At the end of January 2015, Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry sent a letter to the Government asking them to pardon 49,000 homosexual men convicted of gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Acts 1885.
Mr Cumberbatch recently played codebreaker Alan Turing, who was convicted of gross indecency in 1952, and pardonned by Her Majesty in 2013. Stephen Fry is of course a self-proclaimed homosexual, so in that sense he has a dog in this fight. But in the circles in which they move, both must at least know or know of men who were convicted of gross indecency before the law was changed.
In a video just published on Youtube, I support their campaign on the grounds that this must be the most intelligent, compassionate, sophisticated and plain clever generation that has ever walked this earth, so that if something is not against the law now, it never should have been. Follow the argument to its logical conclusion on the video.
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Theresa May: in favour of increased internet surveillance in Britain.
Theresa May has resurrectedplans for a “snooper’s charter” in order to counteract, she says, terrorist threats from British jihadists in Syria.
She stated againthat she wants to “equip the state with greater surveillance powers—including the ability to access citizens’ email and social media accounts.”
May claims that it is vital for security authorities to have enough power to counteract terrorist in a world with ever-increasing internet capabilities. She claims that having this power is a matter of “life and death, a matter of national security.”
She related how many Britons have travelled to Syria to fight the Assad regime, and how this could represent a threat when they return to the UK.
May also claimed that at least 20 cases, 13 of which involved a threat to a child’s life, were dropped by the National Crime Agency in the past six months for lack of communication data.
Speaking at the Lord Mayor’s Defence and Security Lecture, May said that “the real problem is not that we have built an over-mighty state but that the state is finding it harder to fulfil its most basic duty, which is to protect the public.”
She believes that internet technology has given criminals more ways to commit crimes, and that the Government needs to be able to match these criminals in technological advances, which includes accessing information that can help stop them. She even referred to the internet as a “breeding ground for criminals.”
Emma Carr, acting director of privacy campaigner group Big Brother Watch, assertedthat May differs from the majority opinion on this issue.
“Yet again the Home Secretary is clashing with the broad political consensus that no new powers should be introduced until a full independent review into the currently available surveillance legislation and oversight mechanisms has taken place,” she said in a statement.
“We know from surveillance transparency reports published by private companies that they largely comply with law enforcement requests for communications data.
“Therefore, if the Home Secretary is stating that communications data was unavailable in specific cases, then that would suggest that a warrant was either not submitted to, or was rejected by, the companies in question. The question therefore should be why is this the case?” Carr added.
May introducedthe “snooper’s charter” proposal last year to increase surveillance of people’s internet and phone communications, but it was blocked by Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister. He believed her plans would be opening up doors for all sorts of mass surveillance by the government.
If passed, the proposed legislation would require internet firms to keep records of all email and social media interactions for up to a year, in case these records need to be accessed in an issue of national security.
Based on recent reports, May appears to want this legislation passed before the next general election.
May also denieda “surveillance state” programme as alleged by Edward Snowden, and she affirmed that Britain did not rely on the US to illegally obtain internet records.
“There is no programme of mass surveillance and there is no surveillance state,” May asserted.
However, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has already been accused by privacy campaigners of spying on citizens by hacking unlawfully into personal information.
Privacy International allegesthat GCHQ was illegally spying on people and has broken the European Convention of Human Rights by doing so. This document ensures citizens a right to privacy and freedom of speech.
Privacy International claims that, based on information from whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the GCHQ and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) used a monitoring programmed called Tempora, which “taps into the network of fibre-optic cables which carry the world’s phone calls and online traffic.”
The deputy director of Privacy International, Eric King, said this was the “modern equivalent of the government entering someone’s house and reading their diary, correspondence and journals.”
May denied these allegations as well, calling them “nonsense” and affirming that everything the Government is doing in surveillance is perfectly legal.
The Government received more criticism when Charles Farr, Britain’s most senior security official, said in a statement in mid-June that the Government is allowed to access citizens’ personal messages on social media sites because they are regarded as “external communications.” These include searches on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, in addition to emails from non-British citizens.
This is the first time that the Government openly stated that they intercept, without a warrant, what citizens believed were private messages.
Farr said that today the biggest threat to national security in the UK and beyond is from “militant Islamist terrorists,” and it is therefore necessary to find these suspects before it becomes too difficult to trace them. If the government was only allowed to monitor individual people or locations, this would not provide an adequate degree of protection which the people expect.
In addition, ministers have proposed this week to enact emergency laws that would require phone companies to keep records of people’s phone calls, texts, and internet history. Labour and Liberal Democrats are supporting this move but also warnedthat they will not allow this new law to reinstate a more extensive “snooper’s charter.”
Many allegations have been recently made against the Government regarding surveillance, followed by profuse denial from Theresa May. Are online terrorists really a threat to our national safety and is this the only way we can counteract terrorist threats? It is hard to say. But one thing remains certain: as much of a danger as terrorism may be, an even greater danger arises when a populace is willing to surrender substantial liberties for the promise of security. As we pointed out earlier this year, the normalization of the modern surveillance state arises from the universal human temptation to surrender freedom for the often illusory promise of increased security. That is why, when Government officials begin talking about “matters of life and death,” one must be cautious about the motivation behind it.
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Baroness Hale, pictured, has called into question whether or not the law makes accommodation for Christians beliefs.
In an unexpected turn of events, Supreme Court Deputy Baroness Hale has said that she “may have been wrong” in her earlier ruling against Christian bed and breakfast owners who refused a double bed to a homosexual couple.
The UK’s senior female judge called for a re-think concerning her decision to condemn Peter and Hazelmary Bull of discrimination against homosexuals. In addition, she said that the law has done little to protect Christian beliefs.
Baroness Hale’s remarks,which have come more than six months after the Bulls’ final appeal was refused, call into question the relationship between gay rights and religious rights
In 2008, the Bulls refused to rent a double bed to a homosexual couple in their Marazion Bed and Breakfast called Chymorvah House. The same-sex couple, Steven Preddy and Martyn Hall, took the Bulls to court, where Lady Hale and four other judges eventually ruled that the rights of the gay couple trumped the religious freedom of the Bulls.
Lady Hale declared that the Bulls will not have to pay Preddy and Hall’s legal costs for the case, which was in the original sentence. In addition, she said that laws which ignore the consciences of Christians will not be and may need to be adjusted to include a “conscience clause” for Christian business owners like the Bulls.
Speaking to Irish lawyers, Hale used the Bull case as one example among many recent cases that may have been unfair to Christian beliefs. In this speech she asked: “Should we be developing an explicit requirement upon providers of employment, goods and services to make reasonable accommodation for the manifestation of religious beliefs?”
“It is fascinating that a country with an established church can be less respectful of religious feelings than one without”, Hale was quoted in the Telegraph as saying. “It is not difficult to see why the Christians feel that their religious beliefs are not being sufficiently respected.”
Mrs. Bull was glad to be relieved of the case costs, and hoped that her case would pave the way for other Christians in similar situations.
“It is too late for us, which is a shame, but at the same time I hope her comments will restore some kind of balance back to the issue,” Bull said. “I am glad that something positive looks as though it will come out of this although I would not call it a victory.”
The Bulls nearly closed their B&B because business had declined, and they could no longer keep up their advertising. However, thanks to financial support from different supporters they were able to stay in business.
Mrs. Bull added that she had no hard feelings toward anyone, but thinks that the Supreme Court “missed a big opportunity to put something right.”
“We are certainly not homophobic but hopefully the pendulum is being corrected. I have never been able to understand why two different lifestyles cannot live together harmoniously,” Bull added.
Mrs. Bull’s comments touch on issues of concern in cases like these. Christians have been given the blanket reputation of “homophobe,” while gay people have refused to allow others to disagree with their lifestyle at the expense of their own convictions.
Christians do not call non-Christians “Jesus-phobes” or some other nonsensical term. Contrary to popular belief, it is indeed possible for Christians to have different views and to still treat other people as humans created in the image of God.
While gay rights activists are very fond of calling Christians “homophobes,” in reality they are usually even more intolerant of Christians than Christians are intolerant of homosexuals.
It is hoped that the courage shown by Peter and Hazelmary Bull, together with Lady Hale’s recent remarks, will pave the way for rulings in the favor of Christians to practice their beliefs.
A summaryof this article, published by the Gatestone Institute, discusses the key points of the report, highlighting how “police, social workers, teachers, neighbors, politicians and the media” turned a blind eye to the crimes of these Muslim gangs for fear of being accused of racism or “Islamophobia.”
Muslims at prayer – in the street
The “conspiracy of silence” regarding child grooming by Muslim gangs was exposed in 2010 when the underground investigation Operation Retriever found and convicted 13 Muslim men for grooming approximately 100 underage girls for sex. This generated more investigations and led to the discovery of several Muslim grooming gangs. Although many offenders were identified, few were prosecuted.
According to the “Easy Meat” report, these offenders are 154 times more likely to be Muslims, while the victims are almost always non-Muslim girls. But authorities have “never deemed it important to declare this, or even denied the pattern existed.”
These incidents were deemed unimportant because of multiculturalism. The report tells us:
“There is far more to this story than has come out so far. The population are already outraged by what they have learned in the last year or two, but know only a fraction of the scandal… This massive over-representation of Muslim men in this crime spree has been borne out by the prosecutions of the last three to four years, but it is clear that it must have been known long ago and should have been made public. Because the predators were Muslims, the agencies responsible for child-protection have almost entirely failed in their job to protect vulnerable children. From a fear of being called ‘racist,’ police forces across the country have buried the evidence.
“On the rare occasion when the phenomenon [of child grooming] would be discussed in more than the briefest details, political activists and the authorities would come together to stop the public from knowing more. Political correctness would be used to make sure that people did not speak about this phenomenon, enabling the perpetrators free rein to sexually abuse schoolgirls for decades. Yes, decades. We know that in an age where parents are not allowed to smack their children, this sounds unbelievable.”
The problem is much more prevalent than previously reported. In fact, as many as 10,000 schoolgirls have been victimized over the years by these Muslim gangs. According to a House of Commons report, as of November 2012 “at least 16,500 children were identified as being at risk of child sexual exploitation during one year.”
Their method is to drive around towns at night and zero in on young, non-Muslim schoolgirls between the ages of 11 and 16. They often give the girls drinks and drugs to entice them into the car. Many of the victims are from care or foster homes, where they might not be immediately missed. The younger the better is usually the policy with the girls they target. The younger the girls are more likely to be virgins who are free from any sexual diseases. (Most of these men have Muslim wives whom they do not want to contaminate.)
The report criticizes British Government for using multiculturalism as an excuse to turn a blind eye to this issue. The Government continues to excuse Muslims because many of the crimes they commit under British law are not crimes according to Sharia law. As the report says, “Multiculturalism is a fundamentally incoherent doctrine, invented to conceal the serious conflicts which have arisen when peoples from vastly different cultures, with different values, are forced to live together.”
In its reluctance to be even-handed and non-discriminatory, the Government has outright refused to take into account religious or ethnic connections to these and other crimes perpetrated by Muslims. The possibility that Islamic law might have something to do with this behaviour is not worthy of consideration.
The British Government expects all its citizens, including Muslims, to embrace multiculturalism. However, the religion of Islam is by its very nature opposed to the principles of multiculturalism through its intolerance of all dissenting voices. Moreover, the symbiotic relationship between Islam and the political left cannot last since once Muslims achieve power, they kick behind them the ladder of multiculturalism that they used for climbing to power.
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John Craven was arrested for quoting the Bible after two gay teenagers asked what his views were on homosexuality.
A Christian preacher won £13,000 last week in compensation after being arrested and held in custody for 19 hours simply for quoting the Bible.
The arrest occurred three years ago when John Craven was preaching in Manchester city centre. Two teenagers approached the street preacher to ask what he thought of homosexuality. Craven read from Revelation 21:8, which says that sinners will be burned in a lake of fire. He also quoted John 3:16 and said that “Whilst God hates sin, he loves the sinner.”
Following Craven’s response the boys began kissing each other in front of Craven and making “obscene gestures.” Soon the youths called a mounted policeman, claiming that Craven’s comments had “insulted” them and caused them “harassment and distress.”
The policeman arrested Craven for possibly committing a public order offence. The officer allegedly took Craven “roughly by the arm” and told him that he was under arrest. The officer did not ask for Craven’s name or address and handled him roughly.
Craven was taken into custody, and remained in a jail cell for about 15 hours. He did not receive food, water, or medication for his rheumatoid arthritis.
This event happened in 2011. On March 29th Craven was finally awarded his £13,000 compensation after a three-year legal battle against the Manchester Police. This battle has cost the public purse approximately £50,000. Mr. Craven won his damages under the Human Rights Act.
“I never intended to cause anyone harassment, alarm or distress. I preach the gospel, which means good news and the love of God for all.
“At the end of the day God loves everybody, but homosexuality is a sin and I am not going to contradict the word of God.”
Police Superintendent Alan Greene could not go into detail, but admitted “We can acknowledge that we did make mistakes and kept the claimant in custody for too long.”
This is just one of several incidents involving the persecution of Christians in Britain. In one of our other articles, we have listed several examples of the rising totalitarianism that is spreading over Britain. Christianity is coming under fire, which results in Christians being marginalized and prohibited from freely expressing their religious views. But this victory gives us some encouragement to Christians who boldly proclaim their faith.
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Mr Roache, 81, of Wilmslow, Cheshire, was found not guilty of two rapes and four indecent assaults after a trial at Preston Crown Court.
Five women had claimed he assaulted them when they were aged 16 or under between 1965 and 1971.
But the testimony of all of them broke down under examination. But Louise Blackwell QC, defending, said the women’s evidence “lacked sense and credibility”.
In court, the woman making the rape claims changed her mind about how old she was at the time.
Another woman initially told police she was warned about Mr Roache by actor Johnny Briggs, who played Mike Baldwin, but when it was discovered he was not in the show at the time she said the warning had come from a different actor.
After the case, Lancashire Constabulary said the allegations had been “thoroughly and professionally investigated by specialist detectives”.
A spokesman said that “all the evidence was subjected to careful scrutiny before a decision was taken to charge, in the belief that there was sufficient evidence to justify a realistic prospect of conviction”.
He added that the force “entirely respect the verdict reached by the jury”.
The case came to court as part of ‘Operation Yewtree’, the police investigation which began with Jimmy Savile and expanded in ‘Savile and others’ and then ‘Others’. Mr Roache was investigated in the latter category.
Lancashire Constabulary probably thought that five separate women could not possibly all be making it up. But this is precisely what the jury has found, and each one of the accusers should now be charged with perjury. They remained anonymous while Mr Roache’s name was dragged through the mire in full public view. That is an injustice, despite the not guilty verdict.
Equally, the police may have been swayed by Mr Roache’s admitting to broadcaster Piers Morgan that he had slept with ‘more than a hundred’ women and his admitted infidelity to his first wife Anna Cropper. He has plainly acted like a cad, and has described this behaviour as ‘inadequate,’ but maintained throughout that he had no interest in under-age girls or non-consensual encounters.
Sadly, the verdict casts doubt on all the non-Saville parts of the Yewtree investigation, leading ordinary people to conclude that celebrities may have been targeted for some perverse reason by their accusers.
The prosecution said that, if the actor was telling the truth, he was the victim of a “huge, distorted and perverse witch-hunt”. Those comments may come back to haunt them and the Yewtree investigators.
A greater sadness is that there are genuine victims of horrific sexual abuse who cannot secure justice because their abusers were too well-connected or evidence has been mysteriously lost. They have not been well-served by this debacle.
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The six-colour rainbow ”diversity’ flag on display at a homosexual rally.
A rainbow flag has been raised in Leicester to mark the beginning of February as ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans History Month’.
The flag was raised on Monday by Labour Councillor Manjula Sood, a previous Lord Mayor of Leicester, and currently assistant Mayor and Vice Chair of Equal Opportunities, Education and Social Services for Leicester City Council
She said: “The city council is committed to celebrating Leicester’s diversity.”
How celebrating sodomy will increase a sense of city cohesion within Leicester’s Christian and Muslim communities was not stated.
Cllr Sood is Leicester City’s only female Asian elected councillor, a position held since 1996. She is of course a Hindu with strong links to India. According to her biography, she has partaken in the last three International Women’s Day.
Councillor Manjjula Sood
Cllr Sood is very busy promoting diversity. She is Trustee and an Executive Director for the Leicester Council of Faiths, Vice Chair and Women’s Officer for the local Constituency Labour Party, Member of Asian Refuge Shelter, Member of the Afro-Caribbean Working Party (what has she to offer there?) Member of the Children and Young Persons scrutiny committee, Member of the Leicester Domestic Violence forum, naturally, Member of the Faith Regeneration Advisory Group, engaged with developing a multi religion centre in Leicester (very New Age, that) and Member of the Inter Faith Network UK since 1995.
The rainbow flag is also flying outside Leicestershire police headquarters in Enderby, as well as County Hall in Glenfield.
Leicestershire’s assistant chief constable Steph (sic) Morgan, who speaks on LGBT issues for the Association of Chief Police Officers, explained away his and the council’s flying of the flag like this: “Flying the rainbow flag together in this way is a symbol of our joint commitment to the LGBT community locally and is part of ongoing work with our local authority partners to create a just and fair society for all.
“As national LGBT strategic policing lead, I was pleased to see 10 police forces, including Leicestershire police, featured in the Stonewall 100 Index of gay-friendly employers in January 2013.”
Concentrating on such divisive issues as being ‘gay-friendly’ may explain why the police now have no time to investigate internet fraud and why there seem to have been so many recent financial scandals involving senior police officers.
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Andrew Woodhouse, 44, from Govilon, Monmouthshire, was woken at about 00:30 GMT in March 2013 by a text message telling him a burglar alarm had gone off at the tyre yard where his business is based a mile from his home.
Dressing quickly, he drove to the yard and confronted burglars Kevin Green and Timothy Cross. In an ensuing fight, he tore something ‘like a fence post’ from Kevin Green’s hands and swung it at him, breaking his arm and both legs.
He then gave chase to Timothy Cross, rugby-tackled him to the ground, called the police and sat on him until they arrived.
He was astonished to be charged with causing grievous bodily harm and faced a prison sentence.
James Wilson, prosecuting, described Mr Woodhouse’s actions as an “unreasonable and unlawful assault”.
He said: “It was not reasonable self-defence. Mr Woodhouse lost his temper and went over the top.
“He is a hard working businessman but he has let his frustration get the better of him. He lost it.”
The court heard how Mr Woodhouse gave police a full account of how he fought with the two raiders like a “mad man”.
But barrister Andrew Taylor of 30 Park Place Chambers in Cardiff, defending Mr Woodhouse, said: “These thieves thought they would have nice easy pickings that night.
“Many people would have given up and just claimed on their insurance but Mr Woodhouse is made of sterner stuff.
“He showed stoicism, courage and fitness to chase them.
“One of the men was armed and went to attack him. He acted in lawful self defence.
“He agrees the red mist came down which you can understand when his business has almost been wiped out by crime.
“If it hadn’t been for him these men would not have been caught. Where are we in society when a person cannot act in self-defence to protect his property? That is what Mr Woodhouse was doing.”
Green and Cross were fined £75.00 each for theft last year.
The Bible says:
Exodus 22:2 If a thief be found breaking up, and be smitten that he die, there shall no blood be shed for him. 3 If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be blood shed for him; for he should make full restitution; if he have nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft. 4 If the theft be certainly found in his hand alive, whether it be ox, or ass, or sheep; he shall restore double.
We read there of restorative justice rather than a fine from the state but firstly of a principle that those who break in and enter property at night take their lives in their hands. In the daytime it is easier for a householder to see what is going on, and take proportionate action, but not so at night. Most burglaries happen at night (some will say that burglary is by definition at night) because the hours of darkness provide cover for evil deeds, as Jesus said when he was arrested in the garden by night:
Luke 22:53 When I was daily with you in the temple, ye stretched forth no hands against me: but this is your hour, and the power of darkness.
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Jayden Wray’s vitamin deficiency was to blame for the broken bones which led to him being taken ‘into care’.
The BBC’s flagship current affairs programme has investigated child-snatching by social services.
In a landmark edition of Panorama screened last night (13/01/2014) entitled ‘I want my baby back’, a number of cases of horrific injustice were revealed.
According to the write-up: ‘Panorama reporter John Sweeney investigates the secretive world of the family courts and asks whether some parents may have unfairly lost their children forever’.
Presenter Sweeney traveled to Spain to interview one mother who fled the country after her elder daughter was taken and ‘freed’ for adoption in the secret family courts.
Like other parents in the film, and many others whose stories were not told, her child was taken after X-rays showed multiple bone fractures, leading to accusations that she or her partner had physically abused the infant.
But new evidence is linking fragile bones with vitamin D deficiency. In the landmark case of baby Jayden Wray, his death from multiple fractures led to his parents being charged with murder and having their surviving child taken ‘into care’.
Paediatric Pathologist Irene Scheimberg’s brilliance should lead to a major rethink on juvenile fractures.
Some very uncomfortable details emerged during the Panorama programme.
Firstly, parents like those of Jayden Wray who protest their innocence are looked upon as uncooperative and ‘in denial’ by social workers, value-judgments which lessen their chances of being re-united with their child. However, if they admit any kind of guilt, they won’t have their baby returned anyway.
Secondly, the programme revealed something of the merry-go-round of medical experts who are paid to present evidence on behalf of social services departments in the family courts. Thousands of pounds are paid out for preparing evidence and presenting it at a hearing. The experts find themselves depending on social services for a considerable income which they know will only continue if they present evidence which supports the position of social services, which appears always to hang on to a child until the bitter end.
Investigative journalist John Sweeney of Panorama
One qualified expert radiographer even told a court that cases of vitamin D deficiency were unknown in white children of Caucasian parents, something which is blatantly untrue.
What the programme did not investigate was the huge sums paid to social services and adoption agencies in the event of a successful adoption. This successor to targets, which also had financial rewards for being met, mean that a single baby is worth £27,000 in adoption grants to somebody.
That might explain why children’s charities always seem so keen on the present system and, put with panic over cases like that of ‘Baby Peter’ why SS departments are so eager to take children ‘into care’.
There are so many children in care now that a scheme to speed up the adoption process has recently been trialled. This, according to the Guardian, has left parents reporting being ‘bulldozed’.
The only bit of possible good news is that Sir James Munby, president of the Family Division of the High Court, said in November last year that parents of children taken into care should no longer be gagged by the courts and journalists should be allowed to report on proceedings. Only the death penalty is more drastic than removing a child, he has said.
But opening up the family courts is not going to happen any time soon, and until it does, what John Hemming MP described last night to Mr Sweeney as ‘a tsunami of injustice’ will continue in the secret family courts with their retinue of tame experts and their backdrop of adoption payments.
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The Wunderlich children have been taken from their parents because of the decision to homeschool.
German social services officials have raided the home of a family and abducted their children on the sole grounds that the parents were exercising their right to home-school.
The armed raid occurred on the morning of 29 August, just as the Wunderlich family was beginning lessons.
The team of 20 SS personnel, police officers and special agents approached the home with a battering ram after Judge Koenig, a Darmstadt family court judge, authorized force “against the children” since the children had “adopted the parents’ opinions.”
The four children, ages 7-14, were all forcibly removed and taken to unknown locations, leaving the parents devastated.
Home School Legal Defense Association obtained the court documents authorizing the seizure. The documents reveal that the only legal grounds for action against the family was their decision to home-school. There were no allegations of abuse or neglect, nor any concern that the children were receiving inadequate education.
Dirk Wunderlich, the father, reported, “I looked through a window and saw many people, police, and special agents, all armed. They told me they wanted to come in to speak with me. I tried to ask questions, but within seconds, three police officers brought a battering ram and were about to break the door in, so I opened it.
“The police shoved me into a chair and wouldn’t let me even make a phone call at first. It was chaotic as they told me they had an order to take the children. At my slightest movement the agents would grab me as if I were a terrorist. You would never expect anything like this to happen in our calm, peaceful village. It was like a scene out of a science fiction movie. Our neighbors and children have been traumatized by this invasion.”
The Wunderlich family with members of HSLDA, taken prior to the raid.
“When I went outside, our neighbor was crying as she watched. I turned around to see my daughter being escorted as if she were a criminal by two big policemen. They weren’t being nice at all. When my wife tried to give my daughter a kiss and a hug goodbye, one of the special agents roughly elbowed her out of the way and said, ‘It’s too late for that.’ What kind of government acts like this?”
Having been pestered by the state for their decision to home-school, the Wunderlich family has traveled throughout the EU in the last four years looking for a place to live in freedom. Sadly, the family was forced back to Germany by lack of work. Upon returning to the country, the children’s passports were immediately seized to ensure they could never leave again.
The right of German parents to home-school is recognized by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Ignoring these and other declarations, the German government seems to be following the directives of Adolf Hitler, who wrote in 1937: “The youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.”
Dirk Wunderlich spoke with Mike Donnelly, HSLDA Director for International Affairs. “These are broken people,” Donnelly said. “They said they felt like they were being ground into dust. They were shaken to their core and shocked by the event. But they also told me that they had followed their conscience and the dictates of their faith. Although they don’t have much faith in the German state, they have a lot of faith in God. They are an inspiring and courageous family.
“I’ve been fighting for German home-school freedom for years,” he continued, “and I had hoped that things were changing in Germany since it has been some time since brutality of this magnitude has occurred. But I was wrong.”
Petra Wunderlich said her heart was shattered. “We are empty,” she said. “We need help. We are fighting but we need help.”
Obama Interferes to Deport German Homeschool Family
The Obama administration has ordered the Romeike family to be deported to Germany, where the parents will almost certainly lose custody of their children for their decision to home-school.
Many other families have been persecuted at the hands of the totalitarian German state for wanting to home-school. One particular family, the Romeikes, fled Germany in 2008 after being ordered not to home-school. They hoped to find safety in the United States. In 2010 the Romeike family were granted asylum to remain in the U.S. on the grounds that returning to Germany would be dangerous for them (Michael Farris has pointed out that the German High Court is on record for saying that religious home-schoolers should be targeted and severely punished). Since then they have been living in Tennessee, where they purchased a farm and have been educating their children according to their evangelical Christian beliefs.
In an unexpected act of executive interference, President Obama appealed the ruling which allowed the Romeike family to remain in America. In April, the Obama administration obtained an order from a higher court to deport the family., arguing that parents essentially have no right to determine how and what their children are taught. At the same time, Obama is granting amnesty to millions of people who have gone to the US illegally. He has also released thousands of illegals who have committed crimes.
In the German state schools, children are exposed to graphic sex education, violence, witchcraft and atheism. Moreover, the German government has openly declared that its policy is based on suppressing minorities. One German court decision explained their opposition to home education explicitly in terms of ideological thought control:
“The general public has a justified interest in counteracting the development of religiously or philosophically motivated ‘parallel societies’ and in integrating minorities in this area. Integration does not only require that the majority of the population does not exclude religious or ideological minorities, but, in fact, that these minorities do not segregate themselves and that they do not close themselves off to a dialogue with dissenters and people of other beliefs. Dialogue with such minorities is an enrichment for an open pluralistic society. The learning and practicing of this in the sense of experienced tolerance is an important lesson right from the elementary school stage. The presence of a broad spectrum of convictions in a classroom can sustainably develop the ability of all pupils in being tolerant and exercising the dialogue that is a basic requirement of democratic decision-making process.”
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Our earlier post, ‘Live-birth Abortions and the Politics of Choice‘ ended by asking why there has been such reluctance among abortion defenders to acknowledge that a child who survives an abortion is a human person of value.
Hadley Arkes’ book Natural Rights and the Right to Choose offers some possible answers to this question. Mr Arkes suggests that part of the problem has been a move away from natural rights towards an exclusive reliance on positive law. The concept of natural rights recognized that those laws which are posited must be based on more fundamental first principles of ethics. There are certain moral absolutes that are prior to, and the basis of, the laws which are posited.
Beginning around 1965 natural rights began to be questioned in American benches and law schools and was gradually replaced by what is known as ‘legal positivism.’ Arkes traces this process and shows how Positivism “usually goes hand in hand with the expression of a deep scepticism about the sources of law. The Positivist is more likely to register a profound doubt that there are moral truths, holding steady from one place to another. In our own time, there has been more of an inclination to say that there are merely ‘opinions’ or right and wrong, which will always be ‘relative’ to the feelings of the person who holds them, or to the opinions that are dominant in any place.”
The rejection of natural rights entailed by legal positivism feeds on a type of ‘soft’ relativism that eschews the casting of moral judgements, especially judgements which might affect policy. However, all policy is essentially moral, whether we recognize it or not, and it is inescapable that the public will absorb the moral principles implicit in the laws. As Arkes writes,
“As the public absorbs the understandings of rights and wrongs contained in the laws, the character of the public becomes shaped, for better or worse…. Law there must needs be, and the men and women who shape the laws must be, perforce, teachers of morality, even when they profess to teach that there is no morality. In fact, we have discovered in our own time that judges and political men are never more rigid and moralistic in their teaching as when they are ridiculing moral judgment and professing to free people from the tyranny of moral truths.”
Arkes shows that this move away from natural rights toward relativistic notions of positive law has followed the trajectory of thinking on abortion rights. Before the “right to an abortion” can have any plausibility, it is necessary to first deny that a baby in a womb is a human person in any meaningful sense, let alone that it possesses a human ‘nature.’ Thus it has become routine for defenders of abortion to maintain, in all seriousness, that they really do not know what it is a pregnant woman is carrying in her womb.
For example, in issuing a verdict for Planned Parenthood v. Doyle in 1998, Judge Richard Posner announced that partial-birth abortion is simply a removal of tissue comparative to cosmetic surgery.
Or again, in striking down the laws against partial-birth abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, Judge Barry explained that the law forbidding this barbaric procedure had been addressing a mirage since, in reality, there was no child to be born, and no ‘delivery’ of a baby since “a woman seeking an abortion is plainly not seeking to give birth.” Thus, the difference between delivering a human and not delivering a human depends on the intention of the woman. This introduces an element of radical subjectivity into our understanding of human life. Since the answer to question “What is a human being?” depends on a value judgement, each one of us must be left to determine the answer to this question for ourselves. The difference between an actual human life and a potential human life becomes a matter of personal opinion. Thus we have the bizarre situation of American judges pronouncing that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey)
But this logic, once accepted, spills outside the immediate confines of the debate about abortion, and has entailed a more general denial that there is such a thing as a shared human ‘nature’ that we can know and agree upon. To truly experience liberty, the ruling of Planned Parenthood v. Casey seemed to suggest, each person must be free to decide for him or herself what constitutes a human life. In this way, the ‘right’ to an abortion can only be sustained by denying the foundation of natural rights and positing a new concept of rights evacuated of moral substance.
A result of relativizing the definition of human life is that there is great difficulty when it comes to speaking meaningfully about man. As Arkes explains:
“The judges in our own day, profess to be far less certain about the meaning of ‘nature’ and ‘man.’ …they are more disposed to leave to the ‘political process’ the power to resolve that question of what constitutes a person or a human life… Since there is no ‘objective’ standard of what constitutes a human being, the decision will be left in the hand then of people with political power. And when they flex their power, in reach a judgment, that judgment will be tested by no standard of right or wrong apart from power itself.
“As the judges advance in their work, at the end of the century and the beginning of a new millennium, they have removed from our law any fixed notion of what constitutes a ‘man’ or a human being.
The problem, of course, is that if there is no nature common to man, then there can be no ‘human’ rights springing from that nature. If there is no objective ‘nature’ that human beings can be said to share in common, then there can be no settled moral truths that arise from that nature. In this way, we have accepted premises that, step by step, have talked ourselves out of the grounds of our own rights:
“If we can arbitrarily alter the definition of a ‘man’ as it suits our convenience, if nature provides no definition of a human being that we are obliged to respect, then – as we shall see – we remove the distinct ground of our claim to ‘natural rights.’ But if we do that, if we remove ‘natural rights,’ we would convert all rights into rights of ‘positive law.’ With that subtle shift, we would have removed, in effect, the very logic and substance of rights. For what we call ‘rights’ then are simply the things declared to be right by the opinion that is dominant in any place. In that event, the ‘rights’ enacted into law are merely the rights that a majority is willing to confer. But what the majority may confer, the majority may also remove when it no longer strikes the majority as right or convenient.”
Enter Gosnell. In one sense he is the prime example of someone defining reality for himself in the way urged by the judgement of Planned Parenthood v. Casey (“at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”) Even though the murder of newborns was routine in the clinic, Gosnell never thought of himself as a murderer. In an article for the Washington Post, Melinda Henneberger said that “Gosnell himself seemed confused, when he was charged with so many counts of murder, as to how that could be. Because even at that point, he didn’t appear to see the children he’s accused of beheading as people.”
Gosnell is being treated as an anomaly, but if Arkes is to be believed, he is only the tip of the iceberg.
“People had to talk themselves into the notion that these beings, conceived by homo sapiens, carried in the wombs of women, were not really human beings—or at least not quite yet. This shift in labelling was not exactly easy to do if one had even a rudimentary knowledge of biology. And it was especially improbably in the light of what modern embryology was able to teach about the human embryo. But the powers of rationalization have been such that even people holding degrees from expensive colleges have been willing to affect, in public, that they have no firm knowledge of what is in a woman’s womb. …for the sake of making us all more suggestible to a new right to abortion, the judges had to begin teaching a novel doctrine: that the taking of human life was not as portentous a thing as we used to think, because we are no longer as sure as we were in the past in our sense of what a human being is.”
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Earlier this month, long-time abortion provider, Kermit Gosnell, was sentenced to life imprisonment on multiple counts of first degree murder and a string of lesser charges. The verdict was issued after it emerged that his Philadelphia based ‘Woman’s Medical Society’ had snipped the spinal cords of hundreds of babies born alive.
Gosnell’s preferred method for performing late-term abortions was to induce delivery and then kill the baby after birth by cutting the spinal cord at the back of the neck. Testimony given to the jury showed that this process of snipping occurred hundreds of times to bring about the demise of a breathing and moving baby. The babies would be thrown away, while their feet would be stored in jars.
The jury heard that sometimes a baby would be left for a while before being killed, and would only stop crying once Gosnell performed his barbaric procedure. One baby was born in a toilet and made what appeared to be frantic efforts to swim moving before an employee grabbed it and cut its neck with surgical scissors. Some of the babies who were snipped would not die immediately and testimony includes accounts of babies screeching in agony.
The pro-abortion machine was as quick as the pro-life lobby to condemn Gosnell’s atrocities, not wanting their abortion-rights movement to be tainted by association with this mass murderer. At the same time, however, we shouldn’t let this obscure the fact that the abortion-rights industry has had a record of ambivalence when it comes to the question of infanticide.
At least, that is what Hadley Arkes suggests in his fascinating book Natural Rights and the Right to Choose. Arkes shows that the idea of protecting babies born alive has been highly controversial within the ranks of abortion-rights activists.
One of the things that made me interested in reading Natural Rights and the Right to Choose is that Arkes was one of the architects of an important piece of American legislation protecting babies who survive an abortion, known as the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002. This bill was put together after revelations surfaced that hospitals in America were routinely performing what was known as “live birth abortion.”
There are numerous harrowing accounts of “live birth abortions” practiced at conventional hospitals. In some of these procedures the baby is killed with surgical scissors, while in other hospitals the baby is literally thrown in the trash or a cot to die of dehydration in a process that has sometimes lingered on for an entire day. Jill Stanek, a former nurse at a major Chicago hospital, has described witnessing babies being born alive after failed abortions and being brought to a “soiled utility room” and left to die. “My experience was that they [the babies] survive as short as a few minutes, to once, almost as long as an eight hour shift.”
Mary Ellen Douglas, National Organizer for Campaign Life Coalition, has reported that “Babies were found struggling for life in a basin and nurses were told to leave them alone because they were aborted.” Official statistics from Canada show that between 2000 and 2009 at least 491 babies died after surviving abortions following a live birth.
Arkes explains that the Born-Alive Infants Protection Bill was not merely a response to the proliferation of live-birth abortions. Arkes was also concerned that much of the reasoning that judges were adopting to defend “partial-birth abortions” entailed accepting premises that also logically entailed infanticide. Indeed, it was coming to be accepted by judges and legal scholars that the right to an abortion means the right to an effective abortion, even if the baby survives the first attempt and is accidentally born. If the right to abortion entailed the right to a dead child, then it is only a triviality which side of the birth canal that child happened to be on. This was exactly the issue that emerged in the landmark cace of Floyd v. Anders in 1977. Arkes explains the significance of this case:
A male child had survived an abortion, and a surgery, for 20 days after an abortion, and the question was posed as to whether there had been an obligation to preserve the life of that child. The answer, tendered by Judge Clement Haynsworth, was no: As Haynsworth “explained,” the mother had decided on abortion, and therefore, “the fetus in this case was not a person whose life state law could protect.” Ordinarily, a child born alive is protected under the laws of a state, but now we had a new constitutional right, a right to abortion, and that new right worked its effects simply by shifting the labels: That child born alive was not a child, or a person, protected by the laws of homicide. That new being was merely a ‘fetus,’ marked for termination. In effect, the right to abortion was interpreted as the right to an “effective abortion” or a dead child.
Hadley Arkes
It was to address atrocities such as these that Arkes pioneered the Born-Alive bill. But in his book Arkes is candid that he also had a more subversive aim. He hoped that the Born-Alive Infants Protection Bill would plant premises in people’s minds that could serve as the most modest of first steps towards questioning the very principles on which abortion rights were based. If the law could recognize that the value and humanity of a baby who survived an abortion does not depend on the feelings of the mother, then it might be reasonable to ask why the value and humanity of the same child, only minutes earlier, can be thrown into question with such ease.
During Arkes’ decade long battle to get the Born-Alive Infants Protection Bill introduced and finally passed, it met with vigorous opposition from House Democrats and the abortion-rights machine. “The most ‘modest first step’ of all was the proposal simply to preserve the life of the child who survived the abortion” Arkes reflected. “As simple as it was, the proposal had a political bite, because the proponents of abortion could not admit even the smallest step that acknowledged the human standing of the child.”
On 20 July, 2000, The National Abortion Rights Action League came out with a forceful press release opposing the bill, claiming it represented “yet another anti-choice assault” that “would inappropriately inject prosecutors and lawmakers into the medical decision-making process.” It further accused the bill of “seeking to ascribe rights to foetuses ‘at any stage of development,’ therefore directly contradicting one of Roe’s basic tenants.”
Since the “stage of development” referred to in the bill was the stage after birth, NARAL’s opposition suggested that there was a principled connection between the logic of abortion-rights and infanticide. As Hadley Arkes wrote, commenting on NARAL’s incredible admission, “The fact that the child had emerged from the womb apparently made no difference for its standing: It was still a fetus. And it would be a fetus presumably, as long as it was marked for abortion. It would never attain the name of ‘child’ or person. All of that quite fit the premises and the lens with which NARAL looked out on the world.”
As an Illinois Senator, Barack Obama crushed a bill that would protect babies who survive an abortion.
The National Abortion Rights Action League had many supporters in Congress, and one of them was state senator, Barack Obama, whoused his position as a committee chairman to kill the same bill in Illinois.
Despite widespread opposition, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act finally passed in August 2002 thanks to two developments. The first development was that Congressman Jerry Nadler (D, N.Y.) realized that the Democrats would embarrass themselves if they insisted too hard on extending “choice” to the killing of children already born. (Interestingly, Obama continued to oppose the bill even after NARAL and most of the Democrats withdrew their opposition.) The second development was the addition of a “neutrality clause” explicitly stating that the bill expressed no judgment, in either direction, about the legal status of a human prior to live birth.
The enactment of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act over a decade ago has not silenced the debate about the personhood of children who survive abortions in America. Indeed, one of the things that emerged during the trial of Hermit Gosnell was just how ambivalent mainstream abortion rights activists have been towards the issue of infanticide.
Now in one sense this should come as no surprise. From the very beginning of the abortion rights movement, judges justified their decision in Roe v. Wade on the grounds that the court was not in a position to resolve the difficult question of when human life begins. But once we concede that we are not in a position to know when human life begins, then the mandatory protection of infants who are already born begins to look merely arbitrary.
This logic has not been lost on the pro-choice lobby. In March of this year a Planned Parenthood lobbyist was asked by a member of the Florida House Civil Justice Subcommittee whether an abortionist should be required to try to save the life of a baby who survived an abortion. The abortion-rights lobbyist, Alisa Lapolt Snow, replied, “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.” Think about that for a moment: the concept of ‘choice’, once only applicable to whether or not to kill the child in the womb, is now being extended to a baby struggling for life on a doctor’s table!
In April this year, an undercover investigator attended a teaching session where a 10-year Planned Parenthood adviser explained what to do if a woman were to deliver her baby at home between the stages in a two-day abortion. She should just “flush it” and said that any surviving baby would die once it was submerged in a toxic solution inside a jar. (See also, ‘Abortion Doctor: I Would Leave Babies to Die Born Alive After Abortion.’)
Last year a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics, entitled ‘After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?’, argues that “both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons…” The authors of this paper, Alberto Giubilini of the University of Milan and Francesca Minerva of Melbourne University, state in the article’s abstract:
By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.
The argument in the main body of the essay used abortion-rights arguments to try to prove that live-birth abortions can be justified for the same reason as conventional abortions. As the authors write, “A serious philosophical problem arises when the same conditions that would have justified abortion become known after birth.” What are these conditions? Earlier in the paper the authors had specified: “a child can itself be an unbearable burden for the psychological health of the woman or for her already existing children…” The essay went on to argue that “In such cases, we need to assess facts in order to decide whether the same arguments that apply to killing a human fetus can also be consistently applied to killing a newborn human.”
In cases where a newborn is found to be disabled, the authors believe the issue is fairly straight-forward because of the detrimental economic impact the child would have on society:
“Nonetheless, to bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care. On these grounds, the fact that a fetus has the potential to become a person who will have an (at least) acceptable life is no reason for prohibiting abortion. Therefore, we argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.”
But even in cases where the newborn is not disabled, they suggest that after-birth abortion should be acceptable on the same principle as conventional abortions:
“…we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be…. The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual. …the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn.”
How old does a baby have to be before we can attribute human personhood to him or her? The authors of the article are reluctant to give a threshold and admit “it is hard to exactly determine when a subject starts or ceases to be a person.”
Shrinking back from the attribution of personhood is not limited to philosophical journals. Arkes quotes a revealing interchange that occurred on the floor of the Senate between Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum and Barbara Boxer of California when debating a bill to ban partial-birth abortions. Mr Santorum asked Mrs Boxer when was the first moment a child came under the protection of the laws regarding human life. Boxer replied, “I think when you bring your baby home…”
Why is there such reluctance to acknowledge that a child born alive is a person with value? We have attempted to address some possible answers to this question in our follow-up post, ‘Abortion and the Problem of Personhood.’
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In Hadley Arkes’ book Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, he makes some penetrating observations about American society which apply with equal force to some of the issues Britain is now facing. He writes,
In the name of ‘privacy’ and ‘autonomy’, [Americans] have unfolded, since 1965, vast new claims of liberty, all of them bound up in some way with the notion of sexual freedom. In the first steps, there was a liberty, for married couples, but then soon for unmarried persons, to have unregulated access to contraceptives. Next, the claim of privacy was extended into a private right to end a pregnancy, or destroy a child in the womb, at any time in a pregnancy, for virtually any reason. That same claim of privacy was soon extended to the freedom to end the lives of newborns afflicted with Down’s syndrome or spina bifda. After the briefest interval, that same doctrine of personal autonomy was applied to the other end of the scale of age and converted into a claim to assisted suicide.
Ironically, this unfolding scheme of liberation has advanced even while privacy, in other domains, has been progressively crimped and disrespected by the law. Private corporations, private clubs, private households, have found themselves under thicker regulation, and the overhanging threat of lawsuits. The combined effect has been to remove the attribute most prized about privacy: the freedom to arrange one’s own association, or private enclave, according to one’s own, private criteria. But this recession of privacy and freedom seems to count for very little when set against the expansion of rights associated with sexual freedom. The dismantling of restraints on sexuality has evidently been taken as far more liberating, even exhilirating, perhaps because it has been taken as a matter of the most irreducible ‘personal’ freedom. And yet these freedoms, celebrated as pre-eminently ‘personal,’ have required the assistance or intervention of surgeons and counselors, and they have quickly annexed to their cause the demand to have the support of public monies, drawn from tax-payers with the coercions of the law. It must surely count, too, as one of the paradoxes of this new phase in our law that people seem to identify their well-being, not with an obligation to preserve life or go to its rescue, but with the creation of vast new franchises to destroy human life, for wholly private reasons, without the need to offer a justification.
Each step in liberation has been marked, then, by a further detachment of people from the traditional restraints of the law. The corollary, of course, is that, as restraints have been removed, persons once protected by those restraints have been removed from that protection. Vast new liberties come along with vast new injuries – unless, of course, the victims no longer count. In any event, there is little doubt that these alterations in our law over the past thirty years have been taken as the hallmarks of a new regime of personal freedom; a freedom so vital to those who savor it, that any threat of having it qualified or diminished in any degree is taken as nothing less than an assault on the constitutional order itself.
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At the centre of the controversy is Mr. Ross’ claim that rape has gradations of violence, and so “rape isn’t always rape.” The last remark is at the centre of this week’s firestorm of controversy.
Sarah Green of EVAWI (End Violence Against Women) was quick to condemn Mr. Ross’s work as “horrible” and accused the former Crimewatch presenter of “trotting out with the same spurious myths about rape.”
The measured and well-researched claims that have provoked such venom from feminists and the liberal media include the following
It is wrong to almost exclusively identify women as rape victims. Men are often the victims of false rape claims.
In the 1990’s, the Solicitor General gave targets to sex crime unites. These had the effect of shifting the presumption of innocence towards a presumption of guilt in cases of alleged rape.
Women are still mostly portrayed as weak when it comes to the issue of crime, and this can often obscure the reality of what happens on the street.
Data shows that the percentage of abusive wives are as great, if not greater, than the percentage of abusive husbands. It is false to automatically assume that if a wife is violent that she must have been acting out of self-defence.
Rape has gradations of seriousness.
It is wrong to assume that any woman who chooses not to pursue a rape claim is being let down by the State or acting irrationally, especially if she is partly responsible for what happened.
Evidence suggests that drug rape is not as frequent as is often assumed.
Many women thought to be coerced into participating in the illegal sex trade are actually doing it voluntarily.
Half of all women who have had sex unwillingly do not think they were raped, and this proportion rises strongly when the assault involves a boyfriend, or if the woman is drunk or high on drugs. In such cases, the women themselves often went too far or didn’t make themselves clear.
Aggravated rape exists
The last point (which echoes points made by Christian Voice last December) has prompted particular anger from feminist organizations who question the very category of aggravated rape. However, if we look at Mr Ross’ words in context, it is hard to argue with his logic. This is what Ross wrote in Chapter 12 of his book:
In any other crime we take account of provocation and contributory factors. Even in murder. Why not with sex? Even to raise the question tempts claims of sexism. But a key theme of this book is that we can aggravate crime by tempting fate and curb it by playing safe. We have come to acknowledge it is foolish to leave laptops on the back seat of the car. We would laugh at a bank that stored sacks of cash by the front door. We would be aghast if an airport badly skimped on its security. No amount of incitement can excuse rape, or any other crime, but it is inane to confuse explanation with justification, let alone vindication. Yet for some it is heresy to suggest that victims should ever be held responsible at all.
Further Resources
Some of the notable articles so far about this on-going controversy include:
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Jason McCue, 34, was falsely accused by two teenage girls of ‘flashing’ at them in the street. They were convicted of perverting the course of justice and jailed for eight months jail by Preston Crown Court on Tuesday 30th April 2012 according to the Lancashire Evening Post.
The 18-year-olds Ella Cooper, of Sheffield Drive, Preston, and Lucie Rhimes, of Pear Tree Road, Chorley, made up their malicious allegation to police in a spiteful attempt to ruin Mr McCue as part of a long-running family dispute.
Mr McCue, of Nelson Crescent, Lea, said: “I’ve been through 10 months of pure hell.
“The false accusations have caused mayhem for me and my family, and the doctor has had to sign me off with depression. Things like this can ruin a man’s life and people should know the massive impact it’s had.
Speaking after the hearing, DS Peter Glover from Preston CID, said: “I hope that these sentences serve as a warning to people who think it is acceptable to make false allegations against innocent parties and lie to the police.”
But will they? False accusations of a sexual nature can so easily be made and women appear to be especially adept at it. With the need for corroborating evidence having been abolished in the 1990s, it now comes down to her word against his. How many innocent men are in jail today after being convicted because they were less plausible in the witness box than their accuser?
Mr McCue was only saved from a conviction because Lucie Rhimes confessed to her father and he took her straight to the police. If she had kept her nerve, it would have been two against one and Jason McCue would be in jail today and on the sex offenders’ register.
Exod 20:16 Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. Deut 19:18 And the judges shall make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother; 19 Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother: so shalt thou put the evil away from among you. 20 And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you. Find out how to join Christian Voice and stand up for the King of kings (clicking on the link below does not commit you to join)
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Reg Travis was cleared of rape and is now campaigning for equality before the law for rape defendants with accusers.
The not guilty verdict in the rape case brought against the late singer Amy Winehouse’s ex-boyfriend illustrates the potential for false accusations in rape cases.
It isn’t the first time that CCTV has come to the aid of a man facing a false rape charge,
In a case which did not make it to court, a female complainant alleged that, while on a night out with friends in a local nightclub, she was grabbed by an unknown male, dragged into nearby toilets and raped.
CID went to the nightclub and checked the CCTV. The police said afterwards: ‘CCTV shows her and this man climb over this rope together, go upstairs, and disappear off into one of the toilets. About twenty minutes later, they come out. You can see her straightening her clothing—I think she gives him a peck on the cheek—and then they exchange telephone numbers before going away.’
What makes matters worse is that accusers of rape are protected with anonymity by the law, but defendants are not.
Reg Traviss is now making the very fair point that the criminal justice system, by siding with his accuser in granting her but not him anonymity, has forgotten the basic biblical principle, that all are equal before the law.
It does not seem fair but it would be an even bigger travesty of justice if those accused of rape were allowed to remain anonymous because it would suggest that rape victims were generally not to be trusted.
While there will always be women who “cry” rape, most of those who do pluck up the courage to go to the police are genuine victims and should be treated as such.
Such is the social stigma around rape that women not only feel too embarrassed or ashamed to report the crime, they are also frightened that they will not be believed.
That situation would get worse if those accused of rape were afforded the special privilege of remaining anonymous.
… the police … do women no favours whatsoever by attracting publicity for the very rare cases when rape victims are making it up.
Is Camilla Tominey right? Are these ‘very rare cases’? Are most complainants ‘genuine victims’? Not according to the figures. Only about 10% of rape complaints make it to court, and of those, just over half, 58%, result in a conviction. Since the law was changed in 1994 to allow cases to be brought with no corroborating evidence, rape cases are often now ‘his word against hers’. The more plausible of the two is likely to be believed, wherever the truth lies, resulting in miscarriage of justice.
Daniel Abeyomi, 19, told the court that he noticed the woman arguing with a man then crying alone, while he was walking home along Heavitree Road. He said she walked with him, they chatted and she kissed him, asked to go back to his home, which he refused, then she initiated sex.
Defence counsel Ian Strongman, summing up his case, said the woman was not making “malicious allegations” but she had “gaps in her memory” from that night, and her friends had then wrongly assumed that she had been raped and had “persuaded her” that this was the case.
In some cases, evidence, often from CCTV, shows the alleged victim was making it all up.
Hilliard, 20, dragged Grant into a Basildon railway station toilet for sex, but later told police that he had forced himself on her. Just a week after the alleged attack, she applied for criminal injuries compensation, which could have netted her £7,500.
Her plan came unstuck when CCTV footage and mobile phone records proved Grant’s innocence. But her twisted story drove Grant to the brink of suicide after he was hounded out of his home and spat at in the street.
What his sister called ‘six months of hell’ started when a woman alleged that he had raped her in a park in 2011.
The court heard that the woman, who said she had drunk more than eight pints of lager and drank spirits during the evening, gave different accounts to police of what had happened. She also texted a friend to tell her she was pregnant, before telling her she had been raped.
CCTV images showed the pair leaving a pub in Holton Road together.
‘False complaints may arise for a variety of reasons. Examples commonly mentioned by respondents during research interviews included: a complainant’s attempts to conceal or deny discovered infidelity; minors concealing consensual under-age sexual activity; consensual sexual activity that is subsequently regretted; and historic complaints following the breakdown of a relationship.’
Rape is a serious crime; a capital crime in the eyes of God. It is a devastating thing to happen, and equally devastating to be accused of wrongly. In far too many cases, too much drink impairs the capacity to make a rational decision, and regrets in the morning turn to a rape accusation.
On other occasions, false accusations can be made to deny a father access to his children in divorce cases, or just to be spiteful after a marriage has come to an end, or perhaps when the husband remarries.
To contradict Camilla Tominey, a ‘special privilege’ – that of remaining anonymous – is already given to rape accusers. In fact, on her own Sunday Express page, she contradicts herself. Having said that women ‘very rarely’ make rape accusations up, she describes 80% of women as liars in a footnote:
‘More than half of British women admit to flirting with men to get their own way, with a fifth saying they do so at work. Just 20%? What a load of fibbers! It might not be what feminists want to hear but a woman who does not use her wiles to get what she wants does not have a pulse.’
That is not to say those acquitted of rape have always behaved impeccably. Our society has slid into a swamp of sexual license where promiscuity abounds and sexual intercourse has become, less the holy expression of love in marriage, more a recreational activity. If we respected biblical morality, young women would be chaste and modest and young men chivalrous and protective. But those whose cases are cited above were innocent of the crime they were accused of.
And just as there are rapists walking free who would be behind bars if it were not for their eloquence in a court-room, there are innocent men in prison just because an untruthful woman was more plausible on the day.
That cannot be right.
Amos 5:24 But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
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Baby in its amniotic sac eight weeks from conception
Jeremy Hunt’s view that the abortion limit should be halved to 12 weeks is untenable, says the National Director of Christian Voice.
The Health Secretary said he believed there is a moral case for cutting the current time limit of 24 weeks.
“Everyone looks at the evidence and comes to a view about when they think that moment is, and my own view is that 12 weeks is the right point for it,” Mr Hunt told The Times.
Mr Hunt, who was appointed to his post last month, denied that his view on abortion was based on religious belief.
He said: “It’s just my view about that incredibly difficult question about the moment that we should deem life to start. I don’t think the reason I have that view is for religious reasons.”
David Steel and Yvette Cooper would allow the legalised killing of this unborn child 20 weeks after conception
Prime Minister David Cameron, Culture Secretary Maria Miller and Home Secretary Theresa May backed a reduction of four weeks, to twenty weeks, but Mr Cameron stressed there were no plans to bring legislation forward.
Some Christian groups have urged their members to write and thank Mr Hunt, Mrs May and Mrs Miller but Anthony Ozimic of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said any move to reduce the abortion limit was doomed to failure. “There is a large pro-abortion majority in parliament which will ensure that any time-limiting amendments are rejected while using the opportunity to push for pro-abortion amendments,” he said.
“The real political debate about abortion in the UK should focus – as it does elsewhere in the world – on the right to life of all unborn children and on the way governments bankroll abortion access at home and abroad.”
Andrew Stephenson of Abort67 agreed. A Parliamentary debate “may allow the pro-aborts to slip in amendments to make access to abortion easier.” He said a reduction might save a few babies from death but pointed out that well over 90% of abortions take place in the first trimester (13 weeks and below) in any case.
A baby in its amniotic sac less than a month after conception, sadly removed because it was growing ectopically, in the mother’s fallopian tube. Abortion can always be allowed to save the life of the mother – but not her lifestyle!
On a positive note, Mr Stephenson said:
“Any attack on the abortion industry is a good thing. This puts them on the defensive and causes them to speak. If you have listened to the abortion advocates speak you will know that they always provide us with new openings to expose how deceptive and corrupt they really are. We want them to keep speaking!
“It also shows that there is growing discontent for the status quo. When MPs feel they can stand up for issues that would have previously been considered too contentious they must know that things are changing; over 63% of people (and increasing) in a recent poll support a total ban on abortion.”
Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice, said:
“I am totally perplexed by Mr Hunt’s logic. Why should we ‘deem life to start’ at twelve weeks when all organs are in place at eight weeks, the baby’s heart is already beating four weeks after conception and all genetic material is there when sperm meets egg? His view is simply untenable.” (See link here.)
Mr Hunt’s remarks drew a predictable tirade of abuse from abortionists and their supporters.
Lord Steel, the unrepentant architect of the Abortion Act 1967, responsible for the deaths of over 6 million British children, “expressed his dismay” while shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper described Mr Hunt’s remarks as “chilling”.
“David Cameron needs to make sure his health secretary doesn’t distort medical evidence and does not impose his own view on women about their health,” she said.
Stephen Green responded:
Child in the womb at 16 weeks gestation – an entirely separate human being from his mother.
“All but a handful of abortions are carried out on perfectly healthy women who just find this new human being growing inside them inconvenient. As for medical evidence, Yvette Cooper merely needs to look at the wonderful new catalogue of images of children in the womb. And if she wants something really ‘chilling’, she could take a look at the results of abortion.” The results of abortion – pictures here.
Raj Bhachoo, a Christian Voice member, was arrested, kept in a police cell for hours and charged with “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 following a complaint by the manageress during a leafleting exercise outside the Tesco store in Gravesend, Kent in January 2012
The case was due to be heard by Dartford Magistrates this morning. But on reviewing the evidence and recent legal decisions including that involving Sandown Free Presbyterian Church, the prosecuting barrister offered no evidence.
The magistrates duly dismissed the case.
Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice, was asked by the defence to give evidence in the case, but, for the second time in a case involving Mr Bhachoo, his evidence was in the event not required.
Mr Green also prepared expert evidence for a case in March of this year when Raj Bhachoo was acquitted after sending a highly critical email to the Stonewall lobby group. A key Stonewall witness failed to turn up in court and the case collapsed.
Michael Phillips, solicitor, represented Raj Bhachoo on both occasions.
Just a week ago, Mr Phillips represented two Christians from the Abort67 group, seeing all charges against them thrown out by magistrates in Brighton. Last February, Michael Overd faced a trial in Taunton after two homosexuals objected to his preaching. Mr Overd, who subsequently joined Christian Voice, was also acquitted.
In September 2006, Stephen Green was himself arrested, locked in the cells for four hours and charged under the same Section 5 by the South Wales Police Minorities Support Unit for handing out evangelistic leaflets at the homosexual Cardiff Mardi Gras. At the subsequent hearing, an embarrassed prosecutor dropped all charges.
Stephen Green said today: ‘Christians just keep winning these Section 5 freedom of speech cases. It is not against the law to preach against sodomy, to tell the public the facts about homosexual lifestyles, nor to display graphic images of the effects of abortion. These things might upset people, but they are not threatening, they are not abusive, they are not insulting and they are not against the law.
‘We actually need no change in the law, but we do need police forces and the Crown Prosecution Service to provide training to officers and prosecutors on the law and on their duty to protect people exercising their freedom of expression.
‘In the abortion case, the police officer who attended admitted in court that the only training he had ever had on the implications of freedom of speech was ten years ago.’
The parental rights of Christer and Annie Johansson will not be terminated, a Swedish district court ruled.
Last week’s ruling comes three years after Domenic Johansson was forcibly abducted from his parents by social services minutes before the family’s departure for India.
In a press release issued last Thursday, the Alliance Defence Fund commented
The court stated it could not ignore the unanimous and extensive testimony of first-hand accounts of friends, family, and others that Domenic Johansson’s parents, Christer and Annie, were properly caring for him prior to Swedish authorities seizing him in 2009.
“The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like home schooling,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska. “We encourage Swedish authorities to release Domenic to his parents in light of the court’s ruling, and we hope the European Court of Human Rights will reconsider its recent rejection of Domenic’s case in light of the Swedish court’s determination. This family’s human rights have been unimaginably violated.”
“This is a tremendous day for the Johansson family,” said HSLDA Director of International Relations Mike Donnelly, one of more than 2,100 attorneys in the ADF alliance. “HSLDA and ADF have been supporting them since Swedish officials took their child–a grotesque abuse of their human rights. Dominic has not been returned home yet, but we have every hope that he will be soon.”
HSLDA is a 29-year-old, 80,000 member non-profit organization advocating the legal right of parents to home-school their children.
Swedish authorities forcibly removed Domenic from his parents in June 2009 from a plane they had boarded to move to Annie’s home country of India. The officials did not have a warrant nor did they charge the Johanssons with any crime. The officials seized the child because he was home-schooled, even though home schooling was legal in Sweden at the time he was taken into custody.
In December 2009, a Swedish court ruled in Johansson v. Gotland Social Services that the government was within its rights to seize the child. ADF and HSLDA attorneys filed a lawsuit, Johansson v. Sweden, with the European Court of Human Rights in June 2010 over the matter. That court recently declined to hear the case even after additional submissions from ADF and HSLDA attorneys, but the new ruling from the Swedish court determined that Domenic’s mother and father are suitable to exercise parental rights over their son, bringing new hope that the child will be returned home.
Following the ruling, Christer Johansson commented,
It feels pretty good to win. The social authorities have been running around winning for the last three years. It was pretty important that we won this because, if we didn’t, we would have permanently lost our only child. There is something very wrong with people who would keep a family separated this long for no legitimate reason….
I don’t think we’d be here today if it weren’t for the support of many thousands of people through their emails, telephone calls and letters,” he said. “We know many people have been paying attention to this, and we are so grateful for their constant and consistent support. We want to say thank you to all of our supporters!
It remains to be seen if Swedish officials will take prompt action to end the separation of three years. Even though the specific issue of Domenic’s restoration was not discussed by the court last week, one would hope that the ruling will make it difficult, if not impossible, for social services to continue to keep the child in state custody.
PRAY
Now that the court has recognized that the Johansson parents were offering Domenic proper care and that it would be unjust to remove their rights, it remains only a small step to recognizing that he ought to be returned to the parents. Pray that officials take this final step to end this family’s misery.
Also pray for Domenic’s health. HSLDA reported that “A review of Domenic’s medical records shows that there have been health issues since he was placed in foster care.”
WRITE
HSLDA Attorney and Director of International Relations Michael Donnelly said, “Many thousands of families have supported the Johanssons with letters and emails and with their prayers and concern. Now is the time for all concerned supporters to call on the Gotland social services authorities to do the right thing—return Dominic to his parents now!” You can do that by contacting the following:
Swedish Social Services Committee
Socialnämnden
Gotlands Kommun
621 81 Visby
SWEDEN
The social workers
Marica Gardell
marika.gardell@gotland.se
Marie Kransberg
marie.kransberg@gotland.se
Gunvor Allqvie
gunvor.allqvie@gotland.se
Head of social board
Hanna Westerén
hanna.westeren@gotland.se
SOCIAL workers want to seize a baby as soon as it is born because of a mother’s political views.
Durham County Council has told Toni McLeod she would pose a “risk of significant harm” to the baby by having ‘inappropriate friendships’.
The 35-week-pregnant mother recently married Martyn McLeod, a serving soldier just back from Afghanistan, but social workers have told him that as a full-time soldier he would be unable to care for his child, reports the Sunday Express.
Mrs McLeod, Antonia (Stella) Evans as she then was last year, was convicted of assault causing actual bodily harm, common assault and being the owner of a dog dangerously out of control, as reported in the Northern Echo.
Her three previous children from different fathers are in care. She was in the English Defence League for a time. She is now said by Durham County Council to have joined the anti-Muslim North West Infidels (motto: ‘Keep the Faith’) which she denies (see her letter to the Sunday Express below).
Social workers say the child would become radicalised with EDL views and want it put up for adoption immediately. Documents prepared by social workers and seen by the Sunday Express mention Mrs McLeod’s alleged previous alcohol and drug misuse, her “aggressive behaviour” and alleged “mental health issues”.
The social worker’s report goes on to say: “Toni clearly needs to break away from the inappropriate friendships she has through either the EDL or break-off group in order that she can model and display appropriate positive relationships to the baby as he/she grows and develops.
“Toni has been a prominent member of the EDL. They claim they are a peaceful group, however, they have strong associations with violence and racism.”
According to the Express, Mrs McLeod has posted racist abuse on social networking sites but denies being racist. She claims she is no longer active with the EDL and has never been charged with violence against children.
Her case has been taken up by John Hemming MP, who chairs the Justice For Families campaign group. Mr Hemming said: “This case is one where the ‘thought police’ have decided to remove her baby at birth because of what she might say to the baby. I wonder what the baby’s father is thinking when he fights for a country which won’t allow him to have a child because of what the child’s mother might say.
The Lib Dem MP is far from being a supporter of the EDL, but contrasts Mrs McLeod’s treatment with that of the extremist Islamic cleric Abu Qatada, who was allowed to remain with his children when he was briefly remanded on bail earlier this year as the Government tries to deport him.
He said: “It raises a curious question as to why Abu Qatada is allowed to radicalise his children but the state won’t take the chance of allowing Toni McLeod to look after her baby in case she says something social workers won’t like. … Freedom of speech means nothing if people are not allowed to say things that are thought to be wrong.”
Mrs McLeod is now planning to move to the Republic of Ireland, out of the jursidiction of British social services, in order to give birth to her baby in safety. She will be following a route taken by many other mothers. Her husband is planning to request a transfer to Northern Ireland so he can be with his child. He said: “Toni would never harm a child.”
Durham County Council told Mrs McLeod on Friday that her unborn baby was being placed on its child protection register but would not comment to the Express.
Obviously Toni McLeod has not behaved well. Nevertheless, should Durham Social Services be allowed to use her political views as even part of their portfolio of excuses to take her baby?
If ‘inappropriate friendships’ with people who hold politically incorrect, or even downright unpleasant, views disqualify a mother from looking after her child, how many of us would social workers actually allow to be parents? Christians, home-schoolers, eco-warriors, anti-Muslim campaigners, pro-marriage activists might all find themselves at odds with the views of social workers. There is no statutory definition or even government guidance of what constitutes ‘significant harm’. Social workers can interpret it to suit themselves.
Cases of children being taken into care have shot up recently as social workers become ‘risk averse’. In the wake of Baby Peter, social workers are deciding it’s more than their job’s worth to leave children out there in the hands of real parents coming across their radar. And of course although they say they may be ‘damned if they don’t’ take a baby into care and that they are ‘damned if they do’, in reality they are never ‘damned if they do’ (except in the courts of heaven) because no-one can call them to account.
We became involved in two other cases of Social Services baby-snatching recently. In one case, astonishingly, a young mother was told she could not be trusted to bring up her children because she had herself been in care. The care system by that logic becomes a self-perpetuating empire.
In another, a father has been told he is a risk to his children because he was sexually abused when he was young. In neither case has any harm occurred or been alleged to any of the children involved. It is so easy to allege ‘a risk’ of harm, and the family courts simply accept what social workers allege.
In addition, Toni is now married, and to a serving soldier just returned from Afhganistan. In Afghanistan he has, according to our political leaders, been fighting to protect our security. Is it right that the security of his own family life is at risk when he comes home?
Toni McLeod was last recorded living in Mellanby Crescent, Newton Aycliffe, which is mid-way between Darlington and Bishop Auckland. Her real need is for total deliverance from the things of this world which have ensnared her. Pray that the Lord will raise up a Christian local to her to minister to her. We so often talk about ‘getting alongside’ the poor and disadvantaged. Here is a woman and indeed a family who have everything stacked against them. They need support, they need true fellowship, they need the Gospel.
Please note that we can write about this story now. If the McLeod baby is taken into care under a court order, it may well be we cannot write about it any more on pain of contempt of court, under the rules of secrecy which govern the family courts.
Contact details to raise this issue with Durham County Council:
Children and Family Care Dept:
Tel: 0300 026 0000 Fax:0191 383 5752 Email: scd@durham.gov.uk
Further to the above story, a letter by Toni McLeod was published in the Sunday Express 24th June 2012:
‘I would like to put the record straight about allegations made against me by Durham County Council and repeated in last week’s Sunday Express (“Why try to take baby from EDL mother but not from ‘terrorists’?”). I have told Children’s Services in Durham they are not true.
‘I am not a racist and I now regret going to the EDL demonstration at which I was arrested in 2010. I do, however, strongly support the British Troops and will continue to back our boys. I have character references from Muslim and Sikh friends. I am not involved with North West Infidels.
‘I have never owned a Pit Bull. It was a German Shepherd I owned.
‘I do not have a mental health problem. I am not and have never been a drug addict. I have not drunk alcohol in 2012. I did get drunk on one day in 2011 when I was told that my children were not returning to me.’
Toni McLeod. Newton Aycliffe, County Durham
Further still, we have now seen the response of Durham CC. They say:
‘We have been contacted by a number of groups and individuals following national publicity surrounding Toni McLeod. Durham County Council will not comment on the confidential circumstances of any case, however we would like to reassure you that, contrary to what may be suggested, we would never consider removing a child from their family on the basis of their parents’ political beliefs or occupation.’
The trouble is, the documents seen by the Sunday Express reveal that Durham CC are doing exactly what they say they do not do.
Four weeks later we are still also awaiting a response from Mr David Williams, promised by Cllr Henig, to the following FOI Act questions:
‘Would you kindly advise me what targets, financial incentives and monies, for example those payable for fostering and adoptions are at present in place for cases like this?
‘How much are foster parents paid by Durham and do any foster parents have familial or other links to social services or Durham County Council staff?’
It will erode public confidence in a system which is already under suspicion if children are being snatched to make up numbers, advance careers or profit the local authority or individuals within it.
