Tuesday, July 03, 2018




Why I favor the Equal Rights Amendment

Because it should KILL affirmative action for women stone dead. It reads:

"Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

But equality between the sexes is denied if a more qualified male candidate for a job is passed over in favour of a less qualified woman.  Yet that is a continuous cry from the Left these days.  They want equal numbers of men and women in many jobs and try to set quotas which would achieve that.  But all that agitation would be pointless if men and women were equally qualified.  The whole feminist aim is to pass over a well qualified male in favour of a less qualified person with less between her legs.  You might call it genital determinism.

There is in fact a great deal of favoritism, both deliberate and narural in favour of women. Probably natural is the greater presence of women in the universities.  But that preponderance would seem to fly in the face of the ERA.  There are simply fewer men admitted and that would have to change -- presumably by easing the admission requirements for men.

The straightforward interpretation of the ERA that I have put forward, however, may not be adopted by the courts.  The courts twist the law to suit their ideology at will and you can be sure that courts would be anxious to avoid feminist rage.  The configuration of SCOTUS created by Trump, however, might very well adopt the literal interpretation that I have proposed.  That would be a great victory over feminist bigotry and bias.

The uncertainty about what courts would rule does however add to the many reasons given below about why an ERA is a bad idea



The idea that the Constitution doesn’t protect equal rights for women, or that the Founders didn’t include women in their views about individual rights, is completely wrong.

Unfortunately, some self-described members of the “Me Too” movement have embraced the so-called Equal Rights Amendment to “fix” the Constitution, including actress Alyssa Milano, who spoke at rallies to generate support in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Illinois recently became the 37th state to ratify this proposed constitutional amendment, which says, in part: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

The amendment has been a huge issue for the left for quite some time. In 2014, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it her most favored addition to the Constitution.

“If I could choose an amendment to add to the Constitution, it would be the Equal Rights Amendment,” Ginsburg said. “ … I would like my granddaughters, when they pick up the Constitution, to see that notion—that women and men are persons of equal stature—I’d like them to see that is a basic principle of our society.”

Ultimately, attempts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment are mostly symbolic for now.

Passage of a constitutional amendment requires 38 states to ratify it. This seemingly puts the Equal Rights Amendment one state away from passage—but most of the other states ratified the amendment in the 1970s, and five actually rescinded their vote (Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, South Dakota, and Kentucky).

When Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, it insisted that the amendment be ratified by the states by 1982, that is, within 10 years.

Only 35 states ratified the amendment by the deadline. It’s likely those states will have to re-ratify the amendment for it to pass.

The Equal Rights Amendment is likely a ways away from passing, but it’s worth noting the false premise it’s built on

Many on the left charge that the Constitution doesn’t protect equal rights for women. But that is simply incorrect, and it is misleading to portray the document as inherently sexist.

As historian Thomas G. West wrote in his book “Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America,” it’s incorrect to claim that the founding documents are inherently sexist.

“The word ‘men’ in the Declaration [of Independence] means mankind, human beings, male and female, or whatever color or race,” West wrote.

While the Founding Fathers certainly didn’t have modern views about the equality of men and women, that is not to say that they did not believe that women, too, qualified for the basic rights and dignities that the new country would be founded upon.

West noted that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, explained in his famed “Notes on the State of Virginia” that only a barbarous society would deny women their equal, God-given rights.

In recognizing these rights, Jefferson explained, however, we must recognize that men and women are different.

This created some problems for early proponents of an Equal Rights Amendment in the 1920s. Many women, especially those working in blue-collar industries, feared they would lose special protections designed for women and mothers working in industries requiring manual labor.

“Civilized men, in Jefferson’s view, do not abuse their superior natural strength. They treat women as free beings, not as slaves compelled to toil for their male masters,” West wote.

Civilization, Jefferson wrote, “first teaches us to subdue the selfish passions, and to respect those rights in others which we value in ourselves. Were we in equal barbarism, our females would be equal drudges.”

The Constitution, following this line of thinking, makes no distinction between men and women.

“Whenever the Constitution speaks of ‘privileges guaranteed to individuals,’ women are always included by clear implication,” West wrote. “Or are we to assume that the constitutional guarantee of ‘the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus’ means that women (but not men) may be imprisoned but not charged with a specific crime? … Obviously not.”

From the time of the nation’s founding, women could give equal testimony in court, own property, and even vote in some states.

While the 19th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote nationally, many states allowed women to vote long before the law went into effect in 1920.

In fact, New Jersey allowed women to vote in the 1790s, in an era in which voting was restricted for some men, such as nonproperty holders. Many Western states in particular opened up voting to women in the 19th century.

Ultimately, the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment likely would cause more problems than it would solve, even for the people who have become proponents.

It would mean that women would have to be registered for the military draft, for one, and could eliminate laws that benefit women, such as alimony.

The late conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who was instrumental in killing the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, wrote in 2007 that it would “[A]bolish the presumption that the husband should support his wife and take away Social Security benefits for wives and widows.”

“It would also give federal courts and the federal government enormous new powers to reinterpret every law that makes a distinction based on gender, such as those related to marriage, divorce and alimony,” Schlafly wrote.

The concerns of the Me Too movement have more to do with culture than anything else, and while the Equal Rights Amendment is unlikely to turn the Harvey Weinsteins of the world into angels, the goal of many of its advocates is to codify the most extreme elements of the sexual revolution into law.

Pro-life groups worry that the Equal Rights Amendment could be a method to add a constitutional right to taxpayer-funded abortion.

Some proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment have argued that putting any limitations at all on abortion would be in violation of the amendment and a form of sex discrimination.

Certainly, adding abortion-neutral language to the proposed amendment has been met with fierce opposition in the past.

National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis, a conservative columnist, explained why the Equal Rights Amendment is both useless regarding the specific concerns of the Me Too movement and dangerous when it comes to the Constitution.

DeSanctis wrote:

If they get their way, it will no longer be the Department of Health and Human Services forcing employers to subsidize contraceptives and abortifacients; it will be the Equal Rights Amendment. When the giants of the abortion industry insist that Congress use taxpayer dollars to fund abortions, they will come carrying a copy of Madison’s founding document. Every demand for complete sexual libertinism, facilitated by the state, will suddenly have behind it the imprimatur of the U.S. Constitution. That’s what they’re after.

Schlafly and a powerful contingent of social conservatives, led by traditionalist women, killed the Equal Rights Amendment even in the culturally heady days of the 1970s, and it should remain a dead issue.

The Constitution already protects equal natural rights for women. There’s no need to revise the document to include a weapon for left-wing social engineering on a national scale.

SOURCE






Black culture in action



A Michigan woman has been charged after she allegedly bit part of a Chinese restaurant owner's ear off because she wasn't happy with her order.

Jade Anderson, 24, was upset about her order at China 1 restaurant in Mount Clemens on Thursday night, reported the Macomb Daily, although it's unclear what she was angry about.

Due to a language barrier, the son of the owner and his wife, described by a witness to be around 10 or 11 years old, was translating Anderson's complaints.

According to the newspaper, Anderson allegedly pushed the son to the ground and threw her food to the floor.

After she began assaulting the wife, the owner stepped in to try and intervene.

Anderson then began assaulting the owner. As she was being pushed out the door, she allegedly bit the man's ear, partially detaching it.

A 911 call from the owner's son was released by WXYZ.  'There's a violent woman over here hitting my mom. She also hit me,' the owner's son is heard saying.

'Who is she?' the 911 dispatcher asks. 'I don't know. I'm scared. Can you please come? She's fighting us right now,' the son says.

Macomb County Sheriff deputies were called to the restaurant around 9.40pm. They found the owner with his ear partially bitten off and a woman with a large bump on her forehead.

Anderson was arrested by authorities and booked on charges of assault with intent to maim charge.

She is being held at the Macomb County Jail in lieu of a $20,00 bail and is due in court on July 11.

The Macomb County Sheriff's Office said that the owner was taken to a hospital and treated for his injuries while the wife was treated at the scene. The son was not injured, deputies said.

The Macomb Daily reported that the China 1 property is owned by Byung Kim and Young Kim of Troy, according to Mount Clemens tax records.

The newspaper also reported that incorporation records from the state of Michigan show that the president of the China 1 location is Liang Wu.

Deputies said Anderson left a small child at home unsupervised when she went to the restaurant. The deputies said the child has been turned over to a 'responsible adult'.

On Friday afternoon, a sign at the restaurant read that it was closed 'because of some reasons', reported WXYZ.

SOURCE






UN to Trump: Accept Muslim Refugees and Illegal Aliens or Else

President Trump has released his updated travel ban and it looks to be legally bulletproof.

The State of Hawaii has filed a lawsuit against the revised Middle Eastern refugee ban, but it’s unlikely to be successful. In 2015, Hawaii resettled just FIVE refugees and none of them were from the six countries on the ban list. Hard to prove that Hawaii was negatively affected by the order…

Now, the DOJ is filing motions to dismiss the dozens of lawsuits against the old order. But lo and behold, a new challenger has emerged. The United Nations Human Rights Commission is meeting behind closed doors to debate whether to go after the United States for violating international law.

That’s right. There are bureaucrats in the UN considering suing the United States and forcing us to accept refugees and illegal aliens..

And the biggest slap in the face is that this whole lawsuit is being financed with our tax dollars!

Enough of this nonsense. Send your urgent FaxBlast to Congress and DEMAND they pass Ted Cruz’s legislation to defund the UN once and for all!

Jordanian Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, declared that President Trump’s policies are “in breach of international law, if undertaken without due process guarantees, including individual assessment.”

SOURCE






College student sues woman for $6million claiming her false rape accusation at a frat party has destroyed his life

A college student is suing a woman for $6million because he says her unsubstantiated claims that he raped her after a drunken frat party have 'destroyed' his life.

Catherine Reddington, 22, has claimed repeatedly via social media that Alex Goldman raped her following a party in April last year at Syracuse University's Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity in upstate New York.

She informed police and the university of the rape accusations in the days after the party and has taken to social media several times in the past month to reveal the details of her alleged assault.

Goldman, also 22, was expelled from Syracuse University after the claims surfaced and more recently was fired from his summer internship with an engineering firm when his accuser informed them of the allegations.

He was never arrested or charged over the incident.

'During the early hours of April 23, 2017 I was raped and sodomized. I woke up in Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity in Alex Goldman's bed confused, bloody, bruised, with ripped clothing and splinter,' Reddington wrote on Facebook on June 4.

'Alex Goldman is a rapist.'

A police investigation into the allegations found no evidence that Reddington had been raped or even had a sexual encounter with Goldman that night.

The investigation, which involved a medical exam and rape kit within 26 hours of the alleged incident, found Reddington had no internal cuts or abrasions in her vagina and that there was no traces of Goldman's DNA.

Both Reddington and Goldman said at the time that they had no memory of the night before.

Goldman filed a defamation lawsuit against Reddington last week claiming that his former classmate is waging a campaign to 'destroy and wreak havoc' on his life and get him expelled from his new school.

'In the past few weeks, in particular, (Reddington) has made numerous posts on social media platforms Facebook and Linkedln falsely accusing Mr Goldman of sexual assault and stating that he is a 'rapist',' the lawsuit states.

'These posts by (Reddington) included a picture of Mr Goldman and 'tagged' Mr Goldman's employer and the university where Mr Goldman attends college. These vicious accusations were knowingly false and intentionally made. These social media posts have been viewed and 'liked' by thousands of people.'

In her Facebook posts, Reddington has often tagged the New Jersey Institute of Technology - the school Goldman now attends.

She also left a review on NJIT's Facebook page that reads: 'A school that accepts recently expelled rapists, despite it being marked on their transcript...'

Reddington contacted Goldman's employer, Bohler Engineering, over social media to inform them of the allegations. She then posted what appeared to be an exchange with Bohler in which they informed her that Goldman had been fired.

Goldman is now seeking $6million in damages from the defamation lawsuit claiming he has suffered emotional, mental and economic harm because of Reddington's allegations.

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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