Segacs’s World I Know

Hamas has called a cease-fire, claiming it will temporarily suspend attacks against Israel:

“Hamas has studied all the developments and has reached a decision to call a truce, or a suspension of fighting activities,” Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin told Reuters.

He said the cease-fire carried conditions and a timeframe but declined to give details or indicate when a truce would be announced. Hamas, dedicated to Israel’s destruction, has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings.

For those hailing this as a breakthrough, it’s important to remember that optimism is usually misplaced when it comes to Mideast politics. Firstly, Hamas has not said it will accept Israel’s existence or that it will stop attacks for a long time. This is merely a tactical truce, giving Hamas time to reorganize and regroup. Secondly, if Israel is attacked and reacts, it will be Israel that is criticized internationally for “breaking the cease-fire”.

Hamas is still committed to Israel’s destruction. Israel’s foreign ministry called the cease-fire “poison covered in honey”, and there’s certainly something to that.

On the other hand, if even one innocent life is saved because of the cease-fire, then far be it for me to condemn it. And hey, maybe I’m being too cynical. Maybe this is a first and important step towards a strong and lasting peace.

Maybe pigs will fly, too.

Looks like dumblaws.com will have one less law to make fun of. The U.S. Supreme Court finally did something right after its idiotic ruling on race in university admissions:

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on Thursday sodomy laws that make it a crime for people of the same sex to engage in “deviate sexual intercourse,” a ruling that gives gay rights advocates a major victory.

[ . . . ]

The 30-year-old Texas “homosexual conduct” law makes it a crime for same-sex couples to engage in “deviate sexual intercourse,” defined as oral and anal sex, even if it is consensual and occurs in the privacy of a person’s bedroom. Violators face a maximum punishment of a $500 fine.

The ruling will invalidate sodomy laws that exist in 13 states. Besides Texas, the other states are Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.

This only a mere 35 years after Pierre Trudeau made his famous statement that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation” and got Canada’s nose out of people’s private business.

Happy separatist day – er – St. Jean Baptiste Day – to all out there.

Whether you spent La Fete Nationale draped in blue and white, or just enjoying the day off from work, I hope it was a good one.

The author of books including Exodus, Mila 18, and The Haj, Leon Uris, has died. He was 78.

Check out the great new Honda Accord commercial (via Damian). Pure genius! And it was all real.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favour of racism:

In upholding the law school’s policy, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said for the majority in the 5-4 ruling that student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify use of race in admissions decisions.

Sad.

Maclean’s magazine has an interesting profile of Michael Ignatieff, one of the few prominent Canadians to speak out in support of US military action in Iraq:

“What I felt was disappointing about a lot of Canadian opposition to the war was that very few people seemed to give a damn about the human-rights situation,” Ignatieff says. “Very few seemed to care that peace had the consequence of leaving 26 million people inside a really odious tyranny.”

Ignatieff also has some choice words about the UN, the organization to which his father was Canada’s ambassador:

“Touring Canada, what bothered me was that the only legitimacy that mattered to most of the audiences was the legal legitimacy of the UN,” he says. “Well, the UN screwed up in Rwanda, it screwed up in Bosnia — it screws up most of the time.” In a seminar for Kennedy School staff on his Iraq position, Ignatieff was even more blunt: “The United Nations is a messy, wasteful, log-rolling organization.”

An interesting read.

The Federal Government has announced legislation to legalize same-sex marriages by redefining the term “marriage”:

The landmark legislation will be drafted within weeks, then sent to the Supreme Court of Canada for fine-tuning and put before the House of Commons in a free vote by MPs months from now. But the prime minister made it clear Ottawa would not impose the new law on religious groups, who can still refuse to perform same-sex weddings. Canada would join Belgium and the Netherlands as the only countries allowing gay and lesbian weddings.

“What we’re doing at this moment might put Canada at the forefront of any solutions that exist,” Chretien said.

I guess I should join other bloggers such as Damian Penny on weighing in with my opinion on the subject, which is that this is one of the best pieces of legislation tabled by the Liberal government since . . . well, in a long time, anyway. And it’s long overdue.

I’ve heard a lot of BS arguments against allowing gay people to marry, usually by thinly-veiled homophobes who spout a lot of claptrap about “definitions” and whatnot. Some argue that it’s a slippery slope to allowing other forms of marriage, such as marriages involving more than one person. Others seem to be perfectly happy to restrict the right to marry to heterosexuals, perhaps afraid that if gays can marry, we’ll no longer be allowed to. I don’t know. I’ve thought long and hard trying to come up with some rational explanation for their objections, and came up with nothing. It’s not as though granting basic rights to someone else means that we have to give up any ourselves.

Especially considering no religious institution will be compelled to marry a same-sex couple, in much the same way that the Catholic Church won’t recognize or remarry divorced people. If you want to follow the tenets of a faith that discriminates, nobody’s stopping you, and there are plenty to choose from. Even Judaism discriminates broadly in who can be married in an Orthodox synagogue. But there are plenty of ministers (and even rabbis) out there who will gladly marry a same-sex couple, or else gay couples can be married in a civil ceremony. So why should the Federal Government be allowed to get in the way?

Marriage is essentially a contract. Sure, a religious marriage is considered holy, and any marriage is an affirmation of love and commitment. But why shouldn’t same-sex couples be allowed to have that love or make that commitment? And why shouldn’t they be granted the same privileges as heterosexual married couples?

I’m reminded of some of the arguments that were put forth before black people had the right to vote in the United States. “Voting is just for whites” or “Why would they even want to vote anyway?” or other ridiculous assertions like that one. Well, here we are again, in a time when we can no longer deny basic rights to 10% of our populations. Let’s end discrimination once and for all.

Demergers are the hot topic everyone hates to discuss lately. After the PQ undemocratically forced through mergers of our municipalities, the new Charest government appears to be making good on its election promise to table legislation that will allow the whole fiasco to be undone.

To those of us who were royally pissed off at losing our cities, this should be welcome news. To the people with the “Je me souviens des fusions forcées” license plates, and to those who picketed in Dominion Square, it seems we were just waiting for the time when someone would recognize what a disaster the mergers were and allow us to undo it.

But, as Don MacPherson explains in today’s Gazette, it’s not that simple:

You can’t go home anymore. Not if your home was one of the 212 municipalities forcibly merged into 42 by the former Parti Québécois government three years ago.

Sure, you’ll be able to get back a town with the same name and boundaries as the one you had before it was annexed by Montreal or one of the other new megacities across the province.

But it won’t be quite the same. The Charest government’s demerger legislation, the second part of which was introduced yesterday in the National Assembly, doesn’t flip the calendar pages back to November 2000, before your town was reduced to the status of a borough.

For one thing, it might lose the official bilingual status it had then – and still has now.

[ . . . ]

But wait, there’s more. If you take advantage of the Liberals’ demerger offer, you might also get higher taxes than you paid before, with less say in how the money is spent and maybe less service.

Looks like my hopes of being a Dollardian again are problematic indeed.

The merger was supposed to lower taxes. It raised them. It was supposed to increase services. It reduced them. It was supposed to make Montreal better able to compete internationally for investment and development. This remained unchanged.

So if merging was a disaster, and demerging would be another disaster, then why didn’t they just leave our cities alone in the first place?