Muslim MP Ashraf Choudhary will not condemn the traditional Koran punishment of stoning to death some homosexuals and people who have extra-marital affairs.Yet.
...
Mr Choudhary once again found himself between a rock and a hard place on questions of Islam when he appeared on TV3's 60 Minutes programme last night.
It was examining warnings about extreme fundamentalism within New Zealand's Islamic community.
Mr Choudhary was asked: "Are you saying the Koran is wrong to recommend that gays in certain circumstances be stoned to death?"
He replied: " No, no. Certainly what the Koran says is correct.
"In those societies, not here in New Zealand," he added.
Ok, explain to me again how one's God-given unalienable rights are alienable by an accident of birth?
Moral relativism is a sickness that cannot be tolerated.
For example, it's a fact that many slaves in the American South stood loyally by their masters during the Civil War. Was that any reason to not free them?
Hitler thought it was ok to exterminate the Jews. Who are we to say he was wrong?
You see how absurd that reasoning is?
It's at this point someone objects that if we think we're right, but others think they're right, how do we decide who is "really" right? Or they'll suggest that they might want to impose their ideas of "rights" on us if we think we can do so.
As if our forebearance were all that was keeping them from doing so! Guess what, they want to already. And we won't allow it.
"Isn't that a double standard?" is the common reply.
Yeah. So what? Who says we have to be held to some artificial set of debating rules?
What ultimately decides these issues is sheer force. If the Right are not Mighty, it doesn't do them a lot of good now if they're all dead, doesn't it?
Sure, some [most!] things are a matter of opinion. We drive on the right; others drive on the left. Which is better or correct? It doesn't matter. The choice is a cultural preference that doesn't impact on true Individual Unalienable Universal Rights.
But when our notion of "rights" has become fuzzy, to be cynically manipulated to push any agenda, as in pandering with the "right to a job" or the "right to housing" -- which are properly benefits that can't in principle be guaranteed, and who's to say whether what is provided is "sufficient" or not? -- then we are open to this kind of sloppy thinking.
No, Rights are protections from government power.
Not handouts.
That's why framing the recent Supreme Court Kelo decision on taking private property by eminent domain for private use as a "states rights" issue is grotesque. States Rights are protections against Federal intrusion, not the "right" to crush the individual! One would think that given that the phrase "public use" is ACTUALLY IN the Federal Constitution, that the Supreme Court would find it its duty to interpret its meaning -- I mean, they come up with meanings about things that aren't even in the document when it pleases them -- rather than to curiously leave its interpretation up to the States.
Very odd.
But what did one expect from government-power-hungry leftists with no principles of limited government? This explains also the recent "medical marijuana" decision, in which the "conservative" justices voted (unsuccessfully) to allow states to decide -- because that is truly a states rights issue, and though those justices may personally oppose the idea, it's a bigger part of their core belief system to uphold the meaning of the Constitution rather than their own whims, unlike an "activist" judge -- and the so-called "liberals" outlawed it, in favor of Federal power to regulate whatever the hell it wants, with or without Constitutional justification.
We need Bush to appoint several more original-intent justices like Thomas, and the Democrat filibuster must be crushed.
P.S. There's also no "right" to not be offended.
