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A Private Member's Bill: the Equal Killing Rights Bill (Protagoras, July 3, 2007) Individual Members of Parliament in the UK may introduce bills on the floor of the House. Protagoras is privileged to be a member of the House of Commons, and will be introducing such a bill in the next session. This short piece explains the aims of his bill. He is happy to say that it commands widespread support on both sides of the House. It is titled The Equal Killing Rights Bill. Many of my constituents have written to me and come to visit me in my constituency surgeries to express their desire for greater cultural sensitivity to our faith based communities in the UK. I usually reply to them that we have accomplished a great deal. I list some of our achievements in this area, and start by pointing to our work on the position of women. It used to be an offence to remove a child from school. At the moment however the practice in the UK is that girls of Muslim extraction may be removed from school at will by their families and the authorities turn a blind eye. This is a great step forward towards recognising the importantly different cultural norms of the Islamic community with regard to the education of women. There was also at one time in the UK a regrettable tendency to treat all killings as equally heinous. In fact, UK law remains deplorably insensitive on this subject. Practice is a different matter however, and we have moved forwards so that it now generally tolerated for fathers, husbands, brothers or uncles, of selected religions or ethnic groups, to kill their wives, sisters, nieces or daughters should their chastity give cause for concern. We have not yet changed the law, but we increasingly recognize in practice that Honour Killing is not properly classed as murder, but as the exercise of a legitimate cultural norm. Britain leads the world in recognising that to enforce what in the West are called the 'rights' of certain classes of citizen in a uniform way is culturally insensitive, colonialist and indeed deeply racist. The effort to treat all citizens 'equally' and to make the law blind in respect of religion and ethnic group has, thank goodness, largely been abandoned as we have come to recognise this. And so it has come about that heads of Muslim families in the UK have the same rights in practice as they do in Pakistan, and that what rights you have as a UK citizen to what is laugably called the 'protection' of the law varies according to your religion. This is why several hundred women a year are killed with impunity in the UK, partly to encourage the others, and partly to ensure that valuable cultural traditions of female chastity can be cherished and preserved. My Bill will formalize this situation and extend cultural sensitivity and tolerance to all religious denominations equally. In accordance with the great British tradition of levelling up, it does this not by removing already recognised rights from some, but by granting those rights to all. The Equal Killing Rights Bill is expected to become law at the end of 2008, with bipartisan support. It provides for every man in the UK, not simply those of the Muslim faith, to have the right to kill women of defined classes in defence of his family honour. My staff have worked long and hard to establish who exactly a man should have the right to kill, and have shown their inclusiveness and cultural awareness by drawing as far as possible on the rules of consanguinity of the Church of England. Under my bill, a man, any man in England, whatever his religion, will have the right to kill his sister, daughter, niece, first cousin or wife if he deems it necessary to defend his family honour. You will notice that these are exactly the women the consanguinity rules prevent him from marrying. The great advantage of this rule is that should he need to kill someone outside these rules, he is allowed to kill his wife, so he can always marry them. My Bill also restores to all UK families the right to control the marriages of their offspring, so this last step will be fairly simple. A man needing to kill, let us say, his wife's cousin once removed, can simply take her as a second wife, whatever her feelings, after which it will be lawful for him to kill her. My Bill also legalizes polygamy for all UK residents. Immorality will not be protected by the difficulty of finding an unmarried man to marry to the criminal. A great advantage of this Bill will be that young disaffected men will no longer have any excuse for firebombing night clubs and other places of immorality. The control of nymphomania will now be exactly where it belongs, in the hands of heads of families and the religious authorities. It will be much more effective there. Laudable though the efforts of the recent bombers have been, they have signally failed to make any difference to behaviour. Women on the streets of London dress as provocatively as ever! After 2008, when my Bill receives Royal Assent, this will stop. My constituents are most supportive of this Bill, but they have raised one issue with me which has caused me deep concern. The Church of England, it seems, does not have equal Powers of Fatwa. We have noted with regret that no cleric of this Church seems to have pronounced a Fatwa for several hundred years, whereas Islamic clerics feel free to pronounce them frequently. The communicants of this church are suffering from a deplorable guidance gap. The many responders to my draft Bill who have commented on this point may be reassured. I am adding a codex to it which will permit any full time cleric or lay preacher of any denomination in the UK, including Scientologists, to issue Fatwas on any subject they choose. They will be binding on their followers and have the force of ASBOS. These Fatwas will be known as FASBOs (Fatwa Based Anti Social Behaviour Orders), and it will be contempt of court, and thus a criminal offence, to disobey them. My correspondents have also commented that there is a regrettably unequal treatment of apostasy in current legislation. Have no fear, in accordance with the overall approach of extending rights to produce equality, not limiting them, my Bill provides for an automatic sentence of death for all who apostasize from the religion in which they were born. Think of it as a kind of autorun Fatwa, issued by the Crown. Converts to Islam or to Christianity or Scientology will be put to death promptly, as well as converts from any of them. This will be as pleasing to the Almighty as it will be to my constituents, particularly when the exemplary sentence is carried out, as my Bill provides, in public. The traditional Christian European cultural practice of burning at the stake, which has unfortunately died out in the UK, and seems last to have been on display at the site of the current Martyrs Memorial in Oxford, around the year 1550, will be reinstated in support of this. Fatwas by Bishops of the Church of England will be empowered to command burnings. And indeeed Fatwas issued by the Chief Rabbi, or Bishops of the Methodist persuasion. The question of which officials of the Church of Scientology may issue such Fatwas requires further study. We will come back to you on this. Our minority communities in the UK are beleagured and under threat. Cultural sensitivity is a duty for us all. Protagoras is privileged to be in a position to contribute to supporting all faith based communities, and as you can see, he intends to do his utmost to justify the confidence the electorate has placed in him by electing him to Parliament. His Equal Killing Rights Bill is only the first step. For more on a wide array of other topics, please visit the oftwominds.com weblog. 
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