B.C. Ferries cracks down on… wait, what?

Sometimes things happen that are so stupid that I’m not quite sure what to say:

Ferry riders using BC Ferries free WiFi service are out of luck if they want to buy condoms online or research where to get an abortion. That’s because BC Ferries online web filters are designed to block any websites about “sex education and abortion”, along with those for sites like pornography, hate speech and piracy.

Although I’m puzzled as to the circumstances under which you’d need information about abortion or condoms on a 2-hour ferry ride, I’m even more baffled by why anybody would bother to block such sites. Were there complaints lodged against frequent abortion searchers? Did someone abandon their laptop and have some poor Amish kid who’d never heard of condoms before wander over and accidentally see a picture of something that suggested sex?

From a consequentialist point of view, this is really a non-issue. Information about abortions and condoms is easily available just about anywhere in the major cities, and given that most kids have ready access to the internet at home and at school, and get semi-decent sex ed in their high school classes, banning access to these kinds of sites really won’t have a negative impact on anyone. The part that’s disturbing is the company these sites supposedly keep:

The list of blocked content categories includes typical filtered items like “child porn”, “hate speech”, “illegal activities” and “non-sexual nudity” along with bandwidth-hogging content like “streaming media” and “file transfer services”. But the list also includes any sites about abortion, a legal medical service in B.C., and sex education, which is part of the B.C. curriculum.

BC Ferries spokeswoman Deborah Marshall said the ferry corporation decided to block such material because it feared websites about abortion or sex education might contain inappropriate photos.

Is Craigslist filtered? Is Reddit? Is 4chan? If you want to find inappropriate images, those are pretty decent one-stop shops. Not only that, but depending on your definition of “inappropriate”, Google image search will yield some… well you be the judge.

It seems like a bizarrely arbitrary line to draw, and this particular grab-bag of issues smacks of political gamesmanship.

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Please don’t be… aww crap

There’s a phenomenon in the black community, whenever someone sees a headline like this:

Man, 21, arrested for drug possession and assault

We immediately flinch and say “Please please please don’t be a black guy.” It’s a reaction to the fact that, nearly without exception, whenever a black man makes the news it’s because he’s a gang-banger arrested for some crime. The problem is that this event reflects such a small proportion of the black population, and yet the fallout is something we all must deal with. We are all tagged with the crime, as our culture unconsciously (in most cases) links the man’s skin colour to his propensity to commit crime. As a result, I get distrustful looks from old ladies when walking the streets at night, and am assumed to be the one in my group of friends who sells drugs.

I’d imagine that Christians are starting to get an appreciation for that phenomenon when they see headlines like this one:

Charity chief convicted of sexual assault

Given the number of Christian organizations, leaders and celebrities that have been exposed doing decidedly un-Christlike things in the past little while, you’ve got to imagine that Christians are more than a little concerned every time someone makes the news for doing something really evil.

I guess we can both say “oh shit” in unison:

The head of two Toronto-area organizations that were stripped of their charitable status after submitting “falsified” documents to federal regulators was sentenced this month for sexual assault for inappropriately touching a teenager, CBC News has learned. Daniel Mokwe was sentenced Jan. 13 to time served — two nights in jail — and given two years probation.

The victim, a minor at the time of the assault, told Det. Richard Petrie of the Toronto Police Service that she knew Mokwe was a pastor. As a result of the incident, she lost her faith in God and would never enter another church again, she said.

Yep, he’s black and Christian. His “charity organization”, Revival Time Ministries (which sounds like a children’s television program on a god-bothering channel) had its licensed revoked after Canada Revenue (the Canadian equivalent to the IRS) found a series of irregularities in their bookkeeping. Mokwe had another charity called “Save Canada’s Teenagers” – the irony should not be lost on anyone.

If I were a lesser blogger, I could score a few cheap points off of pointing out that Jesus didn’t keep Mokwe from being both financially and sexually corrupted, and that this is “proof” that Christianity is just as empty as all religions. I think the point to be made here is larger than that one though. Daniel Mokwe is undoubtedly a bad person, using the auspices of a charitable organization and his position as an authority figure to abuse both the tax code and, more devastatingly, a young girl. The problem is the source from which Mokwe derives his authority – namely, his position as a pastor. His parishoners, and likely those who donated to him, placed trust in him at least partially based on the fact that he claimed a personal relationship with YahwAlladdha. They essentially granted a portion of the trust that they placed in the deity itself in the hands of a man who told them he is tight with the almighty.

I can’t harp on this issue enough, it seems. The problem is not religion per se. The problem is that we take it seriously. If I told you I had a special insight into a voice in the sky, as revealed through interpretation of Beowulf, you’d (quite rightly) think me a lunatic in need of some therapy. However, if I tell you instead that I am granted authority by Yahweh based on the Bible, all of a sudden my cup doth overflow with credibility. Why? Why do people who claim a particular brand of magical thinking get a free pass into positions of trust? Why indeed, since they seem to have no lesser frequency of violating that trust than someone who is a non-believer?

It is there where the difference between the “don’t let him be black” and the “don’t let him be Christian” arises. Black people don’t claim to be morally superior, or to have a conduit to absolute truth based on the colour of our skin. Christians, however, do claim such superiority. Christianity has been made synonymous with honesty and righteousness over generations, despite all evidence that such association is a big steaming pile of turds. It relies on this borrowed heft of asserted uprightness in order to be made a member of the conversation. Why on Earth would we listen to a bunch of nutjobs who think that the only possible explanation for a woman giving birth without having sex with her husband is that God did it, or who think that a book written by amassing the third-hand account of people who claim to have known a particular Palestinian carpenter decades before the fact is the literal word of the almighty? When evaluating those claims at face value, they can be, and should be, dismissed as nonsense.

As long as we keep re-applying the thin varnish of respect to the rotting woodwork of religion, we will see scam artists like this perpetrate their fraud again and again.

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Black History in Canada moment: British Columbia

This year for Black History Month, I have decided to do a bit of research into black history in my home and native land, Canada. Since there are 4 Mondays in February, I am going to focus on 4 different regions of the country. This week, I am focusing on British Columbia, the land of my birth and where I currently reside.

British Columbia joined the Canadian federation in 1871, four years after Canada became a country. A coastal province, much of British Columbia is covered in thick forests, the result of abundant rains coming from the ocean and falling on the windward side of the Rocky Mountains. British Columbia is predominantly populated by the descendants of British immigrants, including English, Irish, Scottish, and even many Germans and Dutch. A more recent influx of South Asian (Indian and Pakistani) immigrants has been matched by one from China, Japan, and Korea. In fact, the history of British Columbia cannot be told without making repeated reference to China, as workers from China connected the province to the rest of the country through construction of the railroad. This construction should not be thought of as some sort of equal partnership between the British and Chinese, but rather immigrants leaving their homeland and facing dangerous work for little pay, working for British-Canadian companies.

However, this view of history does neglect the meaningful contributions that black immigrants and Canadians have made throughout the province’s history. To be sure, the black population of British Columbia has always been vanishingly small. However, in my pokings around the internet, I discovered that the first governor of Vancouver Island was a black man, one Sir James Douglas. It’s the result of the fact that he was a Hudson’s Bay Company man that we know so much about his life – the Bay was the single largest corporation in the territories at the time (of a relative scale to the British East India company).

Reading his history, I am reminded of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – the story of a people who come to a ungoverned wilderness and through backbreaking labour manage to wrest it into a thriving community, while being beset with the consequences of their own human foibles:

As senior company officer west of the mountains, Douglas encouraged the traders at Fort Langley to supplement fur exports with farm produce and other commodities. Knowing that the innovations on Vancouver Island would in time destroy the fur trade, he jealously guarded the company’s rights in New Caledonia, on the mainland. He scrutinized the company’s civil and military expenditures in the island colony, and paid into a trust fund all revenues from sales of land, timber, and mines.

…

A fur preserve boasting a single stockaded fort only a few years before, Vancouver Island was now a colony with limited representative government. Compared with neighbouring Washington Territory where land was free, the colony’s population was small, but it lived in peace without Indian warfare. Through Douglas’ efforts, large-scale farming, saw-milling, coal-mining, and salmon fishing had been established. He had plans for government buildings for his diminutive capital, and was endeavouring to have Esquimalt become a naval base. His accomplishments offset the criticism of his rule by Blanshard, Cooper, and Admiral Fairfax Moresby before the select committee of the British House of Commons in 1857. When the government converted Vancouver Island into a crown colony in 1859, the governor it chose was James Douglas. It was already known in London in 1857 that gold had been discovered on the mainland, still under HBC control. A colonial officer of Douglas’ experience would be a good man to have standing by.

…

“I spoke with great plainness of speech to the white miners who were nearly all foreigners representing almost every nation in Europe,” he reported to the Colonial Office on 15 June 1858 after his first visit to the goldfields. “I refused to grant them any rights of occupation to the soil and told them distinctly that Her Majesty’s Government ignored their very existence in that part of the country, which was not open for the purpose of settlement, and they were permitted to remain there merely on sufferance, that no abuses would be tolerated, and that the Laws would protect the rights of the Indians no less than those of the white men.”

History likes to make heroes of its great men, and so we must be careful when viewing the accomplishments of Sir Douglas. I am sure that the miners had no shortage of criticisms for the heavy-handed enforcement of company policy by this foreign Guayanese half-breed who had managed to get himself appointed governor. While he appears to be defending the native people in the above quotation, he had a long series of struggles and what would be, in today’s view, be called abuses with the Native population. There was apparently little love lost between Douglas and the various Native bands that inhabited the area. I don’t doubt that Douglas’ own view of them was steeped in the anti-aboriginal racist attitudes of the time, but it is still commendable that he at least appeared to consider them as equally deserving of rights and protections as the white miners. To the extent that he viewed them both as interlopers on Her Majesty’s rightful lands… well let’s just say he’s not a saint.

What’s curious (may not so much) and interesting about the linked writeup is that it makes nearly no mention whatsoever of the fact that Douglas was black. To be accurate in a mathematical sense, he was “half” black, but by the standards of the time he would have been considered black. He was an advocate of the abolition of slavery:

He was disturbed by the presence of slavery. “With the Natives, I have hitherto endeavoured to discourage the practice by the exertion of moral influence alone,” he informed the company in London. “Against our own people I took a more active part, and denounced slavery as a state contrary to law; tendering to all unfortunate persons held as slaves, by British subjects, the fullest protection in the enjoyment of their natural rights.” In 1849 he ransomed a slave with goods worth 14 shillings.

This account is somewhat confusing, as the British Slavery Abolition Act was signed in 1833, before the supposed “ransoming” of the slave. There may have been de facto slavery still practiced in British Columbia after the act was signed, or the date might be confused with an earlier time. At any rate, Douglas’ story is an interesting one.

Other notable stories

While Douglas’ story is interesting, there are a couple of others I found particularly cool. The first is of the area formerly known as “Hogan’s Alley”. This is an area of Vancouver that technically still exists, although it looks a bit different from then:

To now:

Hogan's Alley today

This was an area settled by newly-arrived blacks in the early 1900s, many of whom had jobs as railway porters. It is still very proximate to the train station, but the area was mostly wiped out by the construction of the Georgia/Dunsmuir viaducts (which can be seen in the background of the picture). You can actually see my old apartment in this particular shot.

There’s more information about Hogan’s Alley and some more famous names from British Columbia’s black history at this link, as well as info about a few events that I am going to try and check out.

Next week, the prairies.

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It’s Black History Month!

February is Black History Month here in Canada and in the USA. It s a month that is set aside to teach about the contributions that people of African descent have made to American culture and history. Last year I celebrated by writing a series of essays and posting them on Facebook:

While these posts were meaningful to me, and provided the basic underpinning of this entire blog exercise you’re currently reading, they’re not particularly relevant to black history. In my personal life I read a bit about pre-colonial African history and archaeology, which cast a great deal of doubt about the idea that technology and civilization were European imports to Africa.

This year, my plan is to read and blog about black history in Canada. There’s a lot of it, but we weren’t taught it in school. Like it is done in most places, black history begins and ends with slavery. Black history is much richer and more ingrained with Canadian history than the issues specifically related to slavery. I am going to do some of my own reading and throw up one article per week summarizing what I’ve learned.

So… look forward to that I guess.

Alternative therapies aren’t ALWAYS full of shit… but this one is

It seems that once again I am donning my ‘scientist’ cap and wading knee-deep into the shit…

Literally:

A hospital physician from a major B.C. facility says several patients died in the last year from C. difficile — unnecessarily — after the health authority stopped her and her colleagues from giving an experimental, simple and highly effective treatment… The treatment, called a fecal transplant, involves introducing stool from a healthy donor — usually a relative — into an infected patient’s bowel, usually through an enema.

Yes, you read that correctly. Dr. Jeanne Keegan-Henry is proposing transplanting somebody’s poo into the bowels of someone with a Clostridium difficile infection in order to cure them.

Poo.

Transplant.

Poo Transplant.

It sounds like the name of a doomed-to-obscurity high school punk rock band. And yet, Dr. Keegan-Henry, who is by all accounts an able and qualified physician, is recommending it. Skeptical smackdown time, right?

Here’s the crazy thing about skepticism. Detractors would characterize it as being resolutely opposed to anything that doesn’t sound like Big Pharma drugs, or is too experimental or outside the realm of conventional medicine. While it is often worthwhile to listen to the criticisms that come from one’s enemies, it is important to resist the temptation to allow them to define your position. More often than not, they are all too happy to succumb to the temptation of straw-manning you into oblivion rather than give a dispassionate description of what it is you actually think (cue the peanut gallery coming out of the woodwork to point out the many times I’ve done it to them).

Skepticism is about evaluating claims, all claims, according to their plausibility and the evidence supporting their truth. When I first caught wind of poo transplants (reader’s note: this article will be stuffed full of poop jokes – you have been warned) my skeptic hackles immediately went up. It’s really the prototypical case – we have a brave maverick doctor who is standing up to the medical establishment and recommending a completely natural remedy to a condition that is usually treated with drugs. For bonus points, it involves enemas. Seems like this ripe stinker was dumped right on our plate as another crazy whackaloon looking for attention (and possibly a book deal).

So, what does a skeptic do? She goes to the evidence! A quick search on PubMed (the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health centralized research database) for “fecal transplant clostridium difficile” reveals 30 hits – not exactly a stellar start; usually it’s in the neighbourhood of a few hundred to a few thousand results. The majority of these hits were commentaries and letters rather than full-blown research articles – also not a good start; what we’re looking for is systematic reviews of clinical trials, or at least trials themselves. We don’t have that – what we have is a handful of case series reports, each representing a tiny number of patients.

So I took a look at the largest case series, that of a 12-patient sample. And the results? Well… would you forgive me if I say “holy shit”?

Click to enlarge

Of 12 patients with infections ranging from 79 to 1532 days (mean length = 352 days), 100% of the patients in this sample experienced a clinical response, defined as “cessation of diarrhea, cramps, and fever within 3 to 5 days”. The authors describe their inclusion and exclusion criteria clearly, as well as the treatment protocol. Patient followup ranged from 3 weeks to many years after the intervention (which is a necessary evil of a case series – it’s not a prospective trial where follow-up can be standardized).

So, cut and dry answer right? Obviously it worked for these patients! No need for further study – let’s approve the shit!

Not so fast…

The reason for putting on the brakes (and possibly leaving skid marks) is that this is one sample of patients. These results are certainly dramatic, but there were no enterobacteriology cultures done – the gut was not examined to see if it was truly the poop that did the trick. The patients from whom the samples were taken had taken doses of antibiotics before donating their sample – was it the poo or the drugs that done it? Even the authors of the paper admit that they don’t have a certain mechanism by which fecal transplantation works. There are certainly some plausible attempts at explanation, but they still don’t know.There was also no control group for comparison (although in a time-series design it is permissible to use the patients as their own controls, comparing them to their pre-trial state – I am channeling that degree in epidemiology!), meaning that we cannot rule out the placebo effect or some other event as explanatory.

Is Dr. Keegan-Henry right? Should we be allowing fecal transplanation? Maybe – the preliminary results are certainly compelling (to go from years of suffering to resolved in 3-5 days is really remarkable). We should be enrolling people in small-scale clinical trials to test for efficacy. Given that there are no observed adverse effects of the transplantation, there’s certainly no reason to block the investigation:

Dr. George Sing, a gastroenterologist at Burnaby Hospital, also wants to provide the treatment to patients. “We did table [a proposal], but it fell into the cracks,” said Sing. “We have been through all the channels … but when it goes through committees it gets bogged down.”

Heh… he said “fell into the cracks”.

This is the hallmark of skepticism – even if something looks totally batshit insane, we test claims against evidence, not against what we think should work. I’ll be interested to see if this story develops.

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Another case study of cultural tolerance

This morning I explored the stupid side of one of my pet topics, the idea of cultural tolerance. Basically, the argument goes that since we have a variety of cultures all calling this great country of ours “home”, we are called to make reasonable accommodations for different cultural practices. The important word in that last sentence is reasonable. Moving the location of a health care facility because some people are scared little babies about death is not a reasonable accommodation. To the contrary – it flies in the face of reason.

However, this case perhaps bears a bit less contempt and a bit more thoughtful reflection:

An emotionally charged debate over multiculturalism that has raged in Quebec in recent years has landed on the national stage and it centres on a ceremonial dagger worn by Sikhs. MPs face a demand to ban the kirpan, which is worn at all times by at least one Ontario MP. The discussion is being spurred by the Bloc Québécois, which promised Wednesday to take up the issue with the House of Commons’ all-party decision-making body.

Setting aside the obvious fact that this a political move that is motivated primarily by the cultural equivalent of racism (when’s the last time someone in the legislature was attacked with a kirpan?), there are actually two perfectly reasonable arguments on both sides of this issue.

Against the measure: A reasonable accommodation can be made to allow MPs to wear religious items without interfering with the good order and work of the parliament

As I noted above, there have never been any attacks within parliament by a kirpan (or any other weapon). Banning people from wearing a kirpan is not a reaction to an incident of violence, nor is it a pre-emptive attempt to fight a trend of imminent violence. It is simply making an arbitrary rule that has the effect of saying that certain people are not welcome to run for office. For Sikhs who take their religion seriously, the kirpan is a mandatory accoutrement that must be worn at all times. It has the same religious force of compulsion as the burqua or similar head-coverings for conservative Jews.

Given that there is a compelling reason (at the individual level) for wearing a kirpan, and very little is accomplished by banning it (aside from broadcasting xenophobia), a strong case can be made that the measure should not be adopted.

For the measure: The accommodation to allow people to bring a weapon into the legislature is not reasonable

I’ve made this exact argument before (way in the distant past, likely before any of you now reading the blog were around):

In my mind, allowing anyone to carry a weapon of any kind is not a good idea. I don’t care how symbolic or ceremonial it it supposed to be. If my religious convictions require me to carry a rifle in my hands because Jesus could arrive at any moment and I have to help him fight off Satan’s zombie hordes, common sense (and the law) would dictate that the danger I pose to society in general outweighs my religious autonomy. Such is the case here.

The kirpan is not worn to commemorate a battle or to symbolize some kind of pillar of Sikh faith. It is explicitly a defensive weapon that is worn by Sikhs in case they have to prevent some act of evil from taking place. The same argument could be made for a non-religious knife, or a gun, or any other type of weapon. Given that we do not permit MPs (or anyone) to take a weapon into a government building unless they are a member of the security staff, making a special concession for this weapon because it is wrapped up in religious superstition is not a reasonable accommodation, despite whatever nonsense Michael Ignatieff says:

“The kirpan is not a weapon,” Ignatieff told reporters in Montreal. “It’s a religious symbol and we have to respect it.” When asked about the issue Thursday, Ignatieff said that it should be treated as a question of religious freedom rather than simply a security matter.

We have to respect it? With all due respect to your position, Mr. Ignatieff, we don’t have to respect religious symbols. We have to respect a person’s right to believe in their particular religious symbol, but we are under no consequent obligation to respect the symbol ourselves. Considering that the symbol itself, when divorced from its symbolism, is in fact a knife, it is entirely reasonable to ask why it should be allowed inside the legislature (or anywhere else, for that matter).

While I hate compromise (I really do… it usually means that both sides are giving up), I think one is appropriate in this case. While it would be a complete failure on our part to refuse to recognize the impact on the Sikh community (as a manifestation of privilege) of such a ban, we also must respect the fact that Canada is a secular nation, meaning that religious symbols are not to be given any kind of legal standing. The problem with the kirpan is not the kirpan itself – it is its potential to be used as a weapon. Kirpans can be purchased with locks, or made such that they cannot be drawn from their sheath. Passing a resolution that allows the kirpan to be worn but stripping it of its function as a knife is entirely possible, and involves a reasonable accommodation from both sides.

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P.S. Interestingly, as I was writing this piece, I found myself saying “this is absolutely my position” for both sides of the argument. I’m always interested to hear your opinions (even in those cases when I don’t post a reply), but I am particularly curious to know if you were swayed one way or the other on this issue.

“Cultural Sensitivity” meets clear stupidity

It’s been a while since I talked about one of my first pet topics, the burqa bans going on in various places in the world. The point I laboured to make in those early articles was that there may be some specific circumstances under which it is better for society to brook some contravention of its rules in the name of being tolerant of practices imported from other cultures. This is particularly true of Canada, with its wide variety of cultural groups. If we want Canada to remain a place where groups from all over the world can feel at home, then we have to occasionally put aside our discomfiture toward “the other”.

But other times, “the other” is stupid and there needn’t be any accommodation:

Plans for a hospice on the University of British Columbia campus have been put on hold after some neighbourhood residents said the proposed facility offended their cultural sensitivities around death and dying.

“It is all about cultural sensitivity,” said Ms. Fan, a Chinese-born immigrant who lives in a high-rise near the proposed hospice site. “We came here as new immigrants with our own belief system. And in our beliefs, it is impossible for us to have dying people in our backyard.”

The main gist of this argument is that many Chinese-born immigrants share a cultural taboo about death, feeling that it brings bad luck and will spoil marriages and businesses and all sorts of other pursuits. Building a hospice in a neighbourhood with many immigrants from this area lacks cultural sensitivity for such beliefs.

My response: fuck your superstition.

This proposed building is on the campus of the University of British Columbia. UBC has a right to build whatever legal structure they like on their grounds. UBC also has a hospital on its grounds. News flash: people die in hospitals every day. People also die in car accidents, stabbings, from heart attacks… the list goes on ad infinitum. Death is a part of life – in fact, death is the thing that makes life precious. If your beliefs are in conflict with biological fact, it is not the responsibility of the rest of the world to move in line with your beliefs; it’s your responsibility to figure out a way to deal with it.

I feel passionately about this issue, as someone who works in cancer research. The majority of people who pursue hospice care suffer from terminal cancer. At the end of the course of this disease, patients are often in near-constant pain that gets limited (or no) relief through the use of drugs and radiation. The idea behind hospice care is to allow the dying person to maintain a bit of dignity and comfort. It is the sign of a compassionate and caring people when the sick and dying are cared for. Adequate hospice care means that people are not languishing in long-term care facilities, at home, or worst of all in a hospital, unable to access sufficient relief from their symptoms as their bodies shut down.

A very good friend of mine worked in a hospice on a co-op term. She would be able to speak much more eloquently and passionately than I can about what a great job hospice care does of improving the quality of life of people who are lucky enough to have the opportunity to die there. I say ‘lucky’ in full awareness of the fact that it’s not exactly ‘lucky’ to get cancer, but since there are far fewer spaces than there is demand for those spaces, getting in is indeed a stroke of luck.

I hope nobody would accuse me of being a person who is not sensitive to the fact that not everyone sees the world the same way. I am aware that different groups have different ideas about life, and that some issues hit people more viscerally than others. However, in this case we’re talking about conflating superstition with the real suffering of real people. The proximity of death has zero effect on whether or not your business is lucky – the flourishing funeral home business is perhaps a counter-example. People who work in hospitals around dying people can maintain happy relationships, and in some cases the death of a close family member can bring people closer together. To suggest that dying people should put relief of their suffering on hold because you’re afraid of the dark is the height of childish arrogance.

We should make our decisions based on what is real, not what spares the delicate feelings of stupid people.

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Cross-burning comes to a close

One of the very first stories I talked about when I started this site about a year ago was the cross burning incident in Nova Scotia, where an interracial couple woke to find a flaming cross on their lawn. That story has come to a close:

The second of two brothers who burned a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple in Windsor, N.S., has been sentenced to two months in jail.

Justin Rehberg, 20, was sentenced in a Windsor courtroom for criminal harassment and inciting racial hatred. He will be on probation for 30 months and is barred from owning firearms for 10 years. Rehberg was composed during the sentencing when Justice Claudine MacDonald asked if he had anything to say.

“I want to say I’m sorry,” Rehberg told the court. “I screwed up. It was a horrible mistake. It will never happen again.”

On Monday, Rehberg’s older brother, Nathan, was sentenced to four months in jail for inciting hatred and to six months in jail for criminal harassment. The sentences are to be served concurrently, and with credit for time already spent in custody, he will spend two more months in jail.

Well, I should say that the story has come to a close as far as the two brothers are concerned. The victims of this incident will have to live with the aftermath for years to come. That also doesn’t take into account the black community in Nova Scotia, having to deal with the constant spectre of fear of violence for the crime of having been born with a different skin colour.

I don’t have much to say about the sentence. It’s less than my sense of revenge would have liked to see, but as far as I’m concerned the damage has already been done. These kids are royal fuckups, will pull this kind of shit again, and will find hero worship among a small but fierce band of white supremacists. Putting them in jail for a longer period of time won’t do anything to change that fact. I’m almost tempted to say I wish they had been sentenced to do community outreach work in Africville, but I wouldn’t want to foist scumbags like the Rehbergs on the black community of Nova Scotia just to satisfy my perverted sense of justice.

[Crown prosecutor Darrell] Carmichael has said the cases were the first involving a cross-burning in Canada.

“I hope this will be the last, as well as the first,” he said.

Would you like to place a bet, Mr. Carmichael?

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Saskatchewan: Flat, dull, and now gay!

I have a good friend who is moving out to Victoria in a couple of months. She decided she would explore this great country of ours by driving across it. For those of you readers who are not from Canada, you honestly haven’t any idea of how huge an undertaking that is. If you’ve ever driven from New York to Seattle, you’ll have some idea of the horizontal distance this involves, but not quite the vertical. Perhaps the best approximation is to imagine driving from Orlando, to New York, and then to Seattle. That’s what happens if you drive about 3/5 of the way across the country (there’s still all of French Canada and the maritimes to the east of where Niki’s driving from).

In a recent conversation, she confessed to me that she’s a bit worried about driving through the rockies, since there’s nothing quite like the perilous mountain driving anywhere in Ontario. I told her that she should be more wary of the prairie provinces, because while the Rockies are a challenge of skill, the prairies are a trial of endurance. Nothing can prepare you for the unbelievable flatness of the prairies. As you drive west, the road curves slightly to the right every 20 or so minutes – this is to adjust for the curvature of the Earth. It’s flat. And while there is a certain majesty and grandeur to how flat and open it is, after a few hours of driving and having nothing to break the eyeline, the novelty of the flatness wears away quickly.

Suffice it to say, Saskatchewan, in the very middle of the prairies, is not a terribly exciting place. So when there’s news out of Saskatchewan, I jump on it:

Saskatchewan’s highest court will rule Monday morning on whether provincial civil marriage commissioners can refuse to perform same-sex ceremonies on religious grounds. The province asked the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal for advice on whether proposed legislation allowing commissioners to recuse themselves from performing same-sex marriages for religious reasons would be constitutional.

Of course, the court already has ruled (these stories I post under the ‘news’ category are very rarely ‘news’ by the time they go up here). As someone who understands the Charter and the mood of jurisprudence in Canada would have predicted, the appeals court found that someone who is employed by the government does not have the right to refuse service to someone on religious grounds. It makes sense – the government does not grant marriage licenses on religious grounds, it does so as a civil matter. Since the law does not allow for religious discrimination, it follows that civil employees are not allowed to discriminate against people who are pursuing a legal entitlement on the grounds of religion.

Imagine, for a second, that there was an imam from Calgary who held the belief that a woman, once divorced, is unclean and cannot be married within his particular mosque. While this position may or may not be supported by the Qur’an (scripture can really be used to justify any position), let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that such a case existed. This imam, being otherwise quite moderate and progressive, offers his services to the government as a wedding officiant. At this point, he has left the auspices of his mosque and is operating as a provincial contractor. At this point he is obligated to give (at least) the same quality of service that would be given by any other provincial contractor, regardless of his individual aversion to marrying divorcées. There would be, and rightly so, outrage over any provincial employee who refused to give services to an ‘unclean divorcée’. For the same reason, it is similarly wrong to refuse to grant marriages to gay couples on religious Christian grounds.

I can understand the argument on the other side of this issue, however. Why should a priest be forced to violate his own religious beliefs? What business does the government have telling someone that they must perform a ceremony that conflicts with their stupid bigotry closely-held spiritual beliefs? The response from Reynold Robertson, government lawyer, is about as concise a refutation of this position as I’ve seen:

“The decision confirms that people have their religious beliefs, and they may entertain that — there’s complete freedom of religious beliefs,” said Robertson. “It’s only when your conduct on doing something might have an effect on somebody else which has a discriminatory effect.” Robertson also noted that the decision applies only to marriage commissioners — public servants performing civil ceremonies — and not religious clergy.

This is a problem that many libertarians and conservative moderates have with the idea of human rights – that your having human rights means that you have to respect the rights of others. If this were a perfect world (for a libertarian), there would never be a conflict and you could simply live your own life without interference from anyone else. As a result, there would be no need to prioritize rights, and would never be a circumstance that would infringe upon your ability to do and say whatever you want. Of course that describes no world that ever has or ever will exist. We live in a world with other people, and as a result we can’t allow personal prejudices to become the practice of laws. If someone is working under civil authority, they must enforce the rule of law, wherein religion has no jurisdiction.

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The face of racism in Canada – same as it ever was

There is a great scene in one of my favourite movies where a black TV executive assembles a writing team for his new black-themed TV show, and expresses his baffled dismay at the fact that they are all white. To try and explain the phenomenon away, the writers sitting around the table offer a variety of suggestions: maybe they couldn’t find anyone qualified; maybe black writers didn’t want to work on the show; the executive sardonically suggests that maybe they couldn’t put their crack pipes down long enough to fill out the application.

Of course there is a real answer to why there weren’t any black writers around the table: the people that make the decisions on who gets hired picked a group of white people. It’s not a mystery, it happens all the time. For reasons that are (likely) completely unconscious to the powers that be, the black writers who applied just didn’t “seem right” for the position, so they didn’t get hired. Aren’t we lucky that this kind of thing only happens in movies, right?

While it is my usual practice to post an excerpt from the articles I link to these stories I am sadly unable to do justice to what’s contained in the link. I will, however, provide you this screengrab:

January 2011 Federal CabinetDo you see what I see? Go to the link, scroll down the list, and see if you can spot what I’m talking about. Yes, it’s a sea of white faces. White, male faces actually.

Now I feel the need to back up here and clarify a lot of things.

  1. I am not not not not not accusing Stephen Harper of being a bigot. I don’t like the man, I don’t like his politics, I don’t like his policies, and I definitely don’t like who he’s in bed with (although I do find his wife delightful). However, none of that, nor anything that he has said or done, leads me to conclude that he is particularly racist (at least not above and beyond what I would expect from any other person). Anyone who thinks I am trying to smear him by tagging him as ‘a racist’ is way off base.
  2. This cabinet is not not not unusual or particularly white and male. In fact, the linked article points out that there are more women in this cabinet than served under the previous Martin Liberal government. While conservatives and Conservatives tend to be an old-boys club, this particular cabinet does not reflect that any more than Liberal cabinets.
  3. This isn’t about black people. Given that black people represent about 2.5% of the population of Canada, I’d be surprised to see a preponderance of black faces on the Federal Cabinet (especially since few of the ministers are from the Toronto or Ottawa areas).
  4. I have no reason to suspect that unqualified white politicians were hired over qualified People of Colour (PoCs), with the exception of Gary Goodyear who isn’t qualified to hold my cock while I take a piss, let alone be the federal minister of science. I’m sure they are all (with the aforementioned exception) competent politicians in their own right.

This is not a commentary on this cabinet. Please rest assured that while I have strong political disagreements with the Conservative party, I am not interested in smearing them with as ugly and ham-fisted an approach as “they is a bunch of racists”.

This is a commentary on all cabinets, at all times. This is a commentary on the cultural zeitgeist (I am sorry, I cannot avoid using the word) that surreptitiously pushes out PoCs. Aside from Bev Oda and Leona Aglukkaq (and possibly John Duncan, although I don’t think so), the cabinet is made up of white faces. This is not in any way unusual, although it probably should raise some eyebrows that the minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, the minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, and the minister for Indian Affairs (I think) are all white faces. To be sure, International Co-operation and Health are not rinky-dink positions and there are two prominent female PoCs in those ministries, but the preponderance of positions are monochromatic.

As I’ve said countless times, this is how we can tell that we have not reached anything that even resembles the post-racial utopia that many of us (liberals and conservatives alike) would like to pretend Canada is currently. Instead what we have is tokenism and rampant under-representation by one group, with an accompanying over-representation by the group that just happens to be the one with the most political clout historically. This is no accident, although I am doubtful it happens on purpose. It is for this reason that I roll my eyes whenever someone talks about “personal responsibility” being the answer to racial disparity – so much of it happens below a level where we are aware of it. As a result, we get more of the same thing, by a process that looks quite accidental.

This is no accident.

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