One Body. One Person. One Count.

Conservative MP Ken Epp has a private member's bill before the Canadian House of Commons entitled "The Unborn Victims of Violence Act".

Epp has stated that this proposed legislation is intended to give Canadian judges the power to try those who perpetrate violence against pregnant women for a second count of violence against a fetus.

This is, at best, fuzzy law. The Supreme Court of Canada has already resolved (Section 223(1) of the Criminal Code) that a fetus is not a person until it has exited the birth canal alive. Dobson v. Dobson, heard by the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed that a woman and fetus are physically "one" person and all rights accrue to the woman.

This bill has, in reality, one purpose. It is an attempt by the likes of Epp to sneak around Canada's established abortion laws by finding a way to declare a fetus a "person". Make no mistake, Epp's constituency is the Christian dominionist lobby and if this bill doesn't end up where it belongs, trampled on the floor of the House, women will immediately loose rights established under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the rulings of the Supreme Court.

Epp's bill will do absolutely nothing to stem the violence against women, pregnant or not. It will however fly in the face of existing law by creating a separation of a pregnant woman from a fetus. In the US this same kind of legislation has been used to take action pregnant women themselves if the state determined that a pregnant woman did not act in a manner the legal system deemed appropriate.

As an aside, Epp is resigning from politics and has no intention of running in the next federal election. This proposed legislation is actually a land mine he intends to leave behind.

This legislation has no other purpose than to execute a sneak attack on the rights of women.

Stop it now.

This legislation is scheduled for debate in the House on February 29th and for a vote sometime around March 5th. The Bloc and the NDP are going to whip the vote of their parties against it. The Liberals are leaving it a free vote to their members. That needs to change. Write Liberal leader Stephane Dion and demand a whipped vote.

Crush this bill. On February 25th, write about it.

More... much more, at Birth Pangs.

Video by Pale.

UPDATE: Get out and sign the online petition. Make your voice heard. (Thanks to Fern Hill in comments)

Indian judge orders Hindu gods into court

You have to appreciate the practicality of Indian judge Sunil Kumar Singh. If plaintiffs are going to fight their case on religious grounds, he's going to have the gods involved appear in court.

An Indian judge has summoned two Hindu gods to help resolve a 20-year-old property dispute.

Sunil Kumar Singh has placed notices in newspapers in the coal mining town of Dhanbad, in the eastern state of Jharkhand, asking gods Ram and Hanuman to appear in his court next week to present their arguments.

"You failed to appear in court despite notices sent by a messenger and later through registered post. You are hereby directed to appear before the court personally," Judge Singh's notice stated.

The newspaper notices were published, in keeping with accepted Indian legal practice, after two summons dispatched to the plaintiff deities were returned because their addresses were "incomplete".

The deities are, of course entitled to be represented by counsel.

The dispute is over ownership of a 1.4-acre plot in Dhanbad which adjoins a temple dedicated to Ram and another one dedicated to the monkey god Hanuman. Worshippers claim the land belongs to the gods but the priest, Manmohan Patnaik, insists that it is his.

Both sides went to court in 1987 and several years later the dispute was settled in the locals' favour. But Mr Patnaik challenged the verdict in a "fast-track court" set up to cut the backlog of millions of property cases.

I wonder. What would happen if a North American judge entertained the same notion over the dispute of a church on land owned by those who were here before anybody even mentioned the name Jesus Christ?

The law is an ass, and then there are the people with their head in it.

You'd have to be aware of this in the first place to understand what's happening. PZ Myers, who writes the outstanding blog Pharyngula, is an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota and is a vocal atheist found himself being sued by one Stuart Pivar. I'll give you the intro from that last link:

Remember that Stuart Pivar fellow who wrote a book called LifeCode (2004), a book which purported to advance a new theory of developmental biology — a theory which would, naturally, overturn everything biologists have figured out so far? Well, here’s a quick refresher:

The rest you can follow over there.

Well, it appears Pivar's attorney withdrew the lawsuit yesterday. That's a good thing since the whole suit appeared to centre around Pivar's attempt to silence a negative review of his book.

However, Peter Irons, a constitutional lawyer who stepped forward on PZ Myers' behalf and literally destroyed Pivar's case is apparently being threatened with legal action by Pivar's lawyer, Michael J. Little. Presumably the basis for Little's suit is this letter in which Irons, quite appropriately describes Little's activities as hasty, sloppy and frivolous.

And here I was trying to wean myself off popcorn.

Harper admits it

He's stacking the courts with his own judges.

Steven Harper is frankly admitting that he's looking for judges who will back his law-and-order agenda - and provoking cries from his opponents that he's trying to subvert the judiciary for political ends.

"We are bringing forward laws to make sure that we crack down on crime - that we make our streets and communities safer," the prime minister declared in the Commons on Wednesday. "We want to make sure our selection of judges is in correspondence with those objectives."

Really! Competent judges will interpret and observe the laws of this country appropriately and in accordance with the statutes issued by the Parliament of Canada.

Incompetent, partisan hacks won't.

Where have we seen this before, mini-Me? So, much for transparent, accountable government. Get Harper mad enough and he just isn't able to hide that agenda.