SHOCKING SEX-RELATED BIAS

This must be the one of the most troubling stories I have seen for a long time. A woman makes a false accusation of rape that could have landed the accused in jail for 40 years. And the penalty for the false accusation? The court rejected a recommendation for a five DAY sentence and got really tough -- giving a 30 day sentence.

So what's the lesson? If a girl's got a grudge, cry rape! The penalty for being disbelieved is nothing compared to the ruin you can bring on some guy's life.

It seems obvious to me that proven false accusations should get the same sentence as that to which they exposed the guy. But America's law is now so feminist that there is now no justice for men at all in male/female disputes.



JEWISH PC RELIGION

This comes to mind because it is strongly reminiscent of a fad quite common these days among Jewish assimilated liberals and leftists in the United States. These people constitute the School of Jewish Politically-Correct Bible Thumpers. They advocate the PC fads and programs of the American Left, while coating them with a thin veneer of supposedly Biblical ethics.

Like the missionaries of my youth, they learn a dozen or so select Biblical phrases, taken out of context, and argue that the Bible and traditional Judaism unambiguously require that one accept and support a left-wing political agenda. I assume that most readers are familiar with these folks.

Examples of Jewish politically-correct Bible thumping abound. The most outrageous, of course, are the Cheech-and-Chong ethics and the political platform of the editors of Tikkun magazine, featuring the Politics of Meaning psychobabble promoted by "Rabbi" Michael Lerner.

But many mainstream liberal leaders of the Jewish community also engage in Biblical posturing in order to conscript scripture for support of liberal fads. Generally, such Bible-based PC preaching operates through conjuring up the ethics of the Prophets as scriptural underpinning for the Left's political agenda.....

In most cases, politically-correct Bible thumpers are scripturally motivated only under circumstances that they find convenient, and with respect to those political causes they happen to find appealing. Otherwise, they simply ignore everything else in scripture and halacha (Jewish Law) that does not fit their political agenda.

These folks are generally not Jews whose lifestyles are determined by Biblical rules regarding, say, diet, Sabbath, sexual relations, etc. Indeed, when Scripture clearly favors a moral or political position that is not fashionable, these same PC Bible thumpers suddenly decline to adapt themselves to Biblical ethics.

At times, they will go through contortions to force their supposed understanding of these ethics into a PC mold. For example, there is probably nothing as clear-cut as the Biblical prohibition against homosexuality, yet the Thumpers insist that gay "marriage" is a grand expression of Biblical values.

The very notion of gay rights is completely antithetical to Biblical morality; the Bible, in fact, explicitly labels sodomy an abomination and makes it a capital offense. While such punishment was generally not literally applied in Jewish tradition, there is no doubt as to the disgust and condemnation with which the Bible views gay relations.

But that did not stop the PC branch of the Reform movement from deciding that Reform rabbis can ordain gay marriages. It is not clear why they did not at the same time decide that inter-species marriages could be ordained; after all, the Biblical injunction against the latter is no less unambiguous than the prohibition against homosexuality.

Similarly, while the Jewish religious position on abortion is not identical with the one espoused by the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian denominations, abortion on demand when a mother's life is not in danger is hardly a position held by traditional Judaism.

One can accept or reject the scriptural view of homosexuality or abortion - it's a free country. But if one is representing one's political agenda as being Biblically-based, why the arbitrarily selective distortion?

The biggest problem with PC appeals to Prophetic Ethics and Jewish compassion is that there is absolutely no support in Jewish tradition for feel-good advocacy programs that actually exacerbate real-world problems. In other words, one cannot conscript Biblical ethics and morality on behalf of a political cause - even if doing so makes one feel righteous and moral - until one can at least show credibly that the cause would indeed resolve or alleviate real-world problems.

The PC Biblical Ethics-poseurs are too lazy to go out and actually acquire the analytic tools needed for assessing policy proposals. Learning economics, statistics, cost/benefits accounting, etc., requires effort and investment. The PC posturers prefer to practice effortless recreational compassion and armchair peacemaking.

Besides, the very first thing one learns in social science and in policy analysis is that all things have tradeoffs. That is the one truth with which leftist Biblical Ethics-poseurs and other PC preachers simply cannot cope. If a policy proposal has both costs and benefits (and which does not?), there is no way that selective scriptural quotation and appeals to Prophetic Ethics can resolve the dilemma.....

In some cases, the PC Bible thumpers take positions in such clear contradiction to the scriptural ethics they claim to uphold that one does not know whether to laugh or cry. For example, not only is there no Biblical case for animal rights (although the humane treatment of animals is indeed mandated), but one of the most clear-cut messages of the Bible is that human interests always take priority over those of animals. It's true that the Bible does not explicitly prohibit vegetarianism, except on Passover, but there is absolutely nothing therein that mandates it, and much rabbinic commentary is concerned with the rules of kosher slaughter and diet.

Another example: While there is a clear Biblical basis for charity, it is equally clear that the emphasis is on individual charitable acts over which the giver exercises control, choice and personal responsibility. There is nothing that can be interpreted as mandating a massive welfare state that deprives individuals of control over their property; indeed, a good deal of Biblical and rabbinic law concerns the protection and preservation of private property rights. The main rules of Biblical mandatory income-distribution regard funding Levites and priests.....

The hypocritical pretend-enthusiasm for Prophetic Ethics on the part of the PC Bible Thumpers is best understood as part of the overall trend of Jewish assimilation in North America. Liberalism has been the main avenue of assimilation for North American Jews. In effect, assimilationist Jews long ago substituted the liberal/Left political agenda for Judaism as their religion. They are as zealously attached to this pseudo-religion as most Jews in the past were to authentic Judaism.....

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