Thursday, March 02, 2023



A Defender of Faith Emerges at New York



The mayor of New York is making waves as a rare Democrat in public office to stand up for religious liberties. Mayor Adams made this position clear yesterday at an interfaith brunch where he described himself as a “servant of God” much to the disappointment of secularists. Most remarkably, however, Mr. Adams stood up for the traditional view of religious liberties, eschewing the view dominant in his party.

“Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state,” the mayor was reported as saying by Daily News. “State is the body, church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.” Hizzoner was promptly pilloried by the left for what liberals see as a violation of the First Amendment. “It is odd that Mayor Adams would need a refresher on the First Amendment,” says the ACLU’s Donna Lieberman.

“The very opening passage of the Bill of Rights makes clear that church and state must be separate,” Ms. Lieberman adds. She’s trying to palm off on our noble public the idea that the First Amendment says something about separating church and state. What it does is prohibit Congress — Congress — from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” Why does she think the Framers worded the sentence that way?

If the Framers’ plan was to deny Congress the power merely to establish a religion, they would have said, “Congress shall establish no religion.” Instead it said, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Scholars have concluded that what it was saying was that not only may Congress not establish a national religion but it may not disestablish religions established by the states, of which there were several.

So it’s Ms. Lieberman and her camarilla who strike us as off point. Neither the word “wall” nor “separation” appears anywhere in the Constitution. Yet this confounded wall was used by the state of Maine to exclude students in a voucher program from attending their choice of a school if their choice was a religious school. It was used by Montana to do the same, as well as the state of Missouri to deny funds for playground safety at a religious school.

In each of these cases, the Supreme Court has struck down the statutes — which it has called “discrimination against religion.” So Mr. Adams’ remarks meanwhile could start steering his party toward a constitutional path. We once did an informal survey of law firms specializing in religious liberty to ask how many religious freedom cases are alive in our courts. Estimates ran from 200 to several thousand.

Yet we have been unable to find in any of those cases a major Democratic politician siding with the religious party. We might have missed someone. The silence, though, is deafening. It strikes at the heart of New York, where beleaguered chasidic Jews face attacks from the state itself, demanding they educate their children in profane subjects and prohibiting the most orthodox of Jews the right of free exercise.

So congratulations to Mr. Adams for his remarks. He expresses a modern Washingtonian view of religion and citizenship — a positive vision of the role of faith in American life. “When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools,” Mr. Adams said. He reminds us of George Washington’s farewell address, in which he urged the American people to ensure the flourishing of religious life to guarantee the wellbeing of the nation.

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” the first president told the nation. “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Washington sought no persecution of secularists. Neither would he brook religious exclusion, and it’s nice to hear the Mayor of New York echo his sentiments.

***************************************************

No me digas! Spain is leading Europe’s feminine swing to the right

After almost three winters of discontent, Europe is swinging to the right and – reminiscent of the UK’s response to the economic disaster of the 1970s – it is women who are leading the charge. Anti-Woke female leaders from Italy to Sweden are offering economic solutions after years of draconian lockdowns. Writing from one of the most continually locked down cities on the planet, Melbourne, I can certainly see the appeal.

Europe’s latest rising star is a 44-year-old member of Spain’s People’s Party and President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Diaz Ayuso. Six months after her inauguration, the Covid pandemic reached Spain, however, Ayuso’s common-sense approach to the virus preserved freedoms and kept small business alive. Reflecting on a rise in cases in the Autumn of 2020, after cases had previously fallen and a sense of normality returned in much of Spain over the summer, Ayuso summed up her response thus: ‘When everyone was asking to close, with no alternatives, we decided to go against the virus, not the people.’ And it was the people she won. With the most relaxed restrictions in the country, Ayuso became the unofficial patron saint of the capital’s theatres, shops, and hospitality industry. Acknowledging that life in Madrid can be expensive and difficult during the pandemic, she maintained that the one good thing about the city was that you could go for a beer with family and friends at the end of a hard day’s work (something lost on Victoria’s Daniel Andrews).

Leading up to May 2021’s snap regional election, posters of her accompanied by the word libertad! became a common sight behind the bars in Madrid’s watering holes. Her face appeared on the label of an artisanal beer and Ayuso-style papas became a popular dish – they came with two extra huevos: eggs, but also a reference to the expression’s other meaning: ‘with a pair of balls’.

Stylising herself as the ‘freedom’ candidate, Ayuso pitched the election as a fight against the national government of Pedro Sanchez, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, and its months-long application of pandemic emergency powers. The lockdown-fatigued public rewarded Ayuso with a landslide victory – she won almost 45 per cent of the vote. The PP fell only four seats short of an overall majority and secured more votes and seats than all three main leftist parties combined.

Almost two years on and Ayuso is running for re-election this May in a campaign that could see her ultimately face off with Sanchez and become Spain’s first female Prime Minister. The Madrilenian election is seen as crucial before the battle for Spain’s future is fought in December’s general election. Having already established herself as a more credible opposition figure to the central government than the PP’s previous national leader Pablo Casado, ‘Saint Isabel’, as her supporters praise her, is tipped to challenge the PP’s current leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo, and if she does, she has a serious shot at the top job.

It is not just a prudent response to the pandemic that has Madrid gripped by ‘Ayusomania’. Post-Covid, Ayuso cut taxes and red tape in a suite of open market policies that saw Madrid attract US$15.3 billion in foreign investment, growth climbed two points above the national average of 5.7 per cent, and Madrid overtook Catalonia as Spain’s richest region. Further, Ayuso vows to be tough on an increasingly ‘Woke’ Spain and has taken aim at the government’s social program. She has condemned the recently passed law that allows 16-year-olds to change their gender without parental consent arguing that while Spain was the first country to offer publicly funded sex changes and ‘Madrid is the capital of Pride’, this new law is ‘radical’ with the power to harm ‘adolescents who don’t have their sexual identity clear’ as well as whole families. ‘Its type is doing much harm all over the world…’ she observed.

And it seems much of the world, or at least much of Europe, agrees with her. As I pointed out in the lead-up to last year’s Italian general election won by the Brothers of Italy’s sorella Giorgia Meloni, many of Europe’s right wing politicians are united by an aversion to Woke ideology, and many of them are women. Over the past ten years the effects of unregulated immigration from majority Muslim countries and a divisive Woke identity politics have been critical issues for female politicians on the right. As Marine Le Pen has argued, in the face of mass immigration and subsequent attacks on women in France, ‘every woman must be protected in their right to wear shorts or a miniskirt’. When she was the gender-equality spokeswoman for the nationalist Sweden Democrats, and the youngest MP in Swedish Parliament, Ebba Hermansson echoed Le Pen by identifying keeping women ‘safe from sexual violence’ as her main concern. Drawing attention to the changing face of Western Europe, she stated bluntly: ‘If you come from a from a country where women are not worth as much as men, or women don’t have the right to live their lives as they want, when you come [to Sweden] there’s a shock.’

Women seem to agree across the board. Le Pen won 41.5 per cent of the vote in last year’s election – a record both en masse and for female voters. In Germany FridA, or Frauen in der AfD (Women in the AfD), is gaining traction, and Alice Weidel, the recently re-elected leader of Alternative for Germany, who is a strong opponent of what she calls ‘gender idiocy and early sexualisation classes’, led the party to record their strongest performance yet in the states of Saxony and Thuringia in 2021’s federal election. Of note is that Alice Weidel is opposed to the legalisation of same-sex marriage, stating that she supports protection of the ‘traditional family’ while also supporting ‘other lifestyles’. Weidel herself is a lesbian in a civil partnership with another woman. This brings me to the question the Left may ask: why is it that women are leading the Right?

The answer, I think, lies in their unwillingness to be typecast, their commitment to freedom in an increasingly ideologically Woke world, and their unmatched tenacity, or huevos. When the radical feminist activists of Spain’s left criticise her, Ayuso retorts that they reveal their hypocrisy in hating that as a free woman she chose the Right side of the political spectrum. She has also dismissed death threats as things not to ‘make a song and dance about’, echoing the views Afd MP’s Nicole Höchst and Morinna Miazga who are both tough-skinned. ‘I could kill every man in the party’ karate champion Höchst has joked. On the male-female divide in the AfD Miazga laughs, ‘It takes only 10 of us to keep the 82 men in check.’ All quip that as women they can ‘do two things at once’. All have also predictably been called fascists. But as Ayuso states ‘When they call you a fascist, you know you’re doing it right […] and you’re on the right side of history […] In Spain they call anyone a facha who disagrees with the most authoritarian people.’ Unlike Jacinda Ardern and Nicola Sturgeon, I don’t see these women leaving politics anytime soon.

**************************************************

Leftist racists focus on Nikki Haley

If there is one thing about herself that Nikki Haley has constantly emphasized, it is her pride in being the daughter of Ajit and Raj Randhawa, who emigrated from India in the 1960s.

THE OPENING line of "Can't Is Not An Option," Nikki Haley's 2012 autobiography, is a forthright proclamation of her South Asian roots: "I am the proud daughter of Indian parents, who reminded us every day how blessed we are to live in this country."

It was with those words, wrote Haley, who was then in her first term as South Carolina's governor, that she had begun every speech she delivered during her gubernatorial campaign. It was with similar words that she addressed the Republican National Convention in 2020, describing her childhood in the small town of Bamberg, S.C. "My father wore a turban; my mother wore a sari," she told the delegates. "I was a brown girl in a Black and white world."

And it was with those words that Haley launched her bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, repeating them in her formal announcement video and at her kickoff rally in Charleston, S.C., on Feb. 15.

If there is one thing about herself that Haley has constantly emphasized, it is her pride in being the daughter of Ajit and Raj Randhawa, who emigrated from India in the 1960s. And yet because she goes by "Nikki" she has repeatedly been accused of trying to whitewash her ethnic identity and downplay her Indian background.

Of all the reasons for which Haley can be criticized, that has to be the stupidest and most contemptible.

Haley's first name is Nimarata, a Punjabi word meaning "humility." Nikki, which means "little one" in the same language, is her middle name. She has gone by that name all her life, and when she married Michael Haley, she took his last name.

Nothing about that is unusual, of course. Millions of people have always been called by their middle names. Among them: Willard Mitt Romney, Olive Marie Osmond, James Paul McCartney, and Rachel Meghan Markle. But to some chauvinists and haters, Haley's preference for "Nikki" has long been grounds for attack.

During her first run for political office in South Carolina, her opponent — a 30-year incumbent named Larry Koon — ran ads deliberately mislabeling her as "Nimrata N. Randhawa," depicting her alongside her father in his turban, and labeling her a "Buddhist." (In fact, Haley's father is Sikh; she converted to Christianity decades ago and attends a Methodist church). In case anyone missed the point, the ad dismissed her as not a "REAL Republican." Voters weren't swayed by such xenophobia. Haley trounced Koon in the final by 10 percentage points.

More frequent, however, has been the malice aimed at Haley from progressives, who sneer that she uses "Nikki" to hide her origins and win favor with white supremacists.

"Are you afraid the white folks you're kowtowing to won't vote for someone named Nimrata?" tweeted Talbert Swan of the Greater Springfield NAACP when Haley announced her presidential bid. "You not only want to erase the history of Black people to satisfy racists, you want to erase your own. You're a disgrace."

On ABC's "The View" last fall, cohost Sunny Hostin described Haley as one of those "chameleons" who "decide not to embrace [their] ethnicities" so that they can "pass" for white. She asked, mockingly: "What's her real name again?"

What especially seems to trigger the poisonous barbs about Haley's name is her conviction that America is not a racist nation. When Haley repeated that message during her campaign kickoff last month, the popular podcaster and The Atlantic writer Jemele Hill taunted: "So why did she change her name then?"

Such boorish attacks are more than just another example of the ugliness to which public discourse has descended. They also reflect a resentment toward non-white Americans who reject left-wing dogma. Like those who slur Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as "Uncle Clarence" and Senator Tim Scott as "Uncle Tim," the Haley-haters regard her as illegitimate because she makes her political home on the right.

Happily, there are liberal Democrats who reject such bigotry. "I think the fact that she got to be the governor of South Carolina with brown skin is a very impressive accomplishment," Paul Begala, the longtime Democratic Party strategist, said on CNN last week. "I don't think it's something people ought to be attacking or ridiculing her about."

Whatever else may be said about Haley, jeering her for her name is juvenile and shabby. She has shortcomings aplenty, but they don't include hiding from her Indian identity. As a candidate for office, her record and her views are certainly fair targets. Her foes have every right to aggressively challenge her ideas. But when they go after Nikki Haley's name, they demean only themselves.

**********************************************************

A promising employment opportunity for Australian blacks

Last week the ABC broadcast one of its routine, not news, news stories about the labour shortage in the bush (‘Northern Territory workforce shortages force government, industries to seek employees across globe’). Recently a Four Corners episode presented a similar story focusing on the Griffith region (‘A visit to the town of Griffith tells you everything you need to know about Australia’s worker shortage crisis’).

The ABC routinely produces stories lamenting the absence of workers in rural areas and in Darwin and is not alone in presenting such stories. A quick search of the internet reveals dozens of similar tales of woe across most media outlets.

Meanwhile, a close competitor in frequency of publication are the recurrent stories about the absence of jobs for Aboriginal Australians in rural areas. The federal and state governments have, for decades, been regularly churning out earnest reports investigating the reason why unemployment levels for Aborigines remain much higher than those of any other group in Australia. The reports routinely note that the absence of job opportunities in the bush for Aborigines is a major cause of anti-social behaviour in places such as Wadeye.

What I have been unable to find in any of the hundreds of articles and television documentaries published recently on these two topics, is anyone who attempts to seriously link the two issues. The recent Four Corners episode reported on problems in the orchard industry around Griffith where the general manager of a local orchards said, ‘There should have been 200 workers at the vast orchard, picking fruit from its half-a-million citrus trees.’ The Four Corners report continued, ‘Mr Ceccato found just 20. The award wage for fruit picking is $26.73 an hour, but Mr Ceccato pays his workers $29. He says he couldn’t find more workers even when he offered $45 an hour.’

The absence of backpackers and Pacific Island workers has undoubtedly created a crisis in the rural labour market and the question of why no one is trying to use this crisis as an opportunity to get unemployed Aboriginal youths into work requires examination. Why do horticulturalists prefer to recruit gangs of Pacific Islanders to pick fruit rather than gangs of unemployed Aborigines? Why is the NT government currently sending no less than 20 delegates from the hospitality industry to the UK and Ireland to recruit workers for the NT hospitality industry when there is, theoretically, a pool of unemployed workers already here and, more importantly, why is no one in the mainstream media addressing these questions?

The standard redneck racist answer to questions like these is that the Aborigines don’t want to work and would rather hang around in remote settlements living on welfare. A more sophisticated explanation for the reluctance to offer work to unemployed Aborigines is found in a recent parliamentary inquiry into poverty where we are told, ‘It is etched on the collective psyche of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today that social and economic exclusion was arbitrarily enforced upon us. The ramifications of this exclusion have set the platform for the tragic circumstances experienced by [Indigenous] people in Australia.’

The Diversity Council Australia published a major report last year in which it said that high unemployment among rural Aborigines is due to several reasons including racism and the lack of culturally safe workplaces. (‘Gari Yala Speak The Truth’). To remedy this situation the authors suggested a variety of approaches including, ‘Consult with Indigenous staff on how to minimise cultural load while maintaining organisational activity’, ‘Recognise and remunerate cultural load as part of an employee’s workload’, and ‘Recognise identity strain and educate non-Indigenous staff about how to interact with their Indigenous colleagues in ways that reduce this’.

The fact that employers have to remain mindful of ‘identity strain’ and ‘cultural load’ should they wish to employ Aboriginal staff to pick oranges might go some way to explaining why Pacific Islanders and backpackers are preferred employees.

I can find no evidence that any of the thousands of academics, government officials and Land Council officials whose job it is to solve the issue of rural Aboriginal unemployment has suggested putting together teams of Aboriginal fruit pickers to gather experience in the horticultural industry. This is despite the fact that it offers a unique opportunity to enable unemployed Aboriginal youths to gain work experience and an income.

Instead, the whole of government approach to solving the problem of labour shortages in rural and regional Australia is twofold. Firstly the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme which, now that Covid is behind us, aims to bring even more unskilled and semi-skilled workers to Australia and, secondly, a decision to increase by 30 per cent the number of working holiday visas issued to backpackers.

It is difficult to accept that no one, from all the relevant expert bodies, has considered using unemployed Aboriginal youths to fill the current labour shortage. Possibly the experts are all racist and believe it is a waste of time trying to get Aboriginals involved in low-skilled seasonal work. Possibly they recognise that the challenges involved in creating culturally safe workplaces in orchards are insuperable.

But the failure to link the two issues of rural Aboriginal unemployment and the desperate shortage of unskilled labour in rural enterprises speaks volumes about the hypocrisy and dishonesty in the debates emanating from people who make a living in the Aboriginal grievance industry. Possibly they are all too busy fighting for the establishment of the Voice to focus on concrete steps to get Aboriginal youths into the workforce. Possibly they believe that until culturally safe workplaces are established, it is too dangerous for young Aboriginals to earn a living.

The endless supply of ‘sit-down money’ has to be replaced by a get-up program which will teach the young adults in remote communities less about traditional culture and more about the psychological value of being able to support a family. The story of Nabi Baqiri, the illiterate Afghan refugee who arrived with nothing and is now a multi-millionaire part-owner of several orchards, should be better known.

He shows what can be achieved in this country and, instead of the hoo-ha of establishing a Voice to parliament, his voice is one we should all listen to.

****************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

*****************************************

No comments: