Tag Archives: culture

Racism Coming to a Neighborhood Near You

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…or even to your neighborhood.

[T]he Department of Housing and Urban Development is imposing a new rule that would allow the feds to track diversity in America’s neighborhoods and then push policies to change those it deems discriminatory.

The policy is called, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.”  It will require HUD to gather data on segregation and discrimination in every single neighborhood and try to remedy it.

This is just racism being manufactured where none necessarily exists.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan:

Unfortunately, in too many of our hardest hit communities, no matter how hard a child or her parents work, the life chances of that child, even her lifespan, is determined by the zip code she grows up in. This is simply wrong.

He added his claim that

[d]ata from this discrimination database would be used with zoning laws, housing finance policy, infrastructure planning and transportation to alleviate alleged discrimination and segregation.

We’ll make up a racism beef; that’ll solve the problem.  Malarkey.  We need, instead, to address actual causes—lack of jobs, exacerbated by a failed recovery and stagnant economy; failure of family structures; poverty impacted heavily (but not exclusively) by the foregoing.  Racial “imbalance” has nothing to do with this; it’s just a club with which Progressives will attempt to beat those who disagree with them—just as they did the banks with CRA, contributing heavily therewith to the housing bubble.

Our Offensive Constitution

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So says the city of Seattle.

An internal memo at Seattle City Hall is causing quite a stir.  It suggests government workers no longer use the terms “citizen[….]”  According to the Office for Civil Rights, the terms are potentially offensive….

Our Constitution has this, though:

Article I, Sect 2: No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

And

Article I, Sect 3: No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

And

Article II, Sect 1: No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President….

And

Article IV, Sect 2: The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

And

11th Amendment: The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.

And

14th Amendment: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States….

But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

And

15th Amendment: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

And

19th Amendment: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

And

24th Amendment: The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

And

26th Amendment: The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

This evil document is filled with that hateful word.  There ought to be a law.

These…officials…also say “brown bag” lunches are offensive, too, but that’s a separate bit of idiocy.

Another Reason to Shoot Down Drones

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Deer Trail, CO, is looking at passing an ordinance allowing its residents to shoot down drones.  It seems those good folks have a proper disdain for government fishing expeditions masquerading as “surveillance.”

But it’s not just the government that’s intruding objectionably.

When Tina Turner got married at her estate in Switzerland over the weekend, she wanted to keep paparazzi away.  But photographers used drones and other aircraft to get the exclusives they [wanted].

And [emphasis added]

Drones are gradually becoming established in Germany as a tool of photographers and television crews….  Drones are cheaper and quieter than helicopters and can be navigated unnoticed over gardens or in front of windows.

And

“They can be very helpful—it works well in the US,” says Heiko Schoenborn of the photo agency WENN.

Maybe Deer Trail should expand its target list.

Some Thoughts on Citizenship

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…by Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a recent speech at the Chautauqua Institute [emphasis mine; deeper indents are Cohen quoting Kennedy].

[T]he Justice asked his audience to pretend first that “you are a government official, bound by the Constitution…. You’ll be a judge, a federal judge.”  Next, he told the audience, “assume this…you may not like it…but assume that you as a personal matter strongly reject:

the idea of ethical relativism, moral relativism.  That’s the philosophical school which says (and here the Justice’s voice elevated a few octaves and turned sing-song-y, as though he were trying to mimic a new-age guru) that all ideas are of equal value, you have a right to think what you want, all books are the same, all music is the same…the philosophy that one person cannot insist on the correctness of his or her views; the philosophy that there are no absolutes in art, architecture, literature, aesthetics, beauty, religion, the fact that you can and must tell your kids what’s a good book and not a bad book.

“Now how can you be a judge and enforce the first amendment,” Justice Kennedy asked, “If this is your personal philosophy?”  He then said:

The first amendment says all rights are protected.  All movies are protected.  All music is protected.  Aren’t you a hypocrite?  And if as a judge you are enforcing some mandate that is contrary to your conscience and your ethics maybe you should resign.  How can you do this?  There’s an answer.  The Constitution controls only the government.  The first amendment says it’s not for the government to say that this book is good and this book is bad, it’s not for the government to say that this movie is good and this movie is bad.  It’s doesn’t follow that the public cannot say so….

And here the hypothetical seemed to end.  And here Justice Kennedy seemed to be making his own point: “A nation that’s in the grips of moral relativism, as a private philosophic matter, cannot protect basic values,” he said, before offering an example about a group of students he met last summer who later went to Europe and then returned to “give little reports on what they had done.”  As the justice recounted, a young woman said to him:  “‘And I elected to go to Auschwitz and it was very important.’

“‘Why was it important?’ Justice Kennedy said he asked the student.  And she said: “That’s where Schindler’s List was filmed.’: Justice Kennedy then said:

Well, I had this sinking feeling that even with the crime of the enormity of the Holocaust, or of the Stalin massacres, that we are reluctant to condemn….  A strong society, a happy society, a society with a civic consensus, must make judgments on what’s good, bad, beautiful, ugly, right, wrong. That’s not just your right as a citizen.  In my submission it’s your responsibility.

There’s lots more in Cohen’s article, but this is enough for here.

 

h/t Andrew Cohen, writing in The Atlantic.

Corporations and Religion

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On Friday, the Philadelphia-based US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that “for-profit, secular corporations cannot engage in religious exercise….”

The case centered on a complaint concerning the HHS/Obamacare contraceptives mandate brought by Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp,

a manufacturer of wood cabinets based in East Earl, PA, and its owners…Mennonite Christians [who] say the requirement violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which guards against laws that substantially burden that right.

The majority held that

while there is a history of the courts protecting the rights of for-profit companies to engage in speech, the same can’t be said for religious rights.

“Even if we were to disregard the lack of historical recognition of the right, we simply cannot understand how a for-profit, secular corporation—apart from its owners—can exercise religion[.]”

Judge Kent A Jordan dissented, noting that Supreme Court decisions, in fact, have recognized corporations’ right of free exercise of religion.  Further,

The government takes us down a rabbit hole where religious rights are determined by the tax code, with non-profit corporations able to express religious sentiments while for-profit corporations and their owners are told that business is business and faith is irrelevant.
…
It is the profitmaking character of the corporation, not the corporate form itself, that the Majority treats as decisively disqualifying Conestoga from seeking the protections of the First Amendment or RFRA.  That argument treats the line between profit-motivated and non-profit entities as much brighter than it actually is, since for-profit corporations pursue non-profit goals on a regular basis.
…
[I]t said that…any harm to the Hahns’ religious liberty is “too attenuated to be substantial” because it is Conestoga, not they, that must face the Mandate.

Charles Proctor, who was among those representing Conestoga, asked an important question:

How do you parse separate those three sentences in the First Amendment?  They are only separated by a semicolon. In my opinion, you can’t.

The answer is plain: in fact, they aren’t three sentences; they’re one sentence, and the clauses are “not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon[.]”

Moreover, too many on the Third Circuit plainly do not understand the concepts of ownership or property.  Companies are nothing more than agents of their owners.  Religious rights—and free speech rights and any other rights—denied men’s agents are rights denied the agents’ owners by constricting those owners’ capacity to act through their agents.

It’s also clear, on a point not raised in the WSJ Law Blog article, that the contraceptive mandate also violates the Establishment Clause by placing the government’s determination of appropriate religious behavior above the agent company’s—or individual’s.

The full appellate opinion can be seen here.