today i give a hearty "fuck you"

[piranha]

1. to the orangemen who've been rioting in ulster. were you dispossessed, homeless, or starving? were you marched into refugee camps, denied freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and oppressed by the world? naw. you just went nuts because your march got rerouted around a catholic area, so you couldn't rub their faces in your presence the way you like.

i think your atavistic order should be dismantled. there is no room for you damn bigots in this modern world. i am tired of phony christians like you. grow up, or kill yourselves -- i'm sure your god can't wait to do some judging. enough of the killing of other people already.

2. to those moslems who want to push ontario (and other parts of canada) into allowing us to let them use sharia as legally binding law on other moslems, especially woman, of course. guess what? NO. sharia is not compatible with canada. tt is not appropriate for the state to validate, encourage, or finance faith-based law. this is a country with equal justice for all, in which the rights of the individual are supreme. go and live in a moslem country if you can't stand that. the equivalent goes for jews and christians, and anyone else who thinks their religion should get special decision powers. NO. i am all for scrapping the arbitration act -- i like the separation of church and state, and if anything, i want to see more of it.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

As a Jew, I would want exactly ONE binding legal power for Jewish courts. And that is the right to make a Jewish man grant his ex-wife a Jewish divorce after a civil divorce.

I'd want to make sure that Jewish organizations could also have trademark protection for their own distinctive kosher symbols, but that's allowing religious organizations to use existing, normal civil rights, which nobody has a problem with.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

binding legal under canadian civil law, or under jewish religious law? i simply do not want any intermingling of religious and civil courts; if those religious courts do something in parallel (or make decisions over things civil courts don't consider at all), that's fine by me. as far as i care people can get married and divorced solely religiously; but as soon as they involved the state by conducting a civil marriage, i want them to handle divorce and custody also under civil law.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The problem is:

For various historical reasons, divorce and remarriage are asymetric in Jewish law. This is, frankly, the single largest problem in Judaism today. It's a big enough problem that solutions as radical as banning marriage entirely are being floated and considered. Okay, that particular proposal was pretty much a longshot, but that shows the severity of the problem.

The thing is: a man can get remarried without a proper divorce. A woman can't. A man is forbidden from doing so by rabbinic law, but rabbis can only impose civil penalties for violations of rabbinic law, and so, if he ignores the rabbinic decree, there's jack shit they can do about it.

Hiring thugs and Mafia to threaten and beat recalcitrant husbands is only a stopgap measure.

A law that stated that, in cases of civil divorce, if either party wanted it and the religion in question granted it, the parties must also pursue a religious divorce would solve that.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm going to back off of that, and narrow it further.

I'd like it to be possible for people to sign a prenuptual agreement that stated that, if there was a divorce, that they would also get a religious divorce.

Courts in the United States have refused to count such contracts as binding, precisely for the reasons you'd expect: that is using civil courts to force people to take a religious action, and the courts in the US have, in some juristictions, decided that that was a mixing of church and state.

And I truly do respect that logic.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

ah, i see; thanks for explaining. yes, now i remember that unequalness about divorce. i think i would take the same stand on that as those US jurisdiction you mention: it would get civil courts involved in religious rights. and that's probably untenable for a lot of religous people as well.

i figure it's up to jewish law to deal with this problem itself, and people who want this changed need to put pressure on religious authorities. maybe jewish law could come recognise such a prenuptial agreement.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

no, really -- i can reade and righte the english veddy veddy vell.

[redbird]

I don't know if this stood up in the (civil) courts, but the New York legislature's solution was to include in the divorce law a requirement that, in order to get a civil divorce, both parties must testify in court that they had removed any impediment to the other person's remarrying. I'm not sure of the exact phrasing. It doesn't explicitly mention religion, but it means that if the couple were married under Jewish law, the man has to issue a get before the civil divorce can be final.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

That would work in my mind. It seems, at least at first glance, to solve the problem I'm talking about without entangling church and state.

[liv]

Random data point, cos I'm a Jewish IP geek: in the UK, the hechsher, the mark which indicates food is kosher, does have the status of a trademark. More than that, it has the special status of a mark of quality, with the appropriate legal protections which don't apply to more run-of-the-mill trademarks. I'm not sure how I feel about this; to an extent, the civil legislature is basically acting to enforce an aspect of Jewish law, namely kashrut. And it's not theoretical, there's case law on this issue.

As for the agunah (unequal divorce) issue, I would be very concerned about the secular state getting involved in that. There's something to be said for the court enforcing a pre-nup, but that's at the level of the state enforcing contracts, rather than getting involved in religious issues directly.

I'm not American so I don't have a knee-jerk reaction about separation of religion from government. But even so, I really don't think it would benefit the Jewish community as a whole to have this kind of thing enshrined in civil law.

[djm4]

I'm not sure how I feel about this; to an extent, the civil legislature is basically acting to enforce an aspect of Jewish law, namely kashrut

It's enforcing correct advertising, which surely is a good thing. It's not saying 'you should only eat kosher food', but rather 'if it's important to you to eat only kosher food, this is certified kosher'.

[liv]

It's enforcing correct advertising, which surely is a good thing.
In general principle, yes, and I think that's the basis by which this ended up being the legal situation. The trouble is, whether or not a kosher seal counts as correct advertising can only be decided in terms of whether or not the food in question is kosher. Thus the secular courts may (and in fact have, in the past) end up deciding whether a given food is or isn't kosher. This is bad in that the courts are poskening on a matter of Jewish law, which is not how Jewish law is supposed to work!

I think it's also bad from the point of civil liberties. When the court makes a decision about whether food is kosher, they are enforcing a particular interpretation of kashrut. That means that one particular approach to the issue gets state support, to the exclusion of others (for example, the courts found in favour of the London kashrut board over the Manchester one). Now, for the majority who don't care about keeping kosher at all, this isn't an issue. But for anyone who does, the state is interfering in their religious practice in a way I would argue the state shouldn't.

[djm4]

Yes, point taken.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

See, I don't want a civil court to determine whether a particular mark is or is not a valid hecksher. All I want them to do is to determine that only a specific organization can put a specific mark on something. If someone wants to market "Bob's Kosher Pork Rinds -- Certified By My Dad" -- I'm fine with that. I just don't want them to be allowed to put a mark on that looks like any specific mark that a kashrut certification organization uses. If they want to make up their own hecksher mark (maybe a pig in a Jewish star?) that's cool by me. I'm fine with taking responsibility for remembering that the "pig" mark isn't really a valid hecksher. . .

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

:::three cheers:::

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

i think your atavistic order should be dismantled.

fwiw, the Orange Order in Montreal had a big fuss covered in the Gazette the year before last, about how the Orange Order in NI are dragging the organisation into disrepute, and why do they have to make the Glorious Twelfth an occasion for sectarian violence rather than an excuse to party ? With that example to hand I'm disinclined to see dismantling as the answer.

a quote from Rushdie

[novazembla.livejournal.com]

Salman Rushdie: I think the Canadian idea of allowing in the Sharia is very, very dumb indeed. India has been plagued by the existence of a parallel civil code for Muslims, which essentially delivers women into the power of the mullahs.

@%<