In Muslim countries children are beaten at school for not having sufficient enthusiasm for learning the Koran.

Child abuse during Koran lessons investigated in The Hague

The Hague – The Hague has filed charges in 49 cases of corporal punishment of children during Koran lessons, the newspaper de Volkskrant reported Wednesday. Signs of bodily abuse, including bruises and welts, were discovered by the state health service in an unusually large number of 10-year-olds taking the Koran lessons.

Nearly half of the cases involved students at the el-Islam mosque in The Hague. The imam of the mosque denied the accusations and demanded proof to back them up.

The de Volkskrant newspaper reported further that unnamed “sources in the Moroccan community” had confirmed that children are often “beaten hard” during Koran instruction. It was hard to prove the abuse since parents mostly wouldn’t dare to speak out against it, the sources said.

In a Christian country a child at school is not allowed to read the Bible:

A third grader was told by a teacher at her New Jersey elementary school that the Bible was not appropriate reading material for quiet time, MyFoxNY.com reported.

The teacher at Madison Park Elementary School in Old Bridge, N.J., ordered the girl, Mariah, to put away her Bible.

Michelle Jordat, Mariah’s mother, said her daughter was upset and confused by the incident, MyFoxNY.com reported.

But children are encouraged to read gay pornography (not to be read on a full stomach) with the intent of alerting them to its delights.

Islam beats children to make believers out of them; Christendom, intent on self destruction, schools its young in rejecting the foundations of what makes it work and opts instead for this:

What a mess.

From the Daily Mail:

Five British sailors are being held hostage after their racing yacht may have inadvertently strayed into Iranian waters.

Foreign Office officials “immediately contacted the Iranian authorities in London and in Tehran on the evening of 25 November, both to seek clarification and to try and resolve the matter swiftly,” Foreign Secretary David Miliband said today.

And beg for their return.

However, an Iranian Foreign Ministry official said he was not aware of reports a British yacht had been stopped. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry official mysteriously disappeared shortly after making this statement.

Fears were growing that the detention of the British sailors will dramatically increase tensions between Iran and the West.

Surely not.

The country has come under increasing pressure in response to its plans to build 10 new nuclear fuel plants.

Why don’t we offer to build them for Ahmadinejad in exchange for the return of the hostages?

In March 2007 HMS Cornwall made headlines around the world in March when seven Royal Marines and eight sailors were arrested at gunpoint.

The humiliation was compounded as the Iranians gleefully exploited the propaganda opportunities in the following days, broadcasting footage of the hostages apologising for straying into Iranian waters, and warmly thanking president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for releasing them.

After thanking Ahmadinejad for letting us build his nuclear plants we should accessorise them with a few intercontinental ballistic missiles. Perhaps he’d start to like us then.

One of my favourite pastimes when very young was digging up road tar with a lollipop stick, aided by my curly-haired friend Anne from across the street; we probably licked the tar. When not profitably occupied with this, I used to play “alleys” in the gutter – rolling marbles to hit an opponent’s marble, thereby acquiring it. As I recall, the streets were quite dirty by today’s standards: dogs wandered free, no-one stooped and scooped and the gutters were replete with assorted detritus discarded by the less than fastidious inhabitants of Canton, Cardiff. I enjoyed my childhood, including the dirt; now I look askance at my children as they scrub the germs off my grandchildren with smelly antiseptic “wipes”. “A little dirt won’t hurt them”, I say, thinking to myself that they are being deprived of one of childhood’s pleasures – filth.

As an aside, it’s hard not to notice that as we become more obsessively hygienic physically, so we are becoming more polluted spiritually. Hand sanitisers are in every doorway, yet we live in a culture pervaded by pornography, one that holds up homosexual copulation as an exemplary pastime and one which actively suppresses any expression of Christianity in its civil institutions.

It seems that today’s children are deprived in two ways: they are physically too clean for their own good:

Children should be allowed to play in the dirt, research suggests

Scientists have discovered that bacteria on the surface of the skin play an important role in combating inflammation when we get hurt.

The bugs dampen down overactive immune responses, which can lead to rashes or cause cuts and bruises to become swollen and painful.

The findings support previous research which suggests that exposure to germs during early childhood can prime the immune system to prevent allergies.

The so-called “hygiene hypothesis” has previously been used to explain why increasing numbers of children suffer allergies such as eczema and hay fever in more developed countries.

And are being exposed to pollution that won’t come off in the bath:

Children as young as five are simulating sex acts at school because they are exposed to pornography on satellite television and the internet, a senior MP has warned.

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.