Category Archives: rights

In Which Riley Gaines is Right

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Riley Gaines thinks the only way left for women to protect their sports and their sports programs, to go back to being able to compete on even ground, is to boycott competitions in which a trans athlete(s) is competing, and to be joined by their coaches in the boycott.

We have to have girls who, when the whistle blows, they don’t run, they don’t swim. They stand up on the block and they don’t go[.]
…
I think this will get worse before it gets better. How many girls have to be injured playing against a male, how many girls have to lose out on scholarships and trophies and titles? How many girls have to feel violated in the locker room?

Progressive-Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) gives the lie to Party’s and its Leftist supporters’ “argument” against barring trans athletes from women’s sports with his smear against MAGA (Make America Great Again) and Republicans, using those terms as some sort of condemnation:

MAGA Republicans are trying to sensationalize an issue that doesn’t really exist in the way that they are falsely portraying[.]

He deepens his lie by claiming that the problem with biological men competing in women’s sports isn’t a problem.

Trans athletes and their Progressive-Democratic Party supporters could make a better case, or at least an honest one, by arguing, under Title IX, for requiring sports programs already receiving Federal money (which is to say, receiving the tax dollars remitted to the Federal government by us citizens, and then transferred to those programs) and which already have separate men’s and women’s sports programs to have, also, substantially equally funded and supported trans athlete sports programs.

The better solution, and one which likely would have broad bipartisan support (depending on the actual details), would be to amend Title IX, which already mandates program separation based on biological sex, to explicitly include a third separation, trans.

A Red Flag Law

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This one waiting to be signed by Michigan’s Progressive-Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

A judge would have 24 hours to decide on a temporary extreme risk protection order after a request is filed. If granted, the judge would then have 14 days to set a hearing during which the flagged person would have to prove they do not pose a significant risk. A standard order would last one year.
Lying to a court when petitioning for a protection order would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to 93 days in jail and a $500 fine.

The law starts out being unconstitutional: the flagged person would have to prove they do not pose a significant risk. No. As with all other moves to limit an individual liberty or to circumscribe an individual right, it must be on Government to prove the “flagged person” is a risk.

Then, since the matter is claimed to be urgent, the court should be required to complete its adjudication within an additional 24 hours after having granted the temporary order.

Beyond that, the sanction for dishonestly petitioning for a red flag order must not be left to the wrist slap of a misdemeanor punishment. Falsely petitioning for a red flag order should carry a jail sentence—not reducible—of one year, the same duration of the red flag sanction if a petition is upheld.

And one item not addressed in this red flag law proposal, or in any of the others: the police department that took possession of the weapons on execution of the temporary extreme risk protection order must produce them in court, and in the event Government fails to make its case of significant risk, release them to the now no longer flagged person on the spot.

There also are no protections for the rights of other members of the “flagged person’s” household regarding their lawfully possessed weapons. Those weapons also are subject to seizure under the Michigan red flag law and other such laws. That seizure is an unconstitutional infringement of the non-flagged persons’ right to keep and bear Arms.

As with all the red flag laws on the books or currently proposed, this one is fatally flawed and a deliberate attack on our Constitution’s Second Amendment.

Another Example of Federal Government Run Amok

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This time it’s by President Joe Biden’s (D) infamous medical wonder, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, in his attack on those evil Catholics. This attack is on Oklahoma’s Saint Francis Health System. The hospital system maintains, in the chapel of its Saint Francis Hospital South, a candle representing the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

That’s no good, insists Becerra, who had—or has tacitly allowed—his Department’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to use the Joint Commission (nominally an independent accrediting organization which CMS uses for Medicaid and Medicare certification) to manufacture a fire hazard (!) from the candle.

Lose the symbol of Christ or lose Federal certification and funding for Medicaid and Medicare is the threat from the Feds.

Fire hazard: this is the candle and its danger, located as it is in the hospital’s chapel:Here is Becerra’s statement, carefully done through a spokesperson, instead of being made by Doctor of Ersatz Becerra himself:

[T]he department “is aware of a safety finding involving a fire risk, made by an independent accrediting organization, issued to a hospital in Oklahoma.”

Apparently, all those flammables are too close to the glass and brass-enclosed flame. Apparently, too, the flame of Christ burns so brightly in Catholics that the candle’s flame might burn through all that glass and brass, leap that distance, and ignite the furniture. Or something.

This is yet another campaign in the Biden administration’s war on religion.

Update: The Biden administration has–for now–decided not to pursue the Saint Francis Health System over the candle in the System’s Saint Francis Hospital South.

After the hospital threatened legal action through The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the government reversed course on what seemed to be the latest development in a pattern of aggressive regulatory and criminal enforcement actions by the Biden administration against the Catholic Church.

Child Abuse

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The Oregon House of Representatives, dominated as it is by the Progressive-Democratic Party, has moved to legalize child mutilation and sex abuse. Oregon House Bill 2002 B, passed strictly partisanly (the vote was 36-23),

would allow minors younger than 15 to obtain an abortion without parental consent. Doctors would not be compelled to disclose this information to parents unless receiving express written permission from the child.
The legislation would expand taxpayer money to fund gender reassignment surgery—including sterilization for children as young as 15—without their parent’s consent.

This governmental abuse of parents’ children is another path along the Progressive-Democratic Party’s plan to fundamentally transform America,

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
—Barack Obama, October 30, 2008
We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.
—Michelle Obama, May 14, 2008

and to fundamentally change things—our economy, certainly, as President Joe Biden (D) only recently asserted but also the relationship between children and their parents and between children and the State.

Permit to Buy

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The Delaware legislature is trying again to infringe on American citizens’ right to keep and bear Arms; the Know Betters of the legislature are renewing their drive to require the State’s citizens—who, for those Progressive-Democrats not keeping up at home, also are American citizens—to get the State’s permission just to buy a firearm.

A proposal filed Wednesday in the state Senate would require prospective handgun owners to complete a state-authorized firearms training course and submit an application that would include fingerprinting and an extensive background check. If approved, Delaware’s Department of Safety and Homeland Security would issue a free 180-day permit.

A permit just to buy. The duration of this…requirement…is laid out in the proposed bill:

A handgun qualified purchaser permit is valid for a period of 180 days from the date of issuance….

I have no conceptual objection to requiring training on the firearm, so long as neither the training itself nor the cost of it, are constructed as barriers to the getting and subsequent keeping and bearing, and so long as any license (not permit to buy) is issued on a will-issue basis.

I do object to fingerprinting the prospective firearm keeper and bearer of his weapon. No government has any business keeping track of which of its citizens have weapons and which of them do not. That’s a need only with regard to criminals, and acquiring a firearm is not, by definition, a criminal act.

But beyond that, these worthies are carefully ignoring the key phrase in our Constitution’s 2nd Amendment [emphasis added]:

…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Plainly, getting Arms, including the purchase of one or more of them, is a necessary precondition to the keeping and bearing of them. Restrictions on buying a firearm—which is what a State-granted permission slip, of any duration, is—is just that infringement. No permit to buy, no matter its construction, is legitimate; such permission slips start out unconstitutional and they are incurably so throughout their existence.

 

The bill on offer can be read here.