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

[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. . .