No matter the sovereignty of Great Britain. In fact, no matter rationality or justice or the rule of law. The EU court has spoken. And its decision is that the U.K. must start giving the vote to all otherwise "qualified" prison inmates or start paying the EU millions of pounds in penalties.The members of Parliament are resisting this unconscionable and foolish act of tyranny. They've voted 234 votes to just 22. But even so, it looks like English law will end up surrendering, at least in some degree -- and maybe altogether -- to the new rulers in Luxembourg.
Goodbye, democracy. You had a nice run.
Susan Easton's column in the Guardian about this matter goes under the headline, "Opposition to prisoner voting rights stems from hostility towards inmates." Well, I would doubt anyone would contest that. After all, people go to prison for committing dramatically uncivil things. It is only natural (and I would argue morally correct) to feel hostility towards criminals.
But Ms. Easton, a fan of the EU decision, goes further. She equates prisoners being denied the vote with physically torturing them!
And she's not alone. There are others willing to surrender Britain's traditions and moral standards, the requirements of personal responsibility and, yes, common sense. One is Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrat's backbench spokesperson on home affairs. He also likes the EU court order. And he too goes to the absurd extreme of suggesting that denying a prisoner the right to vote (Britain's practice for more than a century) will lead to physical torture.
"Once we start picking and choosing the laws should apply, and those we believe we can disregard, where does it end?" The Americans know - in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib."
But the Brits clamoring that their country cave-in to the EU on this bizarre order are not limited to leftist politicians and journalists. They even include the Archbishop of Canterbury. The reverend leader of the Church of England, Dr. Rowan Williams, is also backing the cause -- a cause created initially by an axe murderer who "took his case" to the European court. It seems that the Archbishop doesn't like England's current approach to crime because it creates two victims; that is, the human being whose life has been hacked away by an axe...and the poor murderer who must suffer his vote being taken away.
Insanity, you say? The Bookworm fully agrees with you.
The Archbishopric of Canterbury used to be a pretty important job. The guy who held that position, going back to the earliest Middle Ages, was the premier leader of the English church, whether that church gave allegiance to Rome or the British Monarch. The current Archbishop, Rowan Williams is, as best as I can tell, insane.
A few years ago, he made a place for himself on the radar by supporting sharia law which is (a) anti-Christian and (b) antithetical to Western notions of human rights. I don’t need to tell any of you that, under sharia law, Christians and Jews, if they are allowed to live, are second class citizens; women are prisoners of men and can be beaten or murdered with impunity; homosexuals are routinely murdered by the State; and the whole theocratic tyrannical institution seeks world domination.
Williams’ apparent comfort with the idea of creating a vast prison for the entire world population may stem from the fact that his view of prisoners is, to say the least, unique. He thinks that even the worst of them should be entitled to the full panoply of rights, including the right to vote. Yes, this is true. The Archbishop of Canterbury would be comfortable giving, say, Charles Manson or the Yorkshire Ripper a voice in electing government officials, determining government spending, creating laws controlling citizens, etc:
That the lunatics who have taken over the EU asylum would like to perpetuate their power by giving the vote to those who have, through their conduct, blatantly violated the social compact is, sadly, understandable. What’s so deeply disturbing here is that it is the Archbishop of Canterbury who has slipped his moorings and is advocating the same inversion of morality and decency. This is the man, after all, who is supposed to stand for the highest Christian traditions — traditions that include respect for the sanctity of life and law. For him to treat an axe murderer in precisely the same way he treats the shopkeeper on the street corner is a travesty of the notions of grace, decency and ethics.
(Hat tip: Blogs Lucianne Loves)
