Britain protects gross sexual deviants

Or is it a determination to hide gross bureaucratic bungling?

The findings of an inquiry into why a convicted murderer freed from prison was able to abduct and rape a ten-year-old boy will remain secret because its publication would infringe the killer's right to privacy. The Parole Board cites the Data Protection Act to justify its refusal to make public the findings of an internal review into its 2005 decision to free Stephen Ayre.

A separate internal inquiry was conducted by the Probation Service into its supervision of Ayre after his release. It was sent to the Home Office and also remains private. Ayre, 45, was jailed for life in 1985 for bludgeoning Irene Hudson, 25, to death with an iron bar. She had a mental age of 13. He was given a minimum tariff of 14 years. His first four attempts to gain parole were rejected and he had served 20 years in prison before he was finally released, with the approval of a parole panel, in April 2005.

Ayre spent the next six months in a Probation Service hostel before he was allowed to move into rented accommodation in Shipley, West Yorkshire, in October 2005. He was still being monitored by the service. Four months later, in February last year, he lured a ten-year-old boy to his flat, promising to give him a BMX bicycle. He threatened to slash the terrified child's throat before raping him.

Ayre admitted abduction and rape and was told by a judge that he would spend the rest of his life behind bars. Mr Justice Tugendhat told him that it was not the court's role to establish "how you were free to commit these . . . very serious offences", but added that "the family and the public will be concerned about certain aspects of this case".

After the hearing, West Yorkshire Probation Service announced that it had ordered an internal inquiry into its role "as a matter of urgency". The Parole Board also referred the case to its review committee to establish what lessons could be learned. The Parole Board revealed yesterday that although its review had been completed, its findings would remain private for fear of breaching Ayre's right to confidentiality under the Data Protection Act. A Parole Board spokesman said that it had wanted to make its report public but had received legal advice to the contrary. "We took legal opinion on this because we would like to put more information into the public domain. We want a more transparent and open process," he said. "The advice we got was that you can't publish anything that relates to individual prisoners because of the Data Protection Act."

The only information that the Parole Board has made public relates to "organisational findings" that do not affect Ayre's right to privacy. These include the need, in future, to ensure that no important information is missing from the dossier considered by the parole panel before it decides whether or not a prisoner should be released. No indication is given of what key information was missing from the dossier prepared by the prison and probation services in Ayre's case.

Maxine Myatt, director of interventions for West Yorkshire Probation Service, said last night that its internal review of the case had been conducted "rigorously and objectively". The report was sent to the Home Office and the review's recommendations had been swiftly implemented.

Philip Davies, the Conservative MP for Shipley, has fought unsuccessfully for the two reports to be made public. He claimed last night that the Data Protection Act was being used as an excuse to prevent the publication of potentially damning findings. "If it really is the case that this Act is preventing their publication, then the law should be changed to make sure that such reports can be made public," he said. "A convicted murderer was released from prison and raped a boy in my constituency. For the public to have confidence in the criminal justice system, they need to know what went wrong. "Until something changes, people are going to believe that the rules are there to protect the rights of convicted criminals and not those of the decent, law-abiding public."

Freed on licence:

Damien Hanson stabbed John Monckton to death at his Chelsea home. Had been released three months earlier after serving just six years for attempted murder

Anthony Rice a rapist on probation, killed Naomi Bryant, 40, nine months after being freed from a 16-year jail sentence

Peter Voisey sexually assaulted a six-year-old girl in North Tyneside while the subject of a multi-agency public protection arrangement. He had served two years for assaulting a 12-year-old girl

Yousef Bouhaddou stabbed Robert Symons to death in October 2004 after being let out weeks earlier

Adrian Thomas, Michael Johnson, Jamaile Morally and Indrit Krasniqi gang members on probation who raped, tortured and stabbed Mary-Ann Leneghan, 16, in 2005

Mark Goldstraw murdered three children and their stepfather in an arson attack in 2006, 18 months after jail release.

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Judicial Speech Code: Opposing a nominee for words he never said

Move over, Roe v. Wade. The latest liberal judicial litmus test is whether the nominee is willing to repudiate the phrase "homosexual lifestyle." Believe it or not, that's one of the two raps against Leslie Southwick, whose nomination for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals comes before the Senate Judiciary Committee today.

After more than five months of Democratic control, Ralph Neas, Nan Aron and other liberal activists are so desperate to prove their relevance that they will grasp at any allegation to put another trophy kill over their mantel. What happens to Judge Southwick's nomination may well preview the fate of other appeals-court nominees in the rest of President Bush's term.

We'll come to the specific charges against the judge in a moment, but first a word about his r‚sum‚. He is no Priscilla Owen or Janice Rogers Brown--prominent conservative jurists whose appellate nominations were filibustered by Democrats in previous Congresses. Judge Southwick has been a member of the Mississippi Court of Appeals since 1994, with time out for a military leave from 2004 to 2006, when he served in Iraq. His record is so uncontroversial that last fall the Judiciary Committee unanimously approved him for a district court judgeship. The year ended before the full Senate could vote on that nomination. But when Michael Wallace withdrew for the Fifth Circuit after Democratic objections, the White House nominated Judge Southwick as an act of bipartisan good faith.

So much for that. His nomination looked safe enough until two weeks ago, when liberal critics, having scoured his 7,000-plus rulings on the Mississippi appeals bench, uncovered two allegedly hanging offenses. Both were about words that the judge himself never uttered but were contained in decisions he joined--one involving homosexuals, the other race.

S.B. v. L.W. is a 2001 opinion upholding a lower court's ruling giving custody of a child to her father rather than her lesbian mother (on the basis of several factors, including the mother's conduct). Judge Southwick didn't write the ruling, but he joined the majority opinion, which used the phrase "homosexual lifestyle." Mr. Neas calls the language "troubling," and Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobbying group, says it "denigrates" their members and that Judge Southwick's statements to Judiciary suggest his positions have not "evolved," whatever that means.

The second case, Richmond v. Mississippi Department of Human Services, involves the "N" word. Judge Southwick is criticized for agreeing with the majority in a decision upholding the state employment agency's decision not to fire a woman who had used a racial slur in her workplace. The appeals court found that the agency acted reasonably, given that the woman had used the slur only once and the target of the slur had accepted her apology and not reported it. The Congressional Black Caucus says Judge Southwick's decision to join the Richmond opinion shows he has an "unacceptable record on race." It's more accurate to say this is reverse racism by association against any white nominee from Mississippi.

The flimsy pretext for stopping Judge Southwick suggests that the judicial left has decided to browbeat Democrats into blocking nearly all Bush appellate nominees. They're hoping to retake the White House in 2008 and want everyone to forget that the current President still has 19 months in office. Only three Bush appointees have been approved this year, and there are currently five nominees for 13 vacancies. At this pace, the confirmation rate won't come close to the 15 appeals-court nominees approved by a GOP Senate during Bill Clinton's last two years.

Judiciary Democrats aren't saying how they'll vote today, but Republicans believe they have the votes to confirm if Judge Southwick's nomination gets to the Senate floor. If the judge loses--or if he's approved in committee and then denied an up-or-down vote on the floor--you'll know Ralph Neas is running the confirmation asylum.

Source



HOLSINGER UPDATE

Post lifted from Taranto. See the original for links

Yesterday we noted that President Bush's nominee for surgeon general, James Holsinger, is under attack for a 1991 paper in which he observed that the sexes are "fully complementary" and that some forms of male homosexual activity are considerably more dangerous than ordinary intercourse.

The Associated Press reports that Holsinger's detractors are also complaining about his religious activities:

"Holsinger has come under fire from gay rights groups for voting to expel a lesbian pastor from the United Methodist Church. . . . Also, Holsinger helped found a Methodist congregation that, according to gay rights activists, believes homosexuality is a matter of choice and can be "cured."

As president of the Methodist Church's national Judicial Council, Holsinger voted last year to support a pastor who blocked a gay man from joining a congregation. In 2004, he voted to expel a lesbian from the clergy. The majority of the panel voted to keep the lesbian associate pastor in place, citing questions about whether she had openly declared her homosexuality, but Holsinger dissented. . . .

As for the congregation Holsinger helped establish, Hope Springs Community Church, the Rev. David Calhoun told the Lexington Herald-Leader last week that the Lexington church helps some gay members to "walk out of that lifestyle."

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which is opposing the nomination along with the Human Rights Campaign and other local and national groups, calls such a practice "nothing short of torture" for gays.

This is an attack not only on Holsinger but also on the U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, which means that the government has no business dictating its moral preferences to the United Methodist Church. That same First Amendment protects all congregants who find the Hope Springs approach objectionable. They are free to follow their conscience, or to find another congregation, denomination or religion.

U.S. senators, however, are bound by the Constitution, which stipulates in Article VI that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." Any senator who votes against Holsinger's confirmation because of his church activity is defying the Constitution (although there is probably no way to hold such a senator to account apart from the ballot box).

Finally, take note of that quote, which comes from a statement by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, that so-called reparative therapy is "nothing short of torture." This may shed light on some of the hysterical claims about the treatment of terrorists at Guantanamo. After all, if voluntary counseling is "torture," then pretty much everything is.



Australia: His Eminence upholds Catholic orthodoxy without fear or favour

He is wise to do so. It is the wishy-washy churches that have empty pews



Comment below by Christopher Pearson

It should have come as no surprise to anyone last week when George Pell [Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney] announced he would ask principals in Sydney's Catholic schools and teachers in charge of religious instruction in his diocese to affirm their loyalty to Catholic doctrine. He wants them to swear an oath of fidelity to what the church teaches, with specific reference to various issues of sexual morality and an exclusively male priesthood. But the theological modernists who've long ruled the roost in Sydney were appalled at the idea of a bishop taking orthodoxy seriously and expecting the people responsible for the formation of young Catholics to do likewise.

They voiced their indignation in the secular media and fringe Catholic magazines, as modernists and ultra-liberals have been doing since the Second Vatican Council. However, on this issue the boat-rocking exercises met with limited success. I expect most non-Catholics don't much care one way or the other and there's also a matter-of-fact general acceptance that every club has its rules and members in good standing abide by them.

Later in the week, Pell put himself in the line of fire a second time by issuing a statement about embryonic stem cell research, on behalf of the Catholic bishops of NSW. It was essentially a collegial response to contentious legislation rushed into the NSW parliament. But it was also another pretext for the cardinal's clerical detractors, The Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC to brand him as an authoritarian zealot.

Sydney's Anglican Archbishop Phillip Jensen condemned the bill just as forcefully as Pell did. The research the bill was designed to give licence to was compared to the unethical developments of Nazi scientific experiments. He also warned that, if passed, the bill would "enshrine in law the corrupt view that the embryos used are not morally significant or important". Despite that, Jensen was left unscathed, on this occasion at least, and almost all the media attention was on the cardinal.

The statement Pell had issued was unobjectionable. "No Catholic politician, indeed no Christian or person with respect for human life, who has properly informed his conscience about the facts and ethics in this area, should vote in favour of this immoral legislation."

One of the main responsibilities of bishops is to teach their people precisely so they can develop their individual consciences, informed by sound doctrine rather than in a moral vacuum. There is an even weightier responsibility when telling Catholic politicians, who have to vote on contentious moral issues, what the church's position is. This is especially the case, as was obvious last week, when they are ignorant and not very observant Catholics, indifferent to the church's teachings when they are politically inconvenient.

No Catholic theologian of any consequence has argued in favour of human embryo cloning, or creating embryos with three or more genetic parents, or creating human-animal hybrids for testing purposes. Although these procedures raise new issues, in the sense the science itself is new, they are experiments that contravene fundamental tenets regarding human procreation. No consequentialist argument, based on possible miracle cures down the track, could trump first principles.

Pell tells me that when The Sydney Morning Herald's Linda Morris attended his press conference, she had given advance notice of two questions on the subject of excommunication. He told the press, as she duly reported the next day, that he wasn't threatening Catholic politicians who chose to support the bill with excommunication. But he did say there would be "consequences in the life of the church" for those who voted for the legislation.

Consequences short of excommunication were once widely understood, both by Catholics and most religiously literate adults. They ranged from the risk of disapproval from other people in the pew and earnest entreaties to think things over by the clergy to stern words from your confessor, if you availed yourself of the sacrament of penance. He might withhold absolution until there was some sign of contrition or even advise against going to communion until you had acknowledged the error of your ways. Such consequences, which these days would perhaps weigh only on a delicate conscience but still reflect the seriousness of the offence, fall a long way short of medieval declarations of anathema, with bell, book and candle, as the saying goes.

There has recently been a lot of (mostly ill-informed) media hype on the issue of excommunication. Raymond Burke, Archbishop of St Louis in the US, caused a great stir when he said he would refuse the sacrament to Catholic pro-choice Democratic candidate John Kerry in the lead-up to the previous presidential election.

On the plane to Brazil, Pope Benedict XVI told an interviewer that, in some cases where people were directly involved in assisting at an abortion, they automatically excommunicated themselves. This was the case in a technical sense, known as latae sententiae, whether or not the church formalised the matter by announcing it.

Voting in support of cloning is a serious matter, although not in the same grave category as participating in an abortion. Still, it is hard to imagine how any of the notionally Catholic MPs, of whatever party, who voted in favour of the bill could imagine themselves as being in good standing in their membership of the church. For all that, press speculation about possible excommunication combined with Pell's warning of lesser consequences had them waxing righteously indignant about threats and "bully-boy tactics".

NSW Premier Morris Iemma said he "wouldn't take kindly to being denied communion", as though it were a simple matter of entitlement. His deputy John Watkins said he was "a bit mystified by the authoritarian view" put by the cardinal. Frank Sartor, the NSW Planning Minister, went one better and described Pell's comments as "reminiscent of the Dark Ages".

Federal Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey decided to buy into the argument, even though it was a state issue. He offered, for all the world as though he'd given the matter great thought, the line: "I don't object to Pell expressing that opinion, but I do object to any suggestion that there are consequences."

As the cardinal noted in an article on Friday in The Sydney Morning Herald, actions do have consequences, as any politician who crosses the floor soon finds out. I was heartened to see NSW Liberal leader Barry O'Farrell undertook to consider what Pell had said and refrained from grandstanding. The Nationals' Adrian Piccoli couldn't resist boasting: "I would like to see them try and stop me taking communion."

NSW Emergency Services Minister Nathan Rees made the silliest contribution so far from a serving politician. He objected to what he called Pell's "emotional blackmail", saying: "The hypocrisy is world class. No government would seek to influence church teaching when providing taxpayer funds for the refurbishment of St Mary's Cathedral or the education of Catholic school children or to subsidise rates exemptions for churches." He also raised the possibility of referring the cardinal's remarks to the house's privileges committee: "I consider Cardinal Pell's incursion a clear and arguably contemptuous incursion into deliberations of the elected members of the parliament."

The debate hasn't reflected much credit on many of the Catholic politicians in the NSW parliament. Nor does it show the quality of instruction they received in church or in Catholic schools in a flattering light. It's clear many of them don't know the first thing about what their church teaches on life issues and don't regard themselves as being under any obligation to take notice when it's pointed out to them. They have a convenient and strangely Protestant notion of the sovereignty of conscience - shared, it seems, by Jesuit priest and academic Frank Brennan - and somehow imagine "everyone's entitled to their own opinion" in matters of faith and morals. There is a theological term for this. It's called "a condition of invincible ignorance".

When I spoke with Pell in the middle of the brouhaha, he sounded a bit saddened but not at all surprised by the turn the debate had taken. "All this talk of excommunication is a distraction from the main issues. No amount of political bluster will change the fact that this bill is an assault on human life, for gains which are so far nonexistent. Everyone claims to believe in the sanctity of human life. We really mean it."

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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