Official bigotry in British courts: Men now second-class citizens

Official guidance issued by feminist judges

Judges have been told to treat female criminals more leniently than men when deciding sentences. New guidelines declare that women suffer disadvantages and courts should `bear these matters in mind'.

The rules say women criminals often have poor mental health or are poorly educated, have not committed violence and have children to look after. "Women's experiences as victims, witnesses and offenders are in many respects different to those of men,' according to the Equal Treatment Bench Book. `These differences highlight the importance of the need for sentencers to bear these matters in mind when sentencing.'

The controversial advice comes from the Judicial Studies Board, which is responsible for training the judiciary. In the past, the board has caused upset by suggesting Rastafarians have religious beliefs which allow them to use cannabis. It has also tried to ban words such as immigrant, asylum-seeker and even West Indian from the courts on the grounds they are offensive.

The latest guidelines have also caused anger, this time among campaigners for male victims of domestic violence.

The Bench Book tells judges that the problem `consists mainly of violence by men against women'. It adds `the reality is that some of the most physically violent incidents are committed by men on female partners'. The document also suggests that aggression against men by women is rare, saying that `men and partners in same-sex relationships might also be victims of domestic violence'.

However, campaigners for male victims of domestic violence claimed that men are being treated as second-class citizens by the new guidelines. They also point to analysis of official figures by the Parity campaign group which last week concluded that four out of ten victims of domestic violence were men.

Mark Brooks, of the ManKind campaign group, said: `For a document that claims to be about gender equality, it clearly leaves the impression that male victims are seen as being second class when, of course, all should be seen the same. `It is unacceptable that men, often suffering in silence at home, are being shown to be second-class victims by those running the legal system.'

He added: `To say grudgingly that men might also be victims is sweeping their problems under the carpet, when the Government's own figures show hundreds of thousands of men every year are suffering.' The study from Parity based its assessment on Home Office statistics and the British Crime Survey, the measure of crime most trusted by Whitehall. The campaign group said that the average proportion of domestic violence victims who are men has been 40 per cent.

Updated guidance on how to sentence female criminals was distributed in April in a new section on `gender equality'. It told judges: `Women remain disadvantaged in many public and private areas of their life; they are under-represented in the judiciary, Parliament and senior positions across a range of jobs; and there is still a substantial pay gap between men and women.'

On women accused of crime, the guidance quoted Judge Baroness Hale, the only woman among the 11 at the Supreme Court, who describes herself as a `soft-line feminist'. She said: `It is now well recognised that a misplaced conception of equality has resulted in some very unequal treatment for women and girls.'

The rules were prepared by a team headed by High Court judge Dame Laura Cox. She wrote: `It is hardly revolutionary that judges should know of the matters central to the lives of those who attend courts and to aim to provide judges with that knowledge.'

SOURCE






More petty bureaucratic tyranny in Britain

Council threatens father for not walking his daughter, 7, to school bus stop... 20 yards from family home

A father could face legal action after he was reprimanded for allowing his seven-year-old daughter to walk alone to a school bus stop - just 20 yards from their home. Mark McCullough received a letter from Lincolnshire County Council threatening to report the situation as a 'child protection issue' unless his daughter Isabelle was accompanied the short distance to and from the bus stop.

The 32-year-old makes sure either he or his partner, Natasha Fegan, 33, is at home to see Isabelle off in the morning, and meet her when she returns home from school. But the couple, of Glentham, Lincolnshire, have now been told there must be a 'change in arrangements' or they will face action. Mr McCullough, who has four other children, has also been criticised for sending Isabelle to Normanby by Spital Primary School without a jumper.

He said today: 'This is more than upsetting. It has made me angry. 'I am happy for Isabelle to walk from home to the end of the road and, if necessary, cross a country lane and walk home. 'I'm not going to wrap my children up in cotton wool. 'When I was a child I would go anywhere during the school holidays. I would be out at eight in the morning and not back until teatime.

'Admittedly I would not let the kids do that now because times are different. But for a seven-year-old not to be able to walk 20 metres to the top of the courtyard and cross a quiet country road is an absolute joke. 'I'm going to carry on as normal even if it means going to court.'

Mr McCullough, a refuse collector, received the letter from the council on Friday. It claimed the bus driver felt 'obliged' to help Isabelle safely cross the road at the end of the day. It added: 'Should there be no change in the arrangements for Isabelle's delivery to and collection from the bus stop, I will have no option but to consider reporting this as a child protection issue.'

Denise Carr, Lincolnshire County Council's head of transport services, said: 'As a responsible authority we have expressed our concern that a seven-year-old is standing on a busy road alone each morning and then crossing the road unaccompanied. 'As the child was also left standing by the roadside on a cold morning without warm clothing we have raised our concern with the parents.' [A threat is "raising concern"?]

SOURCE






FreedomWorks fights back against NAACP's accusations of Tea Party `racism'

Dick Armey's conservative organization FreedomWorks is readying for the launch of a comprehensive political program aimed at debunking the NAACP's race-charged attacks on the Tea Party movement.

FreedomWorks President and CEO Matt Kibbe said the organization will roll out Diverse Tea, a platform and advertising campaign that will showcase diversity in the Tea Party movement, sometime this week or early next week. "The idea is to create a platform for African-American Tea Party leaders, Hispanic Tea Party leaders and Jewish Tea Party leaders to get out there and talk about why they're involved and why these issues matter so much to them," Kibbe said.

Kibbe said the NAACP is trying to change the conversation from the "failed policies of the stimulus and they don't want to talk about unemployment and they sure as heck don't want to talk about a government takeover of health care."

The NAACP is just one of the many left-wing organizations that fear the Tea Party, Kibbe explained.

"It's ironic that the left that so eagerly celebrates the notion of diversity is attacking what I believe to be the most diverse political movement in my lifetime," Kibbe said. "They [the left] are afraid of the Tea Party and, frankly, they're afraid of the diversity of the Tea Party. If you actually take the time to get to know the people in the Tea Party movement, you see an amazing amount of diversity - not just different skin colors but people literally from all walks of life that have united around the idea that the government is too big and is spending too much money it doesn't have."

As a part of FreedomWorks' overall counter to the NAACP's teapartytracker.org, former Garland, Texas NAACP chapter president and current Tea Party leader, The Rev. C.L. Bryant, is developing a feature-length documentary called "Runaway Slave."

Bryant, who left the NAACP because he was upset with what he perceived to be the organization's focus on liberal politics and lack of interest in civil rights, said the film will show viewers how organizations like the NAACP use their clout to keep people under their control. He says he's a "runaway slave" in modern terms because he isn't accepting the status quo.

The whole idea behind the film, Bryant said, is to encourage Americans to "flee economic slavery, run toward the blessing of liberty." "Two Octobers ago, when John McCain and then-Senator Barack Obama came off the campaign trail to sign onto to TARP, I realized that this was going to enslave the American people," Bryant said.

Bryant said the film is going to take on the ideas of the current left establishment by showing viewers stops along the Underground Railroad between Atlanta and Delaware.

"There are people in the world who do have shackles on them, but here in America, a person has full rights of the Constitution, regardless of their skin color," Bryant explained. "In fact, I defy anyone to name one thing in this country at this point in time that would hinder you from being whatever you want to be because of your skin color - it just does not exist."

More HERE





Judaism's Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality

DENNIS PRAGER

When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah's prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible.

Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.

This revolution consisted of forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women.

It is probably impossible for us, who live thousands of years after Judaism began this process, to perceive the extent to which undisciplined sex can dominate man's life and the life of society. Throughout the ancient world, and up to the recent past in many parts of the world, sexuality infused virtually all of society.

Human sexuality, especially male sexuality, is polymorphous, or utterly wild (far more so than animal sexuality). Men have had sex with women and with men; with little girls and young boys; with a single partner and in large groups; with total strangers and immediate family members; and with a variety of domesticated animals. They have achieved orgasm with inanimate objects such as leather, shoes, and other pieces of clothing, through urinating and defecating on each other (interested readers can see a photograph of the former at select art museums exhibiting the works of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe); by dressing in women's garments; by watching other human beings being tortured; by fondling children of either sex; by listening to a woman's disembodied voice (e.g., "phone sex"); and, of course, by looking at pictures of bodies or parts of bodies. There is little, animate or inanimate, that has not excited some men to orgasm.

Of course, not all of these practices have been condoned by societies --- parent-child incest and seducing another's man's wife have rarely been countenanced --- but many have, and all illustrate what the unchanneled, or in Freudian terms, the "un-sublimated," sex drive can lead to.

De-sexualizing God and religion

Among the consequences of the unchanneled sex drive is the sexualization of everything --- including religion. Unless the sex drive is appropriately harnessed (not squelched --- which leads to its own destructive consequences), higher religion could not have developed. Thus, the first thing Judaism did was to de-sexualize God: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" by his will, not through any sexual behavior. This was an utterly radical break with all other religions, and it alone changed human history. The gods of virtually all civilizations engaged in sexual relations.

In the Near East, the Babylonian god Ishtar seduced a man, Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero. In Egyptian religion, the god Osiris had sexual relations with his sister, the goddess Isis, and she conceived the god Horus. In Canaan, El, the chief god, had sex with Asherah. In Hindu belief, the god Krishna was sexually active, having had many wives and pursuing Radha; the god Samba, son of Krishna, seduced mortal women and men. In Greek beliefs, Zeus married Hera, chased women, abducted the beautiful young male, Ganymede, and masturbated at other times; Poseidon married Amphitrite, pursued Demeter, and raped Tantalus. In Rome, the gods sexually pursued both men and women.

Given the sexual activity of the gods, it is not surprising that the religions themselves were replete with all forms of sexual activity. In the ancient Near Fast and elsewhere, virgins were deflowered by priests prior to engaging in relations with their husbands, and sacred or ritual prostitution was almost universal. Psychiatrist and sexual historian Norman Sussman describes the situation thus: "Male and female prostitutes, serving temporarily or permanently and performing heterosexual, homosexual oral-genital, bestial, and other forms of sexual activities, dispense their favors in behalf of the temple."

Throughout the ancient Near East, from very early times, anal intercourse formed a part of goddess worship. In ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan, annual ceremonial intercourse took place between the king and a priestess. Women prostitutes had intercourse with male worshippers in the sanctuaries and temples of ancient Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Corinth, Carthage, Sicily, Egypt, Libya, West Africa, and ancient and modern India.

In ancient Israel itself, there were repeated attempts to re-introduce temple prostitution, resulting in repeated Jewish wars against cultic sex. The Bible records that the Judean king Asa "put away the qdeshim [temple male prostitutes] out of the land"; that his successor, Jehosaphat put away out of the land ...the remnant of the qdeshim that remained in the days of his father Asa"; and that later, King Josiah, in his religious reforms, "broke down the houses of the qdeshim."

In India until this century, certain Hindu cults have required intercourse between monks and nuns, and wives would have intercourse with priests who represent the god. Until it was made illegal in 1948, when India gained independence, Hindu temples in many parts of India had both women and boy prostitutes. In the fourteenth century, the Chinese found homosexual Tibetan religious rites practiced at the court of a Mongol emperor. In Sri Lanka through this century, Buddhist worship of the goddess Pattini has involved priests dressed as women, and the consort of the goddess is symbolically castrated.

Judaism placed controls on sexual activity. It could no longer dominate religion and social life. It was to be sanctified --- which in Hebrew means "separated" --- from the world and placed in the home, in the bed of husband and wife. Judaism's restricting of sexual behavior was one of the essential elements that enabled society to progress. Along with ethical monotheism, the revolution begun by the Torah when it declared war on the sexual practices of the world wrought the most far-reaching changes in history.

Inventing homosexuality

The revolutionary nature of Judaism's prohibiting all forms of non-marital sex was nowhere more radical, more challenging to the prevailing assumptions of mankind, than with regard to homosexuality. Indeed, Judaism may be said to have invented the notion of homosexuality, for in the ancient world sexuality was not divided between heterosexuality and homosexuality. That division was the Bible's doing. Before the Bible, the world divided sexuality between penetrator (active partner) and penetrated (passive partner).

As Martha Nussbaum, professor of philosophy at Brown University, recently wrote, the ancients were no more concerned with people's gender preference than people today are with others' eating preferences:

Ancient categories of sexual experience differed considerably from our own... The central distinction in sexual morality was the distinction between active and passive roles. The gender of the object... is not in itself morally problematic. Boys and women are very often treated interchangeably as objects of [male] desire. What is socially important is to penetrate rather than to be penetrated. Sex is understood fundamentally not as interaction, but as a doing of some thing to someone...

Judaism changed all this. It rendered the "gender of the object" very "morally problematic"; it declared that no one is "interchangeable" sexually. And as a result, it ensured that sex would in fact be "fundamentally interaction" and not simply "a doing of something to someone".

To appreciate the extent of the revolution wrought by Judaism's prohibiting homosexuality and demanding that all sexual interaction be male-female, it is first necessary to appreciate just how universally accepted, valued, and practiced homosexuality has been throughout the world.

The one continuous exception was Jewish civilization --- and a thousand years later, Christian civilization. Other than the Jews, "none of the archaic civilizations prohibited homosexuality per se," Dr. David E. Greenberg notes. It was Judaism alone that about 3,000 years ago declared homosexuality wrong.

And it said so in the most powerful and unambiguous language it could: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is an abomination." "And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed an abomination." It is Judaism's sexual morality, not homosexuality, that historically has been deviant.

The Hebrew Bible, in particular the Torah (The Five Books of Moses), has done more to civilize the world than any other book or idea in history. It is the Hebrew Bible that gave humanity such ideas as a universal, moral, loving God; ethical obligations to this God; the need for history to move forward to moral and spiritual redemption; the belief that history has meaning; and the notion that human freedom and social justice are the divinely desired states for all people. It gave the world the Ten Commandments, ethical monotheism, and the concept of holiness (the goal of raising human beings from the animal-like to the God-like). Therefore, when this Bible makes strong moral proclamations, I listen with great respect. And regarding male homosexuality --- female homosexuality is not mentioned --- this Bible speaks in such clear and direct language that one does not have to be a religious fundamentalist in order to be influenced by its views. All that is necessary is to consider oneself a serious Jew or Christian.

Jews or Christians who take the Bible's views on homosexuality seriously are not obligated to prove that they are not fundamentalists or literalists, let alone bigots (though, of course, people have used the Bible to defend bigotry). Rather, those who claim homosexuality is compatible with Judaism or Christianity bear the burden of proof to reconcile this view with their Bible. Given the unambiguous nature of the biblical attitude toward homosexuality, however, such a reconciliation is not possible.

Much more HERE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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