That's not a knife... now THIS is a knife.

I make no bones about my frustration with religion and the fact that we as a society often turn a blind eye to behavior that we would otherwise see as unacceptable if it’s veiled by ‘religious rights’. What it comes down to is this: no one cares much what you do in your home, church, temple etc., but when ‘religious rights’ infringe on our right to be free of religion there’s a problem. Let me be clear here, I have nothing against immigrants or any other people for that matter. My issue is with religion and I have no urge to change my life or behavior to accomodate someone’s religion. It’s time to get real with this; whatever their religion, no one should be allowed to carry what amounts to a big knife into a secure venue at the upcoming Vancouver Olympics. The claim is that the kirpan is not a weapon. Perhaps it is not intended to be, but the reality is that it has been used as such. Check out  the attached story about the kirpan at the Olympics and then be sure to keep reading about just one of the examples of it being used as a weapon.

from CBC.ca

Sikh daggers allowed at Olympic venues

Baptized Sikhs will be allowed to carry their ceremonial daggers, called kirpans, into venues at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the RCMP announced Thursday.

A kirpan is one of five symbols of faith that must be worn by baptized Sikhs according to their religion.

The RCMP’s Integrated Security Unit held discussions with members of the community to come up with guidelines, said Sgt. Mike Coté.

“Because of the security measures at the venues, access would entail going through a metal detector. We thought we would be proactive and deal with this prior to the Games, and in fact we reached out to the Sikh community and sought their input to come up with some type of consensus,” said Coté.

Only a baptized Sikh wearing all the five articles of faith will be able to wear a kirpan into an Olympic venue, and the blade can not be more than 10 centimetres long.

Kirpan incident raises questions about court ruling
Teen accused of using it as weapon could rekindle kirpan-in-school debate

HENRY AUBIN
(The Gazette, September 16, 2008)

The controversy over the kirpan is back. Police say a 13-year-old Sikh boy last week used a religious dagger to threaten another student outside a school in Montreal. Police say the knife was wrapped in cloth at the time. No one was injured.

What was hurt, however, was the case for allowing Sikhs to take the symbolic weapon to school. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld that right in 2006.

The kirpan was hugely influential in the whole debate over the accommodation of cultural differences. In its report last May, the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodations noted that the Supreme Court’s decision had “contaminated” that debate and also “discredited the courts.” Indeed, an SOM poll in La Presse a year ago suggested that an overwhelming 91 per cent of Quebecers opposed the court-sanctioned right of young Sikhs to wear the bladed object to class.

Does the wearing of the ceremonial dagger, seen by many Sikhs as a purely symbolic weapon in the fight against evil, compromise public security? That question has dominated each of the many deliberations on the kirpan.

Administrators at L’École Ste. Catherine Labouré reached an agreement in 2001 with the parents of a 12-year-old boy, Gurbaj Singh Multani, to let him wear the dagger if it were sewn into his underclothing to impede impulsive removal. The school’s governing board then reversed the decision, banning the object. When the Marguerite Bourgeoys School Board upheld that ruling, the parents went to Quebec Superior Court: That court said the boy could wear the knife so long as he kept it in a cloth envelope under his shirt.

The Quebec Court of Appeal overturned that. It said that barring the kirpan contravened the Charter of Rights’ guarantee of religious freedom, but it said the question of safety made the ban reasonable.

What’s significant in light of last Thursday’s incident is the Supreme Court’s logic in overturning the Court of Appeal and dismissing safety as a problem.
The court said that the evidence “reveals that not a single violent incident related to the presence of kirpans in schools has been reported.” Now we have a report of such an incident in LaSalle. Granted, according to police it did not take place “in” a school but on the street just outside of one, the Cavalier-de-LaSalle school, during lunch break.

The Quebec Court of Appeal had said it was “not hypothetical” to suppose that in a tight situation a Sikh youth might make use of his kirpan. If the police are to be believed, that court was right.

The Supreme Court acknowledges three violent incidents involving kirpans in metropolitan Toronto. One case involved use of a kirpan in an attempted murder. Another time one was used to stab someone in the back.

You might think this would discredit Sikh authorities’ claim that a kirpan would never be used as actual weapon. But, no, the high court split hairs. It indicated that these incidents were not relevant to the Multani case because none of them took place in or near a school.

The Supremes were quite impressed by Gurbaj Singh Multani’s character. “The risk that this particular student would use his kirpan for violent purposes seems highly unlikely to me,” said the writer of the judgment, Justice Louise Charron.