Classroom & Courtroom Correctness

The coffin of freedom had two giant nails hammered into it last week. One was the official demise of objective justice in New Zealand, with the acceptance by a High Court judge of witchdoctery as an excuse for crime; the other was the heralding of an Iran-style theocracy with the Prime Minister's advocacy of witchdoctery in state classrooms.

For a justice system to be just, two things, at minimum, are necessary. Its proscriptions & strictures must be universal — i.e. they must apply to all citizens equally, regardless of such irrelevancies as skin colour, cultural background or any of the other boring, unimportant distinctions among people which excite the Politically Correct to orgasm; and it must be objective — i.e. it must be concerned with facts, not subjective beliefs. A crime must be treated as a crime regardless of the religion or ideology of the person who commits it. Murder must be deemed to be murder whether its perpetrator is a Christian, a Muslim, a Moon-Worshipper or an atheist. Adherence to a belief system — and its attendant customs — must not be accepted as an excuse for committing a crime, nor as a mitigating factor in the sentencing for that crime. Last week, however, Justice Morris said he accepted unreservedly that a man who shoved a crucifix up someone else's nose & nearly killed her thought he was under a Maori curse, and that this absolved him from the punishment that would be visited upon anyone else who did the same thing. In that one reprehensible act of judicial treason, Justice Morris threw objectivity out of the nation's courtrooms. He betrayed a fundamental tenet of the justice system, and opened the floodgates to a torrent of subjectively-justified abdications of personal responsibility.

As an astute letter-writer to the Herald observed: "I have always blamed my Irish grandmother for the naughty things I've done during my life. I now realise I owe her a thousand apologies; a leprechaun was responsible every time. If I should be unlucky enough to appear before Justice Morris, I know he will accept my evidence unreservedly in view of my personal beliefs and will see the leprechaun as being the responsible party."

Freedom requires the rule of law. Justice Morris has served notice that the law counts for nothing; it can be overturned by blatant nonsense, if the nonsense is of the "correct" racial origin. Justice Morris should be removed from the bench forthwith.

And what did the Prime Minister have to say about this rampant Political Correctness in the courtroom? Absolutely zilch, zero, nothing. She was too busy advocating it for the classroom! She was too busy applauding Maori schools for teaching precisely this brand of Politically Correct hocus-pocus, and announcing that she wants her own brand — Christianity — reintroduced into mainstream schools!

As a libertarian I say, privatise all education & let religious parents patronise religious schools if they wish. But while we have state schools, there can be few things more dangerous than allowing religious indoctrination into their curricula. For one thing, it is the prerogative of parents, not the state, to determine their children's "spiritual" upbringing; for another, the idea that right conduct can be instilled only by religious instruction, given religion's idiotic content & appalling history, is ludicrous & downright disgusting.

This is not yet the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, or John Calvin's Geneva, or Plato's hideous totalitarian Republic which propagates "noble lies" in order to make people "good." It is not yet Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia where the state likewise took total control of children's spiritual development. Not yet. But we're closer to such abominations than you might think. The combination of an avowedly subjectivist "justice" system & state-mandated religious indoctrination will assuredly, eventually, take us over the edge of the totalitarian abyss.

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