Monday, November 16, 2020



Therapist in Canada says bill before Parliament would prevent counselors from affirming patients who reject gender transition

Ann Gillies, a Canadian psychologist, says a bill before her nation's Parliament would ban therapists and parents from affirming people, including children, who consider but reject gender transitions.

The proposal, called Bill C-8 would ban conversion therapy, which it defines as any "service, practice or treatment designed to change a person's sexual orientation to heterosexual, gender identity to one that matches the sex assigned at birth, or to repress or reduce non heterosexual sexual attraction or sexual behaviors."

Gillies says this definition of conversion therapy differs from that used by the Canadian Psychological Association. The phrase "repress or reduce non heterosexual sexual attraction or sexual behaviors" does not reflect the CPA's definition.

Gillies says this additional language would likely make it illegal to affirm people who seek counseling and decide not to transition to another gender or decide to remain celibate.

A press release on Gillies's website includes video footage from therapy sessions that she says would be illegal if Bill C-8 becomes law. In the sessions, a girl identified as "Rachel" talks about her own decision not to pursue a gender transition, despite considering such a transition at one time. At 12, Rachel began dressing and acting like a boy at school. She says she began to consider a physical transition under pressure from teachers and peers. But she experienced rejection when she decided not to go through with it.

"When you come out as transgender, everyone is so accepting. But when you come out as cis, everyone turns their back on you," Rachel said in one of the videos.

Cisgender is a term used for people who identify as the gender they were born as.

During these sessions, Gillies encourages Rachel, whose face is blurred out in the videos, to accept herself as a female.

"We need to support Canadians, regardless of how they choose to identify," Gillies said in the press release. "This law discriminates against 'Rachel,' preventing people like her from choosing their support."

Philadelphia Vietnamese Baptist Church is a "total loss" after thugs burned it

The Vietnamese Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was burned on Tuesday night as the Black Lives Matter protests continued in Philadelphia following the police shooting of a Black man Monday.

"I have no idea why they attacked our church. They burned it from the roof. They threw flammable chemicals on the roof and [flames] burned through the roof, said Pastor Philip Pham, adding that the building is a "total loss."

The latest protests are in response to the shooting death Walter Wallace, Jr., a black man who brandished a knife in a confrontation with police on Monday.

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., several officers have been injured during an attack involving fireworks. Other incidents between protesters and police resulted from the death of Karon Hylton, a man who was killed on a moped last Friday. Hylton was fleeing from police when he collided with a vehicle..

AOC Exposes the Underbelly of Leftist Tyranny

It's clear that if given the power, AOC and her ilk would punish and destroy political opponents.

Will the real fascists please stand up? Prior to any mainstream media outlets calling the presidential election for Joe Biden, extreme leftist “Squad” member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) posted the following statement on social media: “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”

Several people responded to AOC’s speech-chilling statement by pointing out its obvious allusions to some of history’s most brutal dictators. One commenter wrote, “Joseph [Stalin] is proud of you!” Another posted an image of Mao Zedong captioned, “Big shoes to fill but you’ll get there.” Still another simply stated, “Archive this: You are insane.”

Maybe the best rebuke came from liberal academic Bret Weinstein, a staunch free speech advocate. “You are an elected representative in a democratic republic and you are setting the stage for retribution against fellow citizens for the crime of holding a different opinion,” he warned. “It’s un-American, you should stop it and council others to do the same.”

Even Whoopi Goldberg of “The View” responded, “We don’t go after people because of who they vote for. … We don’t print out lists. … The last time people did this, people ended up killing themselves. Do not encourage people to print out lists because the next list that comes out, your name will be on, and then people will be coming after you.”

In fact, AOC had also linked to a website run by leftist anti-Trumpers called The Trump Accountability Project. The site advocates collecting the names of anyone who directly worked to support Trump’s presidency so as to target them for harassment. The site states, “The world should never forget those who, when faced with a decision, chose to put their money, their time, and their reputations behind separating children from their families, encouraging racism and anti-Semitism, and negligently causing the unnecessary loss of life and economic devastation from our country’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.” She later deleted the posting, but it’s patently clear that if given the power, AOC would use that power to destroy those with whom she disagrees.

For AOC, like all totalitarians, anyone who fundamentally disagrees with her views on government and “justice” are not merely political opponents. They are evil enemies that need to be attacked and eradicated. As Weinstein noted, this is un-American. And the great irony is that while AOC claims to be fighting for greater democracy and against racism and bigotry, she is actually engaged in doing the exact opposite. What is truly amazing is how apparently blind she is to it.

Australia: Calls for 'class quotas' in Young Labor to bolster party's blue-collar ranks

What an air-headed proposal! How would it work? Are they going to get working class kids by the collar and drag them along to Labor party meetings?

That most young Labor members are kids from affluent families going to elite universities, means that it is hard to see how anything could change. The plain fact is that conservative parties now have most appeal to the workers. That is particularly seen in the USA where Trump mopped up most of the working class vote

Youthful inexperience still does ensure that most young people do vote Leftist but it is unlikely that that tendency will flow through to party membership. The cultural climate in meetings dominated by rich kids would leave most working class kids very uncomfortable


Labor must fill its ranks with more working-class young Australians and TAFE students to help it reconnect with suburban and blue-collar voters, the head of an ALP-aligned think-tank says, proposing a major overhaul of the party's youth wing ahead of the next election.

The federal opposition has been plagued by infighting during the past 18 months over attempts to turn around its electoral fortunes following three successive poll defeats and to balance its climate change credentials with attempts to win back its traditional base.

Nick Dyrenfurth - executive director of the John Curtin Research Centre - says the party should introduce new quotas for Young Labor (representing ALP members aged between 15 and 26) to recruit and retain more non-university students into its ranks.

Dr Dyrenfurth, who was the ALP's national policy forum secretary between 2016 and 2019, said there had been no effort to recruit "actual working people" such as tradies, assembly-line workers, train drivers, cleaners, retail employees or plumbers into the party's membership.

He said the narrowness of the party's membership had contributed to the cultural problems and electoral weakness at the federal level.

"Labor was once a working-class party that needed middle-class votes to win elections; it has since become a university-educated, socially-liberal, white-collar party that needs blue-collar, non-tertiary educated, precariously employed votes to win," Dr Dyrenfurth writes in The Tocsin, the centre's quarterly publication.

Young Labor draw upwards of 95 per cent of its members from university campuses, mainly from the top-ranking institutions he writes, and not from the 72 per cent of non-tertiary degree holding Australians.

Dr Dyrenfurth wants a Young Labor membership ratio of one-third university students, one-third TAFE and vocational students and one-third young workers not studying by 2022.

"Such an approach would bolster the role of Labor's affiliated trade unions, which currently shoulder the load in keeping the party connected to its working-class base but find themselves all too often ignored by an arrogant parliamentary wing," he writes.

"Too many Labor MPs and especially its young activists look and sound the same as their ostensible Greens rivals: university-educated, socially liberal and likely non-religious or atheist, and destined for white-collar, higher-income secure work, living in the inner-cities."

Former Labor minister Craig Emerson, who now chairs the ALP-aligned McKell Institute, backed Dr Dyrenfurth's idea but with some reservations.

"The idea of getting more young people from working class backgrounds is fine and quotas have been effective in the past, especially in relation to getting more women into Parliament," he said.

"But I don't think that it's a good idea to tell university students they are [worth less] ... A lot of university students come from working class backgrounds. There are a lot of first-in-family university graduates and I wouldn't want to be signalling to working-class kids who want to go to university they are less valuable [to Labor] for doing so."

Emma Dawson, executive director of progressive think tank Per Capita, said she agreed with the aim of broadening the party's membership but quotas were not the way to get there.

"It's really important the Labor Party remains a labour party, but you can't coerce people into joining a political party," she said.

"The key thing is to devolve some of that decision making and some of that gatekeeping and listen more responsively to what people need, and that's different in different parts of the country."

Long-time frontbench MP Joel Fitzgibbon quit shadow cabinet this week after 18 months of disagreement over climate and energy policy, which he said had alienated its blue-collar constituency and cost it millions of votes outside capital cities.

He said the party had provided too much focus on progressive issues while ignoring its traditional base and the policies that working people need to "help them meet their aspirations and the aspirations for their families".

Labor's post election review found the party had moved to address political grievances of a vast and disparate constituency during its time in opposition and warned working people experiencing economic dislocation would lose faith if they do not believe the party was responding to their needs.

Low-income workers swung against Labor at the May 2019 election with the review finding its ambiguous language on the Adani Carmichael coal mine in central Queensland, combined with anti-coal rhetoric, devastated its support in the coal mining communities of regional Queensland and the Hunter Valley.

But it found higher-income urban Australians concerned about climate change swung to Labor, despite the effect Labor’s tax policies on negative gearing and franking credits might have had on them.

Labor's assistant climate change spokesman Pat Conroy said on Friday the party could only govern when it unites it two bases of working class Australians university educated, progressive voters. "We're at our best when we represent both of those groups," he said.

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http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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