Would you cross the street to give a drunk a shot glass of whiskey? Hand the keys to the new Camry to a known and chronic car thief?
Of course, you wouldn’t.
Yet everyone who is now poised to give heroin to addicts is being hailed for innovation and progressiveness.
Take John Reynolds.
Mr. Reynolds, co-chair of Stephen Harper’s 2006 campaign and a full-time political operative, is on the board of something that calls itself with the Inner Change Society.
The entire purpose of the Inner Change Society is to promote the giving of heroin to heroin addicts.
Ezra Levant had a run-in with Jennifer Lynch, head of the Canaduian Human Rights Commission, on Friday.
Or, Levant would have had a run-in, if Lynch had been willing to turn up. Instead, says Levant, she tried to bully CTV into blocking him from the program, then sent a junior in her place, who still wasn't allowed to debate Levant face to face.
"What an embarrassment Lynch and her CHRC have become to this government -- and to all Canadians," Levant writes.
Read his report here.
What's patronizing is the view – as suggested in a written decision handed down last week by an Ontario Superior Court judge – that anti-black racism is unfairly, or anachronistically, isolated from other pertinent factors in the screening of potential jurors.
Justice John Murray urged that the race-based challenge, which has been allowed in Ontario courts since the mid '90s, be framed in more generic terms, jurors asked instead whether they could judge a case "without regard to the race of the accused."
By way of substantiating his contention that race is but one of many issues that can shade a jurist's view of the accused, Murray referenced what he characterized as an outdated stereotype of prejudice as presented in Harper Lee's seminal novel from the '60s, To Kill A Mockingbird – still on the reading list at most high schools.
"We live in the world of Spike Lee – not that portrayed by Harper Lee," he wrote, which has a nice rhetorical ring to it while not necessarily standing up to intellectual scrutiny.
Murray's world perspective must be blinkered indeed if he truly believes that race fosters no more a distorting perspective than a whole slew of other identifying details, from religion to class to sexual orientation.
Race is glaringly visible. That's why non-whites are classified as visible minorities, whether they be black, brown, Asian or aboriginal. It is also a none-too-tacit subtext in aggressive urban policing that targets gangs and gun crimes, with blacks disproportionately represented on arrest sheets, in the defendant's box and within prison populations.
The Ontario Court of Appeal acknowledged that a specific, unsubtle problem existed with potentially biased jurors, requiring particular redress.
It has become fashionable, particularly among constituencies of the aggrieved, self-asserted, to cast a wider net, an equivalency of discrimination that has attempted to usurp the very real and very specific historical experience of blacks in North America and – notably – in our courts. This dilutes the exceptional, deep-rooted prejudice that is a core part of the black narrative.
The Ontario Court of Appeal acknowledged this was a particular issue with potentially biased jurors, requiring particular redress. This might feel wrong in the pit of Murray's stomach, as he put it, but that's not where the law and precedent is made, just as his ruling – refusing to permit such pre-emptively "black" challenges in his court – will no doubt be kicked up to appeal for review.
The intent of the original Court of Appeal judgment was to keep off juries those individuals incapable of fulfilling their duties impartially – with a black defendant in an interracial alleged crime. That is assuming a potential juror answers the question honestly. It further assumes – this, the clear implication – a white-on-black equation: a white, or non-black, juror being probed for bias.
In practice, however, there have been intriguing revelations.
When a black teen came to trial last year in the Yonge St. killing of Jane Creba, his legal team asked of prospective jurors: Would your ability to render a fair verdict be affected by the fact that the accused is a young black male and the deceased a young white female?
At least two of those who admitted to bred-in-the-bone bias were black. One, a middle-aged male, stated flatly: "I am prejudiced." Another, a woman with a heavy crucifix at her throat, answered: "Yes, sir."
It is a pity that these two individuals, summarily challenged for cause, were not questioned further. What will forever remain unclear is whether they were biased in favour of the defendant because he was black or against the victim because she was white. One is no more crippling a prejudice than the other.
If we want to know ourselves better as a society, that is a bias that needs to be explored, too.
Acme Insurance Company employs 500 employees and managers at its Toronto head office. They work in a pleasant, some might even say tranquil, office environment. In the 50-year history of the company, there has never been any hint of violent behavior in the workplace. To the contrary, some people find it too quiet there.
Bawring, Bawring & Yawn is an old accounting firm in Ottawa, serving its faithful, established business clients. It has 30 employees and a dozen partners, many of whom have quietly worked together for decades.
Pete's Wholesale Groceries is a family-owned business that imports and sells European delicatessen products. It consists of a total of 60 employees and managers and operates out of the company’s cramped Mississauga premises. One quarter of the employees are members of Pete's extended family.
“Leave parenting to parents,” thunders the Post in its Saturday editorial. “The courts have no business — none — in such routine family matters.” Québec Justice Suzanne Tessier’s “galling decision” in favour of a 12-year-old girl from Gatineau, who asked the court to overturn a perfectly reasonable act of parental discipline, must itself be overturned, lest parents no longer know “where their authority over their children ends and the state’s begins.”
I’ve reported in-depth on publicly-subsidized La Raza/The Race schools that abandon academics for Aztlan studies. The US Department of Education has forked over $8 million in public charter school grants to La Raza/The Race, which helps propagate such multi-culti claptrap as “Aztec math” in dozens of Mecha madrassas.
Now, John A. Ward, a former teacher at a Tucson High School magnet school that peddles a Raza/Race curriculum, gives an insider’s look at what’s being taught on your dime. Ward has been attacked as a “sellout” because of his Hispanic heritage. Here’s a key excerpt, but read the whole thing:
During the 2002-2003 school year, I taught a U.S. history course with a Mexican-American perspective. The course was part of the Raza/Chicano studies department.
Within one week of the course beginning, I was told that I was a “teacher of record,” meaning that I was expected only to assign grades. The Raza studies department staff would teach the class.I was assigned to be a “teacher of record” because some members of the Raza studies staff lacked teaching certificates. It was a convenient way of circumventing the rules.
I stated that I expected to do more than assign grades. I expected to be involved in teaching the class. The department was less than enthusiastic but agreed.
Immediately it was clear that the class was not a U.S. history course, which the state of Arizona requires for graduation. The class was similar to a sociology course one expects to see at a university.Where history was missing from the course, it was filled by controversial and biased curriculum.
The basic theme of the curriculum was that Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites. In this narrative, whites are able to maintain their influence only if minorities are held down. Thus, social, political and economic events in America must be understood through this lens.
This biased and sole paradigm justified teaching that our community police officers are an extension of the white power structure and that they are the strongmen used “to keep minorities in their ghettos.”It justified telling the class that there are fewer Mexican-Americans in Tucson Magnet High School’s advanced placement courses because their “white teachers” do not believe they are capable and do not want them to get ahead.
It justified teaching that the Southwestern United States was taken from Mexicans because of the insatiable greed of the Yankee who acquired his values from the corrupted ethos of Western civilization.
It was taught that the Southwest is “Atzlan,” the ancient homeland of the Aztecs, and still rightfully belongs to their descendants - to all people of indigenous Mexican heritage.
As an educator, I refused to be complicit in a curriculum that engendered racial hostility, irresponsibly demeaned America’s civil institutions, undermined our public servants, discounted any virtues in Western civilization and taught disdain for American sovereignty.
When I raised these concerns, I was told that I was a “racist,” despite being Hispanic. Acknowledging my heritage, the Raza studies staff also informed me that I was a vendido, the Spanish term for “sellout.”
The Tucson public school system is a favorite breeding ground for the Raza/Race ethnic nationalists.
You may recall that open-borders radical Dolores Huerta–Hillary Clinton’s campaign co-chair–was an invited speaker at a mandatory assembly at Tucson High Magnet School, where she inveighed that “Republicans hate Latinos.”
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Here's a radical concept: Maybe parents should check their kids' knapsacks for guns, knives, baseball bats and brass knuckles before the little darlings leave for school in the morning.
Maybe those same parents, rather than hollering discrimination and inequity in the application of formal discipline by school officials – as feeble and litigiously diluted as that has been – should explore attitudes, rationalizations and see-no-evil laissez-faire in their own households.
If you think this is not true, or too harsh, then spend a day in youth court and observe while young people who've run afoul of the law – repeatedly, in many cases – present themselves as insolently towards the bench as they no doubt do in a principal's office, often in the company of a parent or guardian who appears more resentful over the procedure than distressed for a kid rocketing off the rails.
It doesn't take a village to raise a child. It takes one or two responsible adults, especially in homes that are particularly vulnerable to the broader, contaminating and voracious environment outside.
Falconer never asked us: No-shows
Louise Brown Jan. 13, 2008 She has had seven students murdered under her watch in seven years as a Toronto school superintendent, and Phyllis Hill says she would have a lot to say to Julian Falconer about how each horrific young death is complex,
