Tag Archives: culture

Racist Persecution Persists

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Now the racist persecution begins because of a politically incorrect verdict in a Florida trial.

Former Obama adviser Van Jones declared that “racism won” in the trial of George Zimmerman.

And

Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse fired off an incendiary stream of tweets late Saturday night suggesting that racism and politics prompted the jury to acquit George Zimmerman of all charges.

And

[From an NAACP petition] Attorney General Eric Holder [t]he Department of Justice has closely monitored the State of Florida’s prosecution of the case against George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin murder since it began.  Today, with the acquittal of George Zimmerman, it is time for the Department of Justice to act.

What’s Up

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…with this?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Ms. Salecl, at the fast food chain Subway we have to make half a dozen decisions before we can finally enjoy our sandwich.  Is that what you mean when you speak in your lectures about the “tyranny of choice?”

Salecl: I try to avoid places like Subway, and if I end up there I always order the same thing.  When I speak about the “tyranny of choice,” I mean an ideology that originates in the era of post-industrial capitalism.  It began with the American Dream—the idea of the self-made man, who works his way up from rags to riches.  By and by, this career concept developed into a universal life philosophy.  Today we believe we should be able to choose everything: the way we live, the way we look, even when it comes to the coffee we buy, we constantly need to weigh our decision.  That is extremely unhealthy.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why?

Salecl: Because we constantly feel stressed, overwhelmed and guilty.  Because, according to this ideology, it’s our own fault if we’re unhappy.  It means we made a bad decision.

Say, what?  Whose fault is it, then?  Who made the bad decision for us sheep?  Government?  A neighbor, sticking a gun in our ear?

She went on in this interview:

Salecl: …I don’t criticize political or electoral freedom, but capitalism’s perversion of the concept: the illusion that I hold the power over my own life.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But I do have that power.  I can decide for myself what I want, even if the thought stresses me out.

Salecl: Not at all.  A friend, who’s a psychologist, told me about a patient once: a woman who was well educated, had a good job, a house, and a loving husband.  “I did everything right in my life,” said the woman.  “But I’m still not happy.”  She never did what she herself wanted, but what she believed society expected from her.

And whose fault was that?  Oh, wait….

She repeated her theme in a TED presentation:

In our post-industrial capitalist age, says Salecl, choice, freedom and self have been elevated into an ideal—the ideal.  But the flip side are increased feelings of anxiety, guilt, and inadequacy at facing the possibility of not “making it”—that is, not reaching the ideal.  What’s strange, says Salecl, is that increasingly people turn this anxiety inward, indulging in self-critique, rather than social critique.  Ultimately this has made us unable to move toward social change; our abundance of choices has made us politically passive.

Leave it to a Liberal, politically passive and entirely dependent on a Know Better Government to tell him what to do, to be so confused by the choices available to him that he’s uncomfortable with them.  And then to project that weakness onto everyone around him.

Silent No More

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Rafael Cruz had some thoughts.  You know Mr Cruz: Senator Ted Cruz’ (R, TX) Cuban-born father.  Here’s some of what he had to say, via The Daily Caller.

[A]s a teenager I found myself involved in a revolution.  I remember during that time, a young charismatic leader rose up talking about “hope and change.”  His name was Fidel Castro.

That same man who had been talking before about hope and change, now was talking about how the rich are evil, about how they oppress the people, and about the need to redistribute the wealth.  He began attacking the press, curtail freedom of the press, attacking religion, confiscating property.  Then he began instituting socialized medicine, and imposing wage-and-price controls.  Basically reducing everybody’s salary to a least common denominator.
…
I think the most ominous words I’ve ever heard was in the last two State of the Union addresses, when our president said, “If Congress does not act, I will act unilaterally.”  Not much different than that old bearded friend that I left behind in Cuba.  Government by decree, by executive order, just like a dictator—like Fidel Castro.
…
When I faced oppression in Cuba, I had a place to come to.  If we lose our freedoms here, where are we going to go?  There is no place to go.
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I feel so offended when our president goes around the world apologizing for America and negating our American exceptionalism.  But the truth is, this country is exceptional and unique in the world….  And you know, when we see the intrusion on our liberties; when we see—whether it is looking at our emails, or listening to our telephone calls—or we see the IRS targeting tea party groups—freedom-loving groups—for their political ideology, I say we can remain silent no more.  Silent no more.

What he said.

What He Said

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The following, via The Weekly Standard, is excerpted from Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in US v Windsor.

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Let the People Decide

By ANTONIN SCALIA, FOR THE EDITORS

This case is about power in several respects. It is about the power of our people to govern themselves, and the power of this Court to pronounce the law. Today’s opinion aggrandizes the latter, with the predictable consequence of diminishing the former….

[In its holding, the Court] accuses the Congress that enacted this law and the President who signed it of something much worse than, for example, having acted in excess of enumerated federal powers—or even having drawn distinctions that prove to be irrational. Those legal errors may be made in good faith, errors though they are. But the majority says that the supporters of this Act acted with malice—with the “purpose” “to disparage and to injure” same-sex couples. It says that the motivation for DOMA was to “demean,” to “impose inequality,” to “impose…a stigma,” to deny people “equal dignity,” to brand gay people as “unworthy,” and to “humiliat[e]” their children.

I am sure these accusations are quite untrue. To be sure (as the majority points out), the legislation is called the Defense of Marriage Act. But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence—indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race….

By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition. Henceforth those challengers will lead with this Court’s declaration that there is “no legitimate purpose” served by such a law, and will claim that the traditional definition has “the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure” the “personhood and dignity” of same-sex couples. The majority’s limiting assurance will be meaningless in the face of language like that, as the majority well knows. That is why the language is there. The result will be a judicial distortion of our society’s debate over marriage—a debate that can seem in need of our clumsy “help” only to a member of this institution.

As to that debate: Few public controversies touch an institution so central to the lives of so many, and few inspire such attendant passion by good people on all sides. Few public controversies will ever demonstrate so vividly the beauty of what our Framers gave us, a gift the Court pawns today to buy its stolen moment in the spotlight: a system of government that permits us to rule ourselves. Since DOMA’s passage, citizens on all sides of the question have seen victories and they have seen defeats. There have been plebiscites, legislation, persuasion, and loud voices—in other words, democracy.

Victories in one place for some, see North Carolina Const., Amdt. 1 (providing that “[m]arriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State,” approved by a popular vote, 61% to 39% on May 8, 2012, are offset by victories in other places for others, see Maryland Question 6 (establishing “that Maryland’s civil marriage laws allow gay and lesbian couples to obtain a civil marriage license,” approved by a popular vote, 52% to 48%, on November 6, 2012). Even in a single State, the question has come out differently on different occasions. Compare Maine Question 1 (permitting “the State of Maine to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples,” approved by a popular vote, 53% to 47%, on November 6, 2012) with Maine Question 1 (rejecting “the new law that lets same-sex couples marry,” approved by a popular vote, 53% to 47%, on November 3, 2009).

In the majority’s telling, this story is black-and-white: Hate your neighbor or come along with us. The truth is more complicated. It is hard to admit that one’s political opponents are not monsters, especially in a struggle like this one, and the challenge in the end proves more than today’s Court can handle. Too bad. A reminder that disagreement over something so fundamental as marriage can still be politically legitimate would have been a fit task for what in earlier times was called the judicial temperament. We might have covered ourselves with honor today, by promising all sides of this debate that it was theirs to settle and that we would respect their resolution. We might have let the People decide.

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What he said.

A Thought on Fisher

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Justice Clarence Thomas has one.  Fisher v University of Texas at Austin was a case that wound up in front of the Supreme Court that involved a white woman who was denied admission as a result of UTA’s racial preference admissions system that explicitly deprecated some students and elevated others in the UTA admissions system solely on the basis of race, or so she claimed in her suit.

Monday, the Supremes took the easy way out and sent the case back to the Appellate Court on the legal technicality that that court had used the wrong criterion in reaching its decision upholding UTA’s race-based admissions system.

Justice Thomas, in his separate concurring opinion, had this to say concerning race-based discrimination, as cited in The Wall Street Journal:

While I find the theory advanced by the University to justify racial discrimination facially inadequate, I also believe that its use of race has little to do with the alleged educational benefits of diversity. I suspect that the University’s program is instead based on the benighted notion that it is possible to tell when discrimination helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities….  The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities.

Slaveholders argued that slavery was a “positive good” that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life. See, e.g., Calhoun, Speech in the U.S. Senate, 1837, in P. Finkelman, Defending Slavery 54, 58–59 (2003) (“Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually….”)

…A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students. They argued, for example, that separate schools protected black children from racist white students and teachers. See, e.g., …Tr. of Oral Arg. in Bolling v. Sharpe, O.T. 1952, No. 413, p. 56 (“There was behind these [a]cts a kindly feeling [and] an intention to help these people who had been in bondage. And there was and there still is an intention by the Congress to see that these children shall be educated in a healthful atmosphere, in a wholesome atmosphere, in a place where they are wanted….”)

…Following in these inauspicious footsteps, the University would have us believe that its discrimination is likewise benign. I think the lesson of history is clear enough: Racial discrimination is never benign.

What he said.