Wednesday, August 31, 2022




Edinburgh to apologise over historical links to slavery

Edinburgh will apologise for suffering caused through the city’s involvement in slavery, while statues, street names and buildings associated with the trade will be “re-presented” to explain the consequences to the public.

City councillors on Tuesday unanimously accepted all 10 recommendations made in a report on Edinburgh’s historical links with slavery and colonialism, the result of a review set up in 2020 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and chaired by Scotland’s first black professor, Sir Geoff Palmer.

Palmer said the council’s decision to accept the full recommendations was “very significant” and a civic apology was another move towards redress.

“An apology doesn’t buy bread but it gives another form of sustenance,” he said. “It is about feeling that somebody has looked at something and recognised it was wrong. They are saying to you, the person offended, that they regret what has happened.

“Even though many people say ‘we weren’t there, it wasn’t our doing’, we all have responsibilities. We are responsible for what happened in the past, because the past has consequences. We can’t change the past but we can change the consequences of racism.”

The report outlined that statues and other parts of city architecture celebrating people who made money from the suffering of others should not be removed but reframed in order to educate future generations.

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Vegan mother jailed for life after 18-month-old son starved to death on diet of raw fruits and vegetables

A vegan mother has been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder over the malnutrition death of her 18-month-old son who was fed on a diet of raw fruits and vegetables.

Sheila O’Leary, 39, was convicted by a Florida jury in June of first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse, aggravated manslaughter of a child, child abuse, and two counts of child neglect.

Prosecutors say that her son, Ezra, was severely malnourished and weighed just 17 pounds when he died in September 2019.

O’Leary and her 33-year-old husband, Ryan O’Leary, told police that they fed their children a strict vegan diet of raw fruit and vegetables. Ezra was also fed breast milk, they stated.

Prosecutors say that in addition to Ezra, three other children, a three-year-old, a five-year-old, and an 11-year-old, also suffered from extreme neglect and child abuse.

O’Leary was convicted after three hours of deliberations by a jury in Lee County, Florida, at the end of a five-day trial.

During the trial, the jury was told by prosecutors that the Cape Coral mother “chose to disregard his cries.”

Ryan O’Leary has also been charged with the same crimes as his wife, as well as sexual assault of a victim under the age of 12, as well as lewd and lascivious behavior/molestation of a victim younger than 12.

He remains in prison and has yet to face trial.

“This afternoon, Sheila O’Leary was adjudicated guilty and sentenced to life in prison for First Degree Murder. She was also sentenced to 30 years in prison for Aggravated Child Abuse and 30 years in prison for Aggravated Manslaughter of a Child,” the Office of the State Attorney for the 20th Judicial Circuit of Florida said in a statement.

“She was sentenced to 5 years in prison on two counts of Child Neglect and one count of Child Abuse.”

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Biden’s imposing racism in everything from housing to health care

Unless you’re a person of color or a favored minority, brace yourself to be treated unfairly by the Biden administration.

President Joe Biden is pushing racial equity — which is very different from equal treatment regardless of race. Racial equity means government will treat people unequally, discriminating against whites to equalize outcomes. For Team Biden, it means closing the wealth gap between the white and black populations. By whatever means.

You may think it’s “unfair” to be forced to pay off other people’s student loans after you already paid back your own. But Biden’s White House actually defends debt cancellation as a way to close the “wealth gap” between races, citing data showing that 20 years after starting college, the average black borrower still owes 95% of the loan, while the average white borrower has paid off all but 6%.

At the other end of life’s spectrum, older people who are white will find it harder to get an appointment with a doctor who takes Medicare. The Biden administration is forcing physicians to categorize their patients by race and demonstrate they have an “anti-racism” plan to combat health disparities. To meet that test, black patients will be in demand; white ones not so much.

This is part of Biden's medical equity initiative.

Doctors who insist on treating patients as individuals rather than by race will be punished with lower payments. Most doctors are expected to give in to avoid the penalty.

If you’re white, good luck dealing with the costs of buying a home. Fannie Mae’s new Equitable Housing Finance Plan will help with appraisals and closing costs — but only if you’re black.

If you’re a white company owner who sells to the federal government, get ready to lose business to a competitor who identifies as “underserved,” “marginalized” or “disadvantaged” — all euphemisms for identity groups. The Biden bureaucracy gives preference to minorities in federal procurement. Straight white men can take a hike.

Stunningly, the 2021 Medicare payment rules for physicians printed in the Federal Register parrot the language used by inflammatory college professor Ibram X. Kendi in his 2019 book “How to Be an Antiracist.” Physicians must show a “commitment to anti-racism” to qualify for merit pay from Medicare. They’re told it will require “considerable time and resources” to “prioritize” certain “populations.”

That’s instead of treating all patients the same. Kendi argues that colorblindness sustains racial inequality: “The only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination.”

Many physicians are horrified, predicting the rule will undermine trust between doctor and patient. It suggests black patients will get more time with the physician and more diagnostic tests. White patients will worry they aren’t getting an antibiotic or a referral to a specialist because of their race.

Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) has introduced a bill banning the rule’s “reverse discrimination.” Eight states and Do No Harm, a physicians’ organization, are suing to overturn the rule. Stanley Goldfarb, Do No Harm chairman, blasts it for pushing doctors to “prioritize some patients over others.”

“Critical race theory has no place in the health-care profession,” says Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, one of the litigants. He says he will not allow doctors in his state “to be penalized for refusing to bend to extremism.”

Extremism it is. It’s being forced on Americans by what Biden calls a “whole of government” approach.

We were warned, even before election night 2020, that a Biden administration would trample America’s commitment to fairness and equal treatment under the law. On Nov. 1, 2020, Kamala Harris tweeted, “There’s a big difference between equality and equity.” Fair warning. Equity is what we’re reeling under now.

Federal courts have struck down several of Biden’s anti-white programs as unconstitutional. More will likely fall. But in the meantime, Biden’s push for equity will foment racial hostility not seen in half a century.

Don’t be fooled by the president’s rhetoric on Sunday, when he commemorated civil-rights leaders who marched on Washington, DC, 59 years ago. They were fighting racial injustice. Biden is not. He’s imposing anti-white discrimination on everything, from housing to health care. It’s racism by another name.

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Australia: Transgender righteousness becoming very oppressive

The rise of the gender affirmation industry and its relationship with children is one of the most important stories of our time.

Under the guise of science, we are being told that toddlers can know with certainty that they have been ‘born in the wrong bodies’.

Under the guise of healthcare, we are being told that it is harmful and cruel to do anything other than affirm a child’s belief that they are a different gender.

Under the guise of medicine, we are being told that it is perfectly fine to treat children with drugs that stunt their natural development.

And if you dare criticise any of this, you run the career-ending risk of being labelled transphobic and turned into a social pariah.

In reality, this remains an open social and medical debate that is being pursued across the West where gender affirmation enjoys far less community support than advertised.

Not in Victoria, however, where the Victorian Education Department’s LGBTQ Support Policy, available on its website, encourages teachers to assist minors to transition genders without parental approval, or even their knowledge.

There may be circumstances in which students wish or need to undertake gender transition without the consent of their parent/s (or carer/s), and/or without consulting medical practitioners.

If no agreement can be reached between the student and the parent/s regarding the student’s gender identity, or if the parent/s will not consent to the contents of a student support plan, it will be necessary for the school to consider whether the student is a mature minor.

If a student is considered a mature minor they can make decisions for themselves without parental consent and should be affirmed in their gender identity at school without a family representative/carer participating in formulating the school management plan.

There is to be no debate after the Victorian government made it a criminal offence – on threat of fines and/or jail time – to attempt to counsel a child out of transitioning genders.

Other Australian states are considering similar legislation.

This runs contrary to decades of accepted best-practice which treated gender dysphoria primarily with therapy, as most children grow out of these feelings.

The previous federal Liberal government watched as bureaucrats edited gendered language within Australian health services against the wishes of the general public. Even medicare forms referred to ‘birthing parents’ until outcry led the incoming Labor government to correct it.

It is very much a one-sided conversation in which the media runs a steady stream of pro-transgender stories, while typically ignoring any negative news, such as the tragic stories of de-transitioners seeking to sue for their lifelong injuries.

There was a good deal of media silence when the UK’s main gender clinic, Tavistock, was closed down with 1,000 families threatening to sue the NHS for harm done to their children.

Meanwhile, you are more likely to find trans puff pieces about teenage girls having double mastectomies.

It is the end result of a cultural shift that has seen the entertainment industry increase LGBTQ+ representation targeted at young audiences – from Buzz Lightyear’s gay kiss to a transgendered character in The Umbrella Academy.

Schools and local councils, particularly in America, continue to integrate Drag Queens into the lives of toddlers despite public backlash against what are traditionally adult performers in sexualised attire.

A doctor friend of mine who dared to suggest, in a very well-written and calm email, that his local council should not be promoting a sexualised all-ages drag show, received a curt response from his local member suggesting he was an ‘overly zealous’ religious ‘bigot’ whose ‘wrongheaded’ ideas were ‘harmful to society’.

Whack!

Consider the dilemma Victorian parents face. If you complain that your children ought not be exposed to gender ideology, you will be labelled a bigot.

So you keep quiet.

If your child – having been exposed to gender ideology at school or at a community event – ends up momentarily confused during a time when kids are confused about lots of things related to their changing bodies, you will be criminalised if you fail to agree with them.

So you keep quiet.

Children are effectively at the mercy of schoolteachers, health professionals, and the state – instead of their parents. Many agree that this is fundamentally wrong.

It is also logically bizarre. Your child, who is not able to take a Panadol at school without parental permission, is assumed capable of making life-changing decisions that often result in permanent medical intervention and sterilisation.

Over the weekend, Libs of TikTok, a conservative social media account that highlights Woke progressive videos, released recordings of a conversation with staff at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC.

Libs of TikTok contacted the hospital as a parent asking if they would perform a ‘gender-affirming hysterectomy’ on a 16-year-old.

Both the hospital operator, who took the initial call, and a hospital staff member to whom the caller was subsequently transferred, confirmed that performing such an operation would not be a problem. Hospital staff said that such operations had been performed on children younger than 16.

On the recording you can hear the hospital operator ask:

‘How old is your patient?’

‘Sixteen,’ the caller says.

‘Okay,’ the operator replies. ‘Alright. So they’re in the clear.’

After confirming with a second person over the phone that a 16-year-old would be eligible for a gender-affirming hysterectomy, the caller asks whether it is a common procedure for that age.

‘Yes, we have all different type of age groups that comes in for that,’ the hospital worker responds.

‘For the hysterectomy?’ the caller asks.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ the employee says, adding later that she has ‘seen younger kids, younger than your child’s age’ undergo the surgery.

The recording went viral, and the outrage was palpable.

And the next day the story was picked up by the Washington Post under the title: Children’s hospital threatened after Libs of TikTok recording on trans hysterectomies.

It continued:

‘Children’s National Hospital has been inundated with threatening emails and phone calls after an influential right-wing Twitter account published a recording that falsely suggested the hospital is performing hysterectomies on transgender children, a hospital spokeswoman said. The torrent of harassment was accompanied by social media posts suggesting that Children’s be bombed and its doctors placed in a woodchipper.’

So the story was not that two hospital staff wrongly told a prospective patient that gender-affirming hysterectomies could be performed on a teenager. The story was that hospital staff had been threatened. Of course, the threatening behaviour is unacceptable, but that does not mean the core of the story should be overlooked either.

The people behind the recording were demonised as ‘right wing’. Later in the story they are called ‘activists’.

The Children’s National Hospital has since corrected the record and confirmed that, despite what its staff said, the surgery is not offered for anyone under 18.

This doesn’t change the scorn with which readers are treated if they raised their eyebrows at gender-affirming surgery on children – even if it is only in speculation.

In this case, the whistle-blowers were slurred as hateful rather than the hospital criticised for managing to make such a strange error about a serious procedure.

It was an error made by the hospital staff, not the reporter – and why did the staff make this error? Why did they hold the belief that surgery was available for young children? And why was their (now corrected) website in error stating that gender-affirming hysterectomies were available to patients ‘between the ages of 0-21’?

They are not the only American hospital to make this mistake, with a hospital in Boston also exposed by the Libs of TikTok. They also had to correct the record.

These are mistakes, but again, why are these patterns of mistakes being made in the field of gender affirmation and young children?

Society is still having a conversation about whether ‘medical care’, as classed by these hospitals, includes giving healthy young girls (at 18) hysterectomies.

I always thought The Washington Post’s adverting slogan – ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ – was meant to imply that the Post existed to shine a light into dark places.

There is a new darkness in our society, and that is the silencing of criticism when it comes to the future health of our children.

Australia doesn’t have a voice in this debate – that has been silenced by the legislation of our premiers – so we must wait to see if legal action in other countries is able to give those harmed by gender affirmation a voice.

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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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Tuesday, August 30, 2022




Doctors Don't Have to Perform Transgender Surgeries Says Federal Court

Our friends at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty have advised us that a federal appeals court just blocked a harmful Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate that would have forced doctors and hospitals to perform gender-transition procedures on their patients against their conscience and best medical judgment.

In Franciscan Alliance v Becerra, the court ruled that a Catholic healthcare network and a group of nearly 19,000 healthcare professionals cannot be required to carry out these procedures in violation of their deeply held beliefs and professional medical judgment.

An association of over 19,000 healthcare professionals, eight states, and two religious hospitals challenged the mandate in the federal court for the Northern District of Texas. (A similar suit, involving other challengers, was filed in North Dakota). In December 2016, the Texas court issued a preliminary ruling that the policy was an unlawful overreach by a federal agency and a likely violation of religious liberty. And in October 2019, the court confirmed its earlier ruling, explaining that doctors must be free to practice in their field of medicine without being forced to perform these controversial procedures that violate their faith.

The court did not, however, issue an order permanently stopping the government from imposing this unlawful mandate on religious hospitals and doctors. Becket therefore appealed on behalf of the challengers. In April 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the district court should consider further whether to grant that lasting protection.

Back at the district court, in August 2021, the judge granted the permanent relief the doctors and hospitals sought. Under the district court’s final ruling, the government may not require the challengers to perform or insure gender-transition procedures contrary to their faith and medical judgment going forward—even if the agency tinkers around the edges with the language of its mandate.

Dissatisfied with not being able to force religious healthcare providers to violate their faith, in late 2021, the federal government, along with the ACLU, appealed the decision back to the Fifth Circuit. Oral argument took place on August 4, 2022.

In the unanimous ruling, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s order “permanently enjoining [HHS] from requiring Franciscan Alliance to perform gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions in violation of its sincerely held religious beliefs.” The court explained that while the government argued it should get more chances to show why it needed religious healthcare providers to participate in gender-transition procedures, other cases showed that permanent protection was appropriate—including, ironically, cases brought by the ACLU, who had intervened in Franciscan to support the government.

Initially, the lower court's ruling blocked HHS "from requiring Franciscan Alliance to perform gender-transition surgeries or abortions in violation of its sincerely held religious beliefs."

“This ruling is a major victory for conscience rights and compassionate medical care in America,” said Joseph Davis, counsel at Becket.

Six years ago, the federal government issued the mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act and tried to apply it to virtually every doctor nationwide. The requirement would have forced doctors to perform these procedures on any patient, including on children, even if the procedures went against their conscience and professional medical judgment. A group of religious organizations and nine states quickly sued and received protection from federal courts in North Dakota and in Texas. Today’s ruling is another successful step in this fight to protect doctors’ conscience rights.

“For years, our clients have provided excellent medical care to all patients who need it,” said Davis. “Today’s ruling ensures that these doctors and hospitals may continue to do this critical work in accordance with their conscience and professional medical judgment.”

Joseph Davis, who works as counsel with Becket, a religious liberty group representing the physicians, said the ruling was appropriate for healthcare workers.

"This ruling," Davis says, "is a major victory for conscience rights and compassionate medical care in America. Doctors cannot do their jobs and comply with the Hippocratic Oath if the government requires them to perform harmful, irreversible procedures against their conscience and medical expertise."

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Democrat Slams GOP for Posting 'Child Pornography,' Then People Remind Him Where It Came From

Democrats appeared horrified in response to a Nebraska Republican Party Twitter account posting explicit cartoon-style images of what appears to be young adults (if not underage children) committing sex acts.

“We apologize for the graphic nature of this tweet. We support Republican values/candidates to protect children, their education and parental rights. The tweet showcases the hard facts of what materials and books are in Nebraska Schools, due to Democratic policies and agendas,” the Nebraska GOP wrote in the since-deleted tweet.

One Nebraska Democrat in particular, former chair of the Nebraska Democratic party Vince Powers, was especially put off by the images.

Sadly for Powers, he failed to realize these are the very same images his colleagues in the Democratic Party have been fighting to keep in school libraries for months on end now.

“[The Nebraska Republican Party] has posted child pornography on Twitter . I won’t retweet it. It’s disgusting.@RepDonBacon @Flood4Nebraska @SenatorFischer and Jim Pillen need to condemn this sick public tweet immediately or otherwise it will be fair to say each is ok with child pornography,” Powers wrote regarding the since-deleted tweet, according to Not the Bee.

As it turns out, the disgusting, explicit pictures shared by the GOP account were from a book called “Gender Queer: A Memoir.” Powers’s allies in the Democratic Party have been fighting to make that book available to underage school children for months.

“Gender Queer” and other books depicting transgender individuals committing sex acts have appeared in schools in Virginia, Rhode Island, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, according to an October 2021 report from The Western Journal.

The Western Journal’s report found one potential reason for the book’s wide dissemination: Two prominent national school library organizations have promoted the book as essential reading material for minors.

Establishment media outlets have covered the Republican outcry over the books as if it was some sort of push for Nazi-style book burning. For example, take these excerpts from a CNN piece titled “Book bans move to center stage in the red-state education wars.”

Keep in mind: Republicans are calling to remove porn and other forms of inappropriate subject matter from school libraries.

“Though battles over access to controversial titles traditionally have been fought district by district, and even school by school, Republican-controlled states, including Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, are now pushing statewide rules that make it easier for critics to remove books they dislike from school libraries in every community,” CNN reported in April.

“Supporters of the efforts to restrict classroom teaching and/or ban books, by contrast, often cite a threat to ‘traditional’ morality as a justification. When DeSantis signed the bill easing challenges to school library collections, one of the speakers he brought to the podium was a mother who had been prominent in protests against school masking requirements in Volusia County.”

The most oft-cited book being removed by Republican critics is “Gender Queer,” and yet, in its coverage, CNN failed to mention it even once.

It’s sure nice to hear Mr. Powers acknowledge that the images from “Gender Queer” are in fact child pornography.

Perhaps its time for him to break ranks with his colleagues and demand it be removed from all of our nation’s schools immediately.

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It’s Open Season on Jews in New York City

The attack that sent 31-year-old Yossi Hershkop to the hospital was an unmysterious crime, the opposite of a stone-cold whodunnit. Security cameras recorded clear video of a group of four men approaching Hershkop’s car, with two of them repeatedly punching him through the driver’s side window while his 5-year-old child sat in the back seat. Another camera recorded the license plate and model of the attackers’ getaway vehicle. The assault took place around 3:40 p.m. on July 13, 2022, on a busy street in Crown Heights. Hershkop believes his assailants were identified later that evening.

In an ideal world, a victim’s personal background would be irrelevant to whether their attackers are arrested and prosecuted. But at least in theory, Hershkop is someone with enough of a profile to keep the police and prosecutors focused on his case. The young Chabad Hasid is an energetic yet shrewdly understated local political activist—the kind of person who knows the total number of newly registered voters in Crown Heights off the top of his head, or who you might WhatsApp when you need to reach a particular City Council member later that afternoon. He also manages a large urgent care center in Crown Heights, a position of real civic significance during New York’s COVID nightmare. Hershkop is also a personal friend of mine, although even people I am not friends with should expect the police to move quickly when they’re able to easily identify the people who bloodied them on camera in broad daylight in front of their child.

The police did not move quickly. No arrests were made during the two weeks after the attack, a span in which the getaway car got ticketed in a totally unrelated incident, Hershkop says. On July 27, an exasperated Hershkop tweeted: “No arrests have been made, despite the assailants’ vehicle having been seen all over the neighborhood. My son still has a lot of trauma from the incident & we now Uber instead of walk whenever we need to go out.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the first arrest in the case was made the day after that tweet, some two weeks after the attack. The first suspect was released on bail after the judge ordered a bond of $10,000, significantly less than the district attorney had requested, according to Hershkop. Hershkop is confident that after a long period of delay, the NYPD is now making efforts toward arresting the second individual who physically attacked him.

“This was a perfect opportunity for them to do the right thing,” Hershkop told me. “Nobody was saying this isn’t a big deal and we shouldn’t make an arrest. Everybody was on the same page here.” As he explained, “it was an assault on a 5-year-old caught on camera. I didn’t think I’d have to fight for justice.”

Perhaps the attack, which stemmed from a seemingly innocuous dispute over a parking space—a common enough occurrence in a densely populated place like Crown Heights, and one that almost never ends with anyone in the hospital—was just too fraught of an event for the police to want to handle too aggressively. Maybe someone feared that drawing additional attention to a group of young Black men attacking a prominent Orthodox Jew would threaten to inflame tensions in a neighborhood with a long but mostly improving (and generally misunderstood) history of racial division.

Maybe, but maybe not: Overload in the New York court system, increasingly lenient prosecutors and judges, and a police department in which officers are quitting at a growing clip, all make it easier for even open-and-shut cases to languish, and for people at every level of the system to find excuses not to resolve them.

The dysfunctional handling of public order takes different forms across the city, and across the country: Philadelphia is experiencing record murder rates; San Francisco experimented with decriminalizing certain forms of property crime, at least until its pro-reform district attorney lost a recent recall election. As with various other recent American traumas, the ambient disorder has its own distinct characteristics as far as Jews are concerned. In a study released this past July, the New York-based group Americans Against Antisemitism found that of the 118 adults arrested for anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City since 2018, only one has been convicted and sent to prison.

Earlier this month, an Orthodox Jew from Baltimore named Aryeh Wolf was gunned down in broad daylight as he attached solar panels to the roof of a building in a gentrifying neighborhood in southeast Washington, D.C. As with Hershkop’s attack, Wolf’s murder was a motiveless crime in which the motive was obvious. To the killer, Wolf and the trendy new technology he was installing might have represented the growing penetration of outsiders, further distilled by Wolf being the ultimate of outsiders: the proud religious Jew. So far, no one has been arrested. The Washington police still consider the motive in the crime to be unknown.

In New York, street harassment, minor assaults, and even full-on beatings of visible Jews are almost a banality now, too frequent over too long of a period to be considered an active crisis, even in the communities most affected. The city reported a 76% year-over-year rise in hate crimes during the first three months of 2022—attacks on Jews more than tripled, accounting for much of the spike. When reached for comment by email, the NYPD’s public information office stated that the Hate Crimes Task Force has made 44 arrests related to attacks on Jews so far in 2022 compared to 33 in all of 2021.

The report from Americans Against Antisemitism only dealt with incidents in which the NYPD found enough evidence of a bigoted motive to refer the case to the department’s Hate Crimes Task Force. Not every potential bias-related attack on Jews reaches that threshold, though. In Hershkop’s case, the assailants used no antisemitic language and had no connection to any extremist networks. The question of whether the attackers would have responded with similar brutality to a parking dispute involving a member of any other ethnic or religious group is considered too hypothetical for the New York criminal justice system to handle. The NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force was not involved in investigating the attack on him, Hershkop told me.

Israel Bitton, executive director of Americans Against Antisemitism and one of the co-authors of the report, said the study aimed “to answer a simple question: Are there consequences for anti-Jewish hate crimes?” The document gives a clear answer: “In the majority of trackable cases, prosecution has been effectively nonexistent.” Some unknowable number of the 118 anti-Jewish hate crime suspects whose cases showed up in the state’s WebCrims database since 2018 were sent to state psychiatric institutions for an unknown period of time, instead of being criminally charged, Bitton explained. Fifteen took plea deals, although the study found no evidence that any of these agreements involved jail time. In 23 cases, the charges were dropped. The only conviction was for a relatively high-profile incident, in which the suspect choked and beat a visibly Jewish man in his mid-50s while he walked home from Shabbat day services in Crown Heights.

Devorah Halberstam, a veteran anti-hate crime activist based in Crown Heights, co-founded a civilian review board that advises the NYPD on how to proceed with incidents that could be classified as hate crimes. The group has been meeting each month for the past year. She stressed that any failure to punish such attacks isn’t a problem limited to Jewish victims. In a widely publicized case this past January, a 62-year-old Asian woman was attacked outside of her home in Queens. She fell into a coma and died 10 weeks later.

Halberstam said the killing was not prosecuted as a hate crime, even though it seemed to have no other motive besides hatred of Asians. “It’s not against the Jewish community. It’s not against the Asian community,” Halberstam said of the rarity with which hate crimes charges are pursued. “It’s the broader picture.” Halberstam blames the sparse number of guilty verdicts on the vagueness of New York’s hate crimes statute, leading prosecutors to drop hate crime charges in order to pursue lesser allegations that can be more easily proven in court. “If you make the guidelines stricter, they don’t have as much leeway to get out of it,” Halberstam said.

A backlog in the criminal courts further gridlocks the system. In early 2022, the state had over 47,000 open criminal cases, an increase of 15% compared to the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Americans Against Antisemitism found that there were nine anti-Jewish hate crime prosecutions in the city that had been pending for two years or more.

The Americans Against Antisemitism analysis only refers to incidents that generated police reports and entered the criminal justice system. Some unknowable number of attacks on Jews occur beyond any official awareness. “Most hate crimes are not even reported in the first place,” says Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, and a former power broker in the New York State Assembly.

Hershkop agrees. “Eighty percent never even got to the point of making a police report,” he speculated, referring to Jewish victims of bias incidents. “That’s how we’re artificially hiding hate crimes. People are so burnt out and so not believing in the system that they don’t even make a police report.”

Even the Jews who do report what are obviously identity-motivated crimes against them can be treated with a revealing indifference. In June, 26-year-old Yizchak Goldstein was sucker-punched on East 33rd Street near Park Avenue at around 1 p.m. Goldstein, who was visiting from Miami, was wearing a kippah, unlike his nearby cousin. The attacker didn’t run off. “He squared off to fight,” Goldstein said. “He wasn’t afraid of the cops—he literally joked to me, call 911 … he was so confident.” When Goldstein did call the police, he discovered that the assailant, who had disappeared down the crowded street at a walking pace, was right not to be worried. The officers told Goldstein that they could not treat the assault as a hate crime because the attacker didn’t say anything antisemitic to him.

That wasn’t all. “They said that even if we catch this guy he’ll be out in a few hours and that this happens every single day,” Goldstein recalled. But at least the police arrived quickly, he said, “and were honest and upfront with me.” Goldstein said the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force never contacted him, and that he only heard from the department one other time, when an officer wanted to confirm the location of the attack about a month later. No suspect was ever arrested.

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A Modern, Americanized Version of a Maoist Struggle Session

Arguing for keeping “presentism” out of history seems like a straightforward argument from an acknowledged history scholar, right?

Wrong. Not these days. The president of the American Historical Association, James H. Sweet, published an essay last week arguing that scholars should bar “presentism” from history.

Sweet’s column in the American Historical Association magazine, Perspectives on History, argued that “doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.”

Pretty basic stuff.

Shortly thereafter, Sweet was mobbed by those who clearly didn’t like his perspective, then issued what looked like a forced confession for his crime.

The whole episode demonstrates how American and other Western institutions have been wholly radicalized in a short amount of time, squandering their reputations and authority.

Here’s how it went down.

The American Historical Association president argued that academic historians should focus simply on bringing to life the world of people in the past as it was and as they saw it, instead of framing every historical person or event through a modern “social justice” lens.

Sweet laid out the problem, which he said is transforming the profession of historian:

This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines.

For an example of this, I’d point to the recent book “The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe,” written by two history professors. The book devotes much space to debunking “whiteness” and ambles through the history of the Middle Ages making often factually dubious evaluations and value judgments of people and events from over a millennium ago.

This is becoming the norm, especially for social history, not the exception.

Here’s the part that really got Sweet into hot water. While making his argument, he offered a rather mild critique of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, writing that the reimagining of U.S. history “spoke to the political moment,” but he “never thought of it primarily as a work of history.”

That’s a rather tepid way of describing the 1619 Project.

The Times’ endeavor was full of inaccuracies and ahistorical revisionism. Its essays were shredded by historians and writers across the political spectrum, from some of my colleagues at The Heritage Foundation to the World Socialist Web Site.

Sweet also took issue with the increasing description of slavery as a problem unique to the United States. He noted how most of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was in Brazil and the Caribbean, and wrote that it was historically problematic to whitewash the prominent role that African nations played in promoting the slave trade.

Sweet threw a few obligatory shots at the right, perhaps to assure the left-wing ivory tower that he was being balanced in his piece and that the real villains are on the right.

It didn’t work.

The essay didn’t go over well with the apparently all-powerful woke left. Sweet’s generous description of the 1619 Project as not really history and his inclusion of a fuller historical record was too much for activists masquerading as historians in the academe.

After a few days of nonstop frothing from academics on Twitter—and undoubtedly much more out of the public eye—Sweet added a long, groveling apology to the top of his article.

He wrote that his gentle rebuke of presentism and politicization of history caused “harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the [American Historical] Association.”

It’s a hallmark of woke activists to claim that arguments they don’t like cause “harm” just before they censor them. The “words are violence” school of thought apparently is universally accepted now among our ruling class clerisy.

The ridiculous apologies went on and on. Here’s more of Sweet’s cringing prose:

I sincerely regret the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends. I am deeply sorry. In my clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism, I left the impression that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those posed from positions of power. This absolutely is not true. It wasn’t my intention to leave that impression, but my provocation completely missed the mark.

The American Historical Association then locked its Twitter account. When it unlocked the account, the association issued an additional apology, blaming the incident on “alt-right trolls.”

The episode—to make a historical comparison—seemed to be a modern, Americanized version of a Maoist struggle session.

It’s not just that leftists responded hysterically to Sweet’s piece, but they apparently have so much power over the American Historical Association that, in effect, they can force the group’s president to issue cringing apologies at the snap of their fingers.

Shall we put a dunce hat on the professor and allow the mob to throw insults and rotten fruit at him, too?

It’s just the latest example of how institutions in America have been rapidly and totally captured by radical, left-wing revolutionaries. The response to the over-the-top opposition to Sweet’s piece should have been an offer to debate or publish another view at the most.

And if that didn’t work, Sweet’s ridiculous critics should have been told to get bent.

That didn’t happen and a struggle session ensued.

Imagine how different things would be if institutions and bureaucracies had just said “no,” or refused to comply with extremist demands? Because even the slightest resistance has been removed, we are left with situations where, for instance, a small tribute to Abraham Lincoln is removed at a university because a single person complained about it.

Our institutions, public agencies, corporations, and professional organizations are becoming both highly censorious of dissent from the dominant “narrative,” while also allowing woke Twitter mobs and campus activists to dictate their policies.

In one sense, Sweet was correct in his apology. His words did cause “harm.” The fact that he apologized to the mob indicates how the history profession and America’s elite organizations and institutions have been totally compromised and radicalized.

As activists and mobs tore down historical statues that they found offensive, one response from the “measured” left was that offensive history and statues should be removed from public display and placed in a museum. You know, for “context.”

But do you trust organizations such as the American Historical Association or James Madison’s Montpelier—which now aligns with the Southern Poverty Law Center—to provide faithful and accurate representations of the past?

Perhaps the way forward is to keep history in the public eye and out of the clutches of ideologically one-note institutions that are fanatically obsessed with, as Sweet wrote, “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.”

It is with the people and alternative institutions that we should place our trust.

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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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Monday, August 29, 2022


Northern Ireland politician faces criticism after response to new gender inclusive uniform policy for police

A controversy about a hat!

DUP MLA Jonathan Buckley has been subjected to criticism on social media after responding to a PSNI tweet regarding their new inclusive uniform policy.

Marking Foyle Pride on Saturday, the PSNI’s online LGBT+ Network account tweeted: “We're proud to say that this week our Police Service changed its policy on uniform items.”

The post featured PSNI officer Paul Bloomer, co-chair at the police’s LGBT group.

“This means all officers have agency over their gender presentation. Men, women & those with non-binary identities may wear either hat. A small but meaningful step forward for equality,” they added.

In response, the Upper Bann politician was critical of the tweet and replied: “I’m sure you all feel great. Everyone can stand around and clap each other on the back in the ‘politically correct brigade’.

“How about getting on with the real issues affecting people such as tackling drugs, theft and crime?”

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Identity politics will be the downfall of Democrats

Sitting in my first-grade classroom back in early 2009, I watched as President Barack Obama was sworn into office. I did not understand the full significance of the moment, but I understood that a milestone in American history had been reached. Love him or hate him, Obama represents significant progress for the United States. But to the Democratic Party, his success solidified the new strategy for future candidates: run a minority who fits the party's social agenda.

Since Obama’s election, Democrats have consistently backed candidates looking first at their race, gender, and sexual identity and second at their qualifications, resulting in our nation’s leaders now lacking the experience and expertise needed to run the country. The Democrats’ insistence on identity politics has hurt their standing within minority communities nationwide.

Look no further than the supposed crowd favorite for 2024. Former Mayor of South Bend turned Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was entirely unknown before the 2020 presidential cycle. Following his failed presidential campaign, securing just 21 delegates, Buttigieg has become the golden child for the Democratic Party. Why? It certainly isn’t his job performance. Since his confirmation, gas prices have hit the roof, and airports across the nation have been plagued by sky-high prices, delays, and cancellations.

So why are Democrats so infatuated with Mayor Pete? He fits the social agenda the Democratic Party is trying to impose upon America. The same can be said of Vice President Kamala Harris, chosen to run alongside President Joe Biden after a disaster of a presidential bid. Harris was chosen, not because her four short years as a senator qualified her to serve a heartbeat away from the presidency, but because her race and gender fit the narrative. Now, the public is seeing firsthand how disastrous selecting a candidate solely for their race, gender, or sexuality can be.

The sad reality for women and minorities in politics is that this strategy by the Democratic Party is only hurting their ability to gain positions of power. Democrats are forcing unqualified candidates to the top to sell themselves as inclusive, abandoning women and minority leaders with experience and instead pushing unqualified candidates such as Buttigieg and Harris. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has many minority candidates whom voters are excited to see throw their hats in the ring. The difference is that when Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott run for president, they won't be just minority candidates; they will be qualified candidates. They have worked their way to the top, not due to the color of their skin or their matching X-chromosomes but because they have done well for their constituents.

This is evidence of a larger problem within the Democratic Party. For years and years, Democrats have taken advantage of minority voters, promising the world but consistently ignoring them once in power. Look no further than Biden’s track record of higher gas prices and a failing economy, devastating minority communities nationwide. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are working hard to earn the votes of minorities. The RNC has made a significant investment in minority communities around the nation through new community centers.

Feeling support slipping among minority voters, Democrats have begun to rely further on identity politics as a tactic to control minority voters under the guise of equal representation. Instead of bolstering unqualified candidates, Democrats should allow their minority leaders time to build positive reputations and run on their expertise and experience.

With their use of identity politics paired with overlooking minority voters and the issues important to them, Democrats are quickly losing support. Now, it is time for the Republican Party to earn the trust of minority voters. Republicans must show minority voters that the values and principles the Republican Party is built on mirror those of the diverse cultures from around this nation. Republican leadership can usher in the greatest political realignment of the last 50 years by showing all people that Republican policies will improve lives from coast to coast regardless of race, gender, or sexual identity.

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Identity politics dominates New York primary race

A woman versus a Jew!

Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler are increasingly turning to identity politics as they make overtures to New York voters ahead of next Tuesday's incumbent vs. incumbent primary.

Maloney is framing the race as a gender war, arguing Nadler embodies the "old boys network" after he received the high-profile backing of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Nadler, meanwhile, is billing himself as the sole Jewish representative of New York City left in Congress.

"The old boys network is very, very close, and they support each other," Maloney said of Schumer's endorsement.

Maloney has argued being a woman makes her uniquely qualified to represent New York's newly drawn 12th Congressional District in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning the long-standing precedent of Roe v. Wade. The congresswoman, who was among a group of lawmakers who were arrested at an abortion rights rally last month, recently released an ad telling voters, "You cannot send a man to do a woman's job."

Nadler, by contrast, has indicated his Jewish heritage makes him best able to represent New York City, home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.

"New York has a lot of outstanding leaders, but few of them lead with the courage, conviction, and brilliant legislative effectiveness of my friend, Jerry Nadler," Schumer, who is also Jewish, said of Nadler. "I've watched as time after time, Jerry — a critical partner of mine in the House — was right on the issues years before so many others."

Earlier this month, Nadler sent out a fundraising email with the subject line "The Last Jewish Congressman from NYC???"

"For a century, New York has been the center of Jewish politics and identity in the United States – but Jerry Nadler is the city's last Jewish congressman," the email said, describing Nadler as a champion for defending Israel.

While the two were once close allies, Nadler and Maloney were thrown into the same district under the Empire State's newly drawn congressional map. The lawmakers, aligned on most political topics, have reached back decades to unearth ideological differences, with Nadler blasting Maloney, who represented what was once the more conservative "Silk Stocking District," for her votes in support of the Iraq War and the Patriot Act roughly 20 years ago.

An aggressive map signed by New York. Gov. Kathy Hochul that would have locked in an expected 22-4 partisan advantage for Democrats was stricken by a series of courts, forcing Democratic lawmakers into awkward games of musical chairs with onetime allies. As Nadler and Maloney, both elected to Congress in the 1990s, battle for the 12th Congressional District, other incumbents managed to avoid being set on a collision course. Freshman Rep. Mondaire Jones, who represents a suburban district north of New York City, relocated to the new 10th Congressional District, thus averting a bitter fight against Rep. Sean Maloney or a tense faceoff with ally Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

New York's 12th Congressional District has a partisan voter index of D+68, meaning whoever wins the Democratic nomination is expected to win the general election in November by a large margin.

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Crime is being decriminalised

In February Joshua Carney, a man with 47 previous convictions, was released from prison early on licence. Five days later, he forced his way into a Cardiff house, locking a terrified woman inside. Her screaming woke her 14-year-old daughter upstairs. Carney raped both daughter and mother in front of each other. On Monday, Carney was jailed for ‘life’; he will be considered for parole in ten years, at the age of 38.

The core principle of British justice isn’t public safety. If it was, Carney would never leave prison.

This isn’t about the preservation of liberty; the threat of crime is a far greater constraint on the average person’s freedom than the threat of prison. Instead, the British justice system is based around an almost pathological need to offer offenders a second chance, and a third, and a fourth, even when these chances come at the cost of somebody else’s chance to live their life free of violence. In Carney’s case, the 47 chances he has already received are deemed insufficient; he will have a chance to return to the streets while still young and able-bodied

British criminal justice isn’t just. Under-resourced and overworked police forces no longer have the capacity to investigate any but the most serious offences. Overcrowded prisons and soft laws mean that in the event someone is caught, offenders will soon be released from jail to reoffend. In effect, theft, burglary, and other offences are no longer meaningfully crimes; there are no consequences for them.

If you feel like things are getting worse, you’re right. Police forces are now solving the lowest proportion of crimes on record, with just 6 per cent resulting in charges, down from 15.5 per cent six years ago. Rape and sexual offences are at record highs, and police resources aren’t keeping pace; a woman who is raped has a one in 77 chance of seeing her attacker prosecuted.

Less serious offences have effectively been decriminalised entirely. Take thefts from vehicles. Last year, the Metropolitan police solved 271 of these incidents, out of the 55,000 that were reported. Now imagine how many more incidents the police didn’t hear about because the victims knew that reporting a crime would have no consequences. Over the last three years, 21,000 neighbourhoods in England and Wales reported at least one burglary; but in 17,000 of those areas, not a single such crime has been solved by the police.

What is deeply frustrating is that it doesn’t need to be this way. Criminal behaviour is remarkably concentrated; in Sweden, 1 per cent of the population commits 63 per cent of all violent crime, while in England and Wales 50 per cent of all prison sentences are handed out to offenders with at least 15 previous convictions. This concentration means that the best ways to prevent crime are remarkably straightforward: put police out on the beat, give them adequate resources to find criminals, and then lock those criminals away so they can’t reoffend.

Right now, our police forces are badly underfunded. The government tells us again and again how proud it is to have put an additional 10,000 police officers on the streets, and how it will soon add an extra 10,000 on top of this figure. Once completed, this recruitment drive will have finally reversed the cuts implemented post 2010. But with a larger population and more crime, this is nowhere near adequate. The court system, too, is crumbling; there are 58,000 cases waiting to go in front of a judge and jury. The average delay between crime and verdict is now almost 15 months.

All of this is worsened by the collapse of Britain’s health infrastructure. The decision to close asylums in favour of ‘care’ in the community has been a disaster; the Metropolitan police now detains someone under the Mental Health Act every 90 minutes, with some officers wasting whole shifts waiting for a hospital place to become available for their treatment. The lack of a place for these people to go means they are eventually returned to a situation evidently unsuitable for them, resulting in more police call-outs. Meanwhile, the permanent NHS crisis means armed police units are regularly dispatched to heart attacks when ambulances are unavailable.

The choice the next prime minister faces is simple. They can find a way to fund criminal justice, or they can continue with the de facto decriminalisation of crime. When they make this decision, they should remember that we ask two things of our criminal justice system. We ask it to keep us safe from criminals, by deterring their activity through policing and incapacitating them through imprisonment. And we ask it to keep the criminals safe from us, by providing punishments which satisfy the fundamental human need to see wrongdoing meet with consequences. When crime is de facto legal, people will eventually take the need to deter and punish into their own hands.

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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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Sunday, August 28, 2022



Canada Is Euthanizing Its Sick and Poor. Welcome to World of Government Health Care

Up until a few years ago, it was even worse in Britain. Under the "Liverpool pathway", seriously ill older people would be completely bombed out with morphine and then deprived of all food and drink. They died of thirst in their sleep. You do have dreams even when kept asleep by morphine. Imagine the nightmares affected people must have had while knocked out.

At least in Canada, people's agreement is sought before euthanasia. In Britain there was no prior consultation with either the person or their family. It was all done on the whim of a government doctor.

It was all so obviously evil that a halt was eventually called to it but versions of it probably still quietly go on. Government medicine is not big on pity or sympathy.

What happens does of course vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Seriously ill older people in Australa are admitted to a palliative care ward in government hospitals where they are given morphine for their pain but not otherwise treated. They continue to talk to their family to the end. Real efforts are made to keep them comfortable and they are in general treated very humanely. It shows what even a government hospital can do


Many leftists tout Canada’s socialized health care system as something America should emulate, claiming government-run health care is more humane. But it seems Canadian officials are more interested in urging doctors to help patients to kill themselves than to treat them.

America’s neighbor to the north has some of the most permissive euthanasia laws in the world. Canada’s medical assistance in dying laws allow almost anyone who can claim some form of hardship or disability to receive physician-assisted suicide, regardless of how minor those disabilities might be.

In a recently reported horror story from The Associated Press, Alan Nichols, 61, was successfully killed after a quick one month waiting period as he was suffering from hearing loss. Nichols was an otherwise decently healthy guy, but his brother claimed he was railroaded into killing himself.

Nichols’ family said that hospital staff helped him request euthanasia and pushed him to do it, a story that has been repeated many times by other disabled or sick Canadians.

Roger Foley, whose story was also reported by The Associated Press, became so unnerved by his hospital’s health care providers discussing euthanasia as an option that he started to record conversations. Foley has a degenerative brain disorder.

During one reported conversation, the hospital’s director of ethics tried to guilt Foley into thinking about the cost of his hospital stay. The director told Foley it would cost “north of $1,500 a day.”

When Foley asked what long-term treatments were, the director responded, “Roger, this is not my show. My piece of this was to talk to you, [to see] if you had an interest in assisted dying.”

Foley says he had never discussed ending his own life prior to the encounter.

The fact that the ethics director mentioned how much it cost is essential to understanding why Canadian officials seem so hellbent on getting people to kill themselves.

There is a flurry of stories of Canadians choosing to die over living through crushing poverty. The Spectator reported on a woman who chose because she “simply cannot afford to keep on living.”

As the Canadian government pays for health care, it is incentivized to cut costs as much as possible. Based on how eager some hospitals seem to push euthanasia, the government seems to have concluded that it’s cheaper to kill people than to cure them.

That’s ditto for the disabled and mentally ill.

Global News Canada reported that a Canadian military veteran, pursuing treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury, was told, completely unprovoked, that he could receive medical assistance in dying by a Veterans Affairs Canada agent. (Global News did not name the veteran, or the sources for the conversation.)

The man fights for his country, receives injuries in the line of duty, and is told that he can kill himself for his sacrifice. How humane.

While these stories are all disgusting, they lay out perfectly the biggest danger of importing a government-run health care system to the U.S.

When the government decides who gets medical care and when they get care, it also can decide who doesn’t.

With the relatively substandard care that America’s poor and vulnerable get under Medicaid, for example, why would we want to give more power to government bureaucrats over patients’ health care decisions?

Something not often considered in the debate over government health care plays into the country’s current fascination with obliterating gender and sex differences.

Scores of children are being given hormones and treatments that will permanently warp and scar them. What’s to stop some future government-run health care program from destroying a confused child’s body and then encouraging him to kill himself rather than deal with the consequences?

Canada is already beginning to consider allowing so-called mature minors to off themselves if the government determines them competent enough to make the decision.

Dying with Dignity, a pro-euthanasia group, posted a ghoulish blog post on mature minors and medical assistance in dying that urged the government to extend the option to children “at least 12 years of age and capable of making decisions with respect to their health.”

The left already claims children are mature enough to change their sex, so giving 12-year-olds the ability to legally kill themselves seems like the logical next step.

Worse, this push for suicide seems to be having a tangible impact on the number of people taking their own lives.

Canadian federal data shows that 10,064 people died in 2021 by medically-assisted suicide, a massive 32% jump from the year before.

This culture of government-endorsed death cannot be allowed to come to America.

Our costly health care system is far from perfect, but at least it isn’t wholesale encouraging people to end their own lives.

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Stop exaggerating the risk of violence for women

Some very wise words from Max Dancona. I may be biased but I doubt that a mother could have written this, though

When my daughter was 16, she got onto an airplane in a city in Mexico. I dropped her off at security. After that she was on her own. She went through customs on her own in a city in Texas. After spending some time in this airport on her own, she got on a different plane and proceeded home. Someone was there to meet her at the airport… although she joked that she would have been fine taking public transportation home. Everything went fine as we all knew it almost certainly would.

This was an adventure for her, something new. But there was extremely low risk to this trip. For all of the stories, teenaged girls are not at risk of violence from strangers, particularly in airports. As we were planning this, I did joke that “I have a very particular set of skills”, just in case something happened (of course, reality is significantly more boring than Hollywood).

My daughter is smart, competent and confident. This is the way I would want any young person to enter adulthood.

The real risks to women

Let’s look at some facts.

Women are significantly less than half as likely than men to be a victim of homicide as men are. This is true across demographic groups.

Women are less likely than men to be a victim of a violent crime.

When women are killed, it is more likely that the perpetrator is a close relation, friend or partner. It is less likely that it is a stranger.

All other things being equal, prison sentences are longer when the victim is a woman.

Looking at this, my son is far more at risk of violence, particularly violence on the street, then my daughter is. In our urban middle class neighborhood, there is no reason for her to be any more fearful than my son.

My daughter is more at risk of domestic violence, and she should be learning about consent, and healthy relationships. She is learning about these things from both her parents and her (rather progressive) school system.

The difference between boys and girls

The narrative is that girls are delicate creatures that need to be protected. This message existed since the middle ages; long before the invention of feminism. And yet it persists.

The summer my son turned 18, he took a 1000 mile bus trip to visit someone he met. What he did was crazy… there was a chance he could be assaulted, robbed or killed (as young men are killed every day). I thought it was a little crazy, but that is youth. I accepted the risk… for young men to get out and explore is a healthy part of growing up.

Why don’t we have the same attitude toward girls? Living life comes with some amount of risk, shouldn’t young women have these same experiences? Somehow risks toward women are exaggerated, not just the amount of risk, but the perceived severity.

There has been plenty of discussion of “Missing White Woman syndrome”. Female victims, particularly White female victims make for a story. A missing male person doesn’t grab your attention. The death of a man is somehow not quite as tragic.

Society puts a greater value on the life and safety of women than of men. An offender who murders a woman is significantly more likely to get a death penalty than someone who murders a man, and in general prison sentences are longer when the victim of a crime is a woman. This likely plays into the narrative that women shouldn’t take risks (while men should). But this isn’t a healthy narrative.

If we are going to state that women should have the same opportunities as men, that they should take the same risks and reach for the same goals, we must reject this idea that girls need to be protected. When girls are “delicate, precious creatures” they will never be able to compete or to thrive in the real world.

Fear is not Feminism

My daughter is smart, assertive and confident (and I am proud of the part I played in that). She is not afraid to live in the world she inhabits or to go after what she wants. She rejects the notion girls are delicate, at risk and need to be protected. This is a narrative that feminism should reject.

It is troubling to me the number of stories, here in elsewhere, where feminist voices are perpetrating the myth that women are at risk and need to lock themselves away. If I believed this narrative, I would never let my daughter travel, I certainly wouldn’t let her go to college.. Heck I wouldn’t let her out of the house on her own.

I reject this, and I wish people would just stop repeating this narrative.

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Another Trump-backed Candidate Takes Home a Win!

It’s official. Florida’s 39th district primary officially goes to Airforce veteran Anna Paulina Luna.


She's gorgeous. She has some Hispanic ancestry

The moment this district decided to get woke, they lost to Luna. She represents the real America. Yes, it’s an America built on LEGAL immigration.

Luna set out to represent Latinas, who started flocking to the GOP in record numbers the moment election season rolled back around. Because they can see, first hand, what a “leader” like Biden does to a country. And they showed their support in the best place possible: the ballot box.

El American reported:

With over 95 percent of votes counted, Luna held a six-point lead over her main challenger Kevin Hayslett and some 26 points clear of Amanda Makki.

Luna, who previously worked as El American’s Chief Correspondent, will now go on to November’s general election where she will face former Obama aide Eric Lynn, who won his race uncontested.

The Gateway Pundit adds:

Anna Paulina Luna says being born in America is like winning the lottery and she never gave up in spite of what she faced. Her family dealt with drug addiction and didn’t have a lot of money, yet they persevered. She graduated from high school and joined the US Air Force.

On the day she was ready to go to medical school she received a call from Charlie Kirk, with Turning Point USA that changed her life. She was placed in front of college students and learned the facts, her greatest weapon when arguing with liberals. Today she is running for US Congress in Florida and she wants to be a representative for all the people in her district and Hispanics from across the nation that flocked to the GOP during the Trump years.

From her website:

Anna Paulina Luna is a strong independent leader, earning her stripes by serving her country, not by serving herself. Raised by a single mother in Southern California’s low-income neighborhoods, Anna learned that she must work hard and be independent to succeed.

Although never married, Anna’s mother and father separated when she was very young. Anna’s father suffered from severe drug addiction and, early on, had asked her mother to have an abortion. But Anna’s mother chose life.

As a result, Anna and her mother were on their own. During Anna’s childhood and teen years, her father struggled and spent time in and out of incarceration. Most of how her communication with him during these times was through letters to jail and collect calls. Her grandmother died of HIV/AIDS contracted from heroin use.

By age nine, Anna had experienced an armed robbery and survived. While Anna was on campus at one of the six high schools she attended, a fatal gang shooting occurred. Her young cousin was murdered while Anna was a teenager. And as a young adult, Anna was the victim of a home invasion.

These types of stories are all too common in America’s low-income, inner-city communities, like where Anna grew up.

Anna’s way out was joining the military. While serving in the United States Air Force, Anna met her husband, Andy. He is a Bronze Star recipient who earned a Purple Heart when enemy combatants shot him in Afghanistan. After recovering, Andy redeployed to fight ISIS in the Middle East.

More here:

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Australia: Christianity told to bow to Woke

There’s an old definition of news that goes like this: ‘If a dog bites a man, that’s not news. But if a man bites a dog, that’s news!’

I was reminded of this when, flicking through The Age newspaper on Friday, I saw an article headlined, Catholic school refuses to show student’s same-sex movie.

Dog bites man, I thought.

That a Catholic school refuses to promote things that undermine its Catholic values is hardly surprising. The Age might as well have reported that Lefties like cancelling people, or that Joe Biden is a walking house plant.

Dog bites man.

But the media is now so appalled by Christian values and so ignorant about Christianity that it is news to them when a Catholic school stands by its doctrine.

The Age reported that a parent was upset his daughter’s film project, which features a lesbian kiss, would not be posted on her Catholic school’s website or showcased at her school’s visual arts exhibition.

Mount Lilydale Mercy College principal Philip Morison told The Age: ‘Some scenes are not in keeping with our values as a Catholic school.’

If you’re unclear, that would be the girl-on-girl action.

The budding LGBTQ+ filmmaker had been told she was welcome to submit her project as part of her VCE assessment, nevertheless ‘a queer film’ would not be promoted by the school at their exhibition.

The student complained to The Age: ‘I thought they would be okay with it. I thought we had gotten past that, but obviously not.’

One can only imagine the Year 12 student’s surprise to learn that the 2000-year-old Catholic church had not gotten past its Catholicism.

The ‘distraught’ student continued: ‘I believe it’s an act of discrimination. All I want them to do is change their minds, so I can be included with my classmates.’

Of course it’s an act of discrimination. Discriminating between Catholic values and non-Catholic values is what keeps Catholics Catholic, just as discriminating between conservative values and Woke progressive values is what keeps the Liberal Party … er, maybe that’s not such a great example.

But I digress.

All the Year 12 student wants is for her school to change their minds about the teachings of Jesus, Saint Paul, and Moses. All the school wanted her to do was to save the lesbian kissing for after-school hours.

Jesus had better change his tune.

As for being included with her classmates, she is. She is enrolled in the school, she is included in classes, and her project was included in VCE assessment. She, however, excluded herself from the Catholic film exhibition when, despite warnings, she went ahead and made an LGBTQ+ film.

Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick has taken the girl’s case to state Parliament where he accused the school of failing to reflect ‘community values’.

He told The Age: ‘I personally believe that if you’re a school, regardless of your religious beliefs, if you’re receiving public funding, then you have a responsibility to reflect the values of the community, not of your particular faith.’

Well Mr Meddick, two can play that game.

I personally believe that if you’re an Animal Justice Party MP, regardless of your political beliefs, if you’re receiving public funding, then you have a responsibility to reflect the values of the community, not of your particular Party.

Incidentally, 20 per cent of Victorians are Catholic while just 2.71 percent of Victorians voted for the Animal Justice Party when Mr Meddick was elected to the Upper House in 2018.

Tell me again who is more reflective of ‘community values’?

Macquarie School of Education Professor Tiffany Jones cast doubt on whether Catholic beliefs are really Catholic beliefs since some Catholics seem not to practice them.

She said: ‘The teaching of the church is arguable … because you will get Catholics who support LGBTIQ+ people, you will get Catholics who are LGBTIQ+ people.’

I think what Ms Jones meant to say was that while Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality has been crystal clear for 2,000 years, the commitment of some Catholics is arguable.

Imagine if Catholics changed their doctrine whenever they came across Catholics who did the opposite of Catholic doctrine so as to ensure Catholic doctrine was fully inclusive of those people who disagreed with Catholic doctrine…

In what way would that still be Catholic doctrine?

But LGBTQ+ activists have no time for such logic. They are not committed to fairness or choice. Gay rights activist Rodney Croome, condemning the Mount Lilydale Mercy College for not allowing the student to show her gay film, said:

‘This kind of discrimination is illegal in Tasmania and now Victorian law. It should also be illegal in federal law. Before the election the new Government promised to act. The time is now.’

It should not be lost on anyone that while the Left love to accuse Christians of wanting to impose themselves on the public, it is the Left who literally make laws by which they will be able to impose themselves upon Christians.

The Left preach tolerance for all beliefs whilst being completely intolerant of Christian beliefs.

And the Left demand inclusivity while seeking to exclude Christian schools from government funding; this despite the fact that Christian parents pay taxes and the state system would collapse if Christian schools suddenly closed for lack of funding.

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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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Friday, August 26, 2022



Some regrets from a woman who drank the feminist Kool-aid

Its been impossible for me to admit this in real life, and the burden of enduring the pain of what I’ve been feeling in utter isolation has successfully worsened my condition, so here I am tricking my mind into believing that I’m not a coward, that I’ve finally found some bravery within me to say that I feel so utterly lonely and to quote the wonderful Charlotte from the Pride and Prejudice movie “I’m frightened”

What I’m about to say is most definitely an unpopular opinion, thus my fear of sharing it with my own real life friends and acquaintances. Making my thoughts public in this piece of writing is by no means easy, I am quite terrified actually, but hiding behind the screen of my computer and not being forced to endure any judgemental gazes regarding the matter makes it all seem a bit safer.

I grew up in quite the traditional household. My father owned a small business whilst my mother took care of me and my siblings all by herself. As a kid, I was pretty wild and I considered myself blessed even if I didn’t fully comprehend the sentiment at the time. I loved playing outside then heading home only to be greeted by the smell of freshly baked cookies which was nearly an everyday thing. Mom truly built a warm haven for us and I loved every bit of my life till I turned 10.

I started developing, my breast grew and I could see my parents, my dad especially, begin to change the way they treated when compared to the way my brothers were treated. Again, I didn’t fully understand things, but it was easy to sense that there was a shift of dynamics occurring in our house, and that it was only going to become more apparent as time passed by.

Normal activities that I used to take part in with my brothers were now deemed a “boys’ only thing”; my mother started coaching me on how to be more feminine, how I ought to behave and conduct myself, how my soft spoken voice should never be raised as loud as that of the men, even when fuming. By the time I hit my teens, I wasn’t allowed to stay out as late as my brothers were, I was meant to talk and walk more elegantly, and my father never let a day pass by without ushering snarky, demeaning comments on the way I dressed.

I didn’t particularly enjoy the new roles I was assigned to play, but the women in my life, my mother being the prime example, all followed the same rules and seemed quite content, so I figured my discomfort was a mere ephemeral thing that’d disappear with time; I’ll grew into the part the same way they did when the time is right. But when I reached high school, a whole new world was opened to me and my life was never to be the same again.

I did a lot of learning when it came to core subjects, but what truly shaped and helped me morph into the woman I am today were the extracurricular stuff I never knew existed. I learned about feminism, a topic never discussed at our dinner table. I was informed about gender roles and the mischievous deeds of the patriarchy. I understood that both my parents, my father in particular, were misogynists and that I’ve been subjected to constant sexist harassments since I first had my period at 10.

My life truly shifted then, I read the “Feminine Mystique”, I listened to everything Simone du Beauvoir had to say about sex, and by the time I was 18; all ready and prepped to go to college and take this world by a storm, I informed my family that I did not wish to get married, I had no intention of having kids, and that I categorically refused to play any role, tiny how it may be, in furthering the tyrannical patriarchal supremacy of the white man.

I worked quite hard during college, I had a great GPA, I was focused on always ending up at the top because I knew I had to perform far better than the average male candidate to guarantee the independent life I very much desired. At the time, I had several folks approach me to ask if I was available for coffee, if they could have my number, if it was possible for them to pick me up at a certain hour to go on date, and my answer has always been a definite “No”. There was a time when many assumed I was “asexual” due to my constant refusal of any attachment beyond that of casual friendship, and I have to admit that for a second; I questioned if I perhaps was.

The truth however was much simpler than that, or much more complicated some may argue. I declined every offer because I was convinced that any form of romantic or sexual attachment with anyone would only work on hindering my career aspirations. I had it all planned, by the time I was 25, I would have finished my master’s degree, I’d have a great income, and I’d be the strong independent woman I’ve always wanted to be. I’d buy whatever I wished using my own money, I’d travel the world, I’d become my own boss and I wouldn’t be forced to listen nor abide to the rules of anyone but my own self, and all of this would, no doubt, contribute to achieving the greatest purpose of them all, making me happy!

Some of those wishes were ticked off of the list. I did get my master degree, I have a job that pays okay, but the money is nowhere near the boss-lady-fantasy-salary I dreamed about as a youngster, I could pay for the things I desire but I’m often coerced into saving up for the things I’m forced to tend to as an adult. I travelled abroad twice, but since the pandemic hit, boarding an airplane has become quite the complicated task. Most importantly though, I am very much an unhappy human being, and a very lonely one at that.

I occasionally find myself contemplating the plethora of choices that led me to be here, and more often than not, I end up stuck in a cycle of blame and utter self hatred. I was set on this career obsession path believing it was the sole righteous route for any true feminist to follow, any divergence would’ve been a huge betrayal to the cause, and on my way I neglected the importance of human contact, I failed to foster a true meaningful relationship when so many eligible candidates graciously presented the opportunity to me to do so. I thought I could delay this to a date of my choosing completely unaware that when you build a fortress around you, you can’t expect many to face the dangers of climbing it because the reality is; they have abundance of doors to knock on instead.

My friends all harbour the same beliefs we had when we first met in college, when such topics sneak into conversations, they’d laugh at women our age getting married or worse, having kids, and I sit there sipping my drink unable to tell them how lonely it has been, even with them around. If my feelings regarding the nuclear family are detected for their severance from the agreed upon consensus of the group, I would be deemed a brainwashed conservative.

When I’m with my parents, my mother especially, I put on a show of how wonderful my life is, how I’ve made every right decision along the way and how being free and liberated equals the true meaning of happiness. She always smiles and tells me how glad she is for me and it only makes me feel worse. I know that if I lay myself bare to her, I would somehow acknowledge a defeat to war I raged at our household since I was a teen. Even if she’s kind enough not to say that she told me so, I’d still see it in her eyes and I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I often screamed and told her that I couldn’t lead a meaningless existence such as hers, I refused to live just so I could cater to a husband and a bunch of children, “I wanted a life of my own” I always said, and now that I am in fact on my own, I just feel lonely.

I am not, by any means, saying that I desire to be a housewife, or that I would choose that path now if presented to me. I like my job, I enjoy the idea of contributing to something larger that myself. I do, however, believe that, us, women have been sold a butchered, disfigured fantasy. We were told, or pretty much taught, that we had to make a choice; its either the career or the relationship, you can’t have both. What’s truly sad about this notion is that it was often pushed on us by our fellow women, many would proudly embrace their kids whilst telling you in a virtuous tone how glad they were to give up a job they once loved to have them, others would scorn on the idea of a family whilst bragging about their newest promotion. In the meantime, male counterparts would proudly inform you that the party they’re throwing to celebrate their new high paid position was delayed because they had to attend their son’s soccer match that day.

Its mid 2022, and though women have indeed made significant progress across the board, they are somehow still gas lighted into believing they’re required to give certain things up for the sake of gaining others; they are simply unable to have it all. A relationship would ruin your career whilst the latter would simply prevent you from having the former, so you need to; after careful deliberation, opt of the one you find more meaningful, more compelling! You simply cannot by any means pursue both, that luxury falls into the “males’ exclusivity package” only.

In our pursuit for independence, we are forced to pay the price of loneliness, and in our pursuit of meaningful human contact, we are occasionally told to abandon our agency. Women will not be truly liberated till the day their choices are made with no external influence, when they’re not required to make a choice, but they do it because they simply wish to.

I don’t believe I’m supporting any political or ideological side by wishing to have a meaningful relationship, I don’t think I’m abandoning my feminist stance, nor should I feel like I am by my peers. I believe as social beings we do crave that human connection, we do desire to be seen and cared for, as we do enjoy showing love to those we hold dear to us. The idea of being independent and not needing anyone is a beautiful concept and it perhaps stems from a genuine, well intended place, however, in the path to secure that financial stability, I wholeheartedly believe every person ought to work on, we confused concepts and we clumped everything together leading women to believe that independence should occur on all fronts including the most basic ones.

Some needs are simply innate within us, and they could never be fulfilled with a thriving career or a global tour, some needs are mundane and could be found in that person next door and it should never be a shame to admit we desire them. Women should not be haunted by the ghost of loneliness as a reward for wanting independence, women simply should be able to have whatever it is they wish with no strings attached, same as their counterparts have been doing for millennia.

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Boston Children’s Hospital’s transgender insanity reveals how unhinged elites make money off our kids

Recent events at Boston Children’s Hospital reveal the yawning gulf between the values of ordinary American parents and the decadent beliefs of a venal and increasingly unhinged elite.

When activist “Billboard” Chris Elston broke the story of videos promoting “gender affirmation” for kids as young as 2 at the hospital, the outcry was immediate and immense. The progressive press has retaliated by calling this “right-wing harassment,” and of course any actual threats should be condemned.

But frankly, outrage is the right response to medics promoting the idea that kids young enough to be in diapers have a clear enough sense of their own identity to justify far-reaching changes such as “social transition,” in which everyone around a child agrees to pretend he or she is the opposite sex. A hospital psychologist even insisted in one video that “a good portion of children do know as early as from the womb.”

So when the US Justice Department came out in defense of the hospital last week, normal parents might be forgiven for thinking America’s rulers have taken leave of their senses. But what’s afoot isn’t insanity so much as a government-approved gold-rush. The “resource” these speculators are fighting over? The healthy bodies of American children.

Data show that “socially transitioned” children are far more likely to go on to medical interventions. And perhaps this is the point: After all, transgender is big business. Gender-transition surgery can cost upward of $100,000. The US gender-surgery market was valued in 2021 at $1.9 billion, with predicted annual growth of more than 10%. And when hormone therapy costs $1,500 a year, for the rest of a patient’s life, no wonder entrepreneurial medics want kids on the treatment treadmill as young as possible. Clinics are popping up like mushrooms to take advantage of this new business opportunity: The first American pediatric gender clinic opened in 2007, and there are now more than 50 nationwide.

Trans golfer Hailey Davidson fights to join LPGA amid backlash
This all comes with a federal seal of approval. Rachel Levine, a transgender individual born male and serving as America’s assistant secretary for health, recently declared on Twitter, “Gender-affirming care is medical care. It is mental health care. It is suicide prevention care. It improves quality of life, and it saves lives. It is based on decades of study. It is a well-established medical practice.”

In reality, every sentence of this is contested. Several European nations have suspended or drastically restricted support for this supposedly “well-established medical practice” following new evidence.

Research reveals, for example, that pediatric transition delivers poor or no mental-health improvements for those who undergo it. The cancer drug used off-label to halt puberty has been shown to cause shocking side effects, such as stunted growth, cognitive impairment, brittle bones and even blindness. And of course once a surgeon has cut your teen daughter’s healthy breasts off, they ain’t growing back — even if she changes her mind later on.

I write from Britain, where the UK government recently shut down the Tavistock gender clinic for endangering kids — by taking exactly the treatment approach Levine approvingly promotes.

But you won’t hear any of this from America’s assistant secretary for health. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

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Federal Court Blocks Biden Rule Forcing ER Doctors to Perform Abortions Against Their Faith

A federal judge in Texas blocked, for the time being, regulatory guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that sought to compel emergency room doctors to perform abortions even if doing so violates their conscience or religious faith.

In a 67-page decision, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Lubbock Division, enjoined HHS from enforcing guidance it issued in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that returned legal authority on abortion to state legislatures.

The HHS guidance, which was issued on July 11 along with a letter from HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, said the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986 (EMTALA) requires emergency room doctors to perform abortions regardless of their religious views, even if doing so conflicts with a state law.

The HHS actions were challenged by three plaintiffs, the State of Texas and two private groups—the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) and the Christian Medical and Dental Associations (CMDA). The plaintiffs are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Arizona-based public interest law firm that specializes in First Amendment religious freedom issues.

But U.S. District Court Judge James Wesley Hendrix said the HHS guidance and Becerra’s letter went far beyond the intent and letter of the 1986 law.

“That guidance goes well beyond EMTALA’s text, which protects both mothers and unborn children, is silent as to abortion, and preempts state law only when the two directly conflict,” Hendrix wrote.

“AAPLOG and CMDA’s members face a substantial threat of enforcement and severe penalties for their inevitable violation of the Guidance’s requirements with regards to abortion.”

The judge also agreed with the plaintiffs that the HHS actions injured Texas’ sovereign interests, saying “the court finds that Texas plausibly alleges an injury to its sovereign interest based on the differences between the guidance’s interpretation of EMTALA and Texas’s laws governing when abortions are permitted.

“Although the defendants dispute this, the language of the guidance and Texas’s laws are not identical, and the differences are material. This mismatch creates areas where the guidance claims to preempt state law—a type of sovereign injury.”

Hendrix further agreed that the HHS guidance was issued in violation of federal law, requiring a public notice period for citizens to comment on the proposal prior to its being issued and enforced.

As a result, Hendrix granted the plaintiffs’ motion and ordered that “the defendants may not enforce the guidance and letter’s interpretation that Texas abortion laws are preempted by EMTALA; and the defendants may not enforce the guidance and letter’s interpretation of EMTALA—both as to when an abortion is required and EMTALA’s effect on state laws governing abortion—within the State of Texas or against AAPLOG’s members and CMDA’s members.”

A spokesman for HHS couldn’t be reached for comment.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs said the court order demonstrates Hendrix’s conclusion that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail if the case is appealed by HHS.

“The Biden administration is needlessly, illegitimately, and illegally working to turn emergency rooms into walk-in abortion facilities. Doctors get into their line of work to save lives and care for people—and that’s exactly what they are ethically, morally, and legally required to do,” said ADF senior counsel Ryan Bangert, who argued before the court on behalf of the pro-life OB-GYNs.

“We’re pleased to see the court halt the administration’s attempt to flagrantly disregard the legislative and democratic process, and we’ll continue to defend those in the medical profession who wish to respect and save lives, not take them,” Bangert continued.

“Emergency room physicians can, and do, treat ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening conditions. Elective abortion is not life-saving care—it ends the life of the unborn—and the government can’t force doctors to perform procedures that violate their conscience and religious beliefs,” ADF senior counsel Denise Harle said in a statement praising the decision. Harle is also director of the ADF Center for Life.

In their motion seeking the order, the plaintiffs told the court that the HHS action “imposes massive financial penalties and disqualification from federally funded health programs for doctors who do not do abortions …” and that because the mandate to perform abortions “issues yet ill-defined threats requiring abortions, it inherently, and intentionally, imposes substantial pressure for them to do abortions regardless of their religious beliefs. That pressure is an irreparable injury.”

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A 24-year-old man charged with murder and torture of 5-year-old in Aboriginal community

Australian Aborigines are notoriously hard on their children


Jason Ross Allan Fourmile, the alleged offender

QUEENSLAND Police have charged a man with murder and torture after the death of a five-year-old boy following an incident in a Far North community.

Initial findings showed that the five-year-old boy was taken to the Yarrabah Hospital with life-threatening injuries and was flown to Townsville Hospital in a critical condition at 12.30pm on Tuesday August 16.

The boy then passed away on Monday August 22.

A 24-year-old man, who was known to the boy, was arrested and charged with one count each of murder, grievous bodily harm and torture.

He has been remanded in custody to also face two counts each of assault occasioning bodily harm while armed and assault occasioning bodily harm in the Cairns Magistrates Court on Wednesday, August 24.

Detectives from Cairns CPIU have established an Incident Centre in the Cairns Police Facility with assistance from Child Trauma Unit detectives from Brisbane after being alerted of the incident.

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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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