Category Archives: morality

Assess or Not?

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Jason Riley had some thoughts in his Wall Street Journal op-ed concerning Harvard’s decision to not bother with any serious assessment of prospective students before choosing which to admit and which to…not. The subheadline on his piece summed up his column:

How do you help young people move forward without honestly assessing where they stand?

I had some thoughts in answer of that question, too, and they’re rather more pithy than Riley’s.

“You” don’t, but that’s not the point of the Left’s identity politics, most explicitly seen in academia. This is just the utter contempt Leftist identity politics purveyors have for blacks and Hispanics, considering them intrinsically inferior and so, paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson’s infamous words, they should be grateful for the protections of no assessments. It’s also the raw jealousy the Leftist identity politics purveyors have for Americans with Asian heritage, viewing them as intrinsically superior to the rest of us.

It’s a completely disgusting and dishonest display, and in a moral world, it would get institutions that employed such as these cut off from Federal and State funding, and alums with any sense of propriety and self respect would stop donating to them.

“Coy,” Is It?

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The Biden-Harris administration, in its argument for the government’s appeal in the 8th Circuit of a trial court’s rulings in Religious Sisters of Mercy v Azar and Catholic Benefits Association v Azar, steadfastly refused to say whether, in fact, these entities would be subject to government suit were those entities, in fact, to refuse to provide and cover so-called “gender transition” procedures. The case and the government’s “enforcement” vagaries center on

how the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) interpret Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination by gender identity, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in relation to RFRA [Religious Freedom Restoration Act].

Just the News mildly referred to that as the government being coy.

The government’s attorney, Assistant US Attorney Ashley Chung, then went so far as to tacitly threaten the judges:

She warned the judges not to “open the floodgates to premature litigation” based on “uncertainty” over how agencies might respond to new legal interpretations or court rulings.

This is a cynical argument by Chung. The judges won’t be opening floodgates for “premature” litigation. HHS and EEOC already have opened those floodgates with their carefully thought out decision to be “uncertain” in their “interpretation” of Obamacare, Title VII, and associated regulations and to be vague on their enforcement procedures for those.

A Progressive-Democrat Threatens

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California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has issued a threat to try to destroy one of our most fundamental rights as Americans: our right to keep and bear Arms. He’s doing it, too, while drawing a disingenuous parallel between Arms possession and abortion—and in the process, threatening an even more fundamental right, one imbued in all humans not just in Americans.

If states can shield their laws from review by federal courts, then CA will use that authority to help protect lives.
We will work to create the ability for private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in CA[.]

In the process, Newsom ignored a critical distinction here. Gun rights are in our Constitution.

The right to abortion exists only in a Supreme Court ruling and has only the force of statutory law—which is explicitly subordinate to our Constitution.

Regarding Newsom’s disingenuous claim about using legal authority to protect people’s lives, he’s also ignoring that our gun rights exist in critical (but not exclusive) part to defend lives and to defend against overreaching government. That the tools occasionally are misused to illegally kill only emphasizes the need to better catch and punish the killers, not to punish the vast majority of us for the crimes of those few. And to not keep letting the accused killers back out on the street with little to no bail.

Abortion laws, on the other hand, kill babies and tend toward blocking legal voices from speaking for them in court. That’s not very protective of our very youngest people’s lives.

Some Key Moments

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From the oral arguments regarding the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case currently before the Supreme Court. And my responses to them. Because you know I don’t lack for hubris.

Perhaps the most famous example of overturned precedent was the 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling, which reversed Plessy v Ferguson….

Well, there was another, preceding case—the Supreme Court’s ruling on Dred Scott v Sandford, which needed a Civil War to overturn because the Justices on the Taney Court and later lacked the integrity, the morals, the courage to overturn the ruling on their own.

And from CJ Roberts,

If we look at it from today’s perspective, it’s going to be a long list of cases that we’re going to say were wrongly decided.

If those rulings were wrongly decided at the outset, of course they should be reversed. Wrong doesn’t become right through the hoariness of age.

If the conditions of those rulings no longer exist, of course they should be reversed. The convenience of the Court isn’t relevant to any of that.

Additionally, Stewart gave Roberts a way out by saying Roberts’ examples are settled.

And,

“What would you say to the argument that has been made many times by people who are pro-choice and pro-life, that the line really doesn’t make any sense—that it is, as Justice Blackman himself described it, arbitrary?” Alito asked Rikelman.
Alito noted that while a woman may still want to terminate a pregnancy after viability, a “fetus has an interest in having a life” both before and after.
Rikelman replied[,] “It is principled because in ordering the interests at stake, the court had to set a line between conception and birth.”

Rikelman evaded Alito’s question. The baby always has an interest—the primary interest in the ordering of interests—in its own life.

Finally,

…a Supreme Court that has undergone enormous changes and currently sits at a 6-3 conservative majority.

No, it doesn’t. At best it sits at a 5-3-1 majority.

Cowardice

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Nadia Murad, sold into sex slavery by Daesh when she was 14, escaped that existence and wrote a book about it: The Last Girl: My Story Of Captivity (due out next February).

She was scheduled to speak with students from some of the 600 schools that are part of the Toronto District School Board about her book and the life it describes, but her presentation and discussion were canceled by Helen Fisher, one of the board’s Superintendents of Education.

But, according to Fisher’s concerns, the event might actually foster Islamophobia. Because Canadian schoolboys and girls are all a bunch of snowflakes who can’t understand such things. Of course, to the extent that’s actually true, that would be a coarse illustration of what Fisher’s Education facility is turning out.

Tanya Lee, proprietor of a book club for teenage girls, A Room Of Your Own—and mother—had a different take:

This is what Islamic State [Daesh] means. It is a terrorist organisation. It has nothing to do with ordinary Muslims. The TDSB should be aware of the difference.

But apparently Fisher’s terror has clouded her awareness. Indeed, even though a statement put out by the school board’s Director of Education, Colleen Russell-Rawlins, claimed to apologize to Murad (and to another, whose event was similarly canceled), the board has not un-canceled or rescheduled Murad’s speaking, even these two-plus weeks later.

Never mind that Murad also is a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, UN Goodwill Ambassador, and “a leading advocate for survivors of genocide and sexual violence.” And that she might know something of her subject and that subject’s implications outside of terrorism.

This isn’t just rank political correctness. This is raw cowardice by the Precious Ones of the Toronto school board.

These are not the Canadians who fought with such courage in WWII. Or only yesterday in Afghanistan.