Saturday, May 27, 2006

ARNIE TO VETO HOMOSEXUAL BILL

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will veto a bill passed by the Senate and pending in the Assembly to revise California's school curriculum to include the contributions of gays and lesbians to the state and nation, a gubernatorial spokesman said Wednesday. "The governor believes that school curriculum should include all important historical figures, regardless of orientation," said Schwarzenegger's director of communications, Adam Mendelsohn. "However, he does not support the Legislature micromanaging curriculum."

Wednesday's announcement signaled a death blow to the efforts of state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, the openly lesbian author of the measure, to obtain recognition for the contributions of gays, lesbians, transgender and bisexual people to the social and historical landscape. Kuehl's bill had passed the Senate on a 22-15 vote on May 11 and was awaiting hearings in the Assembly. She expressed disbelief that Schwarzenegger, who traditionally has withheld comment on legislation until it passes the Legislature and reaches his desk, has broken with his own precedent and made up his mind on a bill that still hadn't been vetted by one house of the Legislature. "He hasn't made up his mind, I don't care what some underling might have said," Kuehl said.

Kuehl said she hasn't spoken to the Republican governor about the bill yet and that she didn't plan on trying to initiate a conversation with him until it had set sail in the Assembly. She said she intends to approach him on the subject. "I expect it to go before the (Assembly) Education Committee, perhaps then the Appropriations Committee," Kuehl said. "When it gets to the floor, I expect to talk to the governor, and I expect to get it through. For them to take a position on it, I think is precipitous. There's nothing controversial about it. The right wing has drummed up a lot of old fears. Once people understand what it really does, the response is usually OK." Schwarzenegger will come around to supporting the bill, Kuehl said, once he "understands how small a change it is."

Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families and a longtime activist who has opposed gay rights legislation, welcomed Schwarzenegger's decision. But he said he wants more out of the governor. "We're very pleased that Schwarzenegger is listening to the concerns of parents," Thomasson said. "Now the governor needs to pledge to veto the two remaining transsexual, bisexual, homosexual bills, AB 606 and AB 1056. Parents and grandparents are demanding it."

Assembly Bill 606 would ensure that school districts act to reduce harassment of students based on their gender identity and sexual orientation. Assembly Bill 1056 would offer $25,000 grants to schools to "promote tolerance and intergroup relations," according to a bill analysis. Seth Kilbourn, political director for Equality California, which advocates for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and sponsored Senate Bill 1437, said he was surprised that the governor would indicate his opposition to the bill at such an early stage. "That is disappointing," he said. With June being Gay Pride Month, Kilbourn said he doesn't see the political benefit for the governor in shooting down the bill. "This would not be the best time for him to be doing that if he wanted to appear more friendly," Kilbourn said. "He's passed more pieces of legislation benefiting the GLBT community -- except for gay marriage -- than any other governor."

Kilbourn called SB 1437 an important and necessary bill that would help promote tolerance in classrooms. "We are not asking for anything new. It's part of the diversity as required by the state of California," Kilbourn said. "It has enormous impact on gay and lesbian students. When gay issues are talked about, gay students feel better about themselves. For non-gays, it's an opportunity to learn about an underrepresented group in society and provides a more positive perspective."

Source



Great! "Ethnic" law to be scrapped in Australia

Sharia zapped

The Howard Government has widened its plan to remove legal recognition of Aboriginal customary law in criminal sentencing to include the cultural beliefs of all ethnic minorities. The extension of the plan beyond Aboriginal tribal law is understood to have been triggered by concerns that a law directed only at indigenous offenders could be in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act. Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock last night said no one convicted of a crime in Australia should be able to plead their cultural practices and beliefs as mitigating factors in their sentencing. "We are not a nation of tribes," he said. "There should be one law for all Australians. Our expectation is that when people come and settle in Australia they are under an obligation to accept the law and the principles that go with it."

The Government's move came after Northern Territory Opposition Leader Jodeen Carney asked Mr Ruddock last week to check if planned restrictions on Aboriginal customary law being used as a mitigating factor when sentencing violent offenders would breach the Racial Discrimination Act. Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough this week said he would put a proposal to scrap consideration of cultural law in serious crimes to state and territory governments at a national summit. He said customary law had been "used as a curtain that people are hiding behind". The minister's remarks followed a national outcry after a 55-year-old Aboriginal elder was sentenced to a month's jail for having anal sex with a 14-year-old girl promised to him as a wife.

Territory Chief Justice Brian Martin, who sentenced the man, admitted this week he had made a mistake by placing too much emphasis on the man's belief that under tribal law he had the right to teach the girl to obey him. Ms Carney urged the Government to change the Racial Discrimination Act if it considered restrictions on customary law would amount to a breach. Mr Ruddock is understood to have sought legal advice on the possibility of changing the Racial Discrimination Act, but his preference is to extend the exclusion to all minority groups in the community.

The scheme drew qualified support yesterday from Islamic civil rights leader Waleed Kadous but was condemned as impractical by the legal profession. "I don't think any member of the community should expect any special privileges because of their cultural background," said Mr Kadous, co-convenor of the Australian Muslim Civil Rights Advisory Network. "Speaking for the Muslim community, we understand we are not entitled to any special privileges in the courts - nor should we be," he said. Judges should always have some discretion to consider a person's circumstances "but our cultural background should have no major impact on how we are sentenced", Mr Kadous said.

However, Law Council of Australia president John North said the Government's plan was "totally impractical". "An important part of the sentencing process, apart from retribution and revenge, is to look carefully at the subjective features of each individual before the court," Mr North said. "Those characteristics may involve cultural or what can be termed customary law matters, and this has long been held by the High Court to be a proper exercise in the use of sentencing discretion. "To try and legislate across the board to remove this discretion would, in our view, prove impossible."

Mr Ruddock said Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough would be urging the states to change their sentencing laws to fall into line with the Government's plan. While he believed the plan would not cause a breach of the Racial Discrimination Act, he indicated that the commonwealth would be prepared to change federal laws - including the Racial Discrimination Act - to achieve its goal.

Source



SCOTLAND: PRACTICAL SUGGESTION CONDEMNED AS "NAZI"

Here, as far as we want to elaborate on them, are the circumstances. In a council house in West Lothian sits an eight-month pregnant 12-year-old, probably with a cigarette in hand, waiting for the fruits of her dubious celebrity to ripen. Soon she will be Britain's youngest mother. She exists in the anonymous limbo of the transgressive child-adult; gawped at by local rubber-neckers, isolated but for the attentions of tabloid journalists and social workers.

Right now, tragically, she is probably the most famous person in Scotland. Her home, it is said, was habitually used by local junkies, who openly smoked drugs and rolled joints in front of the children. Her mother, it is claimed, is a long-term heroin addict, although her daughter denies this, with six children by three different fathers. The 12-year-old's father, said to have been a well-known drug dealer, long ago moved away. Just a few days ago, her mother gave birth to her latest half brother. The newspaper serialising the girl's own story reported her claims that she was smoking cannabis on the night last summer when she got drunk and became pregnant, aged 11, on a night out in Edinburgh.

Okay, so that's the situation. Now comes the difficult bit. What is anyone going to do about it? More to the point, what would the average member of the liberal intelligentsia, placed in charge of this dreadful scenario, do next? Here's a clue: idealistic bleating about ending poverty and raising self-esteem achieves nothing. My heart goes out to the social workers, police and Children's Panel members dealing with the case. I am glad I am not in their shoes; I'm even more glad that the majority of politicians and liberal commentators are not in them, either.

There is all the difference in the world between theorising about what to do in cases like this, and actually doing something. Pragmatism is an art little practised in debating chambers or newspaper columns (or, indeed, in social services high command), but it is the only effective method of dealing with chaotic, damaged human lives. Ask any front line social worker, daily fire-fighting domestic catastrophes, with one hand tied behind their backs by a straitjacket of regulation, theory, best practice, patients' charters, monitoring of standards and the protection of human rights.

I don't know Duncan McNeil personally, but I do know that when he stood up last week and made his controversial speech in Holyrood, about putting contraception in methadone, he spoke from the heart. Even on TV, you could see that. A former shop-steward from the Clydeside shipyards, Mr McNeil is a genuine politician who works hard for his constituents. He has never said anything as bold or controversial before; his speech clearly indicated how bad drug abuse must be in his Greenock constituency.

It was interesting to note that when Reporting Scotland asked people to respond to his speech, those who did not condemn him were those most likely to have seen how incompatible heroin and child-rearing are. The response elsewhere, from those who've never encountered a fix-seeking addict with a baby in their arms, was utterly predictable.

Poor Mr McNeil's views were condemned as eugenicist and Nazi by the chattering classes, who, themselves faced with a mother on heroin, would be as much use as a chocolate fireguard. The Liberals, the Scottish Socialists, the Tories and the SNP scurried to pile words of scorn on his suggestion. Pathetic. Stupid. Irrational. Bizarre. Illegal, they said. Mr McNeil's own Labour Party distanced itself from him.

The criticism was utterly unfair. Mr McNeil's suggestion is none of these things. Oh, it needs some refinement, certainly. But so grave is the drug-abuse situation in Scotland that the concept of enforcing birth control in some way on those unable to care for babies is now being talked about openly by pragmatic, sensible and informed people.

Jack McConnell wants social workers to remove more children from drug-abusing parents (though whether he can provide the vastly increased resources to look after them is not yet certain). Susan Deacon, the former health minister, wants drug-addicted mothers to be offered contraceptive implants at a cost of 80 pounds a time. Professor Neil McKeganey, a drugs expert from Glasgow University - whose research suggests there are 50,000 Scots children growing up exposed to drug addiction at home, and who knows of what he theorises - wants drug-abusing women to be paid to be on contraception. In 39 states in America, it is now common policy for female addicts to be paid $500 to have long-term contraceptive injections: a tiny fraction of what an unwanted child will cost taxpayers.

Is this immoral? No, it's inspired. History shows us that great social reform has always been done by people who saw need and distress and reacted accordingly. The pregnant 12-year-old in West Lothian may never know it, but in the awful nature of her celebrity may yet lie the seed for a radical new social progressiveness in Scotland, which will save unknown numbers of children from despair.

Source



THE REAL CAUSE OF THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS

By Jeff Jacoby

Amid the din over illegal immigration, I have been thinking about two immigrants I happen to know rather well. One is a 3-year-old boy from southern Guatemala. He was brought to the United States in March 2004, one of 11,170 adopted orphans to immigrate that year. The other, who will turn 81 in August, comes from a small village in what is now Slovakia. He entered the United States in the spring of 1948, a few months before his 23d birthday.

Born an ocean and 78 years apart, on different continents and into very different cultures, these two immigrants might seem on the surface to have little in common. But as naturalized US citizens, they in fact have a great deal in common. English, to mention the most obvious example, is the primary language for both. Neither retains the customs of his native land. Both have a share in the American constitutional patrimony.

As it happens, they share more than that. The little boy from Guatemala is my younger son. The older man from Slovakia is my father. America is a richer place because my father and son are here, and no doubt most Americans -- even those now clamoring for a crackdown on illegal immigration -- would agree. Signs reading, "We love *legal* immigrants," have been on display at rallies organized to oppose amnesty for illegal aliens. Another popular sign demands: "What part of illegal don't you understand?"

To countless Americans, the difference between legal and illegal immigration is self-evident and meaningful. But is that really what distinguishes the immigrants we want from those we don't -- that the former enter the country lawfully, while the latter break the rules to get here? Are immigrants like my father and son inherently desirable merely because a lot of exasperating bureaucratic requirements were met before they came? Are the 11 million illegal immigrants living within our borders (and the several hundred thousand added to their number each year) unwelcome and problematic only because they got in the wrong way?

A foreigner who enters the United States without first running the immigration-law gantlet is not congenitally unfit to be a good American any more than someone who operates an automobile without a license is congenitally unfit to drive. Our immigration laws are maddening and Byzantine. They are heavily skewed in favor of people with family ties to US citizens -- nearly two-thirds of all legal immigrants qualify to enter the United States because they are the relatives of someone already here, and even then it can take 10 or 15 years to qualify for legal residence. If you were designing an immigration system that would admit people on the basis of whether they seemed likely to become good Americans -- patriotic, hard working, law-abiding, English-speaking -- this is hardly the system you would devise.

In so many other contexts, Americans admire self-starters and risk-takers who find ways to get around roadblocks that would defeat less inventive, determined, or gutsy individuals. Of course it is vital, especially after 9/11, to properly control the nation's borders. But there is still something to be said for the self-starters and risk-takers who look at the formidable roadblocks we place in the path of most would-be immigrants, especially those not related to a US citizen -- and make up their minds to find a way around them. In his televised remarks last week, President Bush noted that many illegal aliens "will do anything to come to America to work and build a better life. They walk across miles of desert in the summer heat, or hide in the back of 18-wheelers to reach our country." Aren't those the kind of people America should crave -- men and women willing to risk everything, including their lives, for a chance to build their own American dream?

Yes, porous borders -- and not only the one with Mexico -- are a national-security problem, one too long neglected. But the burning *immigration* problem of our time isn't that too many people are breaking the rules to get in. It is what they are finding when they get here. Instead of a national commitment to assimilation, a cynical multiculturalism -- often state-mandated -- sends the message that our culture is no better than any other, so there is no particular reason to embrace the American experience. "Bilingual" education and foreign-language ballots accelerate the loss of a common English tongue, making it easier than ever for newcomers to hunker down in linguistic ghettoes. Identity politics and affirmative action erode the national identity, encouraging immigrants to see themselves first and foremost as members of racial or ethnic groups, and only secondarily as individuals and Americans.

From the day he got off the boat from Europe, my father lived up to the code that expected immigrants to go to work, learn the language, obey the laws, and become an American. My immigrant son, I hope, will live up to it too. The melting pot, it used to be called, before political correctness intervened. That political correctness is what has caused the present crisis. The crisis won't be solved by blaming the immigrants.

No comments: