few more notches, however. Though a member of the unelected portion of the Canadian government, she displays a level-headedness and clarity of principle that the and NDP seem completely devoid of, that the Bloc Quebecois sometimes displays but limits in focus to Quebec, and that the Conservative Party could display if they ever stopped trying to placate both the Liberal government and the liberal media.

I wonder exactly where the fundamental understanding of Jesus and His message goes wrong with Senator Marilyn Trenholme Counsell. On the surface, it seems she thinks of our Lord as some sort of hip swinger, someone who’d permit anything in the name of being “fair”.

Not exactly the picture of Jesus painted in the Gospels, is it? Certainly, Jesus’s message was one of peace and understanding, and certainly He tore down many barriers between Jew and Gentile, man and woman, slave and master, invader and invaded. He preached that all were equal in God’s eyes, and never turned away those who sought him.

Okay, that part sounds kind of like the picture our Senator paints. But is that the whole picture of Jesus?

As I recall it, if people came to Jesus as sinners, one of the first things He would do is ask them to repent and sin no more. If people came to Jesus who were sinners but did not realize it, or thought their actions permissible/moral/justified, He would correct them, often in a very direct and sometimes harsh way. He was especially harsh with the self-righteous authorities, those convinced of the correctness of their ways because of their status in society (not unlike, I would wager, a certain Senator I could name).

When he stopped the stoning of the adulterous woman, He did not condone her sin. He stood up not in support of her right to fornicate herself silly — instead, He stood up against the hypocrisy of those would would overlook their own sin in their zeal to condemn her, since all sins are equal in magnitude before God. And when her would-be executioners had left, He turned to her and (much more gently, but firmly nonetheless) told her to end her sinful practice.

When Jesus met the woman at the well in Galilee, He treated her as an equal, a valued child of God and a person. He did not condone her five (or was it six? Curse my memory…) marriages, nor the fact that she was shacking up with someone she was not married to (note: tacit condemnation of common-law relationships, people!). In fact, He pointed these things out to her as an example of her sin, and His frankness with her inspired her to repent.

Would Jesus support gay-marriage legislation? I think anyone who claims to speak for Jesus, as our Senator has done, is guilty of blasphemy, and so I won’t come out with a “yes” or “no” answer. But I will leave this parting thought:

Christian moral philosophy teaches that proper sexual relations have two seperate but indivisible parts: unification and procreation. If a couple engages in sexual union that is open to one but blocks the other, this is a sin, because it violates the natural order and God’s intention for humanity. Proper sexual relationships should be a joining, strengthening force in the lives of the couple, but the couple should always be open to the possibility of bringing forth a child. (And no, this isn’t the Monty Python conflation that “every time they have sex, they have to have a baby”.)

Bearing that in mind, and assuming for just a moment that the Church has got something right in its understanding after 2000 years of ministry, one has to ask whether a homosexual union qualifies. Certainly, I will be the first to concede that homosexual sexual relations, like heterosexual relations, can be unitive in nature. I admit that’s speculation on my part, having never had a homosexual affair myself, but I would wager it likely. But even in that case, that’s only part of the puzzle, isn’t it? And we could start the debate over artificial insemination and surrogacy, but let’s cut to the chase on that one: procreation, in its natural state, involves one zygote from each partner in the sexual union, so that the child will be biologically related to both of the people it will come to know as “parents”. Wake me when that’s possible in a non-heterosexual setting.

And really, given that same-sex marriage is already a morally contentious issue, do we really need to open the “embryos debate” can of worms too?

Do I support “equal rights” for homosexuals? That depends on what you mean. As I understand it, they are human too, and as such already have equal rights under the law in Canada, even before the various related Supreme Court filings. Should they not be discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality? My first answer is yes. But I think even there I need to disclaim. I think respect is a two-way street, and I think that homosexual lobbyists should not force their agenda on those whose personal beliefs hold the homosexual lifestyle as immoral. That means no bullying town mayors who don’t want to take part in “Pride” days. That means accepting that religions institutions may not condone promotion of that lifestyle in their classes. That even means accepting that some churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples will refuse to perform marriages for homosexual couples…not because they are discriminatory, but because for them the morality of the issue is anything but settled. And in return, I say that yes, homosexuals should not be targets of hate crimes, should not be denied employment (see caveat above), and should continue to enjoy the same full legal protection of the that they have since its institution in 1982.

But, as Anne Cools noted in the Senate debate: “Marriage is not now and has never been a right…No sacrament of the church has ever been a right.”