Friday, November 24, 2006

Boston University group offers white scholarship

Looking to draw attention to what they call the "worst form of bigotry confronting America today," Boston University's College Republicans are circulating an application for a "Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship" that requires applicants be at least 25 percent Caucasian. "Did we do this to give a scholarship to white kids? Of course not," the scholarship reads. "Did we do it to trigger a discussion on what we believe to be the morally wrong practice of basing decisions in our schools and our jobs on racial preferences rather than merit? Absolutely." The scholarship, which is privately funded by the BUCR without the support of the university, is meant to raise awareness, group members say. BUCR member argue that racial preferences are a form of "bigotry." The group has a similar view on affirmative action.

The application for the $250 scholarship, due Nov. 30, requires applicants be full-time BU undergraduate students and one-fourth Caucasian and maintain at least a 3.2 cumulative GPA. Applicants must submit two essays, one describing the applicant's ancestry and one describing "what it means to you to be a Caucasian-American today."

BUCR President Joe Mroszczyk said he spoke to Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore before publicly releasing the scholarship to make sure it would be legal. Mroszczyk said BUCR members also talked to others beforehand, some of whom were initially "agitated or upset" but understood the point after members explained themselves, he said. "If you give out a white scholarship, it's racist, and if you give out a Hispanic scholarship, it is OK," the College of Arts and Sciences senior said. "It is the main point. We are not doing this scholarship as a white-supremacy scholarship."

La Fuerza Co-Chair Sara-Marie Pons, who is also on the Admissions Student Diversity Board, said although she agrees with BUCR's claim that racial preference is "contradictory to our American ideals of freedom and equality," she feels American history justifies today's affirmative action." Our country oppressed people of color for centuries while everyone else who was 'preferred' continued to succeed and lead our country in all aspects," the School of Management senior said in an email. "The goal of a university in striving to admit more students of color is a positive movement to increase the diversity of its institution."

Pons said the university's diversity creates a "better learning environment" and "dynamic discussion." She said she believes minority-specific scholarships serve an important function. "While I can see the controversy over scholarships toward specific ethnic groups, we need to keep in mind its intention," she said. "The [group-specific] scholarship is there to increase the interest of students in that group to continue their education and reach the equality that we all strive for."

After the recipient is chosen, BUCR plans to host an event to honor the winner and speak about the award, as well as hold a forum discussion about racial preference, Mroszczyk said. Mroszczyk said the BUCR borrowed the scholarship idea from the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., which sponsored a similar award in 2003. Former RWU College Republicans President Jason Mattera said the "whites-only" scholarship was meant to be a parody, but it brought harsh media attention to their campus.

Mattera, now the Young American's Foundation National Spokesman, a group supporting the conservative movement, said the idea was spurred when RWU administrators "compiled a list of scholarships for people of color only." Although Mattera, a Puerto Rican, would have been eligible for some of these scholarships, he said he still wanted to "expose the inequities."

RWU College Republicans adviser June Speakman said the organization started receiving complaints as soon as it released the scholarship. Despite protests, 15 students applied for the scholarship. "It was a way to make their protests highly visible, provocative," she said. "They stuck to their guns. They were steadfast."

Speakman said the scholarship was discontinued after its first year when the national and state Republican parties severed ties with RWU College Republicans. Mattera said people were aware the scholarship had "nothing to do with racism," but the Republican National Committee still did not want to be affiliated with the scholarship. "The RNC under [former chair] Ed Gillespie disagreed with me," Mattera said. "For Ed Gillespie to be dismissive or to imply that there was racism, he lacked any type of -- to put it bluntly -- balls in standing up against racial preferences. It would have been a great opportunity."

Regarding BU's adaptation of this scholarship, Mattera said he is glad the BUCR is interested in continuing to promote awareness. "I guarantee that once this happens, be ready for hypocritical charges of racism, and be ready to be attacked," Mattera said, "but once they attack you, the hypocrisy is exposed."

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Breastfeeding incorrect?

Hatred of normal family life?

It's ironic that since a lot of US airlines - airlines everywhere, actually - treat you like cattle that they also might get a bit squeamish over the thought of a dairy. But last month a nursing mother was ejected from a plane about to take off in Vermont because she was trying to breastfeed her baby

The extraordinary tale has sparked a discrimination complaint from the mother, Emily Gillette, and a huge embarrassment for the airline, Delta. The brouhaha here has also sparked a form of protest being dubbed "lactivism". Over the past week there's been rolling breastfeeding sit-ins where dozens of nursing mothers position themselves in front of the Delta airline counters in protest and, like maternal gunslingers, unleash their bosoms and latch on their babies.

Ms Gillette, her husband Brad, and their then 22-month-old daughter, River, were removed from an October flight from Burlington to New York after a flight attendant asked Ms Gillette to cover up while she was breastfeeding the girl. Freedom Airlines was operating the flight on behalf of Delta Air Lines. Ms Gillette, 27, filed a complaint against both airlines with the Vermont Human Rights Commission alleging that the airline violated a state law that allows women to breastfeed "in any place of public accommodation".

Ms Gillette told USA Today she took a window seat in the second-last row and her husband took the aisle. She began nursing River, using one hand to hold her shirt closed. She told the newspaper: "I was not exposed." But the flight attendant approached, tried to hand her a blanket and asked her to cover herself, she recalls. "You're offending me," Ms Gillette quotes the woman as saying. "I'm not doing anything wrong and I will not cover up," Ms Gillette says she said in response. Ms Gillette says the flight attendant walked away and a few minutes later, a ticket agent boarded and said the flight attendant had ordered them removed. The airline arranged for a hotel for the family for the night and a flight with a different airline the next morning.

"No woman should ever be ashamed of breastfeeding," Ms Gillette says. She wants "both airlines to create policies that protect a woman from being harassed for feeding her child on an airplane". Freedom Airlines spokesman Paul Skellon says breastfeeding on a plane is OK if it's done in a "discreet way".

Forty-three states in the US have instituted rights for women breastfeeding. This reporter's wife was told last year to cease breastfeeding in a public hall of a federal office, despite laws saying it is legal to do so. Congress passed a right to breastfeed in 1999, which governs all federal buildings and parks.

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In Defense of Spiderman

By Glenn Sacks

The mayor of London compares him to Osama bin Laden. He's been dubbed a "menace" holding a city for "ransom," as well as a lunatic and an extremist. What has 36 year-old David Chick done to arouse such anger? He loves his little daughter, from whom he's been forcibly separated, and he had the courage to do something about it.

The now world famous Englishman recently ended his traffic stopping, six day, one man protest atop a 150 foot high crane near the Tower Bridge in London. Dressed as Spiderman because he is his two year-old daughter's favorite comic book character, Chick says his daughter's mother has not allowed him to see his girl for eight months and has tried to alienate her from him. Interviewed by English newspapers, the ex-girlfriend admits blocking the standard yet paltry twice a month visitation which English courts have granted Chick. To date, she has declined to offer a reason publicly.

Chick is one of hundreds of thousands of English fathers who have been cut off from their children after divorce or separation. Their voices have crystallized into a widely popular campaign by the activist group Fathers 4 Justice. This campaign seeks to reform the family law system to allow divorced and unwed fathers to play a meaningful role in their children's lives.

The English Lord Chancellor's Department admits that mothers win custody in about four-fifths of all cases in English and Welsh courts, and English courts are notorious for their failure to enforce fathers' visitation rights. According to Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, "some senior judges recently acknowledged that with so many contact [visitation] orders being flouted by mothers, the law is being brought into disrepute."

When one judge recently did transfer care of a child from the child's alienating mother to the father, it was such an event that it merited inclusion in Phillips' column. In reality, these types of transfers should be more common, and would no doubt have a salutary effect on the behavior of parents who try to prevent their children from seeing their exes.

Chick's plight will sound familiar to many American fathers. According to the Children's Rights Council, a Washington-based advocacy group, more than five million American children each year have their access to their noncustodial parents interfered with or blocked by custodial parents. And while politicians and the media hammer away at absent fathers on both sides of the Atlantic, they too often fail to examine the critical role that family courts and vengeful exes play in creating the problem.

To the minimal extent that defenders of the current system have been forced to justify mothers' actions, they claim--as the mayor of London now does--that these men often should not have access to their children.

This is no doubt true on occasion, but is inaccurate in most cases of access and visitation denial. Those opposing fathers' rights claim they are defending women and children from abusive fathers. However, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the vast majority of child abuse, parental murder of children, child neglect, and child endangerment are committed by mothers, not fathers. In addition, decades of research, including that carried out by the National Institute of Mental Health, show that women are just as likely to be violent towards their spouses as men are.

According to Carol Plummer, Chick's sister, "David would never harm his daughter or Jo [the ex-girlfriend]. He doesn't want custody of his daughter, he just wants to see her. But Jo is making him suffer by depriving him of seeing his daughter, who is his life."

Though one can sense a smear campaign against Chick on the horizon, two weeks of digging for dirt on him have turned up little. He was convicted of cannabis possession three years ago and of public indecency (for consensual sexual activity) while a teenager. According to Chick's brother Steven Reed, in the cannabis conviction David took the rap for his ex-girlfriend.

Chick says: "[My daughter] is the most precious thing in my world. I was there for the scans when she was still in the womb, I was there for her birth. I fed her, bathed her, got up in the night with her, cuddled her when she cried. "Now I'm just another statistic--another dad who has no part in his daughter's life. For me, it is a living bereavement."

Today fathers in England, America and most of the Western world stand upon a foundation of sand, knowing that our loved ones can be ripped away from us and there is often little we can do about it. We invest our lives in the children we love and tell them that we will always be there for them. But in the back of our minds we can't help but think of a question which Spiderman no doubt considered before he began his ascent up that crane hanging over Tower Bridge: will we be allowed to?

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Australia: Hatred of Christian political party

A hate campaign has emerged in the eastern suburbs as vandals link the Family First party to the American white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan. Mitcham candidate Miriam Rawson was this week shocked to find KKK had been scrawled on her Blackburn North billboard and a white hood painted over her face. It was the third time the billboard had been vandalised, and four other signs have been stolen.

But Ms Rawson, 28, a teacher and first-time candidate, believes it was not a personal attack but a vicious campaign against the party's values. "Everybody knows that we need to rebuild our schools, but when you start to touch on issues such as looking to reduce the number of abortions in Victoria . . . that starts to push a few buttons," she said. "Obviously there's something that's made them react to what Family First is about so violently they've felt they've had to express themselves that way."

Ms Rawson, who has filed a complaint with Nunawading police, challenged the "cowards" to come forward. "I'd be quite happy to face them in an open debate in public," she said. "Let them have their say and I can respond in a mature, non-criminal way. "When I first saw it I thought, 'Why are you doing this to me?' "But something inside me went, 'I'm going to campaign even harder,' and I have been. It's been almost like a blessing in disguise."

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