Guatay Christian Fellowship Update

The GCF is still technically under cease and desist orders from the County for practicing their 1st amendment right to peaceably assemble and worship as the building in which the 50-member GCF congregates is zoned for a bar instead of a church and knowing that is certainly a disastrous tactic by which to attack the Fellowship, it appears the County has resorted to harrassment in the form of site inspections, instead.

(For some background on this whole fiasco, click here)

The church resumed services at the building Aug. 10, but four days later a county inspection found unsafe wiring and lighting, an improperly installed furnace and water heater and an unsafe doorway, according to a letter to the church from Senior Deputy County Counsel Eliot Alazraki. Those violations, and many others, create fire and safety hazards, Alazraki said.

My god… not an unsafe doorway!

Church attorney Peter Lepiscopo said he believed the county used “heavy-handed tactics”

The church has been meeting at members' homes since the county inspection. Pastor Stan Peterson said he did not believe the violations were major and hoped to return to the building within a month or so

In our line of work, what the County is finding is akin to “underway restrictives” which if looked for long and hard enough, one will find.

Pastor Stan advised the congregation two Sundays ago when we were out there to not get angry at the County… “….they aren’t stupid, they just do stupid stuff sometimes”.

We respect the admonition but its becoming more and more difficult to bestow any grace upon the County when they have had ample opportunity to pull their head out of their ass and politely drop the whole matter but rather continue to fight a petty and nettlesome rear-guard action when they know they don’t have a legal, ethical or common sensical leg upon which to stand.

Hey, Eliot Alazraki... Yeah, Johnny's on the phone... he says, "hi"

Story here

Catchin' up with Ezra

A happy (?) ending to yet another example of bureaucratic thuggery was achieved yesterday as the Alberta Human Rights Commission dismissed the complaint of discrimination filed against Ezra Levant by the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities for reprinting the Danish cartoons of Mohammed some 2-1/2 years ago.

Whew…. There was a lot of time spent by some very diligent civil servants in determining whether or not Levant had actually committed any crimes and Levant himself shelled-out some coin to defend himself against this and other lawsuits against him that are still in progress…. so you would think Levant would be pretty happy, no?

Not quite.

Pardeep Gundara – a second-rate bureaucrat, a nobody – had to give me his approval for me to be allowed to go back to my business. For 900 days I was in the dock, waiting for this literary giant to pronounce his judgment on me. And I found favour in his eyes – but barely.

Sorry. I don’t give a damn what Gundara or the HRC says. Getting his approval is not a success. I won't legitimize his arrogant "authority" by saying "thank you, master". I'll say: "who the hell are you? Besides a busy-body bureaucrat?"

Look at his rationale for acquitting me: because the Western Standard met Gundara’s home-made tests of reasonableness. We published the cartoons in “context”; we published letters that “criticized” them; and my favourite, the cartoons weren’t “simply stuck in the middle” of the magazine. Gundara must have thought for ten whole minutes to come up with that list of journalistic do’s and don’t’s. And – phew! – he likes me. He really likes me!

Sorry again, I don’t give a damn if he likes me. In fact, it rather creeps me out that a whole squad of teat-sucking bureaucrats spent 900 days inspecting me and the Western Standard. I positively want to offend them. In fact, that’s pretty much the only test of my freedom: can I do exactly what Gundara says I shouldn’t? I’m not interested in publishing recipes or sports scores. I’m interested in bothering the hell out of government.

Did we ever mention how much we love this guy?

Levant later references the Rev. Stephen Boissoin who was “sentenced” never to speak about homosexuality again and wonders why it is he got off the hook but Boissoin did not. Levant suggests that he was just too big of a pain-in-the-ass and his star turns in his YouTube videos of the AHRC “hearings” made the AHRC look petty, subjective yet intellectually feeble all at once… all adding up to one huge PR nightmare for them. We would tend to agree but if they decided to cut bait, what took them so long? Oh yeah… we did say intellectually feeble, did we not?

We’ll try to dig up the dirt on Boissoin because his treatment at the hands of the AHRC was perhaps even more egregious than that of Levant’s.