Florida groom is moved to tears on his wedding day after future stepdaughter asked him to adopt her during a heartwarming first-look photo shoot
I am delighted to read this story. Stepfathers usually get a bad rap but good relationships between step-parents and stepchilden are not uncommon. I myself got on well wth THREE stepchilden, including two girls. And we are all still in affectionate touch, many years later
A Florida groom was moved to tears on his wedding day when his future stepdaughter asked him to adopt her and officially become her dad.
Adam Hansen, 30, had no idea the surprise his bride, Brianna, 27, had in store for him when they wed on October 29, 2021. Ahead of the ceremony, he took part in a heartwarming first-look shoot with her six-year-old daughter, McKinley.
He was already overcome with emotion when she saw her in her white tulle dress. He squatted down to give her a hug, saying: 'You look so pretty.'
McKinley then handed him a white gift bag containing a petition for adoption that Brianna had prepared ahead of time. His eyes welled up with tears as soon as he realized what he was reading.
Adam had always been a father figure to the little girl and had hoped to make it official after he married Brianna.
'If I'm becoming a Hansen today, it's only right that she becomes a Hansen too,' she told him. Adam apologized to McKinley for his tears, saying it was the 'only time' he would cry.
'Do you know what this means? It's our paperwork so that I can be your dad forever,' he explained. 'I would love to be your dad forever. I love you so much.'
'I was not expecting this,' he said as they shared a family hug.
Brianna opened up about the heartwarming moment on Instagram a month after their wedding, saying she has been 'so proud' to watch Adam 'evolve into this amazing man and father.'
'For so many months we held this little surprise in for Adam,' she explained. 'The bond that him and McKinley have shared from the very beginning of their relationship is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
'It was like their souls recognized each other. I believe she came in to this world with the title of Dad left blank for the sole purpose of Adam filling it.'
'I believe [McKinley] came in to this world with the title of Dad left blank for the sole purpose of Adam filling it,' Brianna wrote on Instagram a month after their wedding
Brianna also paid tribute to her husband, writing: 'Adam, thank you for showing us a life I told myself we may never get. I should’ve known this was God’s plan from the start.'
'The most beautiful moment the three of us will never forget,' she concluded.
The footage of Adam's wedding day surprise has since gone viral, and it was most recently shared on the Today show on Tuesday as part of the 'Morning Boost' segment.
'If you didn't think a wedding day could get better, how about that?' co-anchor Hoda Kotb said. 'Those adoption papers made it even more joyful and memorable for that incredible family.'
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REAL diversity: GOP governors could institute Diversity & Inclusion of thought in public schools, state bureaucracies—by hiring more Republicans
Whether they are policies aimed at restricting the teaching of critical race theory in public classrooms, or to take on public sector unions that have insulated public school teachers and state bureaucrats with tenured job security, Republican governors and legislatures have been no strangers to dealing with government employees — who they often do not see eye to eye with ideologically.
A 2016 survey by Education Week found that only 27 percent of teachers were Republicans versus 41 percent Democrat and 30 percent independents. In higher education, the advantage is more like 10 to 1. In civil service positions, the Democrats’ advantage is 2 to 1.
And that’s just in the government, but it is the essence of the problem that Republicans face: The GOP lacks representation in our nation’s institutions. In some cases, this might be because of employment discrimination. And for others, Republicans, for various cultural reasons, are less likely to seek to work for the government.
So far, many of the policies either seek to restrict what can be taught in classrooms, or to make it more difficult for government employee unions to engage in political activities — which typically favor Democratic candidates — essentially attempting to regulate outcomes via laws and other public policies.
But why don’t red states run by the GOP simply hire more Republicans to be teachers and bureaucrats and even things out a little?
One model Republicans could look toward are the current Diversity & Inclusion standards that have become a mainstay in human resource departments at public traded corporations. Everything from racial and gender hiring and content quotas are on the table. Hire more minorities. More women. More LGBTQIA. More representation in media for marginalized groups. And so forth.
Diversity & Inclusion, sometimes called Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, are just one among the many Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors that are now dominating private companies in America. By including these types of quotas, companies can gain more favorable access to credit and capital by gaining high ESG scores.
Even if those hiring quotas plainly violate the letter of the law. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act explicitly prohibits using race, sex or religion as a criteria for hiring, firing or promoting employees:
““It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer… to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or … to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled in Steelworkers v. Weber that preferences on the basis of race and sex in favor of women and minorities, which plaintiffs argued was reverse discrimination, were not a violation of the Civil Rights Act, in effect legalizing employment discrimination against whites and males.
Then Associate Justice William Rehnquist, who went on to become Chief Justice in 1986, blasted the ruling in his dissenting opinion: “Now we are told that the legislative history of Title VII shows that employers are free to discriminate on the basis of race: an employer may, in the Court’s words, ‘trammel the interests of the white employees’ in favor of black employees in order to eliminate ‘racial imbalance.’… Our earlier interpretations of Title VII… were all wrong.”
Here, the court was saying that reverse discrimination was okay — if it served the purpose of eliminating, in this particular case, “racial imbalance.”
So, what about eliminating political imbalance so we have Diversity & Inclusion of thought in government employees?
Here the Civil Rights Act, and most state civil rights laws, are silent on the question of employment discrimination on the basis of political party affiliation or ideology. This implies that hiring and firing decisions could conceivably be made with a political rationale, even more so than race or sex or religion, for which there is an explicit prohibition.
In other words, while a racial affirmative action program, even with the old Steelworkers precedent, could still be found to violate the letter of the law of the Civil Rights Act, a political employment standard is not even regulated under the Civil Rights Act.
So, what if a Republican governor or legislature instituted political hiring quotas so that state civil services and public schools were more representative of the body politic of that state? This could be done in a few ways: Hire more Republicans, fire more Democrats or do both until the political imbalances among public employees are eliminated.
Surely such a standard would be challenged legally, the result of which would resonate for years.
On one hand, political quotas in hiring or firing at the state level could be found to similarly violate the Civil Rights Act even though Congress never included politics as a means of employment discrimination. After all, the Supreme Court in 2020 read transgender, gay and gender identity discrimination into the Civil Rights Act in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. Or, the Court might be satisfied to strike down a political hiring standard perhaps under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection of the laws, and leave the Civil Rights Act out of it. That would be a ruling against political discrimination in schools or bureaucracy.
Or it might be upheld because states have a compelling interest in ensuring a politically neutral on balance civil service and public school system. That would be a ruling in favor of politically neutral government agencies that do not oppress political minorities.
Neither would be a terrible outcome.
In the meantime, just by raising the issue, states, particularly red states, would hire more Republicans — who similarly would be awakened to these imbalances — thus helping to restore political balance in classrooms and state bureaucracies. If Republicans want to take back institutions, particularly those in states they control, then what’s stopping them?
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Éric Zemmour: The anti-immigration insurgent reshaping the race for the French presidency
The suburbs, she says, feel like a foreign country, and France's streets are no longer safe for white women.
More and more young people are tuning in to these views, even though they are exaggerated. They provide a populist answer to the insecurity about employment and the future that many of the country's young are feeling.
"I definitely support Éric Zemmour," she says. "I think he's a very, very brave person, that everyone says he's a demon."
Mr Zemmour gained notoriety as a journalist and pundit, with a million viewers tuning in to his appearances on conservative news channel C-News.
He popularised a conspiracy theory called "The Great Replacement", which claims white Europeans are being replaced by Muslims from Africa and the Middle East.
If elected, Mr Zemmour has proposed a program of "re-migration" which would see a million foreigners deported within five years.
Such extreme views were once unacceptable and consigned to the toxic margins of French politics.
In the last election, in 2017, far-right politician Marine Le Pen campaigned on a similar platform. She spoke against immigration and Islam, but lost to the upstart former banker, Emmanuel Macron.
Ms Le Pen is standing again and, this time, is presenting a more moderate image that is winning over voters. She's coming second in the polls — and rising.
That's allowed space for Éric Zemmour's extremist views to take hold on the political extreme right.
One in three voters are now saying they will vote for a far-right candidate when the country goes to the polls this weekend.
If no-one wins an outright majority on Sunday, then there will be another election two weeks later between the top two candidates.
Many are predicting it will be the current president, Macron, going head-to-head with a re-energised Le Pen.
Thaïs D'Escufon says Marine Le Pen is too "soft". Her moderation is a "betrayal" of her voters, she says. Thaïs wants Éric Zemmour to win the election.
"He loves France and wants to defend it," she says. "I really hope he will be elected because people just say to him, 'Please save us".
Thaïs, from Toulouse, is one of a growing band of far-right influencers trying to win over apathetic young French voters.
While surveys show most young people are concerned about global issues such as climate change and the environment, they are not engaged by the presidential candidates, and many simply will not vote.
Participation rates have been falling precipitously in recent elections, with a third of eligible voters aged 18 to 25 failing to vote in 2017.
France's youth have traditionally thrown their support behind left-wing candidates, but at the last election many flocked to the right.
Thaïs has gained a following online for her extreme views. She was once part of the banned nationalist movement Generation Identity and has been convicted for "creating public disorder". Yet she persists, vehemently denouncing the laws that are designed to restrain hate speech.
"I want to defend my identity as a French person," she says. "This is considered you are a racist, the worst thing you can be, just for saying that you love your country and want to defend it."
In one YouTube video, she argues "white privilege" has driven much of the world's progress over the centuries.
And she continues to rail against what she describes as "mass immigration", despite no such program currently existing in France.
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Making Beethoven Woke
Perverting a great work of art to push counterfactual propaganda really is pathetic
For decades, opera directors in Europe and the United States have felt licensed to revise operas to conform to their political agendas. They do so through wildly incongruous stagings that update the action to modern times and introduce progressive totems that would have been unfathomable to an opera’s original creators. Such directorial interventions left the libretto intact, however. Now even that cordon sanitaire between the structure of a work and an interpreter’s political preferences has been breached.
Beethoven has been a particular target for textual revision. In February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City hosted a production of Fidelio, an Enlightenment paeon to freedom and to marital love. In Beethoven’s version of the opera, a wife disguises herself as a male prison guard to free her husband from a Spanish fortress; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fidelio became a Black Lives Matter critique of mass incarceration. A BLM activist is writing a doctoral dissertation on the Thirteenth Amendment and investigating corrupt “fascists” in the criminal-justice system. In retaliation, racist cops shoot him, and a racist warden of a supermax prison throws him into solitary confinement. The activist’s wife, unable to persuade any lawyers to take up her husband’s case pro bono, goes undercover as a female correctional officer in her husband’s prison.
This change from a male to a female disguise allows for a pleasingly homoerotic revision to the plot. In the original opera, a prison guard’s daughter falls in love with the new “male” employee, echoing Lady Olivia’s fruitless infatuation for the disguised Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In the Met Museum’s Fidelio, produced by Heartbeat Opera, the prison guard’s daughter is a lesbian; her black father encourages his daughter to court the new black female assistant. Of all the production’s revisions, this paternal matchmaking is the most counterfactual, given black working-class attitudes toward homosexuality.
In the current political and artistic environment, Fidelio was a Black Lives Matter manifesto waiting to happen. What made the Met Museum’s production noteworthy was that the revision did not occur exclusively through the staging; Heartbeat Opera rewrote the spoken dialogue as well. (That dialogue was delivered in English, while the arias and ensembles remained in their original German.) The activist’s wife complains that the “real conspiracy” was not the one for which her husband was detained but rather the “suppression of immigrants and people of color” in the U.S. The supermax prison contains people “whose only mistake was being poor and black.” The imprisoned activist rails against his black jailer: “You are complicit in a corrupt system that oppresses our people. I see in you a field Negro.”
The white prison warden reveals the depths of his racism by announcing that if the activist really “wanted to help his community he would tell them to stop burning down their neighborhoods and to pull up their bootstraps.” Such an invocation of personal responsibility is—in the revisionist’s mind—a surefire sign of white supremacy. None of these lines is related to the original libretto.
The only reason the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted Fidelio was the Black Lives Matter gloss. Without it, the museum’s leadership would have had no interest in the work. The production provided the museum with a racial-justice twofer, however, since opening night featured a post-performance discussion between five “social justice advocates” on how to dismantle “current systems of incarceration through the abolitionist movement.” The Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University sponsored the discussion. Such a panel may have once seemed tangential to the mission of an art museum; in the post-George Floyd era, such racial-justice advocacy has become central to curating and programming.
https://www.city-journal.org/making-beethoven-woke
****************************************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)
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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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