A Religious Rant

Rant in Three… Two… One…

Listen,

I’ve about had it up to my blessed eye holes over this nonsensical Muslim bashing that we’re seeing from Steve Harper on down to the morons people populating the comments sections of every freaking article on Islam.

The one that set me off is the idiot judge in Quebec who threw a woman’s case out of her court because she was wearing a hijab.  She wasn’t suing someone nor was she charged with a crime.  She just wanted to get her car out of jail.

He son had been caught (illegally) driving the car without a valid licence.  The police had impounded her car.  I have no issues with that.  My issue is this piece of work told the woman she could not be in their court with a hijab on because the court is a secular place.

Just to get her car back.

Now tell me, do you think if someone was wearing a yarmulke or a turban for religious reasons this judge would have told them to take off their hat?  Maybe her honour should call Steve Harper and warn him about the guy in the second row of the House of Commons who has the temerity to wear that blue thing on his head.

After all, this is Canada.  The House of Commons is a secular place, well isn’t it?

Maybe I’m way off base here, but a secular society doesn’t mean you can’t live your religion, you just can’t jam it down my throat.  It means we don’t base our laws on some book written hundreds or thousands of years ago by someone who had a mystic vision or maybe just gathered up a bunch of legends and said this is the word of Diety.  Simple, no?

We’re also supposed to have Freedom of Religion or Freedom from Religion (whatever floats your boat) but that seems to be changing too.

What this means is neither the Queen nor Steve nor anyone else gets to tell you or me what religion we have to belong to, and they can’t tell us what religion we can’t belong too.  That part still seems to be working, at least for the most part, but now it’s turning into you can still have your religion, but only if you do it our way!

When people first started to come to North America, a lot of them were trying to get away from people who told them they were doing religion wrong.  People are still coming here for the very same reason.  And what does Steve and Jason and Chris say?  You’re doing religion wrong!

Isn’t that what’s happening in Iraq right now?  ISIS isn’t running amok killing everyone, just the ones who do religion wrong.  ISIS is religious bigotry on steroids, the same religious bigotry that we get from Steve Harper’s minions.

Think about it.

Look, if it is so all fired important to see the faces of people taking the citizenship oath, wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to have a woman judge with an all woman staff to handle these events?  We wouldn’t need many, a few teams that would go out every few months or when the need arises to welcome the new Canadians into our citizenry. 

I almost use “our family” there, but Steve has gone and tainted that too.

And as for the judge in Quebec who doesn’t like hijabs?  She’s as bad as the rest.  She claims that his court room is secular, but I’ll wager there’s a Bible sitting on the corner of her desk.  It isn’t all that long ago we had to change the rules to allow atheists the ability to promise to tell the truth because they wouldn’t swear on a Bible.

I’m no Biblical scholar, but I have read the stories.  Remember when Jesus told the story about the Samaritan? From that story, I’d say that Jesus wouldn’t have stopped the Samaritan from getting into heaven.  He’d probably welcome that Samaritan with open arms.

Why do I mention this?  Well you see the Samaritans were a lot like the Jews at that time… But they did religion wrong.

The way I figure it, when we shuffle off this mortal coil, the first question at the Pearly Gates will not be which book did you follow or whether your house of worship had pews or mats.  The first questions will be were you kind to strangers?  Did you help your neighbours?

And I think that Steve, and Jason, and Chris, and the Quebec judge are not going to have comfortable eternities.

End rant.

Peace.

BC

Pulling the Veil Off of Hate

Daniel Patrick Moynihan - "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."

You may have seen them, ever since the controversial Charter of Quebec Values surfaced I’ve been seeing them more often.  People are sharing links to venom spewing websites via social media such as Facebook. 

I saw one such post today, and a couple of people who I really know, as opposed to “Facebook Friends” commented on the link.  These are normal people who most of us would have no problem sitting down to coffee with, and yet they are totally against these Muslim women who are not being forced to remove their veils before getting on a plane.

The story revolves around a video shot at Montreal’s Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport where two women were apparently allowed to board a flight without showing their faces.

The video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-3frv4tnx8

In the video we see a man interact with the representative at the counter, and then we see three apparently Muslim women passing by the same representative without a glance.  Did I mention the obvious edit?  We don’t get to see the women interact with the representative at all.

According to Salon.com these women would have already undergone several security checks before getting to this area in the airport.  The article also says that Air Canada, the airline this women were travelling on has a policy of having women who wear religious garments that cover their face brought to a private screening area to allow them to remove their facial covering for Photo ID comparison.

Was this done before this point?  Was it done after they entered the Gate?  We don’t know, the video doesn’t show that. 

Now the website makes it sound like these women weren’t screened at all, that they were permitted to just walk through the airport from the front door to the airplane without ever being screened.  Does that sound reasonable to you?

The article also has a few other still pictures of veiled Muslim women showing their ID, supposedly Passports.  I’ll share them with you.

Look carefully at the Passport.  Her face is uncovered, her hair is uncovered… what does this suggest to you?  Could it be that she has no issue with having a bare faced picture taken for her Passport but won’t appear in public without a veil?  Do you think she would have an issue with being taken aside to a private area to have an airline representative ensure that she is the same person that appears in her Passport?

Or maybe this is just a put up job to inflame emotions.

Another picture.

  

The photo is named “pakistan-vi” from the website I took it from.  If you look carefully, you will see their faces are uncovered on their ID cards.  Now I was unable to find anything in particular on this photo, other than a portion of it (the two ladies on the right) was used in a news story from Saudi Arabia telling how women there would be allowed to vote and that they would be able to obtain ID cards such as these so the a female election official can verify their identity.

Yet another photo.

This one was helpfully named “afghan_election_gi_gal-vi”.  The website infers that these women are holding Passports as well.

The same photo is found at an Australian news program called PM .  It is captioned “Afghan women show cards at polling centre in 2011”.

Last Picture.

 

OK it’s two pictures.  The one on the left is from that same website, the one on the right, I pinched from a news story on the net.  I blanked out the information on Stuart’s licence, but I left enough to show the left picture has obviously been altered, they even went so far as to obscure the state it was from.  The burqa clad woman on the left, her image is crooked on the licence, Stuart’s is nice and straight.  Stuart’s signature looks like a scanned image that is printed onto the card, Fatima’s looks like it was hand written on the signature tape that used to be used years ago.

Finally look at the date of issue.  Although Stuart’s card is older, it looks far more up to date than Fatima’s.  And Fatima’s card?  It appears to have been lifted from YATAHONGA.com, a French humour site.  I looked, it’s not there anymore… must not have been that funny I guess.

I almost forgot, New Jersey does not allow face covering to be worn for your driver’s licence.

 

Look, the guy who has the site where I picked these images from is allowed to have an opinion.  You might agree with him, I do not.

BUT, he should not be allowed to use false images and misrepresentations to support his flimsy argument based on a chopped up video.

You are not entitled to your own facts.

In reality, I’m no fan of the burqa, but if a woman wants to belong to a religion that requires that she wear one, it is not my issue.  The flip side to that is that if a government mandates that women must wear items like this, I do have an issue with that.

I believe in the separation of Church and State.  I don’t want someone’s religion, anyone’s religion telling me how to live.  But the separation of Church and State cuts both ways and I do not want the government to tell me what religions I am allowed to follow nor do I want them telling religions how to run their belief.

By the way, the woman with the Passport, it was a set up job in 2007 by the Sun Newspaper in the UK.

And the video is from 2010, when it was brought to John Baird’s attention he had an investigation started into what actually happened.  Since we never heard about it, we can only suppose that:

a)    There was nothing to the story and so the press let it slide or

b)   The Harper Party is in bed with Muslim Extremists.

Any bets?

BC

I'd be remiss if I didn't thank a Facebook Friend who pointed out that one of the pictures that this website also used was of Muslim women in line to vote.  Thank you very much P.

PS: I intentionally did not include a link to the “venom spewing site”.  I’m not going to drive any business their way.  If you really want it, let me know and I’ll send it to you.  BC