Thursday, September 14, 2017






A rapist in a women’s prison? Society has lost the plot

It is time people took a stand against the trans ideology

What kind of society puts a male rapist in a women’s prison? In what nation would it be considered acceptable to put a man convicted of raping two girls into an enclosed space with hundreds of women? In Britain. In 2017.

Incredibly, Martin Ponting, who was sentenced to life in 1995 for the rape of two girls under the age of 16, was recently moved to the all-women prison of Bronzefield in Surrey because he now identifies as a woman and goes by the name of Jessica Winfield. He has now been segregated from the other prisoners at Bronzefield presumably for some serious misdemeanour. (For making advances to women, say sections of the press, though the prison authorities deny this.) To place a rapist among women because he claims to be a woman might prove to be the moment the cult of genderfludity crossed the line from irritating to psychotic.

Let’s be clear: it is wrong and cruel to make female prisoners live with a rapist. Whatever their crimes, women prisoners have a right to expect the utmost safety. These women should not be made to share their living quarters with someone serving a life sentence for committing serious crimes against young women. This is not to say criminals, even serious criminals, can never be reformed. Prison should seek to redeem even the worst of people. But Ponting is still serving his sentence; he is still being punished; so we can assume he is still considered a threat, particularly to the kind of people he previously victimised: vulnerable females. To put him among vulnerable women is to elevate his narcissistic identity play over the sense of safety of hundreds of women. It prizes his feelings over women’s security. It tells him — and society — that an individual’s personal fantasy now takes precedence over other people’s reality.

The pro-trans media’s response to the discussion of Ponting and his segregation at Bronzefield has been extraordinary. Sections of the tabloid press have expressed concern at the placing of Ponting in a women’s prison. His move to a women’s prison is a ‘kick in the teeth’ to his victims, one newspaper says. He is a ‘rape menace’, say reporters. I agree. This is why he’s in jail: because he is a rape menace. Yet trans-sympathetic columnists have become irate, not at the placing of a rapist in a women’s prison, but at the tabloid press’s use of phrases like ‘transgender rapist’. That this is a statement of fact — Ponting is both transgender and a rapist — matters nothing to these policers of language for whom any expression of disrespect for the trans ideology is a despicable act of ‘transphobia’.

Some pro-trans observers have slammed the media for ‘deadnaming’ Ponting — that is, mentioning his old name, Martin Ponting, rather than solely using his new name, Jessica Winfield. But Ponting / Winfield committed his crimes under that ‘dead’ name. Martin Ponting is on public record as having committed two rapes. The idea that we should erase that name to avoid offending his trans sensibilities is perverse: it erases matters of legal record; it memory-holes the name of a criminal. It negates history itself: in this case that a man called Martin Ponting raped two girls. To instruct the media never to mention the name ‘Martin Ponting’ is to engage in a victim-disrespecting act of Orwellian erasure. It once again elevates the eccentric sensitivities of one individual over the rights of everyone else: in this case the right of the public to know and speak about all the details of a crime.

This strange urge of trans activists and commentators to accord more sympathy to Ponting than to women prisoners — to argue the corner of a rapist rather than women — speaks volumes about how unhinged the trans ideology has become. Or rather how abjectly unwilling society is to withstand this ideology and to tell its believers that they are wrong. In the treatment of Ponting’s belief that he is a woman as more important than the concerns of hundreds of actual women, we see in extreme form the extent to which society is now expected to bow before the narcissistic individual and his or her demands for recognition; to validate every identity, even where that identity is self-evidently irrational.

And where this expectation of validation is annoying and sometimes illiberal in everyday life — such as when student officials pressure people to use pronouns like ‘ze’ or when feminists are harassed online for saying men cannot become women — in the case of prisons it becomes positively dangerous. A society that cannot say even to a man convicted of rape, ‘You are not a woman’, is a society that has truly lost the moral plot. It is a society that has left the realm of reason and objectivity for the unbalanced, unpredictable and plain dangerous terrain of post-modernism, in which what an individual feels counts for more than what others know to be true.

It is time we asserted our right to opt out of trans people’s fantasies. If a man wants to refer to himself as a woman, that is absolutely his business. But there is no reason the rest of us have to accept that he is a woman. There is no reason the birth registrar has to change the sex on his birth certificate (replacing the truth with a lie), or that a women-only college has to accept him as a student, or that the prison system has to place him in a women’s prison.

The rise of the trans ideology speaks to a really problematic 21st-century idea: that society has a duty to respect our chosen identities. It doesn’t. Society must only respect our rights — our right to speak, our right to vote and our right to personal autonomy — not what we believe. Society must uphold our freedom, not our feelings. So yes, a man has a right to say, ‘I am a woman’, but society is perfectly within its rights to say: ‘No, you are not.’ And it should say this more often. It is terrifying that nobody in a position of authority thought to say to Ponting: ‘Jessica, you are not a woman, and you will not be going to a women’s prison.’

SOURCE






Donation Processing Company Drops 'Hate Group' Christian Nonprofit

Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) seemed to claim another scalp. On Thursday, the credit card processing company Vanco Payment Solutions dropped the Christian nonprofit Ruth Institute (RI) over claims that RI "promotes hate, violence, harassment and/or abuse." The group has been listed on the SPLC's "hate map" since 2013.

"The Ruth Institute's primary focus is on family breakdown, and its impact on children. If this makes us a 'hate group,' so be it," the RI's founder and president, Jennifer Roback Morse, declared in a statement.

Vanco sent the Ruth Institute a letter Thursday, declaring that it was canceling their service immediately. "Vanco has elected to discontinue our processing relationship with The Ruth Institute," the letter read. "The organization has been flagged by Card Brands as being affiliated with a product/service that promotes hate, violence, harassment and/or abuse. Merchants that display such attributes are against Vanco and Wells Fargo processing policies."

In a statement to PJ Media, Vanco confirmed that "we terminated our processing relationship with the Ruth Institute on Thursday, August 31." A Vanco spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny whether or not the company's conclusion that RI "promotes hate" was inspired by the SPLC's "hate map."

Morse reported that "no one from Vanco, Card Brands, or Wells Fargo ever contacted the Ruth Institute to inquire about how we 'promote hate, violence, harassment and/or abuse.'"

The Vanco statement did not explicitly link its reasoning with the SPLC "hate map," but the Ruth Institute has been listed on this map since 2013, Morse noted. "To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever been inspired to riot or shoot anyone by our activities," the RI president said.

This stands in marked contrast to the SPLC, which has been linked to two domestic terror attacks.

In the summer of 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins III broke into the Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that the SPLC's "hate map" lists with RI as an "anti-LGBT hate group." Corkins aimed to murder everyone in the building, and he later pled guilty to committing an act of terrorism. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. During an FBI interrogation, he said he targeted the FRC because of the SPLC "hate map."

This past summer, Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson shot people at a Republican Congressional Baseball Game practice, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). Hodgkinson "liked" the SPLC on Facebook. Furthermore, the SPLC had repeatedly attacked Scalise for a speech he gave to a white supremacist group in 2002. The SPLC attacked him for it even after he apologized and was called a "sellout" by white supremacists.

Such carelessness has emerged again and again throughout the SPLC's history. In 2014, the group placed retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson on its "Extremist Watch List." Just last week, the group removed the innocent historic town of Amana Colonies from its "hate map." While the SPLC eventually removed Amana Colonies, it first defended the "hate" label because a white supremacist website claimed to have had a book club in one of the town's restaurants.

In a series of three videos, the anti-Islamist group Quilliam International revealed the SPLC's ever-changing reasons for listing Muslim Maajid Nawaz as an "anti-Muslim extremist." One of the reasons the SPLC gave for targeting Nawaz? His visit to a strip club for his bachelor party.

Along these lines, the Ruth Institute compiled all the items that some groups have found objectionable on a page called "Where's the Hate?" Morse suggested that Americans check out this material for themselves, before deciding that the Ruth Institute is a "hate group."

The SPLC was originally founded to fight white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in court. In recent decades, however, it expanded its legitimate list of racist hate groups to include mainstream conservative groups which which it disagrees.

Morse argued that the SPLC hate map places RI "right next to the guys with white hoods and swastikas," in order to silence debate on the sexual revolution.

"If you go around saying that kids don't really need their parents and adults can make any sexual choice that they want and it will all be good because we will contracept away all the problems on one hand or abort away the problems, or the kids will be so resilient that it will all be fine, that's completely irrational. It's completely crazy," Morse told the Christian Post.

In fact, the SPLC's former spokesman, Mark Potok explained that the group's primary goal is to destroy its political opponents. "Our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them," he said. He later added that the SPLC's criteria for what makes an organization a "hate group" are "strictly ideological."

In addition to RI and the FRC, the SPLC's "hate group" list includes Christian organizations like D. James Kennedy Ministries, Liberty Counsel, the American Family Association (AFA), and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), along with other groups like the American College of Pediatricians and the Center for Immigration Studies. It also lists Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz and women's rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as "anti-Muslim extremists."

Despite the group's shaky track record and history of terror connections, it has been raking in cash after the riots in Charlottesville, Va. George Clooney and his wife Amal pledged $1 million to the group, and the company J.P.Morgan pledged $500,000. Apple CEO Tim Cook was even more generous, announcing his company would give $1 million to the SPLC and that it would set up a system in iTunes software to let consumers directly donate to the organization.

Other companies like Lyft and MGM Resorts have also partnered with the SPLC, and many companies have matched their employees' contributions to the group, including big names such as Disney, Kraft Heinz, Shell, and Verizon. Pfizer, Bank of America, and Newman's Own have each given the organization at least $8,900 in the past few years.

The SPLC does not need this money, however. The Washington Free Beacon recently reported that the group sent multiple transactions to foreign entities, including two cash payments of $2.2 million into funds in the Cayman Islands. The SPLC takes in $50 million in contributions each year, and had $328 million in net assets as of 2015.

Recent support has not been limited to monetary assistance, however. CNN broadcast the SPLC's "hate map" on its website and Twitter account this month (with the FRC still marked on the map). Two other major media outlets, ABC and NBC, parroted the SPLC's "hate group" label against ADF last month.

In June, the charity navigation website GuideStar adopted the SPLC "hate group" list, marking each profile of the targeted organizations as a "hate group." This action inspired the first of three lawsuits against the SPLC, launched by the Christian nonprofit Liberty Counsel. Maajid Nawaz followed up with his own lawsuit soon after, and D. James Kennedy Ministries has been the most recent group to sue the SPLC for defamation.

While Morse vehemently protested having her organization unceremoniously blacklisted, she defended Vanco's right to make such a decision.

"Vanco, Card Brands, and Wells Fargo are private businesses. The Ruth Institute respects their right to conduct their businesses as they see fit," Morse said. Chillingly, she added, "We just wish wedding photographers, bakers, and florists received the same respect."

Morse referred to photographers, bakers, and florists because such professionals have been penalized for refusing to take part in same-sex weddings. These people did not discriminate against LGBT people, but rather opted out of serving a particular event. Even so, they have been fined and ridiculed.

Such cases include Washington state florist Barronelle Stutzman, Oregon bakers Aaron and Melissa Klein, Michigan farmers Steve and Bridget Tennes, Colorado baker Jack Philips (whose case will come before the Supreme Court), and many others. An LGBT megadonor has declared his intention to "punish the wicked," by continuing to penalize such actions.

While Morse defended these companies' right to cut off business with her, she did take a different kind of offensive line against them.

"The Vanco company markets itself to religious organizations," the RI president noted. "We surmise that Vanco dropped us because we hold views about marriage, family and human sexuality that are considered 'Anti-LGBT.'"

Although groups like the SPLC may brand such ideas as "hateful," Morse noted, "Our beliefs are the common heritage of all Christian groups. Christian organizations that utilize Vanco's services may wish to reconsider."

The Ruth Institute president was not calling for a boycott per se, but rather a concerted effort on behalf of Christian nonprofits to shame Vanco into reversing its decision. This is exactly the same kind of campaign the SPLC is waging against such groups, but RI decided not to brand Vanco a "hate group." Instead, Morse called on other Christian groups to reconsider working with the company.

Finally, Morse reiterated that the Ruth Institute will still accept donations the old-fashioned way. "Donors to the Ruth Institute can rest assured that their private information has not been compromised," the president said. "Supporters can send checks to our main office, 4845 Lake St.; #217; Lake Charles, LA 70605."

With Apple, J.P. Morgan, George Clooney, CNN, and all sorts of groups teaming up with the SPLC to wage a campaign against nonprofits like the Ruth Institute, Morse's organization needs all the help it can get.

SOURCE





The Cleveland Browns — Getting It Right?

After controversial national anthem shenanigans, the team showed class before yesterday's game.

Four weeks ago, a group of Cleveland Browns players took a knee (ostensibly to pray) during our National Anthem. Recall, if you will, that former San Francisco star quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who started this absurd celebrity knee protest, is now unemployed – and his unemployment is being blamed on NFL “racism,” even though more than 70% of NFL players are not white.

A week after the Browns’ protest, former Browns Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown criticized the Browns team and Kaepernick for disrespecting our country:

Colin has to make up his mind whether he’s truly an activist or whether he’s a football player. … I’m going to give you the real deal. I’m an American. I don’t desecrate my flag and my national anthem. I’m not gonna do anything against the flag and the national anthem. I’m going to work within those situations. But this is my country, and I’ll work out the problems, but I’ll do it in an intelligent manner.

As a result of Jim Brown’s remarks and protests from NFL fans, the following week all the Cleveland Browns players stood for the national anthem.

Sunday, the Browns organization took another step in the right direction. Ahead of their game against the Pittsburgh Steelers – and the anniversary observance of the 9/11 Islamist attack on our nation Monday, the Browns took the field flanked by U.S. military personnel, police and first responders. This was, arguably, a repudiation of Kaepernick – and by extension, the former St. Louis Rams and their fake “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” charade after the Ferguson race-bait riots of 2014.

As for Kaepernick, don’t feel too bad for him. According to Business Insider, “After leading the San Francisco 49ers to consecutive NFC championship games and one Super Bowl, Colin Kaepernick was rewarded with a ‘record’ seven-year, $126 million contract in 2014. But after three seasons of declining production, including one season of headlines surrounding his protest of the national anthem, [Kaepernick has only] received $39.4 million from the deal.”

Not a bad run for a child born to a destitute white woman, abandoned by his black father, then adopted and raised in privilege by Rick and Teresa Kaepernick, an affluent white couple. His anger is badly misplaced — it is his birth father who was his “oppressor,” not America, where a very generous white couple came to his rescue. (Wait, that sounds a LOT like the bio of an “oppressed” former president.)

As for the NFL, their MSM viewer ratings are the worst on record for an opening season – and the same can be said for ESPN’s ratings

SOURCE




Feds spend $138G asking 4-year-olds about their 'internal sense of gender identity'

The National Science Foundation is spending over $130,000 on a study that asks four-year-olds about their "internal sense of gender identity."

A grant for a two-year study was awarded to the University of Washington this summer. The project will interview 250 children aged four to six, and their parents, asking a series of questions about "gendered behavior."

"Prominent theories of gender development have discussed the degree to which gender identity results from an internal sense of gender and socialization processes," according to the grant. "However, tests of these theories have been limited because, for most children, internal gender identity and environmental socialization substantially overlap, rendering it impossible to distinguish the relative impact of each factor on gender development."

The study will investigate whether gender theories, such as Gender Schema Theory that blames society on differences between genders, are sufficient for today's "wider range of human gender experiences," where there can be anywhere between 3, 37, and 58 genders.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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