Posted on 03/22/2012 12:56:37 PM PDT by Morgana
Necessity in Canadian Law (link)
On the other hand, many decent and upright peole have been imprisoned wrongly, but used the opportunity for prison ministry. I wouldn't be surprised if Mary Wagner did the same.
In Canada it is not against the law to trespass to save someone's life. Check this out:
In no case in the NT --- as far as I can recall --- does a believer have any role in the government in the sense of voter, elected represenmtative, or ruler. However it is not forbidden for Christians to take part in government(although perhaps the Amish think otherwise).
That being said, "insinuating onself into the pagan practices of the day" is certainly proper for just governments if the pagan practices involve human sacrifice; and I would argue that it can be proper not only for just governments to interfere, but also for just individuals to do so.
I recall that in the NT (Acts 16:16-2) Paul cast a demon out of a slave girl, thus depriving her owners of the chance to make money from her prophesying, and as a result Paul and Silas were arrested, beaten, and imprisoned.
They evidently interfered with the practice of profiting off of vulnerable deluded girls. Maybe there's an analogy here somewhere with that abortion clinic waiting room.
If (in the hypothetical), the atheist person has just walked into the church entry area and is talking to people, beating them up is a disaproportionate response. If the atheist became seriously annoying and refused to leave, physical removal via the police could be reasonable; if the atheist went further and were practicing force, threa tof force, fraud, etc. stronger measures than just physical removal might be justified (i.e. arrest).
But beating, imprisoning someone, etc. just for entering the church building and engaging in conversation? That's neither justice nor mercy.
But since the law doesn't recognize the unborn baby as a person, it seemingly follows that legally there is no "another" to defend and so those defenses don't apply. (Please understand that I'm addressing only the legal issue - morally and ethically, the unborn baby IS a human person, abortion IS wrong and OUGHT to be stopped, and it is morally and ethically praiseworthy to practice civil disobedience in defense of unborn persons.)
I understand that the principle of necessity defense can be applied even when the otherwise-illegal action was intended to defend a substantial value other than a human life, e.g. to protect a million dollar lottery ticket, a Stradivarius violin, a valuable art collection, an important document, or a prized dog. Am I (legally) correct on that point?
Under the (7-2) SCOTUS decision in Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1850s), blacks were deemed not to have standing to sue in the courts of the United States because they were not citizens, that no black slave or free ever had been a citizen nor ever could become a citizen even if freed or free-born and that Congress has no authority to prohibit slavery in northern states under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. That embarrassment of a SCOTUS decision (rivaled only by Herod Blackmun's Roe vs. Wade) was effectively reversed by the outcome of the War Between the States and by the enactment of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
The Dred Scott decision thus had attempted to irrationally define out of the human race those persons of black African ancestry. Roe vs. Wade attempted to define out of the human race or even out of personhood preborn human beings. Read the Herod Blackmun decision some time in full for his concession that his infamous decision could not stand if the personhood of the pre-born were ever recognized. I have never in my life felt that abortion was morally tolerable but the Roe vs. Wade decision itself convinced me that it was not legally tolerable or even rational. I was in law school at the time and had favored abortion being declared legal since I was then a libertarian. I was eager to see what rationale the geniuses of SCOTUS had found (that I could not as a mere law student have found and had not found) to justify legalizing abortion. Upon reading the decision, I realized that there was no such rationale or rationalization, abandoned any further ambiguity and have fought abortion ever since. Abortion, as crammed down the nation's throat by Roe vs. Wade, is simply mass murder under color of law.
While Roe vs. Wade is not directly involved in the complicity of the dishonorable Canadian judge and his like-minded colleagues in mass murder, the symptoms in Canada are as they are here. A lot of dead babies who, whatever the rationalizations of these enemies of Western Civilization and of mankind, were human beings, persons and entitled to live and to be protected by law from being murdered.
Well after the late unpleasantness between the states, SCOTUS again humiliated itself and our nation by handing down the (7-1) decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896 which decided in favor of the "legality" of racially motivated Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation by the states in spite of the plain language of the 14th Amendment Equal Protection clause. Segregation continued to be allowable under "the law of the land" until Plessy vs. Ferguson was overturned by SCOTUS itself in the unanimous 1954 decision in Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, KS, outlawing segregation by the states and their subsidiaries in compliance with the 14th Amendment.
The Nazis defined Jews out of the human race and acted accordingly just as Herod Blackmun and six of his SCOTUS colleagues and untold numbers of judges, Canadian and American, defined the pre-born out of the human race and even out of the status of persons and acted accordingly to allow and even encourage their mass murder. In neither case were we obliged morally to submit to such absurdity as though it were reality. Common sense, rationality and objective truth ought not be trumped by subjective and usually self-serving crimes of tyrants. Blackmun's crime will not stand. It is not a matter of whether but a matter of when it will be crushed.
I understand that you are addressing only the legal issue and that you do not favor abortion, but, unless and until we actively resist this holocaust (which is said to have killed 54 million in the USA since 1973 by surgical abortion alone) and, as necessary, the government that perpetrates it, the slaughter will continue. Ms. Wagner has taken her stand on behalf of the babies and on behalf of civilized people everywhere. She is willing to defy the judge to his face leading to her incarceration rather than take the easy (probation) way out. She has therefore denied to the court the submission of herself and of the babies to the law's delusions.
In his famous essay on Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau recounted his story of being jailed for refusal to pay some local tax in protest of slavery (in the 1840s). The story is also told elsewhere of how his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him at the jail and urged him to pay his fine, asking Thoreau: "What are you doing in there?" Thoreau's answer was "Ralph, what are you doing out there? Emerson was as abolitionist as Thoreau but Thoreau was willing to translate his ideals into action. Therein lies Thoreau's moral advantage over Emerson and over the government that jailed him. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a similar vein wrote his Letter from the Birmingham, Alabama Jail. It is well worth reading. letter from the
MRS. DON-O:
I am not aware of a specific decision in which necessity might have been used to protect property but I can speculate. If one parked his car (even legally) and had a conceded right not to suffer trespass by someone breaking its windows, but a nearby fire made it necessary for firemen to break those windows to accommodate a fire hose, I would imagine that necessity might well be invoked even if the fire threatened only property.
Likewise, it would be ordinarily unlawful to trespass upon railroad tracks, necessity should relieve firemen from liability for necessarily placing a fire hose over the tracks. Notice should be given to the railroad to prevent catastrophe by derailment. If it were simply a matter of saving an unoccupied mansion on the hill but by means which necessarily threatened a passenger train derailment, this example would not suffice. At the very least, there must be a balancing of the possible harms resulting from acting or not acting. OTOH, if it were necessary to break the car windows to protect the unoccupied mansion on the hill, subject to civil reimbursement of the car owner, the firemen should be protected by necessity defense of any criminal charge.
Your question is a challenging one.
To each of you: God bless you and yours.
Certaibnly if their intent was not to steal the animls in order to enrich themselves, they wouldn't be prosecuted, or at least they wouldn't be convicted, would they?
BlackElk, I do not understand why being libertarian requires being pro-abortion. The principle of not violating the rights of others precludes a “right” to kill children, born or unborn, since they are “others” with their own right to life. Even if one arbitrarily excludes the rights of the child, his or her father also has rights which are violated by the abortion license.
Certaibnly if their intent was not to steal the animls in order to enrich themselves, they wouldn't be prosecuted, or at least they wouldn't be convicted, would they?
You are absolutely right about genuine libertarianism since abortion is certainly the initiation of unwarranted force against another. Try and convince most libertarians, however. I also knew tow atheist libertarians, Doris Gordon of Maryland and the late John Walker of Rhode Island who were fighting nobly the lonely fight to pursue pro-life from a libertarian perspective as Libertarians for Life. I knew John Walker more extensively and he had been blessed with a formidable mind in spite of his atheism. Doris was a treasure of a human being, although. if she is still living, she must be incredibly old by now.
I was not present at another case in which a young man who was not a matinee idol nor apparently very affluent had impregnated a girlfriend who was determined to abort their child. He actually filed suit, offering to take as much custody as the girlfriend would give him, to pay every nickel of support for the child but asking that she be enjoined from aborting the child. The case came before a friend who was a judge. He was a generally left-wing secular Jewish man but a verrry scrupulously fair judge. He allowed a full trial and ruled in favor of the mother on the basis of Roe vs. Wade but he told the press that they could meet him on the front steps of the court house to hear the rest of his views. He effectively held a press conference in which he expressed his absolute regret that, in his view, he had to rule against the dad because of his judicial oath and because of Roe vs. Wade, expressed his great admiration for the father as a man and as a father, and how little regard he had for the mother in her decision to abort. The judge (I will call him Judge A) died some years ago of cancer. He was also treated quite badly by the judicial system. Please keep in your prayers the cause of his salvation. If salvation could be earned, he would have earned it and I do pray and dare hope that he is with our Heavenly Father.
You may well be right and I certainly hope so.
You may well be right and I certainly hope so.
The ultimate test of faith isn't when a gun is placed against your head and you're told "Renounce Jesus or die." The ultimate test is when a gun is placed against your child's head and you're told "Renounce Jesus or he/she dies."
I do indeed see the Philosophical difference. Here’s a different take.
Here on FR a number of people believe birth control pills kill the unborn and are essentially no different than an abortion. If you believe it is “murder” and you find out that a neighbor is using the bill, is it okay to go into their house uninvited, sit on their bed, and try to talk them out of it?
But that's as much as I'd want to say about this hypothetical example.
If I were a pharmacist, it would be a violation of my professional and ethical judgment to sell indisputably lethal pills, and I woldn't do so. So there's another approach.
It is reasonable to think that a little last-minute coversation could persuade a woman in an abortionist's waiting room to decide not to kill he baby. Eleventh-hour turn-arounds like this, even after the at-risk mom is actually in the procedure room, happen more often that you might suppose, including women already prepped and in the lithotomy position getting up off the table and saying "I changed my mind."
I read about this happening just days ago: the boyfriend went into the clinic and persuaded the girl to spare their baby.
So I think going into a clinic and offering kind and earnest words, would be more reasonable than any of the hypotheticals offered by you and others on this thread.
Reasonable chance of success would a morally relevant factor.
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