Boston removes statue of freed slave kneeling before Lincoln
A statue of Abraham Lincoln with a freed slave appearing to kneel at his feet has been taken down in Boston.
The Emancipation Memorial was removed from its perch near Boston Common early on Tuesday morning.
The optics of the statue had drawn objections for some time, and the national reckoning with racial injustice and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement hastened action.
While some saw a Black man rising up and shaking off the broken shackles from his wrists, others saw him kneeling before the president, his white emancipator.
Officials had agreed in late June to take down the memorial, a copy of a monument erected in Washington, DC in 1876. The Boston version was put up in 1879 as its creator Thomas Ball was from the city.
Mayor Marty Walsh acknowledged in June that the design made both residents and visitors “uncomfortable”, despite its originally intended meaning. The Boston Art Commission voted unanimously to remove the statue.
The mayor said: “After engaging in a public process, it's clear that residents and visitors to Boston have been uncomfortable with this statue, and its reductive representation of the Black man's role in the abolitionist movement. I fully support the Boston Art Commission's decision for removal and thank them for their work."
The original was created to celebrate freedom from slavery, and paid for by freed Black donors, while the Boston version was financed by Moses Kimball, the white politician and circus showman.
The freed slave depicted was based on Archer Alexander, a Black man who escaped slavery, helped the Union Army, and was the last man recaptured under the Fugitive Slave Act.
Both versions are inscribed with the words: “A race set free and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors.”
Biden Pledges to End Religious Liberty
It’s not often that a presidential candidate openly attacks and campaigns against one of America’s founding freedoms, but that’s exactly what Joe Biden is doing. One of the most disturbing items listed on Biden’s platform is his pledge to pass the Equal Rights Amendment within his first 100 days. The Equal Rights Amendment codifies sexual “identity” as a human right and as such provides special protected classification to prevent “discrimination.” In short, the Equal Rights Amendment is a direct assault on the First Amendment’s protections of religious liberty and freedom of speech.
Last Wednesday, Biden reiterated his promise as he decried faith-based organizations that hold to orthodox Christian beliefs regarding human sexuality. Using the disingenuous and false bigotry trope, Biden said, “It’s wrong to deny people access to services or housing because of who they are or who they love.”
Biden then accused President Donald Trump of having “deliberately tried to gut protections for the LGBTQ+ community by creating broad religious exemptions to existing nondiscrimination laws and policies that allow businesses, medical providers, and adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.” He then insisted, “We need to root out discrimination in our laws, institutions, and public spaces. Religion should not be used as a license to discriminate, and as president I will oppose legislation to deny LGBTQ+ equal treatment in public places. I will immediately reverse discriminatory practices that Trump put in place and work to advance the rights of LGBTQ+ people widely.”
As usual, Biden’s rendition of Trump’s actions is more fiction than fact. Specifically regarding the military, Trump sided with science in his order stipulating that soldier admission be based on biological sex and not gender identity. This was in no way a “ban” against “transgenderism” — it was acknowledgement of the truth of biological reality. Just because some people may claim and believe in their minds that they’re a unicorn does not make them one.
The word “discrimination” is a term leftists love to manipulate to rubber-stamp their own discrimination. They use “discrimination” as a shield against any who would dare object to their social agenda, specifically when it comes to sexuality. But to oppose religious liberty is in fact being discriminatory by definition.
Furthermore, Biden is not merely pledging to support equal public access (protections that already exist) for those who identify as homosexual; he’s demanding that all Americans be forced to accept and embrace the homosexual lifestyle as an immutable identity and state of being that trumps all religious beliefs. He’s demanding that Americans’ religious convictions and consciences bow before the alter of sexual preference.
Biden is promising to do to all Americans what Colorado, California, and Washington have done to Christian bakers, wedding photographers, and florists — discriminate against their religious liberty. In short, Biden has no tolerance for those whose religious convictions don’t align with his political and social worldview.
Make no mistake, a vote for Biden is a vote against religious liberty and freedom of speech. It’s a vote against tolerance. It’s a vote against the core ideal of religious liberty upon which America was built. A vote for Biden is a vote against America.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/74598
A Supreme Court Decision May Cause Democrats' Sanctuary Policies to BackfireDemocrat-run states and cities have declared themselves sanctuaries for illegal immigrants and implemented various policies to thwart ICE law-enforcement activities. This includes everything from refusing to honor ICE detainers to the Mayor of Oakland, Calif., issuing a public warning about planned enforcement actions by ICE. Leaders were hopeful these policies would prop up their census counts and assist states in maintaining their seats in the House of Representatives. They went to the Supreme Court to ensure they could.
On December 18, the Supreme Court blew this strategy right out of the water. SCOTUS vacated two lower court decisions preventing the exclusion of illegal immigrants from congressional apportionment. They cited the speculative nature of the claims being made by the jurisdictions opposing the president’s directive.
The memorandum from President Trump to the secretary of Commerce requires two counts—the full census numbers and a second number that excludes illegal immigrants. Because Chief Justice John Roberts did some outrageous judicial gymnastics in an earlier case regarding a citizenship question on the census, the second count will rely on other agencies’ administrative records. That information was collected under an Executive Order issued following the decision on the census question.
The president’s reasoning for requesting that illegal immigrants be excluded from apportionment is clear:
Increasing congressional representation based on the presence of aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status would also create perverse incentives encouraging violations of Federal law. States adopting policies that encourage illegal aliens to enter this country and that hobble Federal efforts to enforce the immigration laws passed by the Congress should not be rewarded with greater representation in the House of Representatives.
In the memorandum, the president noted that a single state (which he did not identify) is estimated to be the home to more than 2.2 million illegal immigrants. Current congressional districts in that state each have about 700,000 residents, so the illegal population would apportion approximately three additional seats. The president points out that this is not consistent with the principles of representative democracy. Providing political influence based on the presence of non-citizens reduces the representation of citizens and legal residents.
The plaintiffs alleged that the exclusion of illegal immigrants from the apportionment would impact federal funding. SCOTUS did not find that this conclusion could be made and determined there was no actual controversy and said it was not a dispute that could be resolved through the judicial process.
California attorney general, and candidate for HHS Secretary under Joe Biden, Xavier Becerra, is unhappy with the ruling. California is a sanctuary state—and likely the state singled out by President Trump in the memorandum. While there has been speculation that California would lose one seat due to unprecedented outmigration from the state’s failed urban centers, it now has the potential to lose three.
In a statement, Becerra said:
A complete, accurate census is about ensuring all our voices are heard and that our states get their share of resources to protect the health and well-being of all of our communities. We remain committed to the core principle that everyone counts. Here in California, we’ll continue to stand up for each and every person who calls our state home.
The memorandum explicitly states that it does not apply to functions of the director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals. It is narrowly construed to address only the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. It would appear Becerra’s premise is moot.
However, it would be nice to insert a bit of federalism here. California voters elect the leaders that implement the policies to encourage illegal immigrants to reside in the state. One could assert that voters in other states that do not have sanctuary policies are under no obligation to provide resources for the decisions of California voters. Sometimes paying for bad decisions helps people make better ones.
5 Arguments Against 'America Is a Racist Country'
America is, in fact, the least racist multiracial, multiethnic country in world history.
The left-wing charge that America is a racist country is the greatest national libel since the Blood Libel against the Jews. America is, in fact, the least racist multiracial, multiethnic country in world history.
Neither the claim that America is a racist society nor the claim that it is the least racist country can be empirically proven. Both are assessments. But honest people do need to provide arguments for their position. I have found every argument that America is racist, let alone “systemically” racist, wanting. For example, the police almost never kill unarmed blacks, and on the rare occasions they do (about 15 times a year), there is almost always a valid reason (as in the infamous 2014 case in Ferguson, Missouri); police kill more unarmed whites than blacks; the reason there are proportionately so many more blacks in prison is that blacks disproportionately commit violent crimes; and so on.
There are very powerful arguments against the charge that America is a racist society.
I offered one in my column last week:
No. 1: If there is so much racism in America, why are there so many false claims of racism and outright race hoaxes?
I offered 15 recent examples. Moreover, there were probably no racist hoaxes when America really was racist, just as there were no anti-Semitic hoaxes in 1930s Germany, when there was rampant anti-Semitism. You need hoaxes when the real thing is hard to find.
No. 2: The constant references to slavery.
If there were a great deal of racism in America today, there would be no reason to constantly invoke slavery and the Confederacy. The very fact that The New York Times, the leader in racist dishonesty, felt it necessary to issue its “1619 Project,” which seeks to replace 1776 as the founding of America with 1619, when the first African slaves arrived in America, is a perfect illustration of the point. The fact that “The 1619 Project” was labeled false by the leading American historians of that era (all of whom are liberals and at least one of whom led a campaign to impeach President Donald Trump) adds fuel to the argument. Even regarding the past, the promoters of the “America is racist” libel need to lie to paint America as bad as possible.
No. 3: The reliance on lies.
“The 1619 Project,” which will now be taught in thousands of American schools, is based on lies. All Americans who care about America and/or truth should inquire if their children’s school will teach this and, if so, place their child in a school that does not.
Two of the biggest lies are that preserving slavery was the real cause of the American Revolution and that slavery is what made America rich.
Even the charge of endemic racist police brutality is a lie. There are undoubtedly racist police, but racism does not characterize police interactions with blacks.
No. 4: The large African immigration to the United States.
Nearly 2 million black Africans and more than 1 million blacks from the Caribbean have emigrated to the United States in just the last 20 years. Why would so many blacks voluntarily move to a country that is “systemically racist,” a country, according to the promoters of the “America is racist” libel, in which every single white is a racist? Are all these blacks dumb? Are they ignorant? And what about the millions more who would move here if they were allowed to? How does one explain the fact that Nigerians, for example, are among the most successful immigrant communities?
No. 5: The preoccupation with “microaggressions.”
According to the University of California’s list of racist “microaggressions,” saying, “There is only one race, the human race,” is a “racist microaggression.” This is, of course, Orwellian doublespeak. Anyone who believes there is only one race is not, by definition, a racist. If everyone in the past had believed there was one race, the human race, there would never have been racism, let alone a slave trade based on racism.
The very fact that the left came up with the intellectual farce known as “microaggressions,” like the race hoaxes, proves how little racism there is in America — because the entire thesis is based on the fact that there are so few real, or “macro,” aggressions.
The race riots, the ruining of people’s careers and lives over something said or done at any time in their lives, the ruining of professional sports (especially basketball and football), the tearing down of America and its history, the smearing of moral giants like Abraham Lincoln — all of this is being done because of a lie.
As I wrote in a column three years ago: “The Jews survived the Blood Libel. But America may not survive the American Libel. While the first Libel led to the death of many Jews, the present Libel may lead to the death of a civilization. Indeed, the least oppressive ever created.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
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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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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