EGYPT: JUDGE EJECTS LAWYER FOR CHRISTIAN FROM COURT

Dispute over evidence stalls bid by convert from Islam to change official ID.

ISTANBUL, January 13 (Compass Direct News) – An attempt by an Egyptian convert from Islam to legally change the religion listed on his identification card to “Christian” hit a setback on Jan. 6 when a judge ordered security personnel to remove his lawyer from court.

Attorney Nabil Ghobreyal was expelled from the courtroom at Cairo’s Administrative Court following a heated argument with Judge Mohammad Ahmad Atyia.

The dispute arose after Atyia refused to acknowledge the existence of legal documents detailing the successful attempt of a Muslim man to convert to the Baha’i faith. Ghobreyal had planned to submit the court records of the decision in support of his case.

The convert from Islam who is trying to legally convert to Christianity, Maher Ahmad El-Mo’otahssem Bellah El-Gohary, first submitted his request to alter the religious status stated on his ID in August 2008. He follows Muhammad Hegazy as only the second Egyptian Christian convert raised as a Muslim to request such a change.

El-Gohary received Christ in his early 20s. Now 56, he decided to legally change his religious affiliation out of concern over the effects that his “unofficial Christianity” has on his family. He said he was particularly concerned about his daughter, Dina Maher Ahmad Mo’otahssem, 14; though raised as a Christian, when she reaches age 16 she will be issued an identification card stating her religion as Muslim unless her father’s appeal is successful.

At school, she has been refused the right to attend Christian religious classes offered to Egypt’s Christian minorities and has been forced to attend Muslim classes. Religion is a mandatory part of the Egyptian curriculum.

El-Gohary also has charged that his nephew was denied a position in state security agencies because of his uncle’s religious “double life.”

“Why should my family pay for my choices?” said El-Gohary in a report by The Free Copts.

No date has been set for resumption of court proceedings, which, due to the dispute, will reconvene under a different judge.

Ghobreyal said he plans to submit a complaint to the High Administrative Court requesting an investigation of Atyia and the expulsion from court. “I am willing to continue the fight,” Ghobreyal told Compass through a translator, saying he remains hopeful of a positive outcome.

Despite a constitution that grants religious freedom, legal conversion from Islam to another faith remains unprecedented. Hegazy, who filed his case on Aug. 2, 2007, was denied the right to officially convert in a Jan. 29 court ruling that declared it was against Islamic law for a Muslim to leave Islam.

The judge based his decision on Article II of the Egyptian constitution, which enshrines Islamic law, or sharia, as the source of Egyptian law. The judge said that, according to sharia, Islam is the final and most complete religion and therefore Muslims already practice full freedom of religion and cannot return to an older belief (Christianity or Judaism).

The seminal nature of the El-Gohary and Hegazy cases is part of what makes them so controversial, according to Gamal Eid, director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.

“First, there is no experience – this is a very new question, it has made judges and lawyers confused,” he said. “The second thing is that many judges are very religious, for many of them it is based on their religion, their thoughts; the law itself allows for people to convert, so that’s what we’re trying to do, have a decision based on law not on sharia.”

Eid attributed much of the reluctance to grant conversion to this religious bias.

“If the Minister of the Interior respected the law, we would not need to go to court,” he said. “The law says clearly that people can change their address, their career, their religion, they only have to sign an application and then they can have a new ID; the law allows people to convert from any religion to another.”

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat amended the constitution in 1980 to make sharia the main source of legislation in order to bolster support from Islamists against his secular and leftist rivals. Legal experts say there are two views of how sharia is to influence Egyptian law: That it is to be enforced directly in all government spheres, or that it is only to influence shaping of law by legislators and is not to be literally enforced by courts or other bodies.  

Report from Compass Direct News

FOREMOST UK GAY ACTIVIST ADMITS THERE IS NO GAY GENE

One of the untouchable dogmas of the homosexualist movement is the assertion of the existence of a “gay gene”, or a genetic marker that causes same-sex attraction. The assertion of a genetic factor in homosexual preference has never been demonstrated by scientists and now at least one prominent campaigner in the British homosexualist movement has admitted this fact, reports Hilary White, LifeSiteNews.com.

Peter Tatchell, an Australian-born British homosexual activist who founded the “direct action” group OutRage! that specialises in media stunts such as disrupting Christian religious services, wrote on Spiked Online that he agrees with the scientific consensus that there is no such thing as a “gay gene.”

Contrary to the findings of some researchers who have tried to posit a purely genetic origin for same-sex attractions, Tatchell wrote, “Genes and hormones may predispose a person to one sexuality rather than another. But that’s all. Predisposition and determination are two different things.”

Homosexual activists have adopted the “gay gene” theory to bolster their assertion that any objection on moral grounds to homosexual activity is akin to objecting to left-handedness or skin colour. It has supported the accusation that Christians and others who object to the homosexual movement are racists and bigots.

Tatchell even went as far as to acknowledge the existence of some who have changed their “sexual orientation.” “If heterosexuality and homosexuality are, indeed, genetically predetermined… how do we explain bisexuality or people who, suddenly in mid-life, switch from heterosexuality to homosexuality (or vice versa)? We can’t.”

Sexuality, he wrote, is “far more ambiguous, blurred and overlapping than any theory of genetic causality can allow.”

“Examples of sexual flexibility… don’t square with genetic theories of rigid erotic predestination.”

Bill Muehlenberg, a Christian writer and philosophy lecturer, called Tatchell’s admission a rare and “refreshing” and “very revealing case of homosexual honesty.” Muehlenberg said that he has been “howled down” by homosexual lobbyists for years for saying the same things about putative homosexual determinism. Whoever is saying it, he wrote, the conclusion must be the debunking of the myth that homosexuals are “born that way” and cannot help, or change, their inclinations.

The “gay gene” theory has been used by gay activists “to deny choice, to make it appear that homosexuals cannot help it, and to argue that any criticism of the gay lifestyle is as silly as criticism of being left-handed or red-haired.”

“And this has been a deliberate strategy by homosexual activists. They have done a very good job to convince a gullible public that homosexuals are born that way and cannot change.”

Report from the Christian Telegraph