From the BBC:

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled against the use of crucifixes in classrooms in Italy.

It said the practice violated the right of parents to educate their children as they saw fit, and ran counter to the child’s right to freedom of religion.

The case was brought by an Italian mother, Soile Lautsi, who wants to give her children a secular education.

If Soile Lautsi is so averse to her children seeing a crucifix in school, perhaps she should home-school them to ensure the expunging from their education of all vestiges of Christianity, even though it underpins the human rights to which she believes she is entitled.

Or she could move to an explicitly secular state like North Korea.

Larry David, in urinating on a picture of Jesus to gain a laugh, is PC in two ways:

He is Politically Correct because mocking Christianity is Hollywood-cool and he knows no reprisals are likely from Christians. Just imagine if it had been a Koran.

And he is a Pee Comedian; toilet jokes are the last refuge of a comic who has run out of ways to be funny.

The answer used to be a unequivocal “yes” since the alternative is to legislate amorality; life is no longer so clear-cut:

Lorne Gunter: Prostitution may be immoral, but it shouldn’t be illegal

I have sympathy for the groups lining up in Ontario Superior Court to preserve Canada’s laws against prostitution.

As Derek Bell, a lawyer representing the Christian Legal Fellowship, the Catholic Civil Rights League and REAL Women of Canada told Madame Justice Susan Himel yesterday, “the prohibitions contained in [the Criminal Code] in part were designed to protect public morals and against moral corruption.”

These are important considerations. I don’t want my daughter or yours or any other young girl drawn into prostitution. Like the largely Christian groups asking the court to turn down a constitutional challenge of the ban on prostitution — brought by a dominatrix, a former sex trade worker and a working prostitute — I oppose prostitution on moral grounds.

But I am even more opposed to laws dictating morals between consenting adults. The state has no business proscribing what is right and wrong for people quite capable of making up their own minds. I would not, for instance, overturn laws against statutory rape, child pornography or bestiality; children and animals cannot give informed consent. Nor am I in favour of legalizing murder, assault, rape or robbery, because no one has a right to take another’s life, liberty, wellbeing, dignity or property without their consent.

Such is the argument of the Libertarian. The problem with it is this:

On the one hand, Gunter says prostitution, while immoral, should not be illegal, implying the legality of a thing should rest on something other than morality.

On the other, he asserts that laws that allow the harming of one individual by another must stand;  the difference is in the harming of an individual, something which he would view as, well… immoral.

This is not untypical of those who proclaim that we cannot “legislate morality”: the truth is, everyone wants to legislate morality. It’s just that the only moral imperative left in our civilisation is “do what you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone”; but it is still a moral imperative, albeit a narrow and short-sighted one. The Libertarian might make the argument that laws against murder, theft and so on are there merely to maintain order; but that doesn’t further the argument, since it assumes that order in human society is better – more moral – than disorder.

So Lorne, we do legislate morality and prostitution, if immoral, should also be illegal.

I have worked in large corporations for the last 43 years; one of them was IBM. The main thing I have learnt is, as Jeremiah says, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? – Jer 17:9.

Apparently there has been financial hanky-panky at the most senior levels of IBM:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – It isn’t often that big blue gets a black eye.

But Friday IBM , the leading U.S. technology firm known for its conservative management, found itself entangled in the largest ever hedge fund insider-trading scheme involving Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam.

Robert Moffat, senior vice president and head of IBM’s systems and technology group was named as a defendant. Executives at leading chipmaker Intel Corp and management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. were also implicated.

At IBM, when the mighty fall, they are not put on display for public excoriation as an example to plebeians who might otherwise be tempted to follow in the footsteps of their putative betters: instead, they disappear. An attempt to look up Bob Moffat at IBM yields: The biography you tried to access does not exist. He has been cast into outer darkness.

Moffat had been with IBM since 1978, so he was a true blue IBMer; clearly he didn’t take the yearly pledge of obedience to IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines very seriously, though. In recent years his popularity with the rank and file at IBM has not been high since he was the architect of numerous purges and of moving North American jobs to India, Brazil, Argentina – anywhere where labour is cheap. IBM euphemistically calls this “Global Resourcing” – GR for short.

Unsurprisingly, when the news of Moffat’s arrest was made public, there were reports of cheering employees in IBM buildings all over North America. I confined myself to a smile.

Funerals for the lost:

A LEADING Tunbridge Wells clergyman has been branded “insensitive” after unleashing a scathing attack on modern funerals.

Father Ed Tomlinson, of St Barnabas’ Church, Quarry Road, said he had better ways of spending his time than at crematorium services where the dead were “led in by the tunes of Tina Turner…and sent into the furnace with ‘I Did It My Way’ blaring out across the speakers”.

The vicar whose blogsite rants attract a cult following, said the widespread fashion for “a poem from nan combined with a saccharine message from a pop star before being popped in the oven” left him feeling like an unwanted guest at many funerals.

He added: “I have… stood at the ‘crem’ like a lemon, wondering why on earth I am present.”

There was a time when even non-believers craved the aesthetics of the Church at the important moments of their lives: marriages and funerals. Now, it seems, all that is left is the expectation that a tame vicar will do the honours while trite secularisms-du-jour are injected into the ceremony. Congratulations to Father Ed for speaking his mind.

On the same day there are two stories, one of the intense romantic love of Queen Victoria:

By Victorian standards, it is really rather daring.

Even more so when one realises that the lovely young woman languorously baring her shoulders is none other than Queen Victoria.

The portrait, known as ‘the secret picture’, was commissioned by the young Queen in 1843 as a 24th birthday present for her beloved husband Albert. It was painted by the respected artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter.

By all accounts it was well received. Victoria, also 24 at the time, referred to it as ‘my darling Albert’s favourite picture’.

He was said to particularly like the way he hair, half released from its traditional knot, cascaded down her back.

The phrase ‘the secret picture’ was taken from Victoria’s journal and referred to the fact that she had commissioned it for her husband’s eyes only. It has only been displayed in public on one occasion since she gave it to him 166 years ago.

And the other of a tawdry and repulsive 21^st Century meretrix:

Britney Spears is racy in lace as she films video for controversial new song 3.
The track has already claimed the top spot in the U.S. charts and is taken from her forthcoming album The Singles Collection, released next month.

Cavorting with two men in a skimpy see-through lace outfit, this is Britney Spears filming scenes for her latest controversial song 3.

Victoria had 9 children, was publicly modest and, contrary to the preconceptions of contemporary bigotry, enjoyed sex.

You can keep Britney, give me Victoria.