Years ago, when the drive for “hate crime” legislation first started taking off, I noticed the rising confluence of speech codes, radical “diversity”-mongering and nascent hate-speech codes, and said “one of the logical consequences of this could be classifying Christianity – or at least the “wrong” kind of Christianity – as a hate crime”. 

The audience – mostly liberals, mostly smug about it – scoffed.  “Poor white WASP, complaining about oppression”, responded the middle-class white anglo-saxons of indeterminate religious interest.

As George Will points out, I was, of course, right:

Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.

At least it is in Oakland, Calif. That city’s government says those words, italicized here, constitute something akin to hate speech and can be proscribed from the government’s open e-mail system and employee bulletin board.

 It’s within government, of course:

Some African American Christian women working for Oakland’s government organized the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), which they announced with a flier describing their group as “a forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family Values.”

The flier was distributed after other employees’ groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city’s e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it “homophobic” and disruptive.

The city government said the flier was “determined” to promote harassment based on sexual orientation. The city warned that the flier and communications like it could result in disciplinary action “up to and including termination.”

Effectively, the city has proscribed any speech that even one person might say questioned the gay rights agenda and therefore created what that person felt was a “hostile” environment. 

This, even though gay rights advocates used the city’s communication system to advertise “Happy Coming Out Day.” Yet the terms “natural family,” “marriage” and “family values” are considered intolerably inflammatory.

In other words, “protected classes” are official protected from any sort of offense at all.

The flier supposedly violated the city regulation prohibiting “discrimination and/or harassment based on sexual orientation.” The only cited disruption was one lesbian’s complaint that the flier made her feel “targeted” and “excluded.” So anyone has the power to be a censor just by saying someone’s speech has hurt his or her feelings.

Unless the speech is “progressive.”

The GNEA should look at the bright side; pretty soon, they’ll be able to drown their sorrows in a moslem foot bath. 

Gary Miller has the best introduction to Bogus Doug’s evisceration of Brian Lambert’s call for media censorship of the global warming debate:

Doug Williams demonstrates why he is duty-bound to never again take 6 months off from blogging by offering this extraordinary post on Brian Lambert’s global warming pronouncements.

In the span of just a few paragraphs, Doug demonstrates Lambert’s unfamiliarity with the scientific method. 

But don’t take Gary’s word for it.  Read Doug’s post.

A highlight:

Brian Lambert has written a screed a bit wordier, but no sillier about conservatives. But we shouldn’t mock. He’s in his terribly serious mode, you see. He’s trying to explain that he – failed media critic Brian Lambert – has figured out the high holy scientific truths journalists ought to respect.

The ethical challenge for journalists and journalism (as opposed to infotainment personalities in “the media”) is stark. It means accepting what the best available science has now concluded is fact about global warming — that it’s happening and human activity is an aggravating if not principal cause — and pulling the plug on spurious “debate” engendered by conservative ideologues, much like what credible news organizations have done with Holocaust-deniers and creationists.

Of course to anyone with a degree studying science as opposed to journalism it’s a grand load of hooey on it’s face. What exactly is a phrase like “accepting what the best available science has now concluded is fact about global warming” supposed to mean? Real science hasn’t “concluded” that any future predictions – about global warming or anything else – are “fact,” because that’s not how science works. And “pulling the plug on spurious ‘debate'” is about as blatant a rejection of the scientific method as one could propose.

Doug shows in tall block letters the scientific illiteracy which is so comical when coming from a cartoon like Lambert – but so dangerous from actual reporters:

It’s child’s play to find leading experts in climate science dissenting from the IPCC report. Yet that’s not something Lambert even finds relevant. Because “for journalists the debate phase has ended.” Science goes in story phases, don’t you know. It’s not really about the search for truth, it’s about framing the narrative. I don’t think he intended to be nearly so honest, but wow is that ever telling.

The other telling thing here is how Lambert has drifted into the position that journalists should trust the scientific pronouncements of political scientific bodies. I know he thinks this is a special and singular scientific issue unlike any other before or likely to come after. But that just illustrates his naivety. Especially in the modern age, scientific funding is driven to a large extent by crisis-mongering. If Lambert is suggesting – and it seems he is – that in the case of a crisis journalists must abandon their skepticism, he’s calling for journalists to become little more than government propagandists. And what could possibly go wrong there?

Read the whole thing.

And Gary was right, Doug; I hope you’re good and rested.  We’re gonna need you.

Reade Seligman is going to sue Nifong:

Former Duke University lacrosse team player, Reade Seligmann, who had been cleared of charges he and two other players raped a hired stripper, says he feels sorry for disgraced prosecutor Mike Nifong’s family, but he added he was hurt by Nifong’s statement at last week’s hearing that he still thinks “something happened in that bathroom” at that now infamous team party last year.

“It was probably one of the most difficult parts of the hearing,” Seligmann, 21, told TODAY host Meredith Vieira during an exclusive interview on Monday. “I really did feel sympathy for his family … It’s been a tragedy that another family is going to have to suffer because of Mike Nifong’s actions, but after hearing him say that, it really did make it difficult to feel [for him].”

I’d be tempted to send a few bucks to any legal fund that went after Nifong – but there are many more, many worse cases of prosecutorial misconduct out there. 

Amid the layoffs, buyouts and restructurings currently going on at the Strib, the rumor had it that Katherine Kersten’s column was saved at least in part because she has never worked as a beat reporter (just as at least one rumor has it that Doug Grow’s departure is tied to the paper’s plan to put him back on the street, due to his experience as a gumshoe general assignment reporter).

And yet her column Friday – about Minneapolis’ reticence to pursue illegal immigrants, even when they are committing crimes – puts to shame many of priorities of the paper’s “news” division (to say nothing of the local partisan agendafloggers dressed in “Ace Reporter” costumes).

Minneapolis, as a matter of city policy, tells its police not to act as surrogate Immigration agents. 

Supporters of the city’s hands-off approach point to a “separation” ordinance, passed in 2003. The ordinance prohibits police from becoming involved in routine immigration enforcement, where immigration is the main issue. Immigrants in the city won’t cooperate with the police if they fear deportation, the reasoning goes.

But that’s not supposed to include interfering with enforcing laws against crime…:

But the ordinance explicitly permits police involvement in investigations like the sex ring. “Nothing in this chapter,” it states, “shall prohibit public safety personnel from assisting federal law enforcement officers in the investigation of criminal activity involving individuals present in the United States who may also be in violation of federal civil immigration laws.”

On Wednesday, Rybak acknowledged that the ordinance doesn’t bar police from engaging in crime fighting just because immigration is involved. “When the issue is clearly prostitution, we will continue to stand strong against it,” he said.

Rybak’s next quote explains a lot about the miasma of dilettantism that besets Minnesota’s largest city:

But wasn’t prostitution the issue in the sex ring bust? “The line between what is prostitution and what is immigration was blurry,” Rybak replied.

I had to stop there for a minute.

“The line between what is prostitution and what is immigration is blurry”.

This is Minneapolis’ mayor. 

Saint Paul, though hamstrung by a similarly-lefty City Council, hasn’t quite slipped the surly bonds of reason:

The St. Paul Police Department, for its part, wasn’t troubled by “blurry” lines though it too has a “separation” ordinance. In fact, the St. Paul police helped lead the charge against the sex ring operators.

So it’s clear that at least one of the Twin Cities’ loony-left-of-center governments can tell the difference between illegal immigration and prostitution. 

Are Minneapolis citizens well-served when city leaders avoid law enforcement on the “blurry” lines theory — when the crimes at issue may involve illegal immigrants?

Mark Cangemi, now retired from ICE, doesn’t think so. Cangemi was special agent in charge of the sex ring investigation until December 2006. “In the guise of protecting citizens, the Minneapolis leadership is actually harming the most vulnerable,” he says…In Cangemi’s view, Minneapolis’ “separation” ordinance — and its overbroad interpretation — have created a wedge between city police and the feds. In an operation like the sex ring investigation, he says, officers would likely be hampered if they had to make an arrest. “They are afraid they will be chastised and disciplined for doing what they are sworn to do: serve and protect,” he says.

Cops, like Cangemi, talk about enforcing the law.

Mayor Giggles talks about clothes and confusion:

“It’s ICE that has created a wedge,” Rybak retorts. The agency has not removed the word “‘police” from its officers’ jackets, despite his request to do so. Rybak maintains that the word “confuses” people who believe that immigration and criminal enforcement should be separate.

“But we are police!” protests Cangemi. Rybak, he says, “is way beyond his level of expertise” in making such a demand of a federal agency. “Police” is an internationally recognized term, used by law enforcement worldwide. Last year, Cangemi sent Rybak an “open letter” making this point, but Rybak never responded, he says. Rybak’s spokesman says he doesn’t know whether that’s true. Meanwhile, it’s Minneapolis leaders’ priorities that confuse people.

And there, finally, Kersten is wrong.

Nothing confusing about R.T. Rybak’s “priorities”.

Protect his constituencies. 

Simple.

Senator Norm Coleman defends last week’s attempt in the Senate to shut down the preening arrogance of the “sanctuary cities” movement – a group of cities who’ve ordered their police to stop cooperating with immigration authorities.  The “movement” includes Minneapolis and Richfield, and might expand to Saint Paul before too long. 

These “sanctuary cities,” which currently include Minneapolis, offer the perfect setting for people determined to hurt us by offering them protection from immigration-related questions. In several cities local law enforcement are forbidden from asking during their routine police work whether a person is in the United States lawfully, thereby evading their legal responsibility to report their suspicions to the federal government. Essentially, the philosophy is “don’t ask, don’t tell” — don’t ask suspects about their immigration status, so you then don’t have to tell the federal authorities about them.

Scores of law enforcement officers have chafed at the gag order. Many say they routinely come into contact with dangerous persons they know have been deported already — yet their local sanctuary policies prevent them from being able to do anything about it. A few chilling examples include Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, who was stopped and ticketed for driving without a license in Broward County, Florida, in early 2001. His visa had expired. Nobody asked, so nobody told.

These cities – universally led by left-of-center extremists – believe that their issues with immigration enforcement (all of which generally trace back to “Democrat influence peddling” and “political correctness”) trump national security. 

Just this month we saw a terror plot unfold in Fort Dix that might have been prevented sooner, had the local officials who pulled the suspects over on numerous traffic violations been able to inquire about their immigration status. Make no mistake — this is a national security issue.

For this reason, I have put forth a proposal in the Senate to simply make it clear that a police officer has a right to ask immigration-related questions of a suspect, and to report his or her suspicions to federal authorities through already established channels. The amendment will lift the gag order on our local law enforcement and make these sanctuary policies illegal. I’m not asking local cops to conduct raids; I’m just asking that they be allowed to use their good judgment.

Here’s an idea, Norm; start spreading the rumor that anti-abortion activists, televangelists and NRA members are sneaking across the border. 

You’ll see Democrat calls for fences along both borders and the coastline and no-knock raids on illegal immigrants’ households faster than you can say “Algore”. 

You’re welcome.

I remember thinking at one point that the best way to discredit Algore and his well-heeled global warming panic machine is to expose people to it by force.

I guess I was right; school kids in Canada are seeing the movie over and over again, and finding it wanting. 

Some of the story reads like Scrappleface:

“One of the teachers at my kid’s school showed it and he even said ahead of time, ‘There is some propaganda in this,’ ” says Tim Patterson, a Carleton University earth sciences professor. “I said to him, ‘You even knew this was a propaganda film, and you still showed it in your classroom?’ ” The weirdest part: It was the gym teacher.”

But no.  It’s real.

First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year.

“I really don’t understand why they keep showing it,” says McKenzie (his parents asked that his last name not be used). “I’ve spoken to the principal about it, and he said that teachers are instructed to present it as a debate. But every time we’ve seen it, well, one teacher said this is basically a two-sided debate, but this movie really gives you the best idea of what’s going on.”

Maybe Chad the Elder has the wrong idea.  Maybe rather than fight his PC ‘burb’s showing of the movie, he should demand that people be hauled to the community center in trucks.

I was having an email discussion the other day with a friend who took exception to my continued criticism of Strib columnist Syl Jones.

To be fair (to Jones and to me), unlike most conservative commentators I’ve actually found reason to agree with some of Jones’ work – but it’s been a rare thing.  For starters, I’m desperately sick of his whole “ice people” slur – the whole Melanistic conceit that people of color are inherently emotionally and mentally healthier than white people because their sun-drenched past made them more open and less repressed they’ve “got no soul”, in effect.  Leaving aside the simple fact that no white commentator could get away with doing the same thing in reverse for any reason (assuming they’d want to – and what, indeed, is the point of slandering an entire race’s “soul”, anyway?), it’s a stupid conceit; anyone who can say that a strand of ethnic groups (linked only by skin color, for crying out loud) that produced Bach, Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Turner, Shakespeare, Tolstoii, Byron, Chekhov, Mahler, Ibsen, Hemingway and Ramone “has no soul” is pretty clearly deluded.

But I come neither to bury nor praise Syl Jones.

One of the remarks in my email exchange that grabbed me was the idea that my criticism of Jones was “white-guy-apologist stuff”.  Which prompted me to think – calling someone “white male”, to a fair chunk of our society, is taken as a sort of rhetorical trump card.  The twin involuntary sins of being Caucasian and male are taken as an explanation for the whole gamut of offenses; colonialism, the oppression of women, war, the despoiling of the environment, the alienation of the Industrial Revolution, bad awkward dancing.  Throw in Protestant Christianity (the dreaded White WASP male), and you add emotional rigidness and frigidity, homophobia, unsatisfying sex and patriarchalism.

It’s an “argument” (and I say argument in scare quotes, since there really is no discussion; “you’re a white guy” is tossed out like a rhetorical stun grenade, intended to knock out everyone in the room, without much backup plan as to what happens if it doesn’t work.  One left-leaning woman, on meeting me a few weeks ago and learning I was a conservative, snarked “a white male who’s a conservative.  There’s a surprise!”.  I chalk it up to my inherent restraint that I didn’t respond “a white, upper-middle-class, never-married, childless fortysomething professional woman that’s a DFLer?  Ibid!”) that I’ve pretty much seceded from.  What, indeed, is the point?  Can someone criticize, say, Syl Jones for his many individual misapprehensions of fact (which have nothing to do with anyone’s skin color), as well as the generalized caustic ugliness of constantly referring to “ice people” in his columns – itself “racist” by any rational measure – without having one’s own race dragged into it?

Or does a white male need to subcontract his own critique out to, say, a Hispanic lesbian ghostwriter for it to be valid?

Whatever.  I’m not the one to untangle this society’s angst about race, which started three centuries before any of my anscestors came to this country. Still, if I must be seen to engage in “white guy apologetics”, I’ll just get it out of the way right now.  Every society on this planet that must interact with other societies, from tribes in the New Guinea highlands barely removed from the Stone Age (many of whom have waged constant war on each other for millenia) to tribal clans in Central Asia and the American steppes (whose inherent discrimination against other clans is reflected in the very language the culture uses; the term for “human” in many indigenous languages around the world becomes more derogatory the farther removed from the home clan the subject is), to large, multiethnic societies throughout history.  And of all the thousands and thousands of such societies, from extended family tribes to globe-spanning empires, which ones have been the ones to even attempt to combat systematic racism, to make the genders equal, and to build societies that transcend such bigoties and hatreds?

I’m just saying.

I can’t begin to untangle the issue of race in this society, much less worldwide – partly because a fair chunk of this society’s punditry considers my opinion invalid (I’m a white guy, remember?), and partly because whatever my skin color, I’m not smart enough.  Nobody really is.  It’s something that’ll resolve itself despite the demigoguery and the rhetorical short-cuts and all the other baggage, eventually.  I  hope.  Maybe the demographers are right – the whole race issue will diffuse itself in another fifty generations, as all the races interbreed and the whole planet comes out looking tan.

So maybe the whole “white” part of the “white male” conceit will die off on its own, eventually.  But the “male” part?  That’s where this gets interesting.

Now, I am and remain the foremost feminist I know.  And it both troubles and amuses me to note that many of my fellow guys who call themselves “feminists” seem to feel that the only way for a guy to express “feminism” is to prostrate oneself before women and demand their forgiveness for the sins of ones forefathers, whatever they may have been and whenever they may have happened.

This, of course, is not only rubbish, it’s dangerous – to feminism.

I have a question.  Feel free to discuss it in the comment section.

Background:  This earth has tens of thousands of different societies and cultures.  Many of them – Islam being a key example – are intensely patriarchal (run by men).  However, many are very matriarchal, either behind the scenes (many Asian societies at the family and clan level) or quite overtly (many African cultures).

It’s a given (for most) that boys and girls are different, of course; in kindergarten, boys tend to be physical and spatial, while girls tend to be verbal and social.  Girls, stereotypically, play in groups and gossip about each other (and no, it’s neither a sexist stereotype nor a product of middle-class Western culture, so don’t go there); boys tend toward aggression (almost always stylized, although the feminization of the school system has arguably destroyed the socialization that taught boys to control that aggression, leading to ever-more real violence), physicality and a more-detailed conception of the physical world around them (recognized even in preschoolers as boys’ typically-greater conception of three-dimensional space compared to girls – which helps counterbalance girls’ greater verbal skills).

History’s great conquerors, of course, have all been males; Alexander, the Romans, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Ditka, the British (who were sometimes ruled by queens, but the queen ran a very patriarchal system) and so on.

Who have been the great rulers of matriarchal societies?   Who knows?

The theory I’ve heard – and I can’t remember when or from whom, sorry – is that matriarchal societies tend to be more inward-focused; it’s in matriarchal socities that it’s believed that “it takes a village to raise a child”; according to the theory, a matriarchal society behaves more or less like a group of girls will act; verbal, group-oriented, alternately supportive and undercutting.

Patriarchal societies, says the theory, act like boys; outward facing, rules-based, individualistic.

Most societies, of course, mix the two in some way or another, more or less.  And when two societies collide in conflict, it’s usually the patriarchal one that prevails (see:  the spread of intensely patriarchal Islam across heavily-matriarchal Africa).

Again – as I noted above, the only large, significant society in all of history that has seriously addressed the notion of equity among races, beliefs and genders is the patriarchal, Judeo-Christian western civilization.

Question:  If the Judeo-Christian West were a matriarchal society, would it have developed into small-l liberal democracies?  Or would they be recognizable to us today?  Would they be viable?

Discuss away.  Stupid comments (as judged by me and only me) will be excised.  Not mutilated; I want to stay on the subject, not on a bunch of tangents introduced by certain commenters’ peculiarities.

Oh, and anyone who replies “why does Mitch Berg hate women?” will earn a rhetorical wedgie.

Ed and I interviewed Troy Scheffler yesterday on NARN Volume II. 

Troy, you may recall, was the Hamline University student suspended from school by executive fiat for emailing the University’s president  to suggest that allowing students to defend themselves against mass-murderers and other criminals (Hamline is a “gun free campus, just like Virginia Tech and the Red Lake School and Cold Springs/Rocori and Columbine…) might better serve the needs of security than wallowing in empty therapeutic blandishments.

Ed beat me to the story, so I’ll let him describe the interview:

I was curious about what kind of person Troy was, and so I looked forward to meeting with him yesterday after our intrepid producer Matt Reynolds made the arrangements. I didn’t think he’d be a Seung-hui Cho type at all, but I was very much surprised when Troy turned out to be as mild-mannered as anyone I had ever met. He didn’t harbor any bitterness nor even anger over his situation, only a resigned bemusement. He, in fact, is a very nice guy caught up in the academic manifestations of political correctness.

I’ll add to that – Troy is not some twentysomething fratboy all fired up on testosterone.  He’s in his early thirties (according to the City Pages article that kicked the whole story off), working on getting into law school.  My first impression was he’s about as regular as guy as they get.

Ed goes on to describe Scheffler’s explication of the email traffic between him and the Hamline administration.  He was suspended from school, and ordered to get psychiatric counseling before he could apply for reinstatement. 

For writing an email suggesting the allowing of guns on campus.

The upshot?

So far, the school hasn’t budged. Troy doesn’t really want to return there anyway under the circumstances, but he worries that the incompletes he had to take and the record of the suspension will damage his chances to get into law school. In fact, he has just about despaired of that career at this point, and isn’t sure what he will do now.

What is certain is that Hamline should be embarrassed to have treated Troy in this manner. Had Hanson actually met Troy, she would have seen that she had nothing to fear from him.

Hamline’s gutless administrators have hidden behind “student privacy” so far (although, as producer Matt Reynolds hilariously pointed out, Hamline’s switchboard isn’t so concerned about “student privacy” that they couldn’t give out the personal cell phone numbers of several principals to the story).

Come on, Hamline.  Explain yourselves – or have the whole world know what a bunch of gutless Orwellian toadies you are.

The challenge is on the table, Hamline.  Do you have enough respect for your students, your neighbors and the public to defend your actions?

Ed finishes:

NOTE: Troy could use a good Second Amendment lawyer. Let me know if anyone wants to give Troy an assist in that manner.

If anyone has any leads for lawyers or other organizations that help gun owners who’ve faced this sort of discrimination, write me at “feedbackinthedark” at the email address yahoo dot com. 

In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings – which could possibly have been thwarted had VT not been a gun-free zone – people and institutions around the country responded.

In the case of my neighbor, Hamline University in Saint Paul, the response involved punishing students that spoke out for concealed carry reform on the “gun-free” campus:

In the aftermath, officials at Hamline University sought to comfort their 4,000 students. David Stern, the vice president for academic and student affairs, sent a campus-wide email offering extra counseling sessions for those who needed help coping.

Scheffler had a different opinion of how the university should react. Using the email handle “Tough Guy Scheffler,” Troy fired off his response: Counseling wouldn’t make students feel safer, he argued. They needed protection. And the best way to provide it would be for the university to lift its recently implemented prohibition against concealed weapons.

“Ironically, according to a few VA Tech forums, there are plenty of students complaining that this wouldn’t have happened if the school wouldn’t have banned their permits a few months ago,” Scheffler wrote. “I just don’t understand why leftists don’t understand that criminals don’t care about laws; that is why they’re criminals. Maybe this school will reconsider its repression of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”

Ironically, Concealed Carry Reform Now of Minnesota – the group that drove the Concealed Carry reform issue for a decade in Minnesota (not, as the media would have you believe, the NRA) – had most of its meetings at the Hamline University law school auditorium. 

But after the Virginia Tech massacre, school administrators across the country were ramping up security. Flip to any cable news channel and you’d hear experts talking about warning signs that had been missed. Cho had a history of threatening behavior and stalking. And a psychological evaluation had deemed him a threat to himself.

So Hamline officials took swift action. On April 23, Scheffler received a letter informing him he’d been placed on interim suspension. To be considered for readmittance, he’d have to pay for a psychological evaluation and undergo any treatment deemed necessary, then meet with the dean of students, who would ultimately decide whether Scheffler was fit to return to the university.

The consequences were severe. Scheffler wasn’t allowed to participate in a final group project in his course on Human Resources Management, which will have a big impact on his final grade. Even if he’s reinstated, the suspension will go on his permanent record, which could hurt the aspiring law student.

“‘Oh, he’s the crazy guy that they called the cops on.’ How am I supposed to explain that to the Bar Association?” Scheffler asks.

For exercising his right to speak freely, he’s branded as a nutcase by the school’s administration.

Sort of like the Soviets used to do.  

While Hamline doesn’t have the rep for relentless PC noodling of, say, Macalester or St. Thomas, it gives both a run for the title.

He has also suffered embarrassment. Scheffler obeyed the campus ban and didn’t go to class, but his classmate, Kenny Bucholz, told him a police officer was stationed outside the classroom. “He had a gun and everything,” Bucholz says…Now Scheffler is looking to hire a lawyer of his own. Even if Hamline lifts the suspension, he doubts he’ll return to campus, he says. “If they’re going to treat me that way before, how will they treat me after?”

Dunno, but I hope his suit draws blood. 

Note to any Hamline administration reading this space; your worthless frat trash’s “puke on Mitch’s property” privileges are permanently revoked. 

The local Sorosphere continues to huff and puff at the notion that a conservative might claim – rightly – to be not only a feminist, but the very best feminist in the Twin Cities.  George Soros’ money is being well-spent, and I for one am having a lot of fun watching the local lefties jump up and down and spatter spit all over the place and demand that I leave “their” sandbox. 

Like this woman, most famous for being enraged all the time and…well, that’s about it.  (Note to Ms. Furious; “truthiness” is so 2005).

Or George Soros’ #1 local temp, Robin, who can’t leave well-enough alone, when she stomps her feet and gets mad that I…:

1.  write a satirical poem about online dating (in the third person, nonetheless)
2. make critical and non-reverent observations about the contributions of a young woman with some deeply fascist ideas
3. point out that the fabled “women earn 3/4 of what men earn” is a misleading mangling of number (she cites an AAUW study which purports to show that women do earn less than men.  While I’m waiting on information from the AAUW on the study’s methodology, it doesn’t matter – it’s one of the reasons I am a feminist; I don’t want my daughter to get any less than she deserves!)

…which sends that message that I shouldn’t criticize any woman in any way, or claim that they’re not eternal victims – which is a pretty Victorian, paternalistic attitude for one who’d style herself a “feminist”. 

If my daughter grows up to be a whiny rage-o-holic, I’ll truly know I’ve failed, both as a father and as a feminist.

It’s been an interesting exercise, watching all these paid operatives  people hop up and down like monkeys on espresso over my simple – though utterly true – little claim.

My inner experimental psychologist is having the time of his life.

First things first:  I am the most feminist person I know. 

Seriously. I have a daughter.  I want her to be able to go wherever her merits and qualifications take her in her life, whether it’s a career or domestic life or…whatever.  So if and where equity is the goal of feminism, I’m totally on board.

Of course, in the vast majority of our society, the equity feminists have long since won the battles that matter.  Feminists with any common sense are currently sorting out the aftermath of those victories (how many women really want to put off having kids to join the work force?), but for the most part the “war” for women’s equality is down to a mopping-up operation.

Now, the feminism that’s most concerned with establishing womyn as a separate fiefdon with its own victimology-based pseudo-religion?  Not so much. 

So you’d figure – rightly – that a blog called “Feministe” would provide a rich vein of fisking material.  Someone planted a bomb at an Austin, TX abortion mill “female health clinic”. 

Had that bomb been found outside a post office or a school, the headlines would have been hysterically running on about ZOMG TERRORISM TERRORISM IS AL QAEDA INVOLVED?

Dunno, “Zuzu”; statistically, bombs in the US aren’t aren’t nearly as rare as we’d like.

And the right-wing warbloggers would be pissing their pants and hyperventilating about profiling Arabs and banning Muslims from public life and dhimmitude and how if they had been there, they’d have stopped it with their concealed carry and their extra-super special powers of righteousness, just like they saw in a movie once and BOMB IRAN! and 9/11 CHANGED EVERYTHING!!!

Are we done yet?

No? 

but they still have better things to do than join the military, but they’ll be happy to go into the woods and hunt Russians and shout WOLVERINES!!

But it’s an abortion clinic, so. Ho-hum.

Now are you done?

Yes?

Is it “terrorism” to put a bomb in an abortion clinic, with an aim toward scaring people out of being suppliers or consumers? Absolutely.  And as anti-abortion as we are, I don’t think you can find a single credible right-of-center voice that doesnt’ condemn it.

But is a bomb in an abortion clinic the deeply-evil act of a person who is putting his or her personal quest to protect human life above the law of the land, or part of a coordinated attack against the US?

For some reason, terrorism doesn’t count if it’s directed against women and their health care providers.

Er, right.  Which is why protestors at Planned Parenthood clinics are kept across the street, right? 

 It’s just not news, and the fact that it goes unremarked in the national media — and hell, even in the local media, as in the case of the Austin bomb — contributes to the idea that women are not important and that violence directed at women is not only to be expected, but to be dismissed.

To the extent that it didn’t get covered in the news, it’s more a symptom of the values of the news industry; nobody bleeds, the story doesn’t lead.  It’s worth noting that while abortion-related violence has been declining, eco-terrorism has been growing, even though the media aren’t knocking themselves out covering that, either.

Does that mean that the nation doesn’t care about loggers and meat producers?  Or that it’s really not news?

But if all you’re after is to assuage your own sense of invincible righteous victimhood, knock yourself out.

And I don’t mean “knock yourself out” to imply I support domestic violence against women, even if it’s self-inflicted.  We’re clear on this, right? 

UPDATE: Lesser feminists than I chortle at my opening sentence, proving two things: Twin Cities leftybloggers are largely incapable of carrying on a logical discussion (preferring, with a few exceptions, snark and obscenity), and George Soros is a terrible comparison shopper.

Seriously, Rew:  try to ding my premise.  Preferably in terms other than “bwahahaha” or “Mitch has a crush on me”.  Side benefit:  If you manage to do either and/or avoid dumb scatology or wondering why I’m not in the Army, you’ll be staging a better argument than 95% of leftybloggers, including the entire Minnesota Monitor staff, can manage.

A student’s creative writing essay – in which he was instructed not to censor himself! – leads to arrest, charges.

A high school senior was arrested after writing that “it would be funny” to dream about opening fire in a building and having sex with the dead victims, authorities said.

Another passage in the essay advised his teacher at Cary-Grove High School: “don’t be surprised on inspiring the first CG shooting,” according to a criminal complaint filed this week.

Allen Lee, 18, faces two disorderly conduct charges over the creative-writing assignment, which he was given on Monday in English class at the northern Illinois school.

Students were told to “write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing,” according to a copy of the assignment.

I’m not sure what part bothers me the most here; that the student was arrested, that he was charged with “disorderly conduct” for essentially following his directions (albeit tastelessly and flippantly, as we’ll see below) or that if you take the statement below seriously, he was quite clearly looking to poke and prod the system:

According to the complaint, Lee’s essay reads in part, “Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, s…t…a…b…puke. So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did.”

Officials described the essay as disturbing and inappropriate.

Lee said he was just following the directions.

“In creative writing, you’re told to exaggerate,” Lee said. “It was supposed to be just junk. … There definitely is violent content, but they’re taking it out of context and making it something it isn’t.”

The system is reacting with the same common sense that I’ve personally come to love about the public (and too many private) school systems:

Lee was moved to an off-campus learning program, and the district was evaluating a punishment, schools spokesman Jeff Puma said.

“It wasn’t just violent or foul language,” Puma said. “It went beyond that.”

The teenager’s father, Albert Lee, has defended his son as a straight-A student who was just following instructions and contends the school overreacted. But he has also said he understands that the situation arose in the week after a Virginia Tech student gunned down 32 people before committing suicide.

Defense attorney Dane Loizzo said Allen Lee has never been disciplined in school and signed Marine enlistment papers last week.

A conviction could bring up to 30 days in jail and a maximum $1,500 fine.

Maybe Lee should treat it as “performance art” parodying the institutionalized paranoia of a system that has lost the ability to discern reality.

I spent a couple of hours last night at Minnesota Public Radio’s UBS Auditorium, the huge top of the MPR’s Taj MaKling, their immense downtown Saint Paul headquarters.

I was a guest on “In The Loop“, a newish MPR public affairs program hosted by Jeff Horwich. Word had gotten to Horwich that I was a conservative who was interested in the whole topic of the planned protests at next year’s GOP National Convention.

More on that later.

As I’ve written in the past, once you get past the whole “public” nature of Public Radio – the fact that taxes go to support what is in essence a medium catering to a specific socio-political niche – there is actually some excellent stuff out there. And “In The Loop” is certainly an interesting experiment. I’ll give the Loop crew this; file away your “Delicious Dish”/Terry Gross “Good Times/Good Times” stereotypes. It’s a fun, fast-paced, eclectic show, recorded live in front of a studio audience (and edited for time and to cut out flubs – it is public radio, after all). Horwich, a talented, personable guy (at from my first impression, as a guest) is a good interviewer. And he seems to have done a good job, tonight at least, of seeking some sort of balance in stacking the show. The show takes an hour (more like 90 minutes before editing) and talks about an issue – in this case, activism from the very personal to the very public (which was where I came in).
Again – more on that later.

———-

After almost thirty years, off and on (mostly off) of working in radio stations that were tucked above drug stores and into transmitter sheds, MPR is something else; big, clean, Scandinavian, expansive, an equipment geek’s dream. The UBS Auditorium feels like a lecture hall at a well-endowed university, with theatrical lighting, badonkadonk acoustics, and a gorgeous north (?) facing view of downtown Saint Paul.

———-

The culture shock continued when I saw the way the show ran.  Where  commercial talk show involves a host or two, a board operator, and maybe a call screener (and on major-league talk shows like Limbaugh they might add a person or two to do on-the-fly research), a National/Minnesota Public Radio show involves a crew that, to my commercial-radio tastes, looks more like the crew for a good-sized TV production.

The show included the host, at least four producers (one of whom acted as a combination stage manager and technical director, calling instructions to the booth staff into a wireless mic as he maneuvered about the floor), at least three engineers that I could see (two or in the large booth at the back of the room running the recording, the lights and the Powerpoint slides that ran behind the interstitial recorded bits, plus one running the house sound from a big mixer back to the audience’s left).  The show’s closing credits ran on a long time, listing close to a dozen people.  Plus the band.

To produce a one-hour, monthly show. 

Not criticizing.  Just saying – to my frugal, commercial-radio-raised tastes, it was like being in a foreign country.

———-

The first guest was songwriter Larry Long, a local folkie in the Pete Seeger mold – musically and politically – who played a couple of songs. A local “storyteller” read a couple of poems. “The Smarts”, a three-guy jazz combo, provided some occasional hilarious bumper music (a jazzy version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” after…well, we’ll get to that).

There were some recorded segments of interviews with people discovering activism and protest in various ways.

And then it was my turn.

———-

I was on a panel with a cute-as-a-bug twentysomething named Erica, from some anti-war organization (the name sounded similar enough to every other anti-war group out there that I involuntarily started replaying the “People’s Front of Judea” sketch in my head).

Her line; she and her fellow protesters want to show the “ruling class” in this county – the one coming to the GOP convention – what anger was all about. They want to block freeways, raise havoc – in her words, they want to break up the convention, in as many words.

Y’know – to teach Republicans a lesson about democracy. The message seemed to be “My ends justify my means!”, delivered in a perky chirp with just a tinge of Valleygirl.

I tried to respond. Horwich split the time – under ten minutes – pretty evenly. Which, being as used to co-hosting a two hours show as I am, was very, very difficult!

I was nearly a loss as to how to respond. The ruling class? Does my boss know this? At any rate, it was hard to find a way to engage her; she seemed to believe her feelings about the President trumped everyone else’s right to participate in a democracy – a point I tried to make several times. Between the fact that Horwich kept the interview zipping along (it’s a live show, after all) and the fact that, like most anti-war protesters, “Erica” would zip away from topics when cornered like a greased rhetorical pig made me pine for my nice, long-form talk-radio interview format.

Still, check it out; it’ll be on at 9PM tonight, and 6PM Sunday on your area MPR affiliate or online.

While Erika slipped away without a word to me, Larry Long and the whole MPR crew were exceptionally gracious; any thoughts of being trapped in the belly of a left-of-center beast were…well, not untrue, but whether you chalk it up to good manners, love of a good debate, or professional polish, everyone I met – Horwich, his producers, the show staff, and the other MPR staff present – was way beyond civil, and downright friendly.

Leaving philosophical problems with taxpayer-funded media aside (let’s face it, MPR could most likely support itself), In the Loop is an interesting experiment – think of it as a live This Minnesota Life with an audience.  At any rate, it’s well worth a listen.

The GOP is bringing their national convention to Saint Paul next year.

The local, regional and (I have to presume) national left is planning on being here in force.

It’s going to be an interesting 18 months.

Let’s pick up where we left off last Thursday.

———-

A couple of bits of housekeeping, first.

I’m schedule to appear on Minnesota Public Radio’s “In The Loop“.  It’ll be recorded Thursday night at the Taj MaKling in downtown Saint Paul, and broadcast  Friday, at 9 p.m. and Sunday at 6 p.m.

The subject?  Protest!

———-

As a couple of commenters obliquely pointed out last week, the temptation to rhetorically overstep is almost overwhelming.

As I noted, the Saint Paul City Council has officially welcomed protesters. I gave significance to the fact that they haven’t mentioned anything about protesters who come to town with an aim toward disruption – and a commenter correctly noted that in fact legislators’ resolutions should be presumed to refer to activities that are within the laws that they make and that their government is charged with enforcing.

True, and a good point.

Another commenter said something to the effect of “he’s just setting up a strawman”.  That’s not true in and of itself – I’m not trying to negate either the legitimate, law-abiding protesters’ points or right to speak with the activities of their less-legitimate pals. 

Merely pointing out something the mainstream media in this town, I suspect, will bend over backwards to avoid reporting; while the fringe left is complaining about nonexistent plans to stifle their free speech, some of them would seem to be intent on no good.

———-

Lassie at Freedom Dogs – who has, herself, immense experience dealing with the left’s professional protest clacque – writes in quoting the RNC Welcoming Committee (RNC-WC) website:

Looks like they hope to maintain a looser structure so as to escape notice by the authoritarians, and are confident that their numbers are strong.

…we hope that the RNC-WC will maintain a unified, anti-authoritarian presence at the 2008 RNC. Our numbers are huge, and it’s time that our actions reflected that.

Well anarkiddies, our numbers are also strong, and we look forward to welcoming you next fall. Keep daddy’s number on speed dial — that unfortunate authority figure is the one you’ll be crying to for bail. This is going to be fun to watch.

It’s a “MySpace” site.  Big whoop? 

Maybe, maybe not.  You be the judge.  Here’s the “Welcoming Committee’s” agenda:

Those who work with the RNC Welcoming Committee must agree to:

1. A rejection of Capitalism, Imperialism, and the State; [Whatever]

2. Resist the commodification of our shared and living Earth; [Kumbaya]

3. Organize on the principles of decentralization, autonomy, sustainability, and mutual aid.  [Kind of like a bunch of terrorist cells.  OK, that was a low blow.]

4. Work to end all relationships of domination and subjugation, including but not limited to those rooted in patriarchy, race, class, and homophobia; [Unless they’re Israelis, but again, whatever]

5. Oppose the police and prison-industrial complex, and maintain solidarity with all targets of state repression; 

6. Directly confront systems of oppression, and respect the need for a diversity of tactics. [Hm.  “Diverse” tactics?  Let’s come back to that later.]

Though the RNC-WC is focused on a specific event, we hope that our work transcends the convention by contributing to the development of anti-authoritarian movements and mutual aid networks both locally and globally. We are no more opposed to the Republican Party than we are to the Democratic Party. Affiliations and labels aside, we invite all who share our vision to join us in resistance.

So they wanna protest.

Cool.  See y’all on the street. I’ll be interested in checking out those “diverse” tactics.

Waving signs and walking around dressed in papier-mache puppets?  Go for it.

Threats, violence and intimidation?

———- 

Jeff Kouba – he of stronger stomach than I – apparently reads the MN Daily.

And a few weeks ago he found this little nugget; a U of M twinkie is having violent little delusions of grandeur.  And if you believe him, he’s not alone.

Oh, not

Maybe it was all the wine my buddy salvaged from some trash containers after a high-class tasting party, and then served up at his own festive blow-out gathering of assorted radicals on Friday night, but I’m really starting to have hope.

Yes, I’m starting to believe certain vague, visionary plans to throw our Republican friends a street party in St. Paul in 2008 are really, truly going to happen.

Look away, you fun-loving Republicans, we’re planning a big surprise party for little ol’ you during your special convention in 2008.

Aw!  You shouldn’t have!  I love surprise parties! 

Hopefully, it will be more fun than the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Oh, but now my mellow is harshed.  I don’t like violence!

And to be perfectly clear, either does the “writer” of the MNDaily op-ed, John Hoff – as long has he’s potentially on the wrong end of it, as in this editorial, where he frets about the crummy neighborhood around his stop on the Ventura trolley.  So we know he’s not a diagnosable sociopath, since he doesn’t like potential violence aimed at him, anyway. 

Right?

Yup, we know you Republicans are still jealous about all the attention Democrats enjoyed in Chicago back in the days of the hippies, but just think: 40 years, my pinstriped, conservative friends.

Oooh!  An ambiguous warning!

Of course, there’s nothing ambiguous about the gutlessness of people like “John Hoff”:

Nobody in this column except me has a real name, of course, and even I have been known to become “John Hoffman,” in homage to Abbie Hoffman of the Chicago 7.

You know – Abbie Hoffman, upper-class yippie turned condo-pink cause celebre, who went “underground” for a decade after being busted for dealing coke?  The person over whom Pete Townsend earned everlasting credit for clubbing with a guitar at Woodstock? 

The person who served as the model, in many ways, for today’s pampered, privileged, tax-funded hothouse “radicals”?

Anyway, the article continues:

We talked about gas masks. I mentioned how difficult it was, during the Battle of Seattle, to procure a gas mask at the last minute. But it isn’t enough to merely possess a gas mask, oh no. I know from my time in the army that gas-mask training is essential, so you will trust your equipment even when you’re exhausted from running, fighting for breath, and it’s tough to suck air through the filters.

Wow.  Gas mask training.  Sounds dramatic!

Stella told me activists have been planning and coordinating for a few months, traveling to the Twin Cities and quietly familiarizing themselves with routes and landmarks. A meeting between a major group of “anti-authoritarians” and a large liberal Christian organization was scheduled to take place … um, well, no sense mentioning the day or the location.

Of course not!  Because acting like it’s a big secret certainly buffs up that self-serving sense of drama that being an arrested adolescent requires.

Which is, perhaps, what we should write this next bit off to (emphasis added):

Will enough people come to the street demonstrations in 2008? Will it be a gas? Will demonstrators have enough sense to focus on a target of opportunity outside the main security perimeter, like a luxury hotel where delegates will be staying with their laptops and revealing documents, instead of going up against massive security surrounding the convention center? It would be good to apply the hard-earned lessons of Seattle in 1999.

Yeah, I know.  John Hoff and his alleged friends are a bunch of hyperdramatic arrested adolescents; for this little flock of state-supported (over half of a U of M student’s costs are paid by the taxpayer before they even see a tuition figure) dilettantes, the drama is the point; sneaking about with secret names and big plans is validation for people who’ve adopted the whole “change the world now” mission in life.  I’ve known the type over the years – even interviewed a bunch of them on my old KSTP talk show (kids from the “Backroom Anarchist Center”); talking about recreating the fabled riots of the mystic past is for them what NASCAR and sports-talk radio are for blue-collar guys – a time-killer, a substitute for doing something useful.

And yet.

Hoff’s piece appears in the Minnesota Daily – a semi-independent body and not an official voice of the U of M, by any means (if I recall correctly, they are partially funded by student activity fees, although I’m not entirely sure of the extent), but certainly no underground publication.

Question:  If it were a Republican student advocating stalking pro-abortion activists (for that is exactly what Hoff is advocating; “Will demonstrators … focus on a target of opportunity…like a luxury hotel where delegates will be staying with their laptops and revealing documents” which has nothing to do with protesting the administration and everything to do with harassing people who are, in turn, exercising their own rights to free speech and assembly!), what would the university’s reaction have been?

———-

Relax.  I’m not especially exercised about little John Hoff’s fantasy life.  Talk is cheap.  And it doesn’t impugn the vast majority of protesters, who, wrong as they are in my opinion, don’t intend to do anything stupid.

But as much as some on the regional left fret about being “stifled” and “oppressed“, the fact is powerful, well-heeled interests in Saint Paul are looking out for protesters’ First Amendment rights.

I just want to make sure that the rights of those of us who dissent from this city’s political mainstream – and those who come to this city – will get the same consideration.  The mainstream media has been reticent to cover the abuses of the anti-war, anti-Republican protesters.  

If that’s a do-it-yourself job, that’s fine; it’s what we conservative bloggers do best.

But someone’s gotta do it.

Reality, as usual, is stuck somewhere between everyone’s perceptions of it.

Immigration is an issue fraught with this trait.

The cultural left believes that America has always been an uneasy truce between incompatible cultures, held together only by the grace of government.

The cultural right believes that until recently, America was a melting-pot rather than a quilt; a place where people (other than the odd bit of pride in their heritage) stripped away the old to embrace the new.

The truth, naturally, is somewhere in between (even if, as usual, somewhere to the right of dead-center).  Not everyone assimilated instantly to the New World.  My maternal grandmother and my ex-father-in-law both grew up speaking other languages – Norwegian and German, respectively.  More globally, many ethnic groups – most notably the Italians of New York and Boston – actively resisted assimilating in the mid-1800s, keeping their language and their customs and the hope of making some money and moving back to the Old Country sooner than later.  Others – the Irish then, some Central Americans now – were similar if not the same.

So it’s not a huge surprise that some people coming from a very foreign cultural tradition and a society little-advanced since the seventh century, might not dive into American culture head-first.

What’s distressing is that so many Americans – too many – are actively facilititating this; creating an America of many cultures that intersect only where they absolutely have to.

 Katherine Kersten in the Strib, in the second part of a great two-part series on MCTC‘s effort to install Moslem-friendly facilties, and the agenda behind the move:

Last week, I wrote about Minneapolis Community and Technical College, which is planning to install facilities to help Muslim students perform ritual washing before daily prayers. It’s a simple matter of extending “hospitality” to newcomers, says President Phil Davis — no different than providing a fish option in the college cafeteria for Christian students during Lent… [But] On the [College’s Muslim Accomodations Task Force website] , I found information about the handful of public colleges that have “wudu,” or ritual bathing, facilities.

Now, a conservative – or one that believes in separation of church and state, no matter what their politics – might be tempted to ask “what allowances do public colleges make for Christians?”  Of course, modern Christianity is pretty low-impact as far as public affordances go; most of us can pray in private if we’re so inclined, and can save our public observances for church. 

Islam, traditionally, is different – although Moslems around the world do get allowances for interacting with modernity.  Should they want them.

Which is the big qualification.  I’ll add emphasis below:

But I also discovered something more important for colleges seeking guidance on “accommodations”: Projects like MCTC’s are likely to be the first step in a long process.

The task force’s eventual objectives on American campuses include the following, according to the website: permanent Muslim prayer spaces, ritual washing facilities, separate food and housing for Muslim students, separate hours at athletic facilities for Muslim women, paid imams or religious counselors, and campus observance of Muslim holidays. The task force is already hailing “pioneering” successes. At Syracuse University in New York, for example, “Eid al Fitr is now an official university holiday,” says an article featured on the website. “The entire university campus shuts down to mark the end of Ramadan.” At Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., “halal” food — ritually slaughtered and permissible under Islamic law — is marked by green stickers in the cafeteria and “staff are well-trained in handling practices.”

At Georgetown University, Muslim women can live apart in housing that enables them to “sleep in an Islamic setting,” as the website puts it. According to a student at the time the policy was adopted, the university housing office initially opposed the idea, on grounds that all freshman should have the experience of “living in dorms and dealing with different kinds of people.” That might sound appealing, Muslim students told a reporter in an article featured on the website. But in their view, the reporter wrote, “learning to live with ‘different kinds of people’ ” actually “causes more harm than good” for Muslims, because it requires them to live in an environment that “distracts them from their desire to become better Muslims, and even draw[s] weaker Muslims away from Islam.”

In some of these cases, I don’t see a huge problem; in areas where Moslems are a significant part of the population (like Dearborn), the market will drive these things, just as Catholics in the market drive cafeterias to serve fish on Fridays.  As to holidays – well, at a private school (like Syracuse and Georgetown), it’s really up to the buyer to decide if they want Eid off; when I was in college, during some of my tougher semesters, I’d have taken Cthulhian holidays if could’ve gotten ’em.

For that matter, if private schools want to invest in prayer spaces and separate facilities for Moslems because it’s just-plain good marketing, more power to ’em. 

But at public schools?  I don’t want tax money going toward separate-but-equal capital expenditures for anyone’s religion, even my own!

Read the rest of Kersten’s piece, which goes into great depth about the agitation for these changes.

My NARN colleague Ed Morrissey writes: Ed Morrissey writes:

In other words, what we will get from this process of multiculturalism is precisely the kind of “separate but equal” facilities struck down by the Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education in 1954. These Muslim activists want to create a separate society within the United States for Muslims, and they want the US to provide them the facilities with which to create it. Separate dorms, separate cafeterias, Muslim-only physical-education classes — they want a separate Muslim college at MCTC and everywhere else. It’s self-initiated apartheid.

Forty years ago and more, we had segregationists insisting that different peoples could not live within the same area without dividing lines…Now we have Muslims who want to reopen the argument in order to create a closed society for themselves within the US. We have no problem with Muslims who integrate into our society and become Americans in deed as well as in name. If Muslims want to open their own universities to ensure the proper exercise of their religion, well, that works too…We do not need religious apartheid at MCTC or any other public university or facility. If devout Muslims do not want to integrate into American society, then they need to find another place to live. Period.

That is, of course, the larger danger; that a significant part of our society will get the means to segregate itself…

…with the active connivance of too many “well-meaning” Americans.

We’ve talked about the “wage gap” in this space before, by way of noting that as long as you compare apples and apples, there really is none.

The media has carried Op Eds on both sides of the issue this past week – from the sublime (or at least sensible) to the ridiculous.

Representing sensible, Carrie Lukas writes in the WaPo:

 In truth, I’m the cause of the wage gap — I and hundreds of thousands of women like me. I have a good education and have worked full time for 10 years. Yet throughout my career, I’ve made things other than money a priority. I chose to work in the nonprofit world because I find it fulfilling. I sought out a specialty and employer that seemed best suited to balancing my work and family life. When I had my daughter, I took time off and then opted to stay home full time and telecommute. I’m not making as much money as I could, but I’m compensated by having the best working arrangement I could hope for.

Lukas hits on two of the key truths of the issue:  Women exercise different options before and during their careers.  Some pundits – Warren Farrell being a key one – might add that it’s because women have more socially-acceptable options than do most men; while our society is pretty open about women being anything from stay-at-home moms to CEOs, men with kids are pretty much expected to provide, provide, provide (to the point that if a marriage breaks down, or never happens, it’s a matter of rigidly-enforced law).

Women make similar trade-offs all the time. Surveys have shown for years that women tend to place a higher priority on flexibility and personal fulfillment than do men, who focus more on pay. Women tend to avoid jobs that require travel or relocation, and they take more time off and spend fewer hours in the office than men do. Men disproportionately take on the dirtiest, most dangerous and depressing jobs.

Leaving aside dirt and danger, there are some social norms at work here.  Women are more likely to go into lower-paying fields like social work, non-profits, humanities and services; Men are more apt to end up in engineering, technology and sciences, fields that pay more right out of the entry-level gate.  After that, of course, women are vastly more likely to take time -years – off to have and raise kids; men are not. 

If you take a man and a woman who start at a job at exactly the same time, earning exactly the same money, and check back twenty years later, what do you think you’ll see?  If the man has clocked twenty solid years of work without a non-vacation break, and the woman took ten years off in the middle to have and raise kids, who do you think is going to be paid more?

Who do you think should?

When women realize that it isn’t systemic bias but the choices they make that determine their earnings, they can make better-informed decisions.

Smart people – irrelevant of their gender, really, since many men do stay home with the kids these days – know this.

But Lee Roper-Batker, writing Friday’s Strib, does not.

Women’s personal choices are to blame for lower earnings? Systemic workplace discrimination for women is a myth? Rubbish. Lukas presumes that her choices represent the preferences and complex geographic, social, racial and economic realities of women everywhere.

 Roper-Batker then utterly fails to show that Lukas’ example isn’t germane.

 Her assumption is that if women sought “the dirtiest, most dangerous and depressing [of] jobs” like men did, we would achieve equal pay. Tell that to Lois Jenson [one of the Iron Range miners that won the stories lawsuit in 1988 enshrined in the movie North Country] and other women across the nation who “get dirty” fighting to earn a livable wage.

This, of course, is a red herring.  The example of a small group of women who won the right to work a dangerous, dirty job (and, more to the point, not be harassed on the job) has nothing to do with the raw comparative numbers of men and women at dirty, dangerous jobs; even less does it address the real point – that men go into higher paid work because they are expected to, and stay with it more consistently.

Roper-Batker shows a keen sense for comparing apples with axles:

In Minnesota, we’ve modeled how a marketplace can be corrected. In 1982, the Legislature passed the bipartisan State Employees Pay Equity Act. On paper, the bill outlawed sex discrimination against state government workers. In practice, it eliminated the wage gap among 45,000 Minnesotans. Since then, average earnings for women employed by the state have reached 97 percent of average earnings for their male colleagues.

Which, of course, directly supports Lukas’ point!  If you compare apples and apples – people of similar education, experience, and consistency on the job – men and women earn very much the same money.  Indeed, in fields where women start younger and work more consistently (technical writing being one in my personal experience) they tend to out-earn men.

But across the nation, women continue to represent a disproportionate (more than 64 percent) share of minimum wage earners — and an even more disproportionate 40 percent are women of color.

And so Roper-Batker moves on to comparing apples with bowling balls – or at least, we think they’re bowling balls; one doesn’t know what sampling of “women” comprise 64 percent of minimum wage earners; all women over the age of 15?  People over 18, or over 21?  Comparing state employees with a general swathe of minimum-wage workers is misleading to the point of meaningless.  Without addressing why adults are working for minimum wage (or even knowing that they’re adults at all), it seems Roper-Bakter is tossing factoids out and hoping that her audience doesn’t care enough to ask questions.

According to Amy Caiazza, program director for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, economists give three reasons for the wage gap.

One-third is due to differences in skills and education. Solution: Let’s fund expanded education and training for women that will lead to higher-paying jobs.

But women are already a decisive majority of students in higher education – and the number is rising, to the point where people are seeing a crisis. 

Another third is due to job segregation: Women tend to cluster in lower-paying occupations. Solution: Let’s work to expand our girls’ visions of the types of jobs they can occupy.

But we’ve been “expanding girls’ visions” for a couple of generations.  When I was in high school, the girls got endless rah-rah about how they could be anything at all.  And they were!  Among my female classmates from Jamestown High in 1981 are doctors, lawyers, nurses, military officers and noncoms, teachers, scientists, engineers and professionals, as well as housewives and service workers – pretty much the gamut of the American labor force.  If a bunch of girls from all kinds of backgrounds from a rural town from almost thirty years ago are all over the occupational map, how can it be that Lee Roper-Bakter, president and CEO of the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, can think that girls today, beneficiaries of boundless information, generations of their mothers, aunts and sisters working in the big world, and thirty years of constant pep-talking about their potential (that has made them three-fifths of our college students) could be doing worse?

Indeed – what actual evidence is there that girls today don’t have every bit as expansive a vision of their future as boys do?  Quite the contrary – since women are approaching 60% of those in higher education, after a generation of feminized education, it’d seem quite likely the opposite has happened; boys’ visions are the ones becoming constricted.

(Barring, of course, the girls who get pregnant as teenagers and take themselves out of the workforce, and consign themselves to the minimum-wage ghetto right out of life’s gate.  Of this, of course, Roper-Bakter makes no mention – even though they are a drag on women’s numbers in general.  Five’ll get you ten they’re a big part of the “minimum wage” numbers Roper-Batker cited, but I suspect she’d be the last one to tell you).

The final third of the wage gap is “unexplainable.” Solution: Let’s work together to end factors like sexism and racism that suppress women’s pay.

But other than a disjointed, out-of-context claim about minimum-wage workers, Roper-Batker can’t really make the association between sexism and racism with any meaningful numbers.  Are black women really paid less than black men with similar experience, training and consistency on the job?

These smack of systemic failures to me, but ones that can be corrected. The glass ceiling and gender-typed jobs are not illusions, as Lukas suggests, but social constructs.

At this point in history, Roper-Batker might be right.  They might be social constructs – where “society” means “left-leaning dogmo-feminist lobbyists pimping a government solution that might address a non-existent problem – but will certainly give plenty of power and influence to the likes of Lee Roper-Batker”.

 Just as Lois Jenson’s courage ended sexual harassment as an accepted workplace practice, legislation will end persistent wage gaps.

This is ludicrous.

How?

Let’s take the real-world example that Lukas alludes to, and that I cited; a man and a woman who start with the same background and salary.  How – why – should the government mandate that the woman, with ten years’ less experience than the man after twenty years, be paid the same?

And has anyone shown that male apples and female apples – people with the same training, experience and time on the job – aren’t paid the same? 

No. 

So while Lukas blames women for the wage gap and doesn’t support federal legislation requiring “paycheck fairness,” the state of Minnesota knows better. It has already demonstrated that the proof is in the numbers — or legislation — to correct the marketplace. Now we just need to expand it, for the rest of us.

The piece is instructive in its incoherence.  Although there’s no demonstrable problem, Roper-Batker wants the government to tackle it anyway.

Robbing from the axles to spite the apples.

Note to the German Army; you’ve really screwed the pooch this time.

Germany – a nation that learned “racism is bad” at the point of American bayonets sixty-odd years ago – is dealing with a series of scandals in the Heer, the German Army:

A German army instructor ordered a soldier to envision himself in New York City facing hostile blacks while firing his machine gun, a video that aired Saturday on national television showed.

The president of the Bronx, the New York City borough that the army instructor referred to in his directions to the soldier, demanded an apology from the German military and said the clip “indicates that bias and assumptions and racism is alive and well around the world.”…The clip shows an instructor and a soldier in camouflage uniforms in a forest. The instructor tells the soldier, “You are in the Bronx. A black van is stopping in front of you. Three African-Americans are getting out and they are insulting your mother in the worst ways. … Act.”

The soldier fires his machine gun several times and yells an obscenity several times in English. The instructor then tells the soldier to curse even louder.

On the one hand, it’s encouraging to see that the Germans, after a decade and a half of post-war decline, are teaching their Army to be something other than a peace corps with guns.

On the other – well, that is just plain wrong.  And dumb.

And you’re treading on you know who’s turf…:

The Rev. Al Sharpton said he was outraged that Germans were “depicting blacks as target practice.”

“I think this is an incredibly racist kind of insult to African-Americans and it speaks to the kind of institutional racism that people think we are hallucinating about,” he said.

The bad news:  we might have to deal with a week of hand-wringing from the media about the culture of oppression to Afro-Americans by the German Army.

The good news:  If Al Sharpton is picketing over in Germany, he won’t be here.

I never cared much for Imus.  I can’t say that I’ve listened to him more than a half a dozen times, ever; he never really took off in the Twin Cities (Pointless disclosure: Salem Radio engaged Imus for the morning shift at the re-tooled AM1570 within the past couple of weeks).  I’ve always found his phlegmy, gargly-sounding voice unlistenable; as someone who grew up in the business, I’ve always found the old-school, big-name “shock jocks” (from back when that term meant something) to be deeply distasteful people; and as he developed as a reliable liberal outlet in a medium run by conservatives, I found him (counterintuitively) less and less interesting.

So he’s gone.  Whoop di doo.

Of course, the scandal that led to his demise (?) teaches all the wrong lessons. 

Jason Whitlock writing in the Kansas City Star sums up the real importance of Imus’ demise, and the way it went down.   You need to read the whole thing – but I’m going to excerpt big chunks of it anyway.

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

Exactly.

William Raspberry wrote an excellent column about 15 years ago, officially consigning the petty racism of name-calling to the “Pathetic, Ignore” bin (and I’d love to find that article online somewhere).  Long story short: anyone who thinks that ignorant morons calling black people naughty names is teh biggest problem facing blacks in America today – or even an important one – is deluded. 

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

The only question I have; which bigots? 

Jackson and Sharpton, who believe Blacks in America deserve no better from their “leadership” to wallow in the sort of petty victimhood afforded by a statement as dumb (dumb!) as Imus’?

Or the casual, de facto bigots who control so much of African-American culture in America:

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

If the misogyny and self-loathing in hip-hop were to be directed self-directed at any other ethnic group, psychologists would queue up around the figurative block to try to find the cause of such a cultural dissociation.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

The thesis – that mainstream black culture has become Black America’s worst enemy?

It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.

There is nothing quite as depressing as watching the various “Apollo” comedy specials and tours.  And while Chapelle is funny (in the same way that “Borat” was funny – in a way that I kind of didn’t like myself for finding funny, in many ways), you watch it knowing that behind all comedy is some form of pain or another – and the sense that the “pain” behind the likes of Chapelle and the less-tony black comic community is self-hatred.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.

But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

Worse than a distraction; it’s going to give some of the lesser lights of the “civil rights movement” a sense they’ve “won” something, while the real problems just grind on and on.

And those real problems, more and more, drive Mercedes and wear lots o’ bling:

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

…No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

Read the whole thing.

And ask yourself; with Imus gone but Fitty Cent and Snoop Dogg still acting out a stereotype more corrosive than Stepin’ Fetchit (because nobody seriously aspired to be Mr. Fetchit, while a generation of kids now use the word “pimp” as an adjective of approval), what’s really changed?

 UPDATE:  Flash at Centrisity adds 2,000-odd words to the subject.

Per my post yesterday, I went to last night’s meeting of the Saint Paul School Board.  There, I met Swiftee from “Pair O’ Dice”. 

The mission?  Speak out against the movement by a well-heeled pressure group to ban or hinder military recruiters from Saint Paul School property. 

The actual “public response” portion of the agenda was shorter than I’d expected.  Aside from Swiftee and I (and a woman who was there to testify about an issue that was both unrelated and deeply familiar), the only speakers were a couple of not-overly-articulate kids from “Youth Against War and Racism”, supported by a couple of rows of Volvo (or Subaru)-driving, alpaca-wearing, Whole Foods-shopping, patchouli-reeking, puerile-placard-bearing pro-dictatorship “anti-war” activist types.

It’s always a pleasure to watch Tom Swift engage the School Board.  What he lacks in Ciceronian polish, he makes up for in passion.  It was – as always – a joy to watch Ann Carroll, Swiftee’s nemesis on the board, shrink down behind the desk when Tom teed up.

The fun, as Tom relates, was after the public hearing was over.  The rows of “activists” noisily got up and stampeded for the door like a bunch of Grateful Dead fans who’d heard there was a bag of Fritos in the rest room; Tom and I quietly left via the side door.

And then it got weird:

After receiving a few handshakes from parents and military vets, we were accosted by a young guy with a “Free Palestine” button on his coat who wanted to have a little dialogue with us…sure, I’ll play!

While we listened to his “Haliburton owns the military” spiel…

 Talking with “Eric” was, indeed, of a piece with a pattern I’ve observed in many attempts to engage these people in a rational debate.  When confronted by facts, they inevitably squiggle away into bizarre conspiracy theories and fanciful self-aggrandizing victimization operas. 

Of course, that’s among the ones that make some pretense of rationality, which to be fair, Eric tried.  Others, as I noted in my coverage of the pro-terrorist “Anti-war” demonstration last month, have let the surly bonds of civility slip, as Tom relates.

… a live, breathing specimen of one of Mitch’s patented “smug, alpaca wearing, Volvo driving, tofu and beansprout eating, prematurely grey” female moonbats cruised by to spin the propeller on her tinfoil hat for us by (loudly) proclaiming that George Bush had “arranged” the 9/11 attacks.

As her pencil-necked life partner shuffled her quickly out of smackdown range, with her screaming incoherently all the while (I think it had something to do with chimpyMcbushitler but I can’t be sure), “Free Palestine” informed us that she was frustrated and felt powerless. 

Swiftee is too charitable.  The woman – a late 40-early-50-something who ooozed “college educated government/non-profit worker”, although that’s just a first impression – had veins bulging from her face; she was howling in an ululating tone that suggested she genuinely felt horrified to confront dissent.  “Why don’t you go to Iraq yourself”, she snivelled as her partner shuffled her, all a-vapor, toward their Volvo. 

“So only the military gets to speak?” I yelled after her – but I let her go.  Confronting actual reason would have probably given her a stroke.

I turned back to “Eric”.

“So”, he said, affecting a moist, unctuous, lecturing tone, “how do you rationalize the fact that our military isn’t democratic, but it’s supposedly spreading democracy around the world?”

I stood, stunned.  Swiftee, to his credit, took a whack at it.  Finally, words came to me.

“Of course the military isn’t ‘democratic’ – but it’s controlled by civilians, who are elected.  The military isn’t controlled by a fascist dictatorship”.

“Eric” affected that “gotcha” look that the rhetorically dim take on, looking a bit like a toddler that’d made a really good pants.  “How do you know it’s not a fascist dictatorship”.

“Oh, for chrissake…”, I started, taking a deep breath, ready to lay into him.

Swiftee was, well, swifter.  “I gotta go”, he said, taking his leave.  It was, in retrospect, the right call.

I can’t wait to do it again!

The Saint Paul School Board is going to debate, again, a resolution by a left-wing boutique pressure group to try to hamper military recruiters on Saint Paul school property.

A source close to the issue says

The superintendent [says] there may be protesters there from the left. While they got the opt out form expanded, they are angry they did not get the recruiter ban from cafeterias. I suspect there has been pressure on the board to reconsider that issue at tomorrow night’s meeting.

Proof that madness doesn’t necessarily reign supreme at the SPPS…:

I believe the superintendent is frustrated that [the school board is]  spending so much time on this issue and not on the issues of student achievement. I fully agree with her, and I know you do to.

And there’s a call to action, here:

I know this is short notice, but if any of you can come to them meeting by  6p.m. tomorrow to hear debate and be prepared to speak at 6:30 — if the left starts the attack at the podium. If they appear, do not sign up to speak until they have thrown the first punch. Otherwise they will have the last say …Let them speak first, then sign up. Or, ask if the sign up sheet is broken down by pro and con.If for some reason they don’t speak, and the debate seems to be controlled, then don’t inflame them. But…this time we will need to. Plus, we must force our differences with the left on this issue and drag them kicking and screaming back to the center.

I’m mostly healthy and rarin’ to go, this time.  I’ll be there. Think what you want about the military – but when it comes to giving opportunity to the working-class, minority and immigrant students that the district serves so very very badly, the military has the best record around. The “student” group – and the board members who are carrying their water, Tom Goldstein and Ann Carroll – are upper-middle-class, Highland Park/Crocus Hill/Mac-Groveland limo paleoliberals who care about people of color, immigrants and the poor – the people who are most likely to see the military as a path to opportunity – only as far as they provide them a political sinecure.  They need to be put back in their place.

So I’ll see you there.

The number one item on all the morning shows today?

Don Imus.

Especially on the Today show; NBC has a financial relationship with Imus, who simulcasts his morning show on MSNBC.

Call me a cynic, but I say lLook for Imus’ numbers to boom after his “two week suspension”.

In fact, look for his return to be the most heavily hyped event in the history of radio.

What approach to take to the leftysphere’s latest bit of navel-gazing self-absorption, “Blogs Against Theocracy?”

Detailed, logical destruction of the premise?

it is painful, frustrating, and annoying to read such ignorant drivel. In the past I’ve written numerous posts on the “theocracy canard” in a futile attempt to address this misconception. But for the radical fringe of the secular left–the Chomskyites, the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Rosie O’Donnell–reason and logic are like kryptonite. Because they live on emotion what they feel is what is true, regardless of facts and reality.

The theophobes, however, are a bit unique in that they embrace an infantile brand of libertarian socialism.* Like other leftists, they tend to advocate for collectivist government solutions. But their support ends when government interferes with their “rights” to do as they please. This is why they hate–and hate is not too strong a word–people who refuse to keep their religious beliefs in the closet. Christians, in particular, are considered a group that is always trying to impose their bourgeois standard of morality on society despite how it makes some people feel.

Or satirical, comic mockery of the premise?

I Blog Against Theocracy because I am not afraid to proclaim to all who hear it “I do not believe in Al Gore!” I Blog Against Theocracy because I refuse to accept prophecies of drowning polar bears simply because Al Gore featured an animated dramatization of one in some stupid movie. I Blog Against Theocracy because they label me “sinner” for refusing to drive a speck car and running the air conditioning on 90 degree days while demurring to purchase salvation through “offsets” and “carbon credits”. I Blog Against Theocracy because I am free and I have the innate ability to think critically!

I Blog Against Theocracy because Al Gore and his robotic acolytes have caused more misery to those with common sense than all the wars in history combined.

Logic or mockery? Mockery? Logic?

Oh, mockery it is!

Do we want to live in a world where two plus two equals six? Where a total may not only be less than the sum of its parts, but that can be declared a Good Thing? Where reason itself is cast adrift in the name of faith in untested, untestable, unempirical, “faith”-based solutions to life’s problems?

Not for me! No way, Johann!

And I’m sure you all feel the same. But that’s not why I’m blogging against Theocracy today. I’m blogging because of all the morons who Don’t Think It Can Happen Here.

It can! It can can canny can can can!

Minnesota is being led by a cabal of theosophists, who, in the absence of proof, are demanding that we adopt a faith-based approach to governing our state! Even though there’s never been any empirical proof that you can “pay for a better Minnesota”, even though there’s no evidence that a shortage of money is causing the state’s education system to fail, that single-payer healthcare is anything but a bureaucratic power grab, you – we – are being asked to suspend logic and dig into our wallets – upon threat of government sanction – to pay for it!

And if you don’t go along with their faith-based beliefs, they become abusive – they attack your character, they accuse you of hating children and promoting mediocrity!

Even though there’s no evidence whatsoever that giving them twice as much money as they already have will do a damn bit of good!

I blog against theocracy because it is worse than genocide!

Johnny Hart – the cartoonist who created BC among other strips – is dead at 76.

BC – which used Hart’s evangelical Christianity as source material – was a canary in the PC coalmine; its various religious messages were getting censored by major newspapers long before it was the norm.

Michelle Malkin has a collection of memoria for Hart.

A few years back, in response to the “epidemic” of “deadbeat dads”, a slew of government agencies embarked on a raft of programs to teach fathers “how to be responsible” as parents. The goal? Well, no, it wasn’t some warm ‘n fuzzy desire to make sure every kid grew up with warm memories of Dad.

No, it was to make sure that guys – even though they were and are discriminated against in custody trials, and subject to being “guilty until proven innocent” by the domestic abuse industry, even though it’s a known fact that as many as 50% of domestic abuse allegations brought during divorce proceedings are false – were both able and motivated (or just shamed) into keeping up their child support payments. Especially those owed to various county government bodies from whom their childrens’ mothers were receiving welfare payments, naturally.

Prejudicial? Sure. Degrading to most men, especially men who are non-custodial parents, the vast majority of whom work their asses off to do what they can (and what their childrens’ mothers will allow, in the worst cases) for their kids? Absolutely.

But there’s money involved. So the pants-wetting class among the professional feminist movement is getting involved, wanting women to get a piece of the action.

It’s called the Promoting Responsible Fatherhood Initiative, and the Bush administration doles out up to $50 million annually to fund its programs to build job skills and help fathers connect better with their children. But the National Organization for Women says the effort is illegal because it’s only about men.

NOW and Legal Momentum, another advocacy group, filed complaints yesterday with the Department of Health and Human Services alleging sex discrimination in the initiative that is funding about 100 programs this year.

Cute.

Are NOW and “Legal Momentum” moving to reduce some of the abject discrimination against men in family court? Trying, perhaps, to remove the punitive aspects of child support enforcement? Maybe even moving to enact Presumption of Joint Physical Custody legislation nationwide, so that parenting rather than finances drive family court settlements?

Har di har har.

The complaints cite 34 programs, including one run by the District and two others in the Washington area, that, they say, do not offer the services to women. That, the groups say, violates Title IX, the law that prevents sex discrimination in federally funded education programs and is best known for forcing universities to offer comparable sports programs for men and women.

“What we’re asking them to do is to make sure that the grantees provide equal services to women and men,” said Kathy Rodgers, president of Legal Momentum. “It should be a parenthood initiative.”

Yeah, I’m sure a lot of women – who win 90% of custody cases in “winner takes all” states, and who are the recipients of the vast preponderance of “child support” payments, will be lining up to get into programs that scold and cajole men parents to step up to their obligations.

Oh, wait – maybe they just want the money!

Another group under fire is the Latin American Youth Center in the District, which got a $250,000 annual grant to provide 30 young fathers a year with job training, language classes and parenting skills. But women can enroll, too, said Lori Kaplan, the executive director.

“It doesn’t mean that anywhere along the line our moms are getting excluded,” she said.

The big difference, of course, is that welfare pretty much does exclude able-bodied men who have children who don’t live with them. Much of welfare, today, is indeed targeted at single mothers – women who become single parents either because the system:

• subsidizes illegitimate parenthood
• forces men out of the family before the family can get welfare
• grants, almost exclusively, full custody to women who are frequently unable to support families on their own – and then subsidizes their lifestyle (and administers the fathers’ child support payments).

I didn’t see NOW complaining about that.

Let me know if I missed something.

John Mellencamp on yesterday’s KQ Morning Show, talking about why the US prospered so much during the Baby Boom’s childhood:

(paraphrasing very closely)

During World War II, we bombed everyone else back to the Stone Age!  That’s why we prospered!  There was no competition!

Ah, Coogs.  Silly, silly Coogs.  We did it, huh?  If the US hadn’t been so damn trigger happy, World War II would have worked out for everyone?

Ah, well.  We’ll always have Scarecrow and Lonesome Jubilee.

Schmuck.