Mmmmm . . (Affirmative Action) Bake Sale

Affirmative action is like nepotism: You end up with more unqualified people, and the qualified employees have to live 24 x 7 x 365 with people — including themselves — wondering if they are really there on their merits.  I feel sorry for the qualified minorities hired under Affirmative Action programs.  They can’t just enjoy what they do, they have live with everyone wondering if they really deserved the job.

Then there is the injustice to the more qualified candidates that don’t get hired.  And the customers and citizens subjected to substandard service or even unsafe conditions (in the cases of emergency responders).  Everyone loses.  Affirmative Action may have had a benefit at a point in time, but it has long outlived its usefulness.

In a free market, the bigots will lose.  You want to be stupid and not hire great employees just because they are black, or female, or whatever?  Great!  I’ll hire them and kick your company’s butt because I’ll have the best and brightest on my side.  Just look at the history of how college football became integrated.  The more schools like Alabama got whipped by teams with great black players, the less racist their recruiting practices got.  Go figure. And the athletes didn’t have to wonder if they were selected on their merits.  Blacks compete very well in athletics and entertainment, two of the most brutally competitive fields.  Don’t insult them and other minorities by saying they can’t compete in education and business.

See Berkeley College Republicans hold affirmative action bake sale.

A controversy over cupcakes is heating up at UC Berkeley in California, where campus Republicans are planning to hold an affirmative action bake sale on Tuesday.

At the sale, white men will be charged $2 for a baked good, Asians will pay $1.50, Latinos $1, African-Americans 75 cents and 25 cents for Native Americans, KGO-TV reported.

Women will get a 25 cent discount.

“The pricing structure is there to bring attention, to cause people to get a little upset,” Campus Republican president Shawn Lewis told the TV station. “But it’s really there to cause people to think more critically about what this kind of policy would do in university admissions.”

The Campus Democrats immediately slammed the sale, which Lewis said is meant to take a stand against an affirmative action-like bill for the University of California system that is awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.

On Friday, the student newspaper reported that the student government could vote to defund the Republican group over the bake sale. A hearing is scheduled for Sunday on the fiery issue.

What a shocker: The majority Left can’t take the sting of satire so they have to use their power to oppress free speech.

Didn’t colleges used to encourage independent thought?

Apparently that was only for Liberal ideas. See Stomping out independent thought, Campus USA.

The IDEA club organizers at some universities complain that their activities are severely discouraged by those in authority, presumably so no student even has a chance of being “infected” with such subversive ideas. One leader, at a uiversity in California told me, “Within a year the cimate became very hostile to ID. The trouble started when a professor complained to administrators about our meetings. At the time the resistance from administration started, I was arranging for pro-ID scholars to present at our campus. After monies were already allocated for speakers and travel costs, our IDEA Club was told by administrators that we were not allowed to publicize our events where pro-ID speakers would be presenting. Pressure from administrators suffocated the IDEA Club within the same academic year … Any given professor that ignorantly speaks against ID may be the one who will give me a shot at an internship or research project. Starting an IDEA Club on any campus would be academic and professional suicide.”

Darwinists sure are thin-skinned. It makes you wonder if they lack confidence in their views and are just a bunch of bullies.

As a Christian, I realize that all other worldviews are false. But I don’t do anything to suppress their speech. I welcome examination of the facts. Too bad the allegedly pro-science types don’t do the same.

Since California solved all their other problems, they had time for this

See California passes bill mandating pro-gay teaching in schools, no parent opt-out | LifeSiteNews.com. What a freak state.  The Democrats have run that state into the ground, and now this.  Just another reason to vote Republican.

A bill requiring public schools to teach the “historical contributions” of homosexual Americans was approved by the California legislature on Tuesday, July 5. The bill also prohibits any school material or instruction that reflects adversely on homosexuality, bisexuality or transgenderism, and prohibits parents from removing children from classes over offensive material.

Bill SB 48 was sponsored by openly homosexual state senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and passed in the Democrat-controlled Assembly by 49-25, with all Democrats voting for the bill and Republicans opposing it. The legislation passed the state Senate in April.

If signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, schools would have to introduce the homosexual curriculum after the bill becomes law in January.

“This bill will require California schools to present a more accurate and nuanced view of American history in our social science curriculum by recognizing the accomplishments of groups that are not often recognized,” said Assembly Speaker John Perez, the first openly homosexual speaker of the California Assembly.

Republican critics of the bill observed, however, that the measure has less to do with education than with homosexual indoctrination of school children.

Free speech and video games

Stan got me thinking about recent Supreme Court case about free speech and video games in his post about Free Speech.  For the record, I’m certainly opposed to these violent video games.

Briefly, the story is that the Supreme Court has struck down a California law that made it a crime to sell violent video games to children. It wasn’t even a close vote. The court ruled 7:2. The court made a stunning decision: Make parents responsible for their children. Is there any doubt that our court system (and the nation that supports it) has lost its mind?

This comment will probably reveal that I’m not a lawyer, but doesn’t the 1st Amendment specifically say that “Congress shall make no law . . .” and not “the States . . .?’”  Also, wouldn’t this get in the way of the 10th Amendment?

More importantly, I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the headlines noting that the responsibility to regulate this would now fall on parents.  That’s one of the major problems of people looking to government to solve all their problems.  The government solutions are usually counterproductive, but like drinking salt water the people just look to the government to solve even more problems.

This is just another example of the slippery slope of government intervention.  Countless parents have come to expect the government to feed their kids multiple meals per day, even if it means wildly wasteful programs.  But what could be a more basic responsibility of parents than to feed their kids?

Even though I thought the court’s view of this as a 1st Amendment issue was an overreach, I’m glad to see them err on that side.  It may mean we’ll have just a little more time before any criticism of the LGBTQX agenda is considered illegal.

Shocking!

See OJ Simpson Finally Confesses to Murder.

“‘He told the producer: “Tell Oprah that yes, I did it. I killed Nicole, but it was in self-defence. She pulled a knife on me and I had to defend myself”,’ the insider was quoted as saying.”

. . .

Is there anyone except the 12 morons who were on the original jury that is surprised by this revelation?

Of course it was self-defense! That’s why he went to his “attacker’s” home wearing gloves and carrying a big knife. He had to defend himself!

One of the more egregious side issues of the OJ case was how groups like NOW, the National Organization of (unaborted) Women, rushed to OJ’s defense.  Uh, what about that pesky domestic abuse issue, folks?  That so disturbed Tammy Bruce that she quit NOW (I think she was head of the California chapter at the time) and began to oppose them.

 

Why “soaking the rich” doesn’t work

They are remarkably waterproof.  Game the rules all you like and they will find ways around them, or just move their capital to an environment that isn’t so hostile to it.  Politicians endlessly create and exploit loopholes but arrogantly assume that no one else is as clever as they are and will do the same.

Driven by a combination of bad planning, a lack of understanding of  basic economics and plain old coveting*, California is now doomed to fail.

See Californians flee to red states at Haemet.

In the five-year period from 2005 to 2009, 870,000 people left California.  Most of them went to red states, like Arizona and Texas, wherein jobs are more plentiful, taxes are lower, and housing prices are lower.

Problematically for California, the type of people who leave a failing state are the ones that a state most needs.  The educated, the wealthy, and the ambitious are the ones who will pack up and move, taking their human capital, their assets, and their earning capacity to other states.  Most of the people who stay are the ones who need the strong and able to carry them.  California is on its way to a death spiral, wherein everything it will need to do will only exacerbate its problems.

This why we need simplified tax structures.  Yes, some will take advantage of them, but they always will.  Having a tax code multiple times the size of the Bible is doomed to fail.  It just increases bureaucracy and wastes money.  We also need to get rid of public-sector unions and radically cut back the welfare state.

* Remember that one?  It made the top 10 list.

From the “I am not making this up category” . . .

I really wish I was making this up.  Public schools in California (yeah, it is a freak state, but many of these things spread to the rest of the country) are teaching children as young as 5 about how “normal” transgenderism is.  This is state sanctioned, taxpayer-funded child abuse.  I know this goes on, but it is always extra-creepy to see it on video.  To state the obvious, this is one more reason to seriously consider home-schooling.

From Coming to a Public School Near YOU?

Fox News covered a class full of kindergartners in California being taught that you can feel like a girl, feel like a boy, feel like both, or feel like neither.

. . .

The group brought in to teach children these lessons (allegedly to prevent bullying) is called Gender Spectrum.

“People can be girls, feel like girls, they can feel like boys, they can feel like both, and they can even feel, like I said, kinda like neither.”

Hey theological Liberals and wimpy orthodox Christians who caved to the political correctness of the gay lobby pressure instead of standing up for the truth: Congratulations, this is what you’ve enabled.   As predicted many times, this is a logical consequence of supporting civil rights for sexual preferences.

Remember, you don’t need to poison the minds of kids to teach them not to bully.  All you need is a simple and thoroughly enforced anti-bullying policy: If you physically or verbally harass other students on or off school grounds you will have swift and serious consequences. It doesn’t matter if you are bullying because they are gay/straight/fat/thin/smart/dumb/pretty/ugly/etc., or if it is just because you are a mean jerk. Lesson over.

Hat tip: Glenn

Dear California, Thanks for the jobs! Love, Texas

Via Growing jobs big in Texas « Hot Air.

A month ago, California legislators trekked to Texas to visit all the new jobs that didn’t land in their own state to figure out what went wrong.

I could have saved them a trip: Stop being a wildly liberal state!  Get real conservative, real fast, and businesses will come back.  Become a Right to Work state, reduce taxes and regulatory burdens, etc.  Pretty basic stuff.

But that will never happen.  Good for Texas, bad for California.  The differences are enormous, especially considering that Texas and California share some significant problems — such as vast numbers of  illegal aliens.

According to BizJournals, a few dozen other states might want to make the same trip.  Over the last ten years, Texas has added more than 732,000 jobs net as the state withstood the worst recession in decades.  The next best state, Arizona, didn’t even make it into six figures:

. . .

Of course, Washington DC ended up 7th on the job-growth list — thanks to the federal government’s expansion at the expense of the states.

Which state did worse?  Why, California, of course.  They even managed to outstrip Michigan, where the downturn in the auto industry and collapse of GM and Chrysler threw tens of thousands out of work.

. . .

What do Texas, Utah, and Arizona all have in common?  They are all right-to-work states.  Among the top five states, only Washington does not have right-to-work laws allowing employees free choice whether to join unions.  Seven of the top ten job-growth states are right-to-work.

. . .

A new report from South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint’s office shows that right-to-work states, or states which prohibit forced unionization and dues payments, are economically outperforming states without the worker protection.

According to DeMint’s study, right-to-work states enjoy more new residents, more new businesses, more new jobs, and faster income growth.

The study shows that more Americans are moving to right-to-work states, causing states that force unionization to lose seats in Congress.

Texas has also worked hard over the decade to lower regulatory burdens and taxes on job creators.  Rick Perry has made this one of his signature achievements, and he has repeatedly challenged other states to start competing with Texas on job creation.  They have a long way to go before they can dethrone the champion, it appears, and most of them haven’t yet started to take the Texas approach seriously — which is nowhere more true than in Washington DC and the Obama administration.

Green lobby plan to destroy jobs & farmland, raise food prices and save a fish is partially successful

And by partially I mean that it did destroy the jobs & farmland and raised food prices.  But it didn’t help the fish. This was a stupid plan even if it would have helped the fish, but it is crime-of-the-decade stupid for causing nothing but destruction.  When will we learn not to trust the Greens?

The green lobby assured everyone it knew what it was doing when it got a judge to cut water to Central Valley farmers to save the delta smelt. But while the Valley economy is now ruined, it hasn’t helped the smelt.

Some day, environmental radicals will be held accountable for crimes against the ecosystem — the human ecosystem.

Back in 2007, they convinced federal Judge Oliver Wanger to rule that the Endangered Species Act gave the federal government the right to cut water to thousands of farmers in California’s Central Valley to protect a 3-inch baitfish called the delta smelt.

That ruling turned many of the Valley’s prized vineyards and almond groves into wastelands. Jobs were lost, family farms were shut, fields went fallow and food prices rose.

But there’s been just one problem with this overreaching of the law: Cutting off water didn’t save the smelt.

A draft of a new study from the Delta Stewardship Council shows the water cutoffs had no effect on the smelt. The smelt remains endangered even as farmers have been punished with a policy that cut off as much as 90% of their water.

Federal Judge Proven to Be Wrong « Timothy Matters.

Feminism unmasked

If the feminist movement was authentic, there would be many things you’d expect to see that don’t happen.

• When a Jerry Brown staffer called Meg Whitman a whore, you’d expect NOW — the National Organization of (unaborted) Women – to back Whitman, not Brown.  But even though Whitman is pro-abortion, she has the audacity to oppose partial-birth abortion (aka infanticide) and supports parental notification laws (so your public schools can’t take your daughter to have your grandchild destroyed without your knowledge).  Therefore, Whitman is unsupportable by NOW, even when a male on her male opponent’s team calls her a whore.
• They should be rejoicing about all the Republican women running for office.  But alas, they aren’t pro-abortion so NOW hates them the way they hate Sarah Palin.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.  Feminism isn’t about helping women, it is about abortion and the destruction of the family.

Only in California

Proposition 2 passed, meaning that farm animals will have more reasonably sized cages.  No objections there.

Proposition 4 failed, meaning that girls under 18 can get abortions without parental consent.

Chickens can now move about more freely while the destruction of unborn human beings continues.  The children of California parents can have extremely serious medical procedures and their grandchildren can be destroyed, all without their knowledge.

Now if the girls were carrying chickens instead of human beings, it would be a different story.

To enable our children to take a single Advil at school, we had to take an original bottle there and fill out a form. If we wanted to retrieve the unused pills at the end of the year, we had to return to school. That seems overly cautious to me, but given the drug problems in schools I suppose I can understand it.

But contrast that with those who oppose parental notification laws for abortions performed on minors. They want public school officials to be able to whisk your daughter off to have surgery which would risk her physical and mental health in addition to killing your grandchild. The surgery would take place at a clinic with lower standards than hospitals have. They might be covering up a statutory rape as well, as that is often the case with teen pregnancies.

32 percent were worried about the risk in notifying parents, even though emergency clauses and notification of an adult relative are included. 

The typical argument put forth by those opposing these laws is that the girls might get abused if the parents were notified. But that is really poor reasoning. Using that logic, teachers couldn’t send home progress reports, report cards or disciplinary notes because the parents might abuse the children. Police couldn’t even arrest teens who committed crimes.

Of course, I’m against child abuse and think it should be punished. But the risk of it is hardly an excuse not to have parental notification laws, especially when there are emergency clauses in place.

California Schemin’

First, let me ‘fess up to shamelessly borrowing stealing the title from Marshall Art’s place.  That song is one of my all time favorites, and I can actually play it on the guitar.  Sort of.

The California Supreme court “same-sex marriage” decision was predictable though unfortunate.  I usually avoid bits on news that everybody is blogging on, but here are a few thoughts.

These judges over-rode the will of the people.  It is as simple as that.  Hopefully this will get California and other states to pass marriage amendments and get people behind a Federal Amendment as well.

“Same-sex marriage” is the oxymoron of the decade: A same-sex union of a man and a woman. 

The precedent isn’t that one man can also marry one man, or that one woman can also marry one woman.  Rather, it is that marriage is no longer just between one man and one woman.  The judges redefined marriage to mean that it can be anything we want it to be, including polygamy, incest and bestiality.  They didn’t spell that out, but it is the logical consequence of the “decision.”

As usual, the pro-gay media emphasized that this was about “love.”  Nonsense.  No one was preventing these people from loving each other before, or even getting married.  It just means the government must recognize the unions.  Does anyone seriously think that a role of the government is to get involved with love?  Government primarily gets involved in marriages because by nature and design marriages produce the next generation. 

I mainly feel sorry for the California school kids, who will have more of the GLBTQ “normalcy” crammed down their throats, just like in Massachussetts.

I encourage you to speak out against it while you still can legally, because by granting civil rights to deviant sexual practices it proclaims that quoting certain parts of the Bible are legally bigoted. 

Here’s a piece I wrote last year:

Some random thoughts on same-sex unions . . .

Basics

The definition of marriage has always been a union of one man and one woman, so “traditional marriage” is a redundancy and “same sex marriage” is an oxymoron. But current events have forced the added words.

Claiming that marriage can be for two men or two women isn’t a little different than saying it is between a man and a woman, it is the opposite.  It is claiming that marriage is not just between a man and a woman and that “marriage” is now whatever we want to define it to be.

Valid issues 

I am sympathetic to hospital and estate issues of gay and lesbian couples, but I think they can be addressed without redefining marriage and generating a slew of unintended consequences.

For example, estate taxes should be done away with altogether.  The government should not profit when you die, regardless of your sexual preferences.  And hospital patients should be allowed to have anyone they like visit them. 

I am also sympathetic to how gays and lesbians feel about many churches being soft on divorce, heterosexual adultery and fornication but not on homosexual behavior.  But the answer is not to lower the bar further, it is to get back to the Biblical model of human sexuality.

Equal rights? 

The issue is often framed as if gays are being denied something.  Gays are free to marry in this country and they do it every day.  Some apostate churches will be glad to perform the ceremony.  Whole industries are set up to help you plan and execute the festivities and set up a household.  The debate is whether the government has an interest in recognizing these unions. 

By nature and by design, homosexual unions cannot and will not produce the next generation.  It is only by exception that these relationships involve children.  Therefore, the government has no reason to interfere with or regulate those relationships.  (Please spare me any arguments that heterosexuals must have kids for this reasoning to be valid.  We’re talking rules, not exceptions.)

Sometimes the “but they love each other” argument is used to support same-sex unions.  I realize that some gays and lesbians love each other.  So what?  What possible reason would the government have to be involved in a relationship just because love is involved?  Plenty of marriages don’t have love.  Many marriages in the world are still arranged. 

Aside from the marriage question, remember that adding sex to a loving relationship doesn’t make it better.  There are plenty of loving relationships (parent/child, siblings, pastor / parishoner, teacher / student) that are made worse by sex, not better.  Whatever happened to just having friends of the same sex?

I realize this isn’t satisfying for them, but gays and lesbians have the exact same rights that heterosexuals do: They can marry someone of the opposite sex.  Heterosexuals can’t marry someone of the same sex either.

Also see Denying Same-Sex Marriage Isn’t Unequal Protection.

Why it matters 

People often wonder why same-sex unions are met with such opposition.  The main reason for me is that when governments recognize same-sex unions then they have given civil rights for sexual preferences.  This leads directly to radical changes in what children are taught in schools, and it shuts down debate.  It will ultimately result to an attempted silencing of the church.  All these things are either happening in the U.S. or other countries already.  It has already impacted the adoption process.

If you love kids – and by love I mean that you have their long term best interests at heart – you won’t support civil rights for sexual perversions, because this will lead to more sickening things being pushed on innocent children.

Civil unions are just a smokescreen for eventually getting “same sex marriages” to be legal everywhere.  It is a two-step ploy: 1.  Gain Civil Union status by acting as if they would be satisfied with all the rights without the legal recognition and associated societal approval of marriage.  2. Point out how there is no difference with the rights of Civil Unions and marriage so we might as well make “same sex marriage” legal as well. 

“Same sex marriage” already resulted in radical changes to adoption and parenting laws. Who is looking out for the children?  Sexual preference with respect to partners is considered immutable and paramount – i.e., a gay guy can never change and he has to have another gay guy as a partner.  A masculine woman just won’t do, nor will a biological female who thinks she is really a male. 

But sexual preference with respect to parents is supposedly irrelevant – it doesn’t matter if a child’s parents are M/F, M/M or F/F (or who knows what combination).  They are all supposedly equal in value.  Let’s put the interests of the children first on this one and not repeat the big lie that adults are vulnerable but children are not. 

Who is being divisive?

Charles Krauthammer said, “Until the last few years, every civilization known to man has defined marriage as between people of opposite sex. To charge with “divisiveness” those who would do nothing more than resist a radical overturning of that norm is a sign of either gross partisanship or serious dimwittedness.”

Polls continue to show that the vast majority of Americans disapprove of “same-sex marriage,” even when the wording of the questions is skewed to favor it.  Even Massachussetts was afraid to let the people have a say in the matter.  That speaks volumes.

The Democratic party has flailed around on this issue. Apparently they haven’t noticed that every state that has voted on the topic has affirmed traditional marriage by an average of an 70/30 ratio, because they are once again in bed (so to speak) with the gay lobby.

Howard Dean, head of the Democrats, hypocritically said that his party supported traditional marriages then back-tracked after catching heat from the pro-gay groups. He then said they wanted to leave it to the states. Now it turns out that they wanted to work behind the scenes to oppose state efforts to affirm traditional marriage. Here is my favorite part of the Dem’s 5 point plan to fight for the homosexual marriage that they supposedly weren’t fighting for:

Labeling efforts to ban homosexual marriage as “divisive” ploys by the Republicans and others to deflect voter attention from other important issues, including “the Bush’s administration’s failed policies.”

Let’s see - marriage is clearly defined as being between a man and a woman, the vast majority of Americans agree, Democrats want to change that, so the conclusion is . . . Conservatives are the ones being divisive.  Of course.

Church issues

I half expect the culture to come up with such ideas, but I’m disgusted at how the apostate churches and false teachers the churches have let in are pushing for same-sex marriages to be normalized.  Pro-gay theology falls apart at every turn, but people continue to mock God with it.  I’m hoping the Episcopal fallout emboldens Bible-believing Methodists (and those in other denominations) to stand firm in the face of the movement.

Miscellaneous 

If I were black I would be really irritated that the gay rights lobby was co-opting Civil Rights language for their cause.  This is a very simple proposition: There is no moral component to skin color, but there is a moral component to sexual behavior.  

Don’t forget the push for polygamy and multiple gay couples raising kids.  These are logical consequences of Civil Unions and/or “same sex marriage.”