The Canadian Press: B.C. man who filed human rights complaint after reading Koran has case dismissed
Humphreys dismissed the case after ruling that Simpson's complaint would not further the purposes of the Human Rights Code.
4 comments:
"B.C. Human Rights Tribunal member Barbara Humphreys says Simpson didn't explain how the Koran, the central religious text of Islam that has existed for more than 1,300 years, had a negative impact on him."
Was he tied up and gagged or did that fascist piece of shit Humphreys just completely ignore everything Simpson said?
I've worn myself out reading and writng aobut jurisprudence recently, coming down on the side of obeying the law even when I think it is against my interest. But here is a counter-argument from Hobbes that I just love: You have no obligation to die, even if you are a scum bag criminal convicted and deserving. Your life is always worth fighting for, no matter how rotten you are.
For the good people of good democracies to sit back and be killed is something even Primo Levi would cry over, (for those who've followed my previous arguments.)
Gagged or ignored? The funny thing isn't the decision - of course they had to come up with some lame excuse not to ban the Koran which is the quintessence of a book that pits us against them with a fervor the Tribunal is supposed to outlaw; the funny thing is that the Trib were dumb enough to take this case in the first place, that they didn't dismiss it as crank, that they thought they could reflect seriously on this, or that they wanted to appear to some complainant as if they would. How sincerely "Canadian" is that? It would seem that the tribunal members are sufficiently sincerely "totalitarian" with their own minds, with their own conscience and consciousness, not to have any sense not to take such a job.
It's amazing and amusing that Humphreys didn't say Simpson's wrong. She left it open that someone else might think so and make a better case. What is that? Is that an escape clause for when the tide turns and the fools now have to look for friends among those they torment today? If I were a Muslim, I think I'd sue for that sleight.
I've worn myself out reading and writng aobut jurisprudence recently, coming down on the side of obeying the law even when I think it is against my interest. But here is a counter-argument from Hobbes that I just love: You have no obligation to die, even if you are a scum bag criminal convicted and deserving. Your life is always worth fighting for, no matter how rotten you are.
-if you worship the law because it's the law you may find that you are falling for Gnostic worship of the magical word rather than the reality the word allows us to see. Yes, obey the law, most of the time, even sometimes if it's a bad law, because you can see that respect for order is a good in and of itself. Once we start disrespecting laws, all hell can break loose. But this reasoning is only a general rule, not a "god-given" law in and of itself.
If our eyes are on the higher "God-given" laws, on the workings of the Creation, on the nature of our anthropology, on all that which respect for the human law normally makes easier to see...; if our eyes are on respect for truth and order and the freedom necessary to build them...; then sometimes we will break the human laws because we will see that in the course of the particular events in which we are immersed, there unfolds a context or scene in which breaking a bad law in the name of the good that leads us usually to follow them is the lesser of evils, the surer road to a new order that only some individual insistence on a necessary freedom can build. We accept the consequences but call on our people to recognize the bad law. The civil disobedient hope to be exemplary because they are willing to take the punishment in order to show us our investment in a sacrificial violence we no longer really need. It's a gamble they may lose, but sometimes that gamble has to be taken. As you often like to remark, all the white South Africans were against Apartheid, *the day after* the civil disobedients won and the system changed; but before that happened, most of them were too worshipful of the law to justify breaking it in the name of the anti-Apartheid cause. And if their worship of the law had won out, there still might be Apartheid in South Africa.
If I may venture a thought, Dag, your intellectual dilemma is that you aren't sure how to relate to the transcendent, to the possibility of a moral and creative imagination and freedom that is higher than human laws because it makes those laws possible. Having given up God, you aren't sure how to replace him or the experience of him as the ultimate guarantor of the rightness of our human distinctions. You aren't sure how to make a difference stand and when you see differences eroding thanks, for example, to the insanity of our "human rights" law, you naturally crave more law and order; but how much can you find when you are, as we all are, caught up in mimetic rivalry and, for example, reducing the evil of the Human Rights Tribunal to dirty names they may deserve but should be below you as a thinking person with a command of the language who could take on the freedom to re-assert order in a truly transcendent language? If you truly reject their law, you must take it upon yourself to articulate something higher. But if your knee-jerk assumption is to worship law, you can only fulminate. Respect for law and order sometimes means showing disrespect in a truly creative way.
Just saw this passage from Rene Girard:
The more these rivalries are aggravated, the more the roles of model, obstacle, and imitator become interchangeable at the heart of the mimetic conflict. In short, to the extent that their antagonism becomes embittered, a paradox occurs: the antagonists resemble one another more and more. They confront one another all the more implacably because their conflict dissolves the real differences that formerly separated them. Envy, jealousy, and hate render alike those they posses, but in our world people tend to misunderstand or ignore the resemblances and identities that these passions generate. They have ears only for the deceptive celebration of differences, which rages more than ever in our societies, not because real differences are increasing but because they are disappearing.
We must love the God, the infinite, that is the guarantor of our *Shared* creative potential to create, through free debate, through innovative suggestions and feedback, new, real, distinctions that hold meaning and create order. In other words, either you believe the possibilities for our shared ordering of our common humanity are inexhaustible - that we can create new and meaningful ways to distinguish ourselves as individuals from each other, or you don't and you collapse into worship of some law or some name calling as if you were a member of the "human rights" tribunal and its Utopian world view of happiness through a law of pointing fingers at white men in black hats.
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