Here's an AP story, for goodness sake, that exposes the "emptiness" (i.e. deceptions, lies) in the Obama-Messiah's Congressional Address last night.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090225/D96IFSC80.html
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
FIREFIGHTER HARASSMENT MINIMIZED IN GAY PRIDE PARADE TRIAL
Last week a jury determined that four San Diego firefighters who were ordered to participate in a 2007 Gay Pride parade had been sexually harassed.
The four were awarded a total of $34,300 in damages—a figure that clearly suggests a “separate and unequal” calculus when it comes to harassment of straight employees by a sexually demonstrative crowd. One can hardly imagine any jury coming up with figures of this diminutive size if the roles were reversed—if, for example, four gay firefighters had been subjected, because of department orders, to demeaning taunts from an unsympathetic crowd.
Still, a positive verdict for the plaintiffs is better than no verdict at all—as was the case last October when another jury fell one vote short of the required nine votes to sustain a harassment verdict.
Plaintiff’s attorney Charles LiMandri also noted that a judicial ruling in the earlier trial had found that the firefighters’ freedom of speech hadn’t been violated—“even though the courts have consistently held that participation in a gay pride parade is a form of constitutionally protected expressive conduct, and the right to speak on a controversial public issue includes the right not to be compelled to speak.”
According to plaintiff John Ghiotto, the firefighters (who had all objected to their last-minute assignment to this public relations “duty”) were subjected to verbal abuse and sexual gestures throughout the parade route—the most explicit of which exceeded even crotch-grabbing and requests for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Elsewhere in California’s culture wars, a student at Los Angeles City College, Jonathan Lopez, is suing a professor, John Matteson, for allegedly calling him a “fascist bastard” in class and not allowing him to finish a speech in favor of Proposition 8.
The incident took place in a public speaking class shortly after the November vote in favor of the constitutional amendment that defined marriage in California as between a man and a woman. According to Lopez, the speech professor also informed him that he should “ask God what your grade is.”
Lopez is being represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, a group that, alongside the Thomas More Law Center, represented the San Diego firefighters. In a letter to ADF a school dean observed that two students were “deeply offended” by Lopez’s speech and that one of them said, “this student should have to pay some price for preaching hate in the classroom.”
Lopez is reportedly asking for a jury trial—a good idea in view of the emerging gap between public sentiment and the views of our black-robed betters when it comes to matters like marriage, freedom of speech, and sexual harassment.
For many of California’s judicial legislators freedom of speech and sexual harassment are one-way streets. Maximum latitude is allowed to groups with “victim” status, whereas individuals without this prestigious moniker must carefully observe the “do not offend” signs erected by “victims.”
All awards, of course, (even those for only $34,300) are subject to judicial review.
The four were awarded a total of $34,300 in damages—a figure that clearly suggests a “separate and unequal” calculus when it comes to harassment of straight employees by a sexually demonstrative crowd. One can hardly imagine any jury coming up with figures of this diminutive size if the roles were reversed—if, for example, four gay firefighters had been subjected, because of department orders, to demeaning taunts from an unsympathetic crowd.
Still, a positive verdict for the plaintiffs is better than no verdict at all—as was the case last October when another jury fell one vote short of the required nine votes to sustain a harassment verdict.
Plaintiff’s attorney Charles LiMandri also noted that a judicial ruling in the earlier trial had found that the firefighters’ freedom of speech hadn’t been violated—“even though the courts have consistently held that participation in a gay pride parade is a form of constitutionally protected expressive conduct, and the right to speak on a controversial public issue includes the right not to be compelled to speak.”
According to plaintiff John Ghiotto, the firefighters (who had all objected to their last-minute assignment to this public relations “duty”) were subjected to verbal abuse and sexual gestures throughout the parade route—the most explicit of which exceeded even crotch-grabbing and requests for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Elsewhere in California’s culture wars, a student at Los Angeles City College, Jonathan Lopez, is suing a professor, John Matteson, for allegedly calling him a “fascist bastard” in class and not allowing him to finish a speech in favor of Proposition 8.
The incident took place in a public speaking class shortly after the November vote in favor of the constitutional amendment that defined marriage in California as between a man and a woman. According to Lopez, the speech professor also informed him that he should “ask God what your grade is.”
Lopez is being represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, a group that, alongside the Thomas More Law Center, represented the San Diego firefighters. In a letter to ADF a school dean observed that two students were “deeply offended” by Lopez’s speech and that one of them said, “this student should have to pay some price for preaching hate in the classroom.”
Lopez is reportedly asking for a jury trial—a good idea in view of the emerging gap between public sentiment and the views of our black-robed betters when it comes to matters like marriage, freedom of speech, and sexual harassment.
For many of California’s judicial legislators freedom of speech and sexual harassment are one-way streets. Maximum latitude is allowed to groups with “victim” status, whereas individuals without this prestigious moniker must carefully observe the “do not offend” signs erected by “victims.”
All awards, of course, (even those for only $34,300) are subject to judicial review.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
SAVING TREES VS. SAVING BABIES
Cutting down large trees is a mortal sin according to the green mores of many Californians—an offense that prompts significant television and newspaper coverage when someone decides, as recently happened in Encinitas, to take a stand (or a seat) in the branches of an endangered leafy organism.
Even health concerns engendered by bird poop right outside an Oceanside restaurant don’t mitigate the righteous indignation of some environmentalists who viscerally feel the pain that neurology suggests is denied our wooden neighbors.
On the other hand, an individual who protests the termination of a nascent human life is unlikely to get much media coverage—much less media sympathy. The same can be said about the attitude of most state legislators toward ending the development of what used to be called “a baby.”
Indeed, Sacramento is so unconcerned (or embarrassed) about the culling of human fetuses that it no longer keeps track of the state’s annual contribution (around 100,000) to the estimated 1.2 million abortions that are performed in the United States each year.
What the state does apparently care about is access to abortion providers—a practice known in the Orwellian language of the Healthcare Workforce Pilot Project as “early pregnancy care.”
In 2006, for the sake of this “Pilot Project,” the state legislature suspended regulations that required abortion providers to be licensed physicians. According to State Senator Sam Aanestad, a trenchant critic of the program, Planned Parenthood has since employed procedure-trained nurses, midwives, and physician assistants to perform abortions by suction aspiration.
Aanestad further notes that HWPP #171 exploits a program that was established in 1973 to address shortfalls in the gerontology workforce in order to expand access to abortion in “underserved areas” of California—including San Diego.
Perhaps the proper name for this little-advertised “research project,” designed to facilitate abortions in poor communities where they are already common, should be “No Abortion Left Behind.”
This “clinical study” has been conducted under the auspices of the University of California San Francisco, Kaiser of Northern California, and several Planned Parenthood affiliates. The program is scheduled for renewal in March—in case there are readers out there who care to climb down from their trees long enough to contact their legislators about Healthcare Workforce Pilot Project #171.
It is unlikely, however, that tree-climbers who weep over the fate of vegetative life will show similar concern over the loss of human life in utero. After all, the former activity is popular and demands only episodic commitment on the part of the activist. The latter activity is likely to invite ridicule from powerful media sources (Hollywood and major television networks) and requires, on the part of those most intimately involved in the decision, years of commitment to the welfare of a child.
The psycho-dynamics of these moral priorities are as follows: As crucial moral standards are increasingly ignored by the public, matters of marginal moral significance take their place—filling a yawning void with moral distractions.
Even health concerns engendered by bird poop right outside an Oceanside restaurant don’t mitigate the righteous indignation of some environmentalists who viscerally feel the pain that neurology suggests is denied our wooden neighbors.
On the other hand, an individual who protests the termination of a nascent human life is unlikely to get much media coverage—much less media sympathy. The same can be said about the attitude of most state legislators toward ending the development of what used to be called “a baby.”
Indeed, Sacramento is so unconcerned (or embarrassed) about the culling of human fetuses that it no longer keeps track of the state’s annual contribution (around 100,000) to the estimated 1.2 million abortions that are performed in the United States each year.
What the state does apparently care about is access to abortion providers—a practice known in the Orwellian language of the Healthcare Workforce Pilot Project as “early pregnancy care.”
In 2006, for the sake of this “Pilot Project,” the state legislature suspended regulations that required abortion providers to be licensed physicians. According to State Senator Sam Aanestad, a trenchant critic of the program, Planned Parenthood has since employed procedure-trained nurses, midwives, and physician assistants to perform abortions by suction aspiration.
Aanestad further notes that HWPP #171 exploits a program that was established in 1973 to address shortfalls in the gerontology workforce in order to expand access to abortion in “underserved areas” of California—including San Diego.
Perhaps the proper name for this little-advertised “research project,” designed to facilitate abortions in poor communities where they are already common, should be “No Abortion Left Behind.”
This “clinical study” has been conducted under the auspices of the University of California San Francisco, Kaiser of Northern California, and several Planned Parenthood affiliates. The program is scheduled for renewal in March—in case there are readers out there who care to climb down from their trees long enough to contact their legislators about Healthcare Workforce Pilot Project #171.
It is unlikely, however, that tree-climbers who weep over the fate of vegetative life will show similar concern over the loss of human life in utero. After all, the former activity is popular and demands only episodic commitment on the part of the activist. The latter activity is likely to invite ridicule from powerful media sources (Hollywood and major television networks) and requires, on the part of those most intimately involved in the decision, years of commitment to the welfare of a child.
The psycho-dynamics of these moral priorities are as follows: As crucial moral standards are increasingly ignored by the public, matters of marginal moral significance take their place—filling a yawning void with moral distractions.
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