« Harry Reid: Save the Thousands of Cowboy Poetry Fans! | Main | "Educated:" You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. »
March 9, 2011
Linda Gibbons: Canada's longest serving political prisoner
Homolka, as everyone probably knows, plea-bargained her way to a modest sentence and was released more than five years ago. According to one press report (in La Presse) she was back in Ontario and studying law. Other reports placed her in the Caribbean with a new husband and child.
Linda Gibbons, by contrast, has no prospect of release. She is a grandmother, age 62. Her crime was praying, publicly, inside the 60-foot "bubble" around a Morgentaler abortion clinic in Toronto. She also, on occasion, held up a placard reading, "Why, Mom, when I have so much love to give?" She first did this in defiance of a temporary court injunction obtained by the Ontario attorney general back in 1994 and has returned to doing it, and been re-arrested, each time she has been released. -- David Warren
Posted by Vanderleun at March 9, 2011 8:09 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
Your comments are called "your say," but what can you say? There is no justice. It seems good is evil and evil is good. God's blessings on Linda Gibbons. May she see great fruit from her sacrifice.
Posted by: Marie at March 9, 2011 5:47 PM
So it looks as if Gibbons' offence is contempt of court. The law looks very sternly on that, and rightly so - respect for the law is one of the foundations of the rule of law.
You don't like the law? Then campaign for it to be changed.
Posted by: Fletcher Christian at March 9, 2011 11:35 PM
Fletcher, try this...
"When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law." Claude Frédéric Bastiat (1801 1850)
The only way one changes human shit is to incinerate it.
Posted by: Peccable at March 10, 2011 3:08 AM
Fletcher:
Martin Luther King also ignored your advice, as did Mohandas Ghandi. And some guy named Henry David Thoreau.
When "the law" shows contempt for the citizen, is the citizen obliged to be a "good German" to the end?
Posted by: Don Rodrigo at March 10, 2011 12:54 PM
And MLK and Gandhi both paid for their contempt of the law, in spades. With their lives, in fact, quite apart from imprisonment.
If the law shows contempt for a particular citizen, he or she ought to consider carefully whether the law reflects the opinion of the majority. I believe that is called democracy.
Law and an individual's morality often contradict each other. Law has a term for such individuals. They are called criminals.
Posted by: Fletcher Christian at March 10, 2011 1:28 PM
Then why doesn't the court stop granting injunctions, if it's a contempt of court thing? They obviously don't think she's dangerous, they know she's stubborn, and there comes a time to utilize the blindness of justice to turn a blind eye. Heck, if I were the abortion clinic I wouldn't want the bad publicity.
Posted by: Anonymous at March 10, 2011 2:30 PM
It is all very well to tug at the heart strings. But how do you change a moral order that looks askance at out of wedlock births? And rightly so (well that is changing - for the better?)
What of raising a child with a husband who doesn't want one?
What of the woman who asks, "Who is going to pay for the groceries?"
Or the one who says, "What if my boyfriend/husband finds out?"
Instead of going to jail the woman should be solving problems. I know. I know. Jail is easier.
Posted by: M. Simon at March 14, 2011 10:18 AM