The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Worse Than Dinkins

Posted on | December 27, 2014 | 10 Comments

The tenure of David Dinkins as mayor of New York City is universally remembered as the absolute nadir of that city’s history, but Bill de Blasio is making a strong claim to the title Worst Mayor Ever:

NEW YORK (AP) — Hundreds of officers outside the church where a funeral was held for a policeman killed along with his partner in an ambush shooting turned their backs on the mayor as he spoke during Saturday’s service.
The reaction from officers watching Officer Rafael Ramos’ funeral on giant TV screens followed comments from police union officials who had said Mayor Bill de Blasio contributed to a climate of mistrust that contributed to the killings of the two New York Police Department officers.
Inside Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens, however, mourners gave de Blasio polite applause before and after his speech.

(Via Memeorandum.) Oh, he got “polite applause” from people mourning a dead cop. Way to go, Mayor Golf Claps!

 

Category: Crime, New York

No, The Homo Bureaucratus Infestation Is Not A Representative Sample

Posted on | December 26, 2014 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

USA Today is closer to being part of the problem than part of the solution:

Yet to look around the USA is to see fear and anxiety. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was a nation of wimps.

Take, for instance, the response to the Ebola outbreak. Millions of people worked themselves into a panic over a disease that has claimed the lives of fewer Americans this year than unsanitary caramel apples.

Or take the many universities so afraid of offending people that they have muzzled the very debate that is reputed to be one of their hallmarks.

You’ve had Godless Commies attacking our institutions for decades, and there are some external effects. The President is incontinent in the face of, well, anything job-related. Brian Williams sounds like a voice of authority, for all he lacks hair #1 anyplace that matters. At UVA, Teresa Sullivan practices fact-free fascism with a Nurse Ratched smile.

However, as Senator Mike Lee noted, the recent shenanigans with CROmnibus aren’t going unnoticed. While it would be silly to think that the country is going to escape at least a partial crash before the No-Talent Rodeo Clown leaves his final mess on the carpet, total collapse seems kind of Chicken Little.

Sure, the Commie twerps are doing everything they can to get a race war going, but pesky facts keep revealing them for liars, right, Sullivan? Lies have a  transient effect at best. The fallout of the lies may take longer to clean up. Indeed, unwinding a century of Progressive collapse is going to be the ultimate test of American Exceptionalism.

via Instapundit

Category: Culture, Instapundit

The Fraternity Initiation Rape Story

Posted on | December 26, 2014 | 50 Comments

“Weeks into my undergraduate career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a friend told me she had been raped a few days earlier as part of a fraternity ‘initiation process.'”
— Annie E. Clark, Feb. 28, 2013, Huffington Post

When I saw that sentence, it struck me as weirdly similar to the story told in Rolling Stone by Sabrina Rubin Erdely:

  • A prestigious public university in the South.
  • A freshman girl raped during a fraternity initiation.
  • An activist’s story about administrative indifference to victims.

You may not recognize the name Annie E. Clark, but in January 2013, she was one of five complainants who accused UNC of violating the civil rights of female students in the handling of sexual assault charges:

Three UNC students, one former student and one former administrator filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Wednesday morning, claiming that the University facilitated a hostile environment for students reporting sexual assault.
The complaint, more than 30 pages in length, has emerged just one month after sophomore Landen Gambill and another female student revealed to The Daily Tar Heel how the University handled their rape cases.
Their stories — rich with what they called unequal treatment from administrators, inappropriate questioning in UNC’s Honor Court and blatant violations of rights — reflected what victims say is a deeply rooted problem at the University.
That problem prompted junior Andrea Pino and Annie Clark, who graduated from UNC in 2011, both of whom are sexual assault survivors, to spearhead the filing of the complaint in an effort to seek justice for survivors and change what they say is UNC’s culture of hostility. . . .
The complaint was also signed by Gambill, the female student who asked that her name not be used for safety reasons in the December [Daily Tar Heel] article, and former Assistant Dean of Students Melinda Manning, who stepped down from her position in December after 11 years at UNC.

 Now, it is certainly not my intent to defend UNC’s administration or to claim to know what happened in any particular case. All I know about any of this is what the complainants themselves allege:

When sophomore Landen Gambill made the decision to press charges against her rapist through the University Honor Court in the spring of 2012, she assumed the process would be easy.
Armed with what she said were pages of convincing evidence that proved the guilt of her accused student-attacker, Gambill thought she was just a hearing away from getting the justice she deserved.
She had endured months of sexual abuse from a long-term boyfriend.
But she said not even that abuse could have prepared for her for the kind she suffered during the University’s handling of her sexual assault case — a process she said was fraught with a clear violation of her rights that left her psychologically damaged and her ex-boyfriend innocent.

Uh, “a long-term boyfriend”? Stipulate that people sometimes get into relationships with partners who abuse them. Still, if Landen Gambill had “pages of convincing evidence that proved the guilt” of her ex-boyfriend, why did she take her case to the University Honor Court rather than presenting this evidence to the police? The account Gambill gave the Daily Tar Heel of how she “was continually abused — sexually and verbally — by her long-term boyfriend” as a freshman at UNC, followed by “months of stalking, threats and harassment” after they broke up, is lacking in detail. Yet if his treatment of her was as bad as she says it was, why did she not pursue criminal charges against him?

That question must be left dangling, unanswered, because if Landen Gambill has ever explained this, I can’t find the explanation and it would be wrong to speculate. Therefore, let us return to Annie E. Clark’s Huffington Post column from February 2013:

Weeks into my undergraduate career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a friend told me she had that been raped a few days earlier as part of a fraternity “initiation process.” I was a young advocate; I had heard stories of assault and I knew how to respond to survivors, but I had no idea what to do within the UNC university system. Therefore, I just went into action mode; my friend and I sat down in the wooden chairs in my residence hall room and began to Google resources and options for reporting… hours later, we still couldn’t find the proper university protocol.
When she asked me about my involvement in violence prevention, I shared that I was a recent rape survivor as well. We brainstormed, and together we came up with an idea: I would go to an administrator and report my assault the following week. I would figure out the resources available, and then I would share with her the process so that she could report as well.
We made a pact.
The next week I tried to report my assault. I was incredibly confident in my story as well as my new university home, and why wouldn’t I be? I was raped. It was violent. He was wrong.
“So why are you here today?” the administrator asked me.
“I want to report what happened and get counseling. I was raped.”
The response which I received left me both speechless and confused:
“Well… Rape is like football, if you look back on the game, and you’re the quarterback, Annie… is there anything you would have done differently?”
I was then handed a multiple page-survey to fill out about my rape.

You can read the whole thing, but surely I am not the only one who senses there is something distinctly weird about Clark’s story:

  • This occurred when Clark was a freshman in fall 2007.
  • Her friend tells her she was raped at a fraternity.
  • Clark had herself already become a rape victim at UNC.
  • Clark also describes herself as an “advocate,” someone involved in “violence prevention.”
  • After her friend reports being raped at a fraternity, Clark and the friend “brainstorm” and decide that — rather than report that crime to the police — what she needs to do is “figure out the resources available” by reporting her own “violent” rape to a university administrator.

Do you see what I mean in saying this is distinctly weird? I am not saying that Clark is lying, I’m saying that her story contradicts any common-sense understanding of what victims of rape should do. The reaction she describes from the UNC administrator — “is there anything you would have done differently?” — also seems distinctly weird, but here I will risk a speculative explanation: University officials hear stories like hers quite often, criminal prosecution is impossible, and all they can do is to attempt to comfort the victim and help her avoid repeated victimization.

It’s always a “he-said, she-said” situation, you see. The college girl and the college boy hook up, usually when both of them are drunk, and in the aftermath — often several days or weeks later — the girl declares that what happened between them was rape. There is no way to prove as a matter of criminal law that a rape occurred, however, and so the girl (and I use the word “girl” deliberately, because these stories almost always involve a teenage victim, usually a freshman) turns to campus officials and becomes involved in an extra-judicial administrative process like UNC’s Honor Court system.

One suspects the “Unfortunate Sexual Incident” files are stacked to the ceiling at a large public university like UNC. How many times a year do officials hear some variation of the stories told by Landen Gambill and Annie Clark? And how many times does it have to be explained that, in any “he-said, she-said” situation where (a) the victim was voluntarily alone with the accused rapist, (b) there is no clear evidence of rape, and (c) the accused rapist does not confess his guilt, it is impossible to prosecute the Unfortunate Sexual Incident as a crime?

Surely no one would seriously contend that officials at UNC or any other prestigious institution of higher education are pro-rape, yet these officials are in effect being accused of enabling rape and thereby violating the civil rights of their female students. Short of returning to an old-fashioned system of curfews and chaperones, or at least a determined crackdown on underage drinking, however, it’s hard to see what universities can be expected to do about the campus environment within which the Unfortunate Sexual Incident typically occurs.

The law of large numbers is at work here. Every fall, tens of thousands of teenage freshman girls show up on the campuses of colleges and universities. They go to parties, get drunk and hook up with boys. Some percentage of those hook-ups will be unpleasant, including some which are clearly criminal. Yet among those many hundreds of Unfortunate Sexual Incident files which pile up in the offices of university administrators, only a few will contain the kind of testimony and evidence that can lead to a successful criminal prosecution. This will leave the majority of complainants feeling that they have been betrayed by the system. Here were can cite the account of Landen Gambill:

“It’s incredibly clear that those people had no idea what sexual assault is, what consent is,” said Landen Gambill, a sophomore whose assault case was processed by interim procedures.
“They were not only offensive and inappropriate, but they were so victim-blaming.
“They made it seem like my assault was completely my fault.” . . .
In her trial, Gambill said she was forced to answer irrelevant and inappropriate questions.
“The woman student said to me, ‘Landen, as a woman, I know that if that had happened to me, I would’ve broken up with him the first time it happened. Will you explain to me why you didn’t?’” she said.
Gambill said the court used her history of clinical depression and her suicide attempt — which she said was a result of her abusive relationship — against her.
“They implied that I was emotionally unstable and couldn’t be telling the truth because I had attempted suicide,” she said.

As I said previously, Landen Gambill’s account includes no detail of the abuse she suffered from her long-term boyfriend, and it would not be appropriate to speculate. Yet the reactions she describes from the Honor Court officials, and their unwillingness to take disciplinary action against Gambill’s ex-boyfriend, should lead us to pause and ask, “What really happened? Why did she keep dating this guy, if his behavior toward her was so atrocious?”

Here it is helpful to know that simply getting admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an academic honor. Only 29% of applicants are accepted and, among those accepted, 78% were in the top 10% of their high-school senior class. So we may assume Landen Gambill is highly intelligent, and that her ex-boyfriend, a fellow UNC student, is not a lowbrow street thug. How is it, then, that this elite young man sexual brutalizes this elite young woman who endures his brutality for many months as part of their relationship?

Maybe I’m naïve. Maybe I simply lack the sophistication to understand the habits and attitudes of these elite students. Or maybe I could make an educated guess about what’s happening.

Never mind my guesses about that, however.

Right now, my suspicious mind is focused on how Annie Clark describes hearing a fellow UNC freshman’s tale of being raped “as part of a fraternity ‘initiation process'” in 2007. Clark told that story in a January 2013 Huffington Post column and then in the fall of 2014 we find that the story of a freshman at the University of Virginia being raped as part of a fraternity initiation becomes the focal point of Rolling Stone‘s story about campus “rape culture.”

If this is not merely a coincidence, what kind of non-coincidence is it? The Rolling Stone UVA story has been ripped to shreds, but what about this seemingly similar UNC story told by Annie Clark? Is it possible that some fraternities at some universities actually do encourage sexual assault as part of their initiation process? If so, why would these (hitherto unsuspected) practices be reported as having occurred at two quite prestigious southern universities, in stories appearing in two different liberal media venues, within the span of two years?

Is this just an Atlantic Coast Conference problem, or what? Are there no rape initiations for fraternities at second-tier state universities? Are freshman girls not being raped by frat pledges in the Midwest, or at private schools in the Northeast?

There is something distinctly weird about this, and I don’t know what it is. However, I can report that Annie Clark has turned her activism into a full-time career as co-founder of a non-profit group called End Rape on Campus: “After directly working with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, she helped write the Bi-Partisan Campus Safety and Accountability Act.” Do you suppose that Annie Clark and her group had any contact with Sabrina Erdely or Erdely’s UVA liaison Emily Renda? I mean, we already know that Emily Renda’s anti-rape activism led to her testifying in June at a Senate hearing chaired by Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin:

“A range of sanctions is about getting survivors through the door,” Emily Renda, a special intern in the Office of the Vice President and Chief Student Affairs Officer, at the University of Virginia, said before the committee. Renda spent much of her time at college working on sexual assault-related activism and worked with a White House task force that investigated campus sexual assault. . . .
Some of Harkin’s fellow senators, including Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., have been leading reform efforts.

So, Kirsten Gillibrand is “leading reform efforts,” and Kirsten Gillibrand worked with Annie Clark’s “End Rape on Campus” group, and Emily Renda (who “spent much of her time at college working on sexual assault-related activism”) turns out to be the official UVA contact for Rolling Stone‘s Erdely, who told this story about a freshman girl being raped as part of a fraternity initiation.

Maybe this is all just a coincidence, but it is distinctly weird.





 

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism

Feminist Logic

Posted on | December 26, 2014 | 16 Comments

Never let facts get in the way of a useful narrative:

When President Obama announced in September his “It’s On Us” initiative to combat college sexual assault, he declared that “an estimated 1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted in her college years.” . . .
But now, in the wake of a new federal Department of Justice report showing the incidence of rape and sexual assault on campus at far lower levels and trending down over the last decade, that statistic is being called into question.
An initiative to combat college sexual assault, led by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., also is under fresh scrutiny. . . .
“Frankly, it is irritating that anybody would be distracted by which statistics are accurate,” said McCaskill, whose legislation also calls for a national survey of campus assault. . . . “This will always be an underreported crime.”
Using data from the Census Bureau’s Crime Victimization survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ new report, released earlier this month, states that between 1995 and 2013, 6.1 female college students of every 1,000 reported being a victim of rape or sexual assault the previous year. The 2013 report of 4.3 rapes or sexual assaults of college women per 1,000 was half the roughly 9 per 1,000 reported in the early 2000s.

Glenn Reynolds observes:

Old narrative: The statistical proof of our argument is overwhelming!
New narrative: Our argument is too important to be undermined by mere statistics!

Feminist ideology requires that rape be a pervasive problem — “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” to quote Susan Brownmiller — in order to justify their continued war against patriarchal oppression. Therefore, it does not matter if a highly-publicized atrocity tale turns out to be a hoax, nor does it matter what actual trend the data show. Facts and logic are tools of the patriarchy, and disagreeing with feminists is hate.

 

Category: Feminism

Merry Christmas, Haters

Posted on | December 25, 2014 | 82 Comments

Reuters reports:

Protests flared into early Thursday in the St. Louis suburb where a white policeman fatally shot a black man who brandished a gun at a gas station on Tuesday night.
A group of protesters marched onto Interstate 170 in the city of Berkeley, Missouri, around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, blocking traffic for roughly 45 minutes. The demonstration followed a vigil at the Mobil On The Run gas station where the shooting occurred.
The site was just a few miles from the Ferguson street where a white police officer shot dead 18-year-old Michael Brown in August, fuelling weeks of protest in the region and across the country.

People obsessed with race keep pointing out white cop, black suspect, because fomenting racial hatred is all that matters to them. There is video of this incident, however, and police say it appears the suspects may have been attempting to stage an ambush: When the officer responded to a reported theft at the Mobil gas station/convenience store, he encountered two suspects, one of whom drew a 9mm pistol.

That 18-year-old suspect had an extensive criminal record, having been previously charged with “three assaults, armed robbery, armed criminal action and multiple uses of weapons since he was 17.” Police say the serial number had been filed off the suspect’s pistol, indicating the weapon was probably stolen.

From what we know, then, it appears that this suspect was a one-man crime wave — a menace to society, a dangerous thug — and the police officer who shot him was entirely justified in doing so. We have already seen how hateful race-baiting rhetoric motivated Ismaaiyl Brinsley to murder NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. As one retired NYPD officer said on CNN: “We have two dead police officers, and I guess Al Sharpton got what he wanted.”

The dangerous consequences of promoting irresponsible hate-mongers like Sharpton, however, won’t stop the liberal media from recycling an anti-police narrative which implies that in any conflict between a white cop and a black criminal, the criminal is actually a victim.

On a parallel hate front, we have feminists whose desire to fight “rape culture” led to a hoax at the University of Virginia in which members of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity were falsely accused of gang rape by a girl who evidently invented her attacker, “Haven Monahan.” (The false accuser reportedly plagiarized an episode of the old teen drama Dawson’s Creek in a fake e-mail.) Why did this apparent fabrication become a lurid 9,000-word article in Rolling Stone? Because it seems that the writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was hunting for a dramatic rape story at an “elite” university, a heinous crime perpetrated by “privileged” rapists — in other words, she wanted a horror tale in which the demonized villains were rich white males. The tale told by Jackie at UVA fit that feminist narrative. Unfortunately for Erdely (and for the feminist narrative), it seems that Jackie is a pathological liar and, whatever the reality of “rape culture” on campus, the Phi Kappa Psi brothers were falsely accused.

“But like most colleges across America, genteel University of Virginia has no radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy.”
— Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone

This kind of hate is all about progressive ideas of “social justice.” Yet as Friedrich Hayek showed, social justice is a mirage — the utopia toward which radical egalitarian ideologues claim to be leading us does not exist, and can never exist, simply because human society requires social order and all social orders involve hierarchy. Once you realize that “equality” is a false goal, you realize that what progressives are actually doing is destroying the existing social order — democracy, economic liberty, the rule of law — with the intention to replace it with a social order controlled by a political elite, with less real liberty for the “masses” and no rule of law to protect the rights of individuals.

It is amazing to me that any American would let these hateful demagogues appealing to prejudice persuade us to embrace their “social justice” swindle, a dishonest scam by which a power-hungry elite seek to defraud us all of our true inheritance, liberty.

Merry Christmas, and may God bless America.





 

Category: Crime, Feminism, Racism

She Never Fails to Amaze

Posted on | December 24, 2014 | 117 Comments

Amanda Marcotte’s irrepressible weirdness:

Before I take off for the rest of the week, I want to flag this amazing post at Feministing written by Katherine Cross that articulates better than anything I’ve ever read why it is so irritating to women to have men constantly sharing how our appearance makes their dicks feel, even if the determination is that we adorn ourselves in a dick-pleasing manner. Often, women react to this constant judgment by saying, “It’s not about you,” but the counterpoint is always that, in some cases, women are clearly trying to look sexy, and thus it must be because it is a performance solely for the benefit of men. . . .

Really? I mean . . . really?

Who are these “men constantly sharing” their phallic responses with women? Whence this sense of “constant judgment”?

Decades ago, I gave up attempting to explain why women decorate themselves the way they do. It’s utterly irrational.

Yes, feminists have a theory of how the “patriarchy” is to blame for women’s fashion habits, but in all my years of being a male supremacist oppressor, I’ve never understood this.

Consider, for example, the designer handbag. One encounters women who complain constantly about their economic plight but who nevertheless simply must have a $200 designer-label purse.

Likewise, shoes — stand-up comedians have endlessly mined the female obsession with shoes. I’m convinced that every woman, no matter her socioeconomic status or cultural background, secretly yearns to be Imelda Marcos. Even the wealthiest man is probably content with owning two or three pairs of shoes (dress shoes in black and brown for business, plus a pair of sneakers for the weekend) while his female office assistant owns a closet full of shoes in every color and style imaginable.

As I say, feminists have tried to blame women’s fashion obsessions on the patriarchy (Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth was the most famous attempt), but having spent my entire life as a male supremacist oppressor, I’m certain it’s not my fault that women are the way they are. Perhaps I wasn’t important enough to be invited to the secret meetings of the Omnipotent Male Cabal where it was decided that women must be brainwashed into spending all their money on handbags and shoes. Still, I think most men probably share my view that women’s fashion appetites are (a) insane and (b) not our fault. Certainly, no sane man has ever felt an urge to discuss fashion with Amanda Marcotte — telling her how her “appearance makes their dicks feel”? really? — and even less would any sane man wish to discuss such a subject with Katherine Cross:

We can even see this in GamerGater propaganda . . . That movement’s ongoing obsession with dyed hair is premised on a similar belief that all women who disagree with them and color their hair brightly — green, or blue, or pink, for instance — are doing so because they wish to thumb their nose at men specifically, or that they are doing it as an entirely self-conscious, petulant political statement; again, for men’s benefit. One male Gater even described this phenomenon as “having political statements shoved at me just by taking a cursory glance at a person.” To them, women with dyed hair are doing it just to irritate them.

It is interesting to note that many of the “Social Justice Warrior” feminist types assailing the videogame industry as a bastion of misogyny have strange-colored hair. It is also interesting to note that some of these women were born male, for example “Brianna Wu” a/k/a John Walker Flynt, whose Encyclopedia Dramatica file is quite interesting.

You may not be aware that Katherine Cross is accused of unethical journalism, having allegedly failed to disclose her professional association with Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency while covering Sarkeesian’s feminist videogame crusade. And you might also be unaware that Katherine Cross was born male and has written at some length about her own transgender status, “the difficult lives we have to live before we can truly be ourselves . . . perpetually battling with a world that despises us,” et cetera. Transgenderism has frequently been a subject of Katherine Cross’s writing at Feministing and, in light of that, let us read more of her column that Amanda Marcotte so highly recommended:

Thus, our appearances are always a complex dance between our own desires and what we think the desires of others are; this is true of all of us. Even when women are performing for others, we do so no more frequently than men do, and often as not are performing for other women . . . We are adrift on the same silken sea of fashion and taste as men are.
To believe that we as women solely adorn ourselves for the specifically sexual gaze of men is, looked at in this way, a denial of humanity.

Yeah. Whatever you say. Dye your hair green and sail away on the “silken sea of fashion.” We don’t care. Really. We’re just so grateful that you gave Amanda Marcotte another excuse to make an utter fool of herself, endorsing a transgender feminist’s critique of how men allegedly judge women by “how our appearance makes their dicks feel.”

How do Amanda Marcotte and Catherine Cross make you feel, guys?

 

Category: Feminism

Set Aside All Traditional Modes Of Argument, And The Left Does Make Sense

Posted on | December 24, 2014 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

But among all the posturers, none was so preening as New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio. In advance of a trip to Washington for a White House summit on policing, he told the press that a “scourge” of killings by police is “based not just on decades, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio embroidered on that theme several days later, after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict an officer for homicide in Garner’s death. (The 350-pound asthmatic Garner had resisted arrest for the crime of selling loose cigarettes; officers brought him to the ground, provoking a fatal heart attack.) “People are saying: ‘Black lives matter,’” de Blasio announced after the grand jury concluded. “It should be self-evident, but our history requires us to say ‘black lives matter.’ It was not years of racism that brought us to this day, or decades of racism, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio added that he worries “every night” about the “dangers [his biracial son Dante] may face” from “officers who are paid to protect him.”

The mayor’s irresponsible rhetoric was a violation of his role as the city’s leader and as its main exponent of the law.

The idea of leaders as exponents of the law is rooted in traditional, rational categories of thought. Fifty years after the Godless Commies launched their assault on our culture, you need to get past all that.

If an official is a Democrat, in the media, or part of the Racism Industrial Complex (all of which had been distinct some years previously) then everything he’s about is the flesh. If you’re not in his club, you’re an animal to be herded.

All that they do or say is about inflaming the hormones. Rage breaks down traditional culture, hedonistic pleasures maintain their sheep in an infantile, irrational flock.

The ultimate test of American Exceptionalism (or even Anglosphere Exceptionalism) is how well we weather this diabolical assault, and set about restoring the ideas of the rule of law, private property, limited government, and individual liberty that the Left so hates and is out to demolish.

But, like Democrat plantation owners of old, their cause is not just. God has bad news for them under the sun, and even worse when their time for eternal judgement arrives.

via Instapundit

Category: Culture

A 21st-Century Feminist Family

Posted on | December 24, 2014 | 23 Comments

Elizabeth Fierro describes her teenage life in Austin, Texas:

I used to be self-conscious about the fact that I have three moms. I worried no one would understand my experience of having divorced biological parents, both recently remarried to beautiful women. . . .
I did hear about families with same-sex parents — never from books and films, but my elementary school best friend had two moms and a hyphenated last name. When I was 12, the first family I babysat for had four adopted children and a pair of loving fathers. . . .
I’m lucky to have the family I do. Not everyone recognizes it — I’ve certainly read my fair share of articles about the alleged horrors that having same-sex parents means for a child — but I truly am lucky. For me at least, more parents means more shoulders to cry on, more voices to phone, and more love to give and receive. Having triple the maternal presence that most children get instilled in me a deep appreciation for motherhood—I have three women in my life who managed to turn down the volume on all the expectations that come with that role, and instead focused on doing what is right for them.
Yet, doing what was right for them wasn’t always easy. When my parents decided to remarry, for example, my dad was able to legally marry in Texas, half an hour from home. My mom and her fiancée, by contrast, had to drive 22 hours to Minnesota last summer to get their marriage paperwork signed — and their marriage still isn’t official in the State of Texas.
That is just one example of how my family gave me a different social experience than many other children. . . .

You can read the rest of that. You can also read her journalistic output for the Harry Potter Alliance: “Lizzie is a Ravenclaw, Gleek, Starkid, and Nerdfighter devoted to making the world a better place.” And by “better,” she evidently means feminist:

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past seven or eight days [she wrote in July 2013], then you must know that quite a lot went down involving social justice recently. But what exactly happened? What are the implications of DOMA and Prop 8’s repeal? What is the VRA and what happened to it? Why exactly did Wendy Davis spend 11 hours talking without eating, drinking, or sitting down? . . .
Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled Section 3 of DOMA as unconstitutional. . . .
This is clearly a win for LGBTQ+ community and supporters across the country, though it may be bittersweet for some people. My mom and her fiancee are to be married in Minnesota on August 1st, as one of the first couples to be legally married in the state- however, since we live in Texas and will have to travel to a different state for them to be legally married, they will be granted none of the federal benefits that same-sex couples who live in Minnesota will. We all cried twice after hearing the news: once out of happiness, and once out of happiness tinged with sadness, jealousy, and curiosity about what it would mean for us to move to a different state. . . .
Can you imagine talking for 11 hours without eating, drinking, sitting down, or going to the bathroom? Welcome to Wendy Davis’s life last Tuesday.
SB5 was the bill under debate in Texas last Tuesday. It would ban all abortions after 20 weeks and require all abortion clinics to meet certain incredibly high standards — standards that would close all but about 5 abortion clinics, which, in a state as large as Texas, would make it nearly impossible for all women living outside of the largest Texan cities to receive an abortion. . . .
Wendy Davis’s courage, the courage of the people in the stands, and the support of all the people watching the filibuster is remarkable. Still, it is baffling to me that it is 2013 and we are still voting on women’s rights, and the thought that Davis’s filibuster may have been for nothing makes me cringe. . . .

Kill your baby (women’s rights!) and if any of them happen to survive, make sure they have gay parents. That’s “a better world.”

 

Category: Feminism
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