That thing when you're a herpes-infected Gender Studies major and someone notices your bisexuality is mostly fake. https://t.co/x7xRXw7yDr pic.twitter.com/Hv48MF0M3F— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) October 30, 2016
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, awaiting the outcome of a presidential election that will determine its future, returns to the bench this week to face a volatile docket studded with timely cases on race, religion and immigration.Well, that's a lot of stuff on race and criminal justice, but I can't wait to see the Court take up the transgender restroom issue, to say nothing of the homosexual wedding cakes. You gotta ask how far is the culture war going to succeed in rending our country into that which is totally unrecognizable.
The justices have been shorthanded since Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, and say they are determined to avoid deadlocks. That will require resolve and creativity.
“This term promises to be the most unpredictable one in many, many years,” said Neal K. Katyal, a former acting United States solicitor general in the Obama administration now with Hogan Lovells.
There is no case yet on the docket that rivals the blockbusters of recent terms addressing health care, abortion or same-sex marriage. But such cases are rare, whether there are eight justices or nine.
“This term’s cases are not snoozers,” said Elizabeth B. Wydra, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal group. “This term features important cases about racial bias in the criminal justice system, voting rights and redistricting, immigration and detention, and accountability for big banks that engaged in racially discriminatory mortgage lending practices.”
There are, moreover, major cases on the horizon, including ones on whether a transgender boy may use the boys’ restroom in a Virginia high school and on whether a Colorado baker may refuse to serve a same-sex couple.
“If either of these cases is taken, it will almost immediately become the highest profile case on the court’s docket,” said Steven Shapiro, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
There is also the possibility that a dispute over the outcome of the presidential election could end up at the Supreme Court, as it did in 2000 in Bush v. Gore.
“That is the doomsday scenario in some respects of having an eight-member court,” said Carter G. Phillips, a lawyer with Sidley Austin. A deadlocked Supreme Court would leave in place the lower court ruling and oust the justices from their role as the final arbiters of federal law.
Race figures in many of the new term’s most important cases, including two to be heard in October, and that seems to be part of a new trend. “The court hasn’t had a lot of cases recently dealing with race in the criminal justice system,” said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a law professor at Stanford.
In June, a dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor brought a new perspective to the issue. Citing James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” she insisted that the brutal history and contemporary reality of racism in the United States must play a role in the court’s analysis.
That dissent may prove influential, said Justin Driver, a law professor at the University of Chicago. “One item to keep an eye on this term,” he said, “is the extent to which the Black Lives Matters movement makes its presence felt on the court’s docket.”
On Wednesday, the court will hear arguments in Buck v. Davis, No. 15-8049. It arose from an extraordinary assertion by an expert witness in the death penalty trial of Duane Buck, who was convicted of the 1995 murders of a former girlfriend and one of her friends while her young children watched. The expert, presented by the defense, said that black men are more likely to present a risk of future danger.
The justices will decide whether Mr. Buck, who is black, may challenge his death sentence based on the ineffectiveness of the trial lawyer who presented that testimony.
“The Buck case raises questions that could not be more relevant to ongoing conversations sparked by police shootings about implicit bias and stereotyping of African-American men as violent and dangerous,” Ms. Wydra said. “The Roberts court, and particularly the chief justice himself, has often been reluctant to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism in this country, but the egregious facts of the Buck case make it impossible to avoid.”
On Oct. 11, the court will consider another biased statement, this one ascribed to a juror during deliberations in a sexual assault trial. “I think he did it because he’s Mexican, and Mexican men take whatever they want,” the juror said of the defendant, according to a sworn statement from a second juror.
The question in the case, Peña Rodriguez v. Colorado, No. 15-606, is how to balance the interest in keeping jury deliberations secret against the importance of ridding the criminal justice system of racial and ethnic bias.
Race also figures in cases on redistricting, fair housing and malicious prosecution...
In recent days, it has begun to dawn on a lot of people that Donald Trump really may win the election. (I, of course, have been predicting it all along…) This is causing near-hysteria in some quarters, and louder demands by Democrats for journalists in general, and the debate moderators in particular, to put their thumbs on the scale. As if they weren’t already doing so!More.
I want to personally apologize to every reader who was hurt by the Sausage Party review. I failed you as a senior editor of this website and I failed you as an ally. I am wholly sorry for the pain and anger I caused you. I offer you no justification. I was blinded by my own whiteness existing inside a system of white supremacy. I must do better. I will do better. I also want to take full responsibility for not working more closely with the freelancer. This was not her fault. This was an editorial failure. I should have asked more critical questions about the film, especially since no one I know had seen it..."Blinded by my own whiteness."
More.
The authorities in Idaho charged a transgender woman this week with secretly taking pictures of an 18-year-old woman changing in a Target fitting room.
The national retail chain drew praise from transgender advocates and condemnation from conservative groups when it announced in April that it would allow customers to use the restroom or fitting room corresponding to their gender identity.
Target has been the subject of a boycott petition created by the American Family Association, which contends the transgender fitting room and bathroom policy would give sexual predators access to victims. The petition has collected nearly 1.4 million signatures since April, according to the group’s website.
Officers from the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office were called to a Target in Ammon, Idaho, on Monday evening by a woman who said she saw someone reach over the wall separating the fitting rooms there with an iPhone taking pictures or a video.
After interviewing witnesses and reviewing surveillance footage, detectives on Tuesday arrested Shauna Smith, 43, on one felony count of voyeurism, according to the sheriff’s office. She was booked into Bonneville County Jail as a male, using her legal name, Sean Patrick Smith. The 18-year-old told the authorities she had been trying on swimwear when she spotted the iPhone, according to a court document obtained by EastIdahoNews.com.
Her mother confronted the suspect, who fled on foot. Both later identified the voyeur as a white man wearing a dress and blond wig, according to the document. Another witness reported seeing the suspect leave in a vehicle that was later discovered to be registered to Ms. Smith.
Ms. Smith’s roommate confirmed to police that she is, indeed, a transgender woman and identified clothes worn by the suspect in surveillance footage as belonging to Ms. Smith, according to the document.
According to the document, an affidavit of probable cause for warrantless arrest, Ms. Smith told a detective that she had made videos in the past of women undressing for the “same reason men go online to look at pornography.”
According to the detective, Ms. Smith said that she gets sexual gratification from such videos and later showed the detective a video of a woman changing in a Target fitting room. Ms. Smith is represented by a public defender.
Target, which has 1,792 stores nationwide, said in a statement that it was committed to creating “a safe and secure shopping environment” and that it immediately cooperated with local law enforcement as soon as it learned of the case...
Have Beverly Hills “greenshirts” run a homeless man out of town? https://t.co/Kiw300hMR5 pic.twitter.com/9N0mps7UGA
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 5, 2016
George Saville slept on a cot in a downtown homeless shelter. In the morning, he would catch the bus to Beverly Hills.
There, Saville’s wit and wide knowledge of news, entertainment and sports drew a circle of admirers, including a half-dozen people who took their morning coffee at Urth Caffe.
The cafe owners supported him. Sports stars such as Lamar Odom and Jason Kidd stopped by for daily tidbits of information. Arab royals from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel asked him to pose in their selfies, Saville’s supporters said.
“He’s smart; he has historical references,” said Maria Belknap, a business manager and Urth patron. “He knows the L.A. Times and New York Times inside and out and he can talk about everything.”
“At best he is charming, at worst he is harmless,” said television host Larry King, who eats breakfast nearby and has slipped him cash on occasion. “Every community has a panhandler, and Beverly Hills is not so far above it.”
City officials, however, call Saville an opportunist and “aggressive panhandler” and considered drawing up a “shame list” to pressure cafe owners to stop catering to him.
After a run-in with a city-funded private patrol, known to locals as “greenshirts,” Saville was charged with two misdemeanors and ordered to stay away from the restaurant. Saville’s friends call the charges bogus and merely a ploy to drive the 57-year-old homeless man out of town.
“What you’ve mounted is an extrajudicial squad of greenshirts [who] are there to clear the streets of undesirables,” David Lyle, president of a television and digital content producers association, told the Beverly Hills human rights commission in May.
At a separate hearing, James Latta, the city’s human services administrator, countered that, “if it’s someone that wanted our help and needed help, we’ve got it for him. But this individual doesn’t want it.”
Saville’s clash with officials raises questions about how far cities can go to clear public spaces of indigents — and what obligation, if any, homeless people have to accept services and shelter...
Feminism is a movement devoted to destroying the family. Feminist theory condemns marriage and motherhood as institutions of “male domination,” which is why taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood is sacred to feminists: The road to “equality” is paved with dead babies.They're usually fat, ugly lesbians at that, heh.
Misery loves company, and the leaders of this anti-male hate movement therefore encourage young women to pursue lifestyles that will lead them to the same attitude of embittered resentment that defines feminism. Crucial to this project is the promotion of abnormal sexual behavior.
“Sex is about reproductive biology,” as I have previously explained. “Human beings are mammals, and any eighth-grader can figure out what that means in terms of sex. Once you understand this scientific definition of sex, everything else is just details.” Rejecting this normal common-sense understanding of sex, feminists adopt intellectual theories that are directly hostile to the reproductive purposes of human sexuality. One obvious reason for this hostility is because so many leaders of the feminist movement are lesbians...
One of the most remarkable controversies of our era is the conflict between transgender activists and radical feminists. Michelle Goldberg outlined this dispute in an August 2014 article for the New Yorker:Keep reading.
Trans women say that they are women because they feel female — that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.”Having written a book (Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature) critical of feminist ideology, I cannot be accused of supporting Lierre Keith’s ideas about patriarchal oppression. Nevertheless, in their disputes with the transgender cult — and yes, the movement has developed a cult mentality in recent years — radical feminists are on the side of scientific truth. “Male” and “female” are biological categories, determined by chromosomes and anatomy. This is simply science, not politics, and the rhetoric of the transgender cult is not actual feminism, but is instead a weird mutant strain of postmodernism, heavily influenced by the “gender theory” popularized by Professor Judith Butler. Radical feminists have taken alarm at the way transgender activists have used the Internet— blogs, YouTube channels and other social media — to promote “transition” as a panacea for every problem young people may experience with their sexual identity. There now exists a vast online community of amateur advice sites on every aspect of transition. Medical providers of “treatment” — hormones and surgery — are now encouraging transgenderism even among preschool children, and some misguided parents appear to be exhibiting Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, by pushing their children toward “transgender” identification.
What is happening here? The rise of transgender mania — for which Bruce “Caitlin” Jenner is the celebrity poster boy/girl — can best be understood as a belated consequence of culture shifts that occurred 40 or 50 years ago, especially in the field of psychology. Whereas once heterosexuality was officially understood as normal, and homosexuality defined as deviant, this understanding was cast aside by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973. If there was no such thing as normal sexual behavior, then it was no longer possible to describe any sexual behavior as abnormal. Pandora’s Box had been opened, and the potential results of this were difficult to predict.
Parents who have more or less traditional expectations for our children find ourselves compelled to protect our children against a culture which increasingly condemns “normal” as a synonym for oppressive. Progressive intellectuals consider you a very bad parent if you expect your boys to be masculine and your girls to be feminine, and you are simply hateful if you expect your children to be heterosexual. Advocates of “gender-neutral parenting” denounce parents who encourage their sons to play sports or who permit their daughters to watch Disney princess movies (which are full of “heteronormative” messages, Women’s Studies professors warn us).
“Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of ‘normal’ as an achievement,” I wrote in April 2015 after examining the way gender theory is taught in universities. As our society has lost any consensus of what “normal” adulthood should entail, a growing and quite vocal segment of the culture have demanded that the traditional family and religious morality must be destroyed. This cultural conflict produces profoundly confusing messages for children growing up in a society where there is no generally accepted definition of what kind of adult they should grow up to be.
Amid this confusion, it has become apparent that, in many cases, the transgender cult is exploiting the vulnerability of young people with serious mental illnesses. Many young people buy into a prevailing attitude that “transition” is a cure for problems of identity and social maladjustment. Many of the harshest critics of the transgender movement are those who are “destransitioned,” having quit the process of sex-change “treatment.” One mentally ill 21-year-old lesbian who abandoned this process described herself as “angry as hell” about her experience with “transition-happy therapists and doctors” who “decided to try to medically correct” her, based on their belief that she would “stand a better chance at being a more normal man than a normal woman.” But what is “normal”? And who is qualified to decide?
The egalitarian mentality — the idea of that social hierarchy is always oppressive and that liberation is always the answer to our problems — tends to undermine every source of authority in society. When ordinary people are unable to distinguish between right and wrong, between normal and abnormal, they are compelled to appeal to “experts.” But how do we decide who is qualified as an “expert”? In regard to transgenderism, we find that many people seeking “treatment” end up in a worse condition than they were before they resorted to this expert-approved process. And now we have activists seeking to require schools and other public facilities to accommodate transgenderism despite concerns for women’s safety. What we realize, eventually, is that sane people are being compelled to adjust their own expectations in order to accommodate the demands of mentally ill people who are unable or unwilling to adjust to reasonable standards of social behavior...
"Bias Response Team" tells professor to avoid "transgender issues" after students complain: https://t.co/lSj7uME8IH pic.twitter.com/pnJanIlsUO— Heat Street (@heatstreet) June 20, 2016
For many students and professors, one of the great appeals of college life is being exposed to new and different ways of thinking. But that age-old process is now under threat at schools around the country. Take the University of Northern Colorado.I don't create "safe spaces" in my classrooms, and I don't let students censor debate, although I don't think my campus has a "bias response team." (And I'm not going to give administrators any ideas.)
After two of the school’s professors asked their students to discuss controversial topics and consider opposing viewpoints, they received visits from the school’s Bias Response Team to discuss their teaching style. The professors’ students had reported them, claiming the curriculum constituted bias.
These incidents, both in the 2015-2016 academic year, reflect a growing trend in higher education. College students increasingly demand to be shielded from “offensive,” “triggering” or “harmful” language and topics, relying on Bias Response Teams to intervene on their behalf. Such teams are popping up at a growing number of universities.
Heat Street filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get a look at some of the complaints to UNC’s Bias Response Team, and a sense of how the team is handling those petitions. In one report reviewed by Heat Street, a professor, whose name was redacted, had asked students to read an Atlantic article entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind,” about college students’ increasing sensitivity and its impact on their mental health.
The professor then asked his students to come up with difficult topics, including transgender issues, gay marriage, abortion and global warning. He outlined competing positions on these topics, though he did not express his personal opinion.
In a report to the Bias Response Team, a student complained that the professor referenced the opinion that “transgender is not a real thing, and no one can truly feel like they are born in the wrong body.”
“I would just like the professor to be educated about what trans is and how what he said is not okay because as someone who truly identifies as a transwomen I was very offended and hurt by this,” the student wrote.
A member of the Bias Response Team met with the professor, the report says, and “advised him not to revisit transgender issues in his classroom if possible to avoid the students expressed concerns.” The Bias Response Team also “told him to avoid stating opinions (his or theirs) on the topic as he had previously when working from the Atlantic article.”
In a separate incident, a professor, whose name was also redacted, asked his students to choose from a list of debate topics, some of them regarding homosexuality and religion.
The Bias Response Team’s notes summarized: “Specifically there were two topics of debate that triggered them and personally felt like an attack on their identity (GodHatesFags.com: is this harmful? Is this acceptable? Is this Christianity? And Gay Marriage: should it be legal? Is homosexuality immoral as Christians suggest?)”
The student, whose name is redacted and who is referred to as “they” in the report, complained that “other students are required to watch the in-class debate and hear both arguments presented.”
“I do not believe that students should be required to listen to their own rights and personhood debated,” the student wrote. “[This professor] should remove these topics from the list of debate topics. Debating the personhood of an entire minority demographic should not be a classroom exercise, as the classroom should not be an actively hostile space for people with underprivileged identities.”
The Bias Response Team wrote that while this incident “did not reach a level of discrimination,” members still contacted the professor to “have a conversation… [and] listen to his perspective, share the impact created for the student and dialogue about options to strengthen his teaching.”
The Bias Response Team wrote that once the conversation was completed, they wanted a full report of “the outcome of your time together. . . so I can document and share with the student that outreach was completed.”
The University of Northern Colorado did not respond to Heat Street’s request for comment about whether the Bias Response Team is a threat to free speech and academic freedom. We also asked to be put in touch with the professors who had received complaints, but we did not hear back before publication...
Stocks, sterling and oil soared at the start of the week after polls suggested the U.K. was more likely to vote to remain in the European Union in Thursday’s referendum than previously expected.Keep reading.
The Stoxx Europe 600 jumped 3.7%, on track for its best day since August, while the British pound surged more than 2% against the dollar to as high as $1.4674.
Futures pointed to a 1.3% opening gain for the S&P 500. Changes in futures markets don't necessarily reflect market moves after the opening bell
“We’re in this sort of frenzied period where Brexit is front and center,” said Bob Doll, senior portfolio manager at Nuveen Asset Management.
A survey published in the Mail on Sunday showed that 45% of respondents backed the U.K. staying in the trade bloc, compared with 42% in favor of leaving. The poll-of-polls, averaging the last six polls in the U.K. vote, returned to 50/50, suggesting growing momentum for the “remain camp” in the referendum...
Congratulations on your important contribution to the movement, @andizeisler #callmeawitch https://t.co/gtN36E5B0P pic.twitter.com/iYJ9s971m3
— Meghan Murphy (@MeghanEMurphy) May 21, 2016
@Not_RSMcCain Have you seen Deep Green Resistance? -->
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 22, 2016
Radical Feminism Frequently Asked Questions https://t.co/dclol0ZFzA
Deep Green Resistance has been accused of transphobia because we have a difference of opinion about the definition of gender.Postcards from the Oppression Olympics, you might say, heh.
DGR does not condone dehumanization or violence against anyone, including people who describe themselves as trans. Universal human rights are universal. DGR has a strong code of conduct against violence and abuse. Anyone who violates that code is no longer a member of DGR.
Disagreeing with someone, however, is not a form of violence. And we have a big disagreement.
Radical feminists are critical of gender itself. We are not gender reformists–we are gender abolitionists. Without the socially constructed gender roles that form the basis of patriarchy, all people would be free to dress, behave, and love others in whatever way they wished, no matter what kind of body they had.
Patriarchy is a caste system which takes humans who are born biologically male or female and turns them into the social classes called men and women. Male people are made into men by socialization into masculinity, which is defined by a psychology based on emotional numbness and a dichotomy of self and other. This is also the psychology required by soldiers, which is why we don’t think you can be a peace activist without being a feminist.
Female socialization in patriarchy is a process of psychologically constraining and breaking girls—otherwise known as “grooming”—to create a class of compliant victims. Femininity is a set of behaviors that are, in essence, ritualized submission.
We see nothing in the creation of gender to celebrate or embrace. Patriarchy is a corrupt and brutal arrangement of power, and we want to see it dismantled so that the category of gender no longer exists. This is also our position on race and class. The categories are not natural: they only exist because hierarchical systems of power create them (see, for instance, Audrey Smedley’s book Race in North America). We want a world of justice and equality, where the material conditions that currently create race, class, and gender have been forever overcome.
Patriarchy facilitates the mining of female bodies for the benefit of men – for male sexual gratification, for cheap labor, and for reproduction. To take but one example, there are entire villages in India where all the women only have one kidney. Why? Because their husbands have sold the other one. Gender is not a feeling—it’s a human rights abuse against an entire class of people, “people called women.”[1]
We are not “transphobic.” We do, however, have a disagreement about what gender is. Genderists think that gender is natural, a product of biology. Radical feminists think gender is social, a product of male supremacy. Genderists think gender is an identity, an internal set of feelings people might have. Radical feminists think gender is a caste system, a set of material conditions into which one is born. Genderists think gender is a binary. Radical feminists think gender is a hierarchy, with men on top. Some genderists claim that gender is “fluid.” Radical feminists point out that there is nothing fluid about having your husband sell your kidney. So, yes, we have some big disagreements.
Radical feminists also believe that women have the right to define their boundaries and decide who is allowed in their space. We believe all oppressed groups have that right. We have been called transphobic because the women of DGR do not want men—people born male and socialized into masculinity—in women-only spaces. DGR stands with women in that decision.
Like I've Been Saying. Now There's Data: Public Is Divided Over #Transgender Bathrooms, Poll Shows. #Gender https://t.co/R2kOCunqyd— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 20, 2016
Wow. 6/10 Americans want state & local govts to decide transgender school bathroom policies, according to NYT poll. https://t.co/Gg7P8fA6ed— Kelsey Harkness (@kelseyjharkness) May 20, 2016
The public is sharply divided along age, party and education lines over whether transgender people should be allowed to use public bathrooms that match their gender identity rather than their gender at birth, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.More.
While less than a majority, 46 percent of Americans say they think that transgender people should be allowed to use only public restrooms corresponding to their gender at birth. A smaller number, 41 percent, think transgender people should be allowed to use the restroom that matches the gender they identify with.
Democrats, college graduates and those under the age of 45 are more supportive of allowing for gender identity in bathroom choice, while their counterparts take the opposite stance.
The nationwide poll was conducted after President Obama issued a directive to public schools last week outlining ways to avoid discrimination against transgender students. The Obama administration contends that the issue is a federal civil rights question, while some states, such as North Carolina, say it is an issue for individual states to decide.
Nearly six in 10 Americans say they think decisions about which bathroom transgender students can use in public schools should be left to individual state or local governments to decide. While a slim 51 percent majority of Democrats think it is a federal issue, more than three-quarters of Republicans say the matter should be decided at the state or local level.
While the public narrowly disagrees with Mr. Obama’s stance on transgender rights and the restroom policy, his overall job approval rating, at 50 percent, is at its highest level in more than three years. His approval rating briefly rose after his re-election in November 2012.
* 46 percent believe transgender people should be allowed to use bathrooms based on their birth gender;
* 41 percent believe transgender people should be allowed to use bathrooms based on their gender identity.
CBS News reports breaking down the results by party lines and political beliefs, the poll finds:
* 65 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of conservatives believe transgender people should use bathrooms based on their birth gender;
* 60 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of liberals believe transgender people should use the bathroom of their gender identity.
Another question in the poll addressed whether federal government or state and local governments should be in charge of the bathroom issue:
* 57 percent believe state and local governments should decide;
* 35 percent believe the federal government should decide.
By party lines, according to the CBS News report:
* 77 percent of Republicans believe the decision should be left to state and local governments;
* 42 percent of Democrats believe state and local governments should decide;
* 57 percent of independent voters believe state and local governments should decide.
Fifty-one percent of Democrats favor the federal government deciding, while 31 percent of independent voters believe it should be up to the federal government. Comparatively, only 18 percent of Republicans favor the federal government weighing in on bathroom choice.
