Wednesday, March 08, 2006

THE MUSLIMS HAVE A POINT ABOUT THE CARTOONS

As John Leo points out below, if you are penalized for speaking ill of homosexuals etc., why not be forbidden to mock Mohammed too? You either have free speech or you do not. Europe and Canada certainly do not and it is pretty shaky in America, despite the constitution

Law professor Eugene Volokh calls it "censorship envy." Muslims in Europe want the same sort of censorship that many nations now offer to other aggrieved groups. By law, 11 European nations can punish anyone who publicly denies the Holocaust. That's why the strange British historian David Irving is going to prison. Ken Livingstone, the madcap mayor of London, was suspended for four weeks for calling a Jewish reporter a Nazi. A Swedish pastor endured a long and harrowing prosecution for a sermon criticizing homosexuality, finally beating the rap in Sweden's Supreme Court.

Much of Europe has painted itself into a corner on the censorship issue. What can Norway say to pro-censorship Muslims when it already has a hate speech law forbidding, among other things, "publicly stirring up one part of the population against another," or any utterance that "threatens, insults or subjects to hatred, persecution or contempt any person or group of persons because of their creed, race, color or national or ethnic origin ... or homosexual bent"? No insulting utterances at all? Since most strong opinions can be construed as insulting (hurting someone's feelings), no insults means no free speech.

It's not just Europe. In Canada, a teacher drew a suspension for a letter to a newspaper arguing that homosexuality is not a fixed orientation, but a condition that can be treated. He was not accused of discrimination, merely of expressing thoughts that the state defines as improper. Another Canadian newspaper was fined 4,500 Canadian dollars for printing an ad giving the citations -- but not the text -- of four biblical quotations against homosexuality. As David Bernstein writes in his book "You Can't Say That!": "It has apparently become illegal in Canada to advocate traditional Christian opposition to homosexual sex."

Many nations have set themselves up for Muslim complaints by adopting the unofficial slogan of the West's chattering classes: Multiculturalism trumps free speech. Sensitivity and equality are viewed as so important that the individual right to speak out is routinely eclipsed. Naturally enough, Muslims want to play the same victim game as other aggrieved groups. The French Council of Muslims says it is considering taking France Soir, which reprinted the Danish cartoons, to court for provocation.

In truth, Muslims have been playing the game for some time. Michel Houellebecq, a French novelist, said some derogatory things about the Quran. Muslim groups hauled him into court, but the novelist was eventually exonerated. Actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, criticized Muslim ritual slaughter and was fined 10,000 francs for the offense. Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci wrote an angry anti-Muslim book, meant to waken the West to the gravity of the threat posed by Islam. Muslims pressed for her prosecution in France. The case was thrown out of court on a technicality in 2002, but she is scheduled to go on trial again this coming June.

In Australia, a state tribunal found two pastors guilty of vilification of Muslims. They had argued that Islam is inherently a violent religion, and that Islam plans to take over Australia. To avoid a fine of up to 7,000 Australian dollars or three months in jail, they were ordered to apologize and to promise not to repeat their remarks anywhere in Australia or over the Internet. The pastors refused to comply and are appealing to the Supreme Court. The case has become a major cause, with churches and Christian leaders fighting to overturn the law, and Muslims pushing for a broad hate-speech law.

An obvious thing to say about laws that limit speech is that we have no evidence that they work to meet their stated goal -- reducing bigotry and increasing tolerance. Banning Holocaust denial, on grounds that it is inherently anti-Semitic, has no track record of improving respect for Jews. If anything, hatred of Jews appears to be on the rise in these nations. Setting up certain groups as beyond criticism is bound to increase resentment among those not similarly favored. (Yes, we know all groups are supposed to be treated alike, but that is not the way these laws work.) In real life, the creation of protected classes sharpens intergroup tensions and leads to competition for victim status.

An even more obvious point: We are very lucky to have the First Amendment. Without it, our chattering classes would be falling all over themselves to ban speech that offends sensitive groups, just like many Eurochatterers are doing now. We know this because our campus speech codes, the models for the disastrous hate-speech laws in Europe, Canada and Australia, were the inventions of our own elites. Without a First Amendment, the distortions and suppressions of campus life would likely have gone national. No more speech codes, please. In America, we get to throw rocks at all ideologies, religious and secular, and we get to debate issues, not have them declared off limits by sensitivity-prone agents of the state.

Source



Don't touch those kids!

New research reveals why teachers and childcare workers now avoid putting a plaster on a child's leg - even though they know the rules are ridiculous

Dr Heather Piper's research at Manchester Metropolitan University into the 'problematics of touching' is an obvious candidate for 'PC gone mad' stories. Reported cases include the teacher who avoided putting a plaster on a child's scraped leg; nursery staff calling a child's mother every time he needed to go to the toilet; a male gym teacher leaving a girl injured in the hall while he waited for a female colleague.

Piper ... has now completed a research project for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Looking at six case-study schools, Piper and her colleagues conducted interviews with teachers, parents and children on the rights and wrongs of touch. She certainly unearthed a number of mad stories. Nursery workers wearing plastic gloves for changing nappies, even though the gloves tore on the nappies' sticky tabs. A school sending a set of 'touching guidelines' to parents for consultation, including the specification that teachers wouldn't put a plaster on a child without parents' permission. Staff at one school keeping an account of every 'touching incident' ('We write down a short account and date it and put which staff were present and at what time, we then explain it to the parent and ask them to read and sign it'), more as if they were keeping police logs than teaching children.

But the research shows that it isn't mad PC henchmen behaving this way, but ordinary, well-meaning child professionals. Piper's work gets inside the mentality of today's risk culture, and captures the crazy contortions that sensible people are ending up in.

Piper tells me that the anxiety about touching children is now 'mainstream'. 'Even schools that said, "this isn't a problem, we're touchy feely" - we found that they were panicking. They were adapting their behaviour in ways of which they perhaps weren't aware.' In some cases, particular individuals might be okay to touch, but only to the exclusion of other teachers. Piper cites one headmaster who said 'I'm okay, because I have 25 years of experience, but I wouldn't trust my staff'. At another school, staff would go to matron if a child needed to be touched - if they had a bump on their head that needed checking, for example - rather than check it themselves.

The normal, everyday interactions between adults and children are being viewed as poisonous. Decent and competent child professionals end up watching each other and themselves for signs of suspicious behaviour, a situation that Piper describes as a 'perfect panopticon'.

Why is this happening? Many teachers claim that they are just following Ofsted guidelines, saying that there is an official prohibition on touch. This just isn't true, says Piper. Instead, no-touch policies are being worked out informally among staff members. Teachers have internalised a sense of mistrust and are policing themselves - something that one teacher described as an 'implanted awareness'. Individuals follow regulations to absolve themselves of suspicion - one nursery teacher admitted that changing nappies with plastic gloves wasn't practical, but 'you've got to think of yourself first'. Another said that to leave the gloves off would make a dubious 'statement'.

Teachers' notion that all this comes from officialdom reflects their lack of ownership of policies. Professionals will steer clear of touching while knowing that it is crazy. 'Often people will giggle about the things they have to do', Piper tells me, 'but they still do them'. Nobody really believes that they and their colleagues are all potential child abusers: Piper notes in her report that 'respondents "knew" that professional abuse was extremely rare'.

Some staff realise that they are poisoning their relationship with their charges, and depriving kids of the care and attention they need. One special school, with children as young as five, generally only touched when it was strictly necessary and avoided 'caring touching'. One manager at the school reflected: 'when we put them to bed, are we allowed to kiss them on the top of the head? That makes me think about what a sterile environment there is - no parental familiarity of touch - does the child's life have to be that sterile?' A primary school headteacher lamented, 'It's just a shame that society is coming round to this'; another teacher asked, 'What kind of adults are we bringing up?'.

This isn't just about touch, says Piper - it's about 'all forms of behaviour'. People are unsure about what counts as appropriate or inappropriate. She cites the example of one teacher texting a pupil to tell them that a school trip bus was about to go. 'Was this invading the pupil's privacy? My research team had a big debate about whether this was okay or not.' The question of whether this was 'inappropriate behaviour' is unrelated to the intentions of any particular teacher; the researchers weren't suggesting that this teacher was a pervert. People view a situation as if they were an outsider assuming the worst, rather than using their own awareness of context and intention.

Summerhill school provided a kind of control for the team's research. This chilled out, hippie school had apparently remained entirely immune from anxiety about touch, and members of staff treated Piper's inquiries with bemusement. 'We felt absolutely ludicrous', she says, 'because it just wasn't an issue. We felt like perverts, going around asking people who touched who and why.' While other schools became jumpy about Piper's research, asking to remain anonymous, Summerhill couldn't understand what the problem was.

Piper's comment is telling, because it captures how this touchiness about touch encourages people to assume the minds of perverts. No-touch policies imply dark desires, as if were it not for the prohibitions teachers wouldn't be able to control themselves. Every nursery worker who wears gloves is in effect admitting that there is something a bit dodgy about them. One respondent to the research noted 'a definite hesitation and suspicion of myself' - and more worryingly, 'a feeling that this implanted awareness alerts any proclivity I have towards "the taboo"; that it might awaken otherwise non-existent desires. It feels like this awareness acts like a carrier of an "infection" to abuse'. It's those who police themselves who end up feeling like perverts, rather than those who engage in unthinking and innocent touching.

Some have started to lay down clearer guidelines about 'appropriate touch', believing that this might clear up the confusion. This might mean allowing 'child-initiated touch', or consulting parents about what they believe is acceptable. But this just leads into 'endless double binds', says Piper. The report quotes a parent's tortured specification: 'I would like my child to be consulted before she is touched.. I want my child to received positive physical contact as praise, appropriate to the situation - such as ruffling hair/patting on the back - if that's okay with her.' Another nursery nurse wondered what counted as 'child-initiated touch': when they are crying?; when they are leaning on her knees?

Piper concludes that the guidelines are 'negative rather than positive, products of fear rather than a characteristic of a confident profession or workforce'. Codes give no space for context or good professional sense, and so were generally 'ignored or became unworkable', creating 'guilt at their non-compliance'. The more specific codes become, the more ridiculous they are, and the more they cast teachers under the veil of suspicion.

Instead, Piper proposes 'a return to notions of professional trust and agency' - a trust in teachers to do the right thing and decide upon the appropriate way to behave. The upshot of no-touch codes is not safe or ethical teacher-pupil relationships, but merely tortured agonising. This research calls on professionals to start judging for themselves how to relate to pupils, and to have more confidence in their judgements.

Source



"INCORRECT" NURSERY RHYMES BUTCHERED

Traditional nursery rhymes are being rewritten at nursery schools to avoid causing offence to children. Instead of singing “Baa baa, black sheep” as generations of children have learnt to do, toddlers in Oxfordshire are being taught to sing “Baa baa, rainbow sheep”. The move, which critics will seize on as an example of political correctness, was made after the nurseries decided to re-evaluate their approach to equal opportunities. Stuart Chamberlain, manager of the Family Centre in Abingdon and the Sure Start centre in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, told the local Courier Journal newspaper: “We have taken the equal opportunities approach to everything we do. “This is fairly standard across nurseries. We are following stringent equal opportunities rules. No one should feel pointed out because of their race, gender or anything else.”

In keeping with the new approach, teachers at the nurseries have reportedly also changed the ending of Humpty Dumpty so as not to upset the children and dropped the seven dwarfs from the title of Snow White.

A spokesman for Ofsted, the watchdog which inspects Sure Start centres, confirmed that centres are expected to “have regard to anti-discrimination good practice” and that staff should “actively promote equality of opportunity”.

Gervase Duffield, a Conservative district councillor representing Sutton Courtenay and Appleford, denounced the ban as ridiculous. “It’s the sort of thing that people continually do nowadays — it’s become something of a curse,” he said. “Why do people waste time and money doing this sort of thing when there are far more important things to think about when it comes to educating our children?”

A mother whose daughter attends the Sure Start nursery at the Family Centre in Abingdon, who did not want to be named, said parents had been astonished by the change. “Baa Baa, Black Sheep has been one of the most well-known nursery rhymes for generations. For people to come along and fiddle with it is ridiculous. What on earth is a rainbow sheep anyway? “I’ve spoken to other parents about it and none of us has ever heard of anyone getting offended by the words ‘black sheep’.”

This is not the first time, however, that the nursery rhyme — written in 1744 satirising the taxes imposed on wool exports — has fallen foul of political correctness. In 2000 Birmingham City Council tried to ban the rhyme, after claiming that it was racist and portrayed negative stereotypes. The council rescinded the ban after black parents said it was ludicrous. Last year, a nursery school in Aberdeen caused uproar, when teachers changed the lyrics to “Baa baa, happy sheep”. Margaret Morrissey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teachers Association, said: “It’s really sad. Children for generations have loved and enjoyed nursery rhymes and it’s very sad if adult political correctness doesn’t allow them to grow up in an unbiased world.”

A DfES spokesperson said: “We don’t support this approach to the teaching of traditional nursery rhymes, but any such decision would be taken locally.”

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