Education and the New White Man’s Burden of the Left

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the way the leftist mantras go:

All white people are responsible for the sins of every white person throughout time.

Unlike whites, not only are all non-white people not collectively responsible for the sins of other non-white people, but non-white people are responsible for no sins. Even the individual non-white person is not responsible for his/her own individual sins.

Instead, white people are responsible for the sins of non-white people as well. If a non-white person commits a crime, for example, it’s because he/she has been driven to it by a condition caused by white people, such as poverty, injustice, and unemployment.

I wrote the above before I saw this letter from an anonymous person self-identified as a UC Berkeley professor of history. Here’s an excerpt:

…I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”. “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam.

These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department…

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

Near the end of the letter, the author – who describes him/herself as a “person of color” – writes:

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites.

This is the same message Shelby Steele delivered in the video I posted previously today. It’s something various black conservative academics have been saying for quite some time now. To me, it rings true and makes psychological sense. But it’s been drowned out, for the most part. Why is that?

I believe it’s because it’s a tough-love type of message, hard to hear and even harder to act on. It is also more cerebral than the competing message, which is deeply emotional and shouted to the rooftops by the MSM and just about every cultural institution in the US today. How can the quiet message of the Shelby Steeles of the world compete?

The NY Times was clever in pushing its deeply mendacious 1619 Project to rewrite American history. Never mind that historians across the land – even historians sympathetic to the left – spoke out against it and tried to correct it. Their cries of “False!” haven’t won the day, because I’m sorry to say that there are way too many people uninterested in the facts as opposed to the emotionally satisfying narrative, and believing history is just a bunch of competing narratives anyway. Why not come up with the narrative you want to be true, and spread it around?

All one has to do is watch the statues being pulled down or defaced these days – including those of abolitionists and people such Lincoln – to understand that the “America and its history are irredeemably evil” message has won the day, at least with enough people willing to act on it and enough people supposedly in charge of our institutions willing to step aside and let them do it.

How else to explain the inclusion of the destruction of monuments to those who fought against slavery? No heroes are allowed to remain – certainly no old white heroes – in the story of America’s original sin of racism. All are collectively guilty.

The seeds of this were planted long ago – even earlier than this passage from Allan Bloom’s 1987 work The Closing of the American Mind:

Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions of any nation in the world. What is more, that tradition is unambiguous; its meaning is articulated in simple, rational speech that is immediately comprehensible and powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings. America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its political foundings on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us. No one serious or notable has stood outside this consensus…All significant political disputes have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness. Nowhere else is there a tradition or a culture whose message is so distinct and unequivocal…

But the unity, grandeur and attendant folklore of the founding heritage was attacked from so many directions in the last half-century that it gradually disappeared from daily life and from textbooks. It all began to seem like Washington and the cherry tree—not the sort of thing to teach children seriously. What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools. The leading ideas of the Declaration began to be understood as eighteenth-century myths or ideologies. Historicism, in Carl Becker’s version (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922) both cast doubt on the truth of the natural rights teaching and optimistically promised that it would provide a substitute. Similarly Dewey’s pragmatism—the method of science as the method of democracy, individual growth without limits, especially natural limits—saw the past as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a hindrance to rational analysis of our present. Then there was Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 1913). Then the Southern historians and writers avenged the victory of the antislavery Union by providing low motives for the North (incorporating European critiques of commerce and technology) and idealizing the South’s way of life. Finally, in curious harmony with the Southerners, the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American principles are, racist…

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

Again, contemplate that that was published in 1987 and probably written somewhat earlier. The ground was prepared long ago, and what Bloom wrote in his book could be considered a sort of prophetic vision of things to come, but a prophecy of the logical rather than the extra-sensory variety.

NBC goes after The Federalist and enlists Google in the campaign

The New Neo Posted on by

The goal is to starve conservative outlets of money and ultimately reduce their reach, leaving the MSM the only ones standing.

The accusation in this case? This:

Criticizing the media.

NBC wrote a story and demanded that Google do something about Google ads appearing on The Federalist.

“The Federalist published an article claiming the media had been lying about looting and violence during the protests, which were both included in the report sent to Google.”

Another complaint was about comments at the Federalist that NBC thinks are racist. But under present law and usage, comments have not been considered the responsibility of sites such as The Federalist, or blogs such as this one. I police mine to a certain extent, but that’s a personal preference.

NBC also refers to The Federalist as a “far-right” site. Ludicrous. I read the Federalist regularly and it’s one of the best, most well-reasoned, most basic conservative and somewhat libertarian sites on the internet. Nothing “far” about it, except to the left.

Oh, and the NBC division devoted to this sort of thing is called the “NBC News Verification Unit.” So apparently NBC has its own little MiniTruth, dedicated to trolling rival conservative sites and reporting them to Teacher Google.

See also this post at Legal Insurrection for more information.

Every American should be outraged at this. But I assume at this point that many (most?) will either not hear about it, or will just shrug and say “Well, they deserved it, they’re racist liars.”

Oh, and as the LI post points out:

I mean, hello, has anyone ever ventured into the cesspool of YouTube comments? Anyone? Google should be banning itself, if the standard were equally applied.

Also under attack is ZeroHedge; I’m not especially familiar with that one. But I am extremely familiar with the Federalist. And I’m extremely familiar with YouTube comments, which are the Wild West and often quite a repository of all sorts of hate.

I don’t have ads on my site. I could get a little revenue from them, but not enough to make a difference, and I don’t like the look of ads nor the way they slow a site down. And I don’t want to be beholden to an ad provider; I’d rather just ask for money directly.

Which reminds me…I may do that soon. I’m obviously not the most effective business person on earth.

[ADDENDUM: Please see this as well.]

Re-education camps for us kulaks

The New Neo Posted on by

This guy is advocating it:

On Monday, Palmer informed his 330,000 Twitter followers that conservatives cannot be teachers, police officers, doctors, lawyers, coaches or hold any position of management or leadership. In fact, Palmer doesn’t even think conservatives are human beings and should only be allowed menial labor jobs until he determines they are ready to join the human race.

“Conservatives CANNOT be teachers, police officers, doctors, lawyers, coaches, or bosses. It’s constitutionally unfair to others who are subjected to the conservative’s deranged judgment. Conservatives can do menial work until they’re ready to join the human race,” he said…

“We should rehabilitate any conservatives who are willing to try. We should pay for them to undergo therapy and retraining so they can understand the world around them. But first we must get them out of positions of influence, because they’re infringing on the rights of others,” he added.

One of the responses to the tweets (Palmer’s tweets themselves are now removed) was “Ok, Stalin.” Actually, I wonder whether Palmer is even aware of Soviet history, or that of Cambodia. But it doesn’t really matter, because it probably wouldn’t change his mind.

Perhaps you can dismiss Palmer as being on the fringe, although with a third of a million followers it wouldn’t seem that way. But the speed at which events are moving indicates that today’s fringe can easily be tomorrow’s mainstream, and even those who are against something like this could already be afraid to speak up.

And isn’t something akin to this policy already being followed, to a certain extent? Universities only have a few conservatives left as professors and I’m not at all sure that any conservatives remain as administrators. Teachers, likewise. Mainstream journalism, for the most part, also has been purged and the process is being further refined, with the remaining conservatives and/or moderates relegated to what the left calls Faux News. The left is now busy getting rid of scientists who are not following the leftist party line. And social media platforms are disproportionately banning conservative voices.

And then there’s that Utopian street fair Summer of Love extravaganza in Seattle known as CHAZ:

Almost immediately, activists established a social structure based on a “reverse hierarchy of oppression”: Native American, black, and trans women are the highest authority; diversity determines individual social status; and whites are called upon to perform rituals of atonement. Through a series of speeches and community gatherings, activists have sought to implement the social theory of “decolonization,” which, in the words of Black Lives Matter activist Nikkita Oliver, means overthrowing capitalism, eliminating the structures of “patriarchy, white supremacy, and classism,” and returning the land of the autonomous zone to displaced Native American tribes.

In practice, the CHAZ leadership has taken small steps toward reversing the power structure and redistributing resources. Black and Native American speakers have been “centered” in leadership roles in all community meetings, with white audience members asked to “move past guilt or fragility” and “commit to long-term action and accountability.” At one evening event, an indigenous-rights activist with a purple bandana wrapped around his face announced a campaign for immediate small-scale reparations: “I want you to give $10 to one African-American person from this autonomous zone,” he said to a large crowd gathered on a baseball field. “White people, I see you. I see every one of you, and I remember your faces. You find that African-American person and you give them $10.”

Though activists have largely succeeded in creating a multiracial coalition, the CHAZ leaders have sometimes adopted policies of explicit segregation, with some spaces reserved for BIPOC—“Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.” Activist Marcus Henderson, an urban farmer with an engineering degree from Stanford, created a shared agricultural project in Cal Anderson Park with a sign announcing: “THIS GARDEN IS FOR BLACK AND INDIGENOUS FOLKS AND THEIR PLANT ALLIES.” As Henderson told reporters, the urban garden is a response to “the question of how Black people have been disenfranchised for so long” and a demonstration of “collective land ownership, taking back property and really making it work for the people.”

Who are the true racists here?

Please read the whole thing.

Coleman Hughes: our moral confusion

The New Neo Posted on by

I agree with Coleman Hughes that the images we see on videos such as George Floyd’s death tap into older images in a way that arouses emotion rather than logic:

An article written by Hughes can be found here.

Hughes is about 24 years old, which I find encouraging in terms of hope for the younger generation. Here he uses the kind of thinking I gravitate to: logic based on evidence. As I wrote earlier today, I think the majority of people are more than willing to ignore such things in favor of emotion. Our current educational system, the MSM, and social media platforms such as Twitter reward and magnify emotion over reason, accentuating and augmenting that human tendency.

[NOTE: Pure logic without any emotion can sometimes produce awful results as well.]

Orthodox Jews in NY fight back against their oppressor de Blasio

The New Neo Posted on by

In addition, there’s this lawsuit:

Two Catholic priests and a trio of Orthodox Jews are suing Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo — accusing them of an “unprecedented abuse of power” in shuttering houses of worship while supporting mass protests…

“These orders, both the emergency stay-home and reopening plan declarations, clearly discriminate against houses of worship,” their attorney, Christopher Ferrara, said in a statement. “They are illegally content-based, elaborate, arbitrary and pseudo-scientific.”

“A victory for LGBT rights” – but a trashing of separation of powers

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve already written about yesterday’s SCOTUS decision in which the majority said that the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employers from firing gay or transgender people because of those traits. But I want to add some further thoughts.

In Justice Alito’s dissent, he wrote this summary of what the Court was asked to do, and I think it states the situation quite well:

Many will applaud today’s decision because they agree on policy grounds with the Court’s updating of Title VII. But the question in these cases is not whether discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity should be outlawed. The question is whether Congress did that in 1964.

This outcome of this case underlines larger principles. The first is one I’ve discussed many times before: content vs. process. People who are applauding the content, which is the expansion of LGBT rights, are ignoring the process. Alito is emphasizing that accomplishing this end through a tortured and unjustified re-interpretation of the 1964 bill is the wrong process, and a dangerous one at that. It appeals to emotion rather than cognition, and ignores the long-term negatives of achieving a goal this way. At least theoretically, either side could use arguments like this to circumvent the protections built into the Constitution, protections that involve the separation of powers.

The left is far less threatened by the precedent of overreach, because the left knows conservatives are ordinarily big on process and are less likely to do that. Conservatives tend to hold the line rather than invent rights that never existed before (such as liberals did in Roe).

For liberal judges to justify what they do is easy. For supposedly conservative judges who want to vote with the liberals it’s harder. But where there’s a will there’s a way (for example, Roberts is a master of the technique, Humpty Dumpty-esque in his ability to find his own meanings in words).

And if judges and SCOTUS justices can do it, why not everyone else? Journalists certainly have no trouble with it, so that the LA Times op-ed headline reads, “The Supreme Court victory for LGBTQ rights is also a triumph for the rule of law.” The first part of that title is correct, the second incorrect. The op-ed (but perhaps not the title?) was written by the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, and the reasoning is similar to that of the majority opinion. The vast majority of people reading that op-ed won’t even understand the conservative argument against it, much less agree with it.

The decision is certainly not a triumph for one of the most important principles of our Constitution, separation of powers, but that phrase doesn’t appear in the piece. The fact that the proper route to have achieved this same “victory for LGBT rights” is the Congressional one – an approach which has been tried but so far has been unsuccessful – is completely lost in the celebration over the outcome.

I think for conservatives the really hard thing about this decision is twofold. One is that the twists of reasoning that Gorsuch and Roberts had to go through to get to their desired result are unusually convoluted. The other is that although conservatives are used to Roberts voting with the liberals, so much so that he has almost become a swing vote, the defection of Gorsuch was unexpected.

Many people are puzzled and angered by the tendency of liberal judges never to defect from the liberal line while conservative judges often do. I’m really not puzzled by it, and I don’t ascribe to the usual conspiracy or “stab in the back” theories to explain it. I actually think it’s rather simple.

Justices are human beings, and human beings have a strong tendency to rationalize cutting corners to get where they want to go emotionally. Judges and SCOTUS justices are hardly above that urge, and what’s more, they are given enormous power. If an ordinarily or previously conservative judge has sympathy/empathy for a cause – let’s say it’s the right of a gay person not to be fired for being gay, which is a principle with which many if not most Americans would agree, as long as religious rights are preserved – then that judge just might try to find a rationale and/or rationalization for getting there. Judges are good, really really good, at argument. And so, in their haste to reach that goal, and succumbing to the temptation that is always present when a person is given great power, they sometimes find a reason to justify the result they want. They then tell themselves they’ve done the right thing. Their conservative colleagues who hold the line (Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh in this case) are seen by much of the public as the old meanies who are out to harm gay and trans people. That’s a difficult position to be in.

The poet Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” a sentiment I’ve never quote understood. I don’t think he meant it the way I would rephrase it, which is that emotions drive a great deal of what passes as reasoning. Judges are not poets. But judges have become the true “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

[ADDENDUM: See also this for my take on the “Bill vs. Amy” argument presented here.]

The enforcement of ideological purity: how the topic of black-on-black crime is handled by the left

The New Neo Posted on by

Matt Taibbi writes

Probably the most disturbing story involved Intercept writer Lee Fang, one of a fast-shrinking number of young reporters actually skilled in investigative journalism…

Yet Fang found himself denounced online as a racist, then hauled before H.R. His crime? During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:

“I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?… Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.”

That seems pretty straightforward to the rest of us, right? Fang interviews a black man in an inner city neighborhood, a person whose family has suffered from crime at the hands of other black people. No one can deny such violence occurs with unfortunate frequency and causes great harm in the US, and that the primary burden is borne by lower-income black people whose plight and suffering the left claims to care about a great deal.

But the left sees something quite different in this interview, and although the quoted black man escapes criticism, the left makes clear to Fang that Fang has transgressed in one of the worst possible ways. He has discussed a forbidden topic:

Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang’s, Akela Lacy, wrote, “Tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to. This isn’t about me and him, it’s about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired.” She followed with, “Stop being racist Lee.”

The tweet received tens of thousands of likes and responses along the lines of, “Lee Fang has been like this for years, but the current moment only makes his anti-Blackness more glaring,” and “Lee Fang spouting racist bullshit it must be a day ending in day.” A significant number of Fang’s co-workers, nearly all white, as well as reporters from other major news organizations like the New York Times and MSNBC and political activists (one former Elizabeth Warren staffer tweeted, “Get him!”), issued likes and messages of support for the notion that Fang was a racist. Though he had support within the organization, no one among his co-workers was willing to say anything in his defense publicly.

Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all directions. He’s written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and “obviously on the right,” and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he described as “jarring,” “deeply isolating,” and “unique in my professional experience.”

To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for “insensitivity to the lived experience of others.” According to one friend of his, it’s been communicated to Fang that his continued employment at The Intercept is contingent upon avoiding comments that may upset colleagues. Lacy to her credit publicly thanked Fang for his statement and expressed willingness to have a conversation; unfortunately, the throng of Intercept co-workers who piled on her initial accusation did not join her in this.

In another article I read about what happened to Fang – which I unfortunately can’t locate at the moment – there was an even fuller explanation of why discussion of black-on-black crime is considered racist by the left. It’s what you’d expect, if you’re familiar with leftist thought on race. First of all, such talk is verboten because it’s an argument that the right sometimes uses, which of course makes it racist by definition because everyone knows that the right is racist. But it’s also racist because it blames black-on-black crimes on black people, as though they are at fault, which of course they’re not because everything seemingly bad that a black person does is a result of systemic racism at the hands of white people. So to mention black-on-black crime without blaming white people for it is to be racist. QED.

Forget about Maximum Fr, whose family is outraged and grieving at what happened to their loved ones. Maximum Fr is not to be blamed, though, because in the mind of the left he doesn’t know any better. He said what he said about black-on-black crime because he’s not educated as to the real causes. He’s not an anti-black racist, he’s just ignorant. His opinion does not count. It’s the young reporter Lee Fang, whose progressive credentials are peerless (ThinkProgress, The Nation) who’s to blame because he should know better.

Even the fact that Fang was quoting another person such as Maximum Fr rather than making the statement himself is no excuse, because such remarks must be censored no matter who utters them. They inflame the tender sensibilities – not of inner city black people such as Maximum Fr – but of Fang’s mostly white leftist colleagues. Fang (who I’m going to assume is most likely an American of predominantly Chinese heritage, which would give him no favored-group status at all) has transgressed and must be made to apologize or become an unperson. One never knows if the apology will be enough, but apparently in this case it was.

For now.

Fang, of course, had a choice. He didn’t have to apologize. If he didn’t apologize, he wasn’t going to be executed or even sent to an actual Gulag – just a social one. He would have become persona non grata at every liberal media outlet in the US, and apparently he was not willing to do that. A conservative outlet might have hired him, but he wasn’t ready to cast his lot with a group he probably still considers The Enemy. So he apologized and kept his job.

But maybe, if he’s a true person of the left, his apology wasn’t just pragmatic. It may have been sincere. Like Winston Smith at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in Fang’s case without even the need for torture and major re-education, perhaps he was ready to sincerely admit the error of his ways. If that was the case, to me it’s even more frightening than if Fang had just sucked it up in order to keep his job. But if he was sincere, it’s a demonstration of how leftists manage to absorb new information and to integrate it into their pre-existing mental map of what’s acceptable and unacceptable. Depending on how far left Fang is, he might just decide that if all the other leftists say he’s guilty of thoughtcrime here, it must therefore be so.

I know nothing of Fang except this anecdote and his previous credentials, so I haven’t a clue what’s been going on in his head. But in either case, what happened to Fang is an example of what’s been happening all over the nation at the hands of the left: the enforcement of ideological purity. Anyone truly moderate has already been purged from the group or never was part of it in the first place. Now we see the further refinement of what’s acceptable and what is not, a narrowing-down of the list of allowable thoughts and statements, and the continuing shift further and further to a unitary doctrinaire ultra-left point of view.

Conform or be shunned, shamed, and ostracized. Only the most courageous of individuals who think for themselves can defy that – and the left is not loaded with that sort of person to begin with. I’m not sure how common such traits are in general, either, but my guess is they’re rather rare.

Shhh! Contact tracers for COVID cannot ask about attendance at protests or riots

The New Neo Posted on by

They are oh-so-serious about contact tracing – except:

The supposed army of 1,000+ pandemic contact tracers in New York City will hit a roadblock this week as they assess the risk of disease spread from COVID-19 positive patients. Mayor Bill de Blasio has forbidden the tracers from asking sick patients if they attended one of the many George Floyd related protests in the nation’s most populous city, giving the tracers an insurmountable barrier as they ostensibly keep New Yorkers safer.

“No person will be asked proactively if they attended a protest,” de Blasio spokesperson Avery Cohen told The City. Surveyors recruited as part of de Blasio’s “test and trace” campaign will instead ask a series of indirect questions about whom the sick individual may have contacted in recent days.

There is nothing at all surprising about this. The protestors and rioters have been protected classes from the start, allowed to gather freely in huge numbers and as close as they like. And not just any protestors – only those protesting the Floyd killing, not those protesting (for example) the shutdowns.

And de Blasio continues his war on Chasidic Jews:

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered gates at a park in a Jewish area welded shut to keep people out despite simultaneously approving numerous mass gatherings of BLM protesters.

In other news, de Blasio is out sick with GI problems that are among those listed as possible COVID symptoms but refuses to take a COVID test.

SCOTUS justices legislate from the bench again

The New Neo Posted on by

The issue was job discrimination:

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in a decision that protects LGBT people from job discrimination.

They decided “that an employer who fires a worker for being gay or transgender violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which already protected people from sex discrimination.”…

Title of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “prohibits employers from discriminating against workers, including in hiring and firing decisions, based on an employee’s sex.”

Gorsuch and Roberts voted for the majority opinion.

Well, I’m not a SCOTUS justice. Obviously. But I have an opinion, too, and it’s that this sort of thing is the job of the legislature. In 1964, there already were homosexuals out in the world of employment, and if the legislators had meant to include them they would have done so. Now, I don’t see that such legislation would even be hard to pass. But Congress has not yet passed it.

So SCOTUS took matters into its own hands, which it has done so many times before, and broadened the definition of a word to include phenomena it was not meant to include.

I’m with dissenter Kavanaugh on this:

Kavanaugh wrote that “the responsibility to amend Title VII belongs to Congress and the President in the legislative process, not to this Court.” He cited the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Seems blatantly obvious to anyone who knows even the rudiments of the Constitution.

However, I learned quite some time ago that people – and SCOTUS justices are people – will all too often cut corners to get what they want. In the process, they can and will use various rationalizations to justify what they do. Justices and lawyers are especially good at rationalizations, because their forte is argument. And so they take on powers they do not have, because they want certain results. The temptation is great, and it is often yielded to.

Roe v. Wade was a good example, one about which even many people who liked the result admitted that the method was faulty, and that SCOTUS had found a right where no such right existed. There are others, as well, and today’s decision falls squarely into that category.

[NOTE: I have not read the full decision, only some excerpts and commentary. This is based on what I’ve read.

I will add that I predict this ruling will be used not just to protect gay and transgender people from firings solely because of their orientation, but also that any such firings may end up presumed to be because of orientation, and it will often be up to the employer to prove that they weren’t. In that way, it may ultimately create a class of people especially protected from firings, period.]

[ADDENDUM: Alito agrees:

In a powerful dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito condemned the ruling as “preposterous” and betraying “breathtaking” arrogance. He noted that Congress has tried and repeatedly failed to amend Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in just this fashion and that no one interpreted the law this way until 2017. In this decision, as in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Supreme Court usurped the power of Congress by making “legislation.”

Exactly and precisely correct. And it should be correct whether you think such a law should be passed or not. But that’s not the way these things are going.

Alito added that the decision could ultimately end up affecting bathrooms and changing rooms, women’s sports, housing, religious employment, health care, freedom of speech, and constitutional claims. Please read the whole thing. Legislation might have addressed these issues, but the SCOTUS ruling leaves it all open. It’s so very much easier to legislate from the bench than from the legislature.]

Here’s a quiz

The New Neo Posted on by

Who said it?:

That is not a protest. It is not a statement. It’s people, a handful of people, taking advantage of a situation for their own purposes — and they need to be treated as criminals…

There’s no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. It is counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting. They’re not making a statement. They’re stealing…

When they burn down a building, they’re committing arson. And they’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities.

Hint: the quotes are from April, 2015.