Tag Archives: morality

A Step in the Right Direction

Posted on by
Reply

The 6th Circuit overruled a Tennessee federal district court’s injunction, lifting it, and allowing a Tennessee law barring gender-related child abuse “gender-affirming” “care” for minors to go into effect. Per the AP, the appellate court ruled

[i]n a 2-1 ruling, the majority opinion stated that decisions on issues such as transgender care, which is considered an emerging policy issue, is better left to legislatures rather than judges[.]

This is a good start, and a strong step in the right direction. It’s also important to keep in mind the fact that the matter is still in the courts: the appellate court lifted an injunction; it did not uphold the law itself.

Decisions on issues such as transgender care, though, are even better left—are best left—in the hands of the parents. Government—at any level of governmental hierarchy—has no legitimate business inserting itself into a family’s internal affairs beyond protecting family members from abuse. Which “treatments” to alter a child’s gender away from his or her biological gender most assuredly is.

Un-American

Posted on by
Reply

And cynically contradictory. That’s the new Inclusive Writing Guide just published by the Portland, OR, government’s Office of Equity and Human Rights.

[C]ity staff members are being told to adopt a more “culturally conscious” vocabulary that includes not using words such as “women,” “Caucasian” or “citizen.”

There’s nothing at all inclusive about erasing women from the city via erasing them from the city’s approved Newspeak lexicon.

And

The staffers are also told to capitalize the word “Black as an adjective in a racial, ethnic, or cultural sense,” while under the definition of “white,” they are told to “not capitalize when referring to one’s race.”
The guide defined “white and whiteness” as “a social construct that serves to reinforce power structures” and suggested avoiding use of the synonym “Caucasian” entirely.

Because “black” isn’t at all a social construct, especially one that serves to reinforce—in the Left’s fetid imagination—victimhood structures. Not at all.

Nor is there anything inclusive about erasing American culture from the city’s Newspeak vocabulary. Immigrants and most illegal aliens alike come to our country explicitly for the benefits of American culture: the concept of limited government, the ability (not just the legal right) to think and speak and worship (or not) freely, the equality of economic and political opportunity, and above all, the very idea of these benefits as the center of American culture.

And this:

According to the guide, the term “citizen” is also “not inclusive” and should not be used by staffers.

It’s especially non-inclusive, and outright unamerican, to deny the essentiality of American-ness: erasing the term “citizen” from their edition of the Newspeak dictionary.

Giving Up

Posted on by
Reply

Our Father, a prominent, if not the prominent, Christian prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) is…problematic. No less a light than Anglican Church Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell says so.

I know the word “father” is problematic for those whose experience of earthly fathers has been destructive and abusive, and for all of us who have laboured rather too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life.

I’ll leave the theological argument to others, other than to note that there was demurral from Cottrell’s claim, for instance Dr Chris Sugden:

Is the archbishop of York saying Jesus was wrong, or that Jesus was not pastorally aware? It seems to be emblematic of the approach of some church leaders to take their cues from culture rather than scripture.

My beef is more secular. Cottrell seems to be saying that, for those victims of abuse at the hands of their fathers there is no hope, no chance for recovery, there is no possibility of meeting a better man, a suitable father substitute. Their eyes and ears must be shielded.

I disagree. Far from helping such victims, this sham protection only further weakens them.

Contrary to Cottrell’s claim, aside from the ecclesiastic content of the prayer, it’s also a statement of earthly hope, and fact, that there is a better father—and Father—available to these victims, if only the members of the Professional Victimhood Guild would get out of their way and let them proceed through their recovery.

Instead, Cottrell and his guild have given up on these unfortunates and are telling them not to bother—to give up on themselves.

“Not a Normal Court”

Posted on by
Reply

With the Supreme Court having struck down affirmative action as unconstitutional, a reporter asked President Joe Biden (D), on his way out from his Friday press conference in which he objected to the ruling, a reporter asked him whether he thought the Court was now a “rogue court.”

Biden answered:

This is not a normal court[.]

It’s not normal for Justices of the Supreme Court to adhere to the text of our Constitution. It’s not normal for Justices to adhere to their oaths of office in which they swear to support and defend our Constitution rather than amend it from the bench.

This is the view of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians: our Constitution is merely suggestive, and should be ignored at convenience.

Justice Thomas Demurs

Posted on by
Reply

Last week, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v

President and Fellows of Harvard College, in which the Court ruled that the use of race in college admissions was unconstitutional.

This post is centered entirely on Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion, and that part of it in which he took issue with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent, a dissent that, IMNSHO, is steeped in racism. Thomas noted that

With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the people of our Nation proclaimed that the law may not sort citizens based on race.

Then he proceeded [external citations omitted, references to Brown’s dissent retained].

Yet, JUSTICE J ACKSON would replace the second Founders’ vision with an organizing principle based on race. In fact, on her view, almost all of life’s outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race. Post, at 24–26. This is so, she writes, because of statistical disparities among different racial groups. See post, at 11–14. Even if some whites have a lower household net worth than some blacks, what matters to JUSTICE J ACKSON is that the average white household has more wealth than the average black household. Post, at 11.
This lore is not and has never been true. Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color. Then as now, not all disparities are based on race; not all people are racist; and not all differences between individuals are ascribable to race. Put simply, “the fate of abstract categories of wealth statistics is not the same as the fate of a given set of flesh-and-blood human beings.” T. Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics 333 (2016). Worse still, JUSTICE J ACKSON uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims. Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me. I cannot deny the great accomplishments of black Americans, including those who succeeded despite long concurring odds.
Nor do JUSTICE JACKSON’s statistics regarding a correlation between levels of health, wealth, and well-being between selected racial groups prove anything. Of course, none of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race—rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor—and individual outcomes. So JUSTICE JACKSON supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victim- hood. If an applicant has less financial means (because of generational inheritance or otherwise), then surely a university may take that into account. If an applicant has medical struggles or a family member with medical concerns, a university may consider that too. What it cannot do is use the applicant’s skin color as a heuristic, assuming that because the applicant checks the box for “black” he therefore conforms to the university’s monolithic and reductionist view of an abstract, average black person. Accordingly, JUSTICE J ACKSON’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step. Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.
JUSTICE JACKSON then builds from her faulty premise to call for action, arguing that courts should defer to “experts” and allow institutions to discriminate on the basis of race. Make no mistake: Her dissent is not a vanguard of the innocent and helpless. It is instead a call to empower privileged elites, who will “tell us [what] is required to level the playing field” among castes and classifications that they alone can divine. Post, at 26; see also post, at 5–7. Then, after siloing us all into racial castes and pitting those castes against each other, the dissent somehow believes that we will be able—at some undefined point—to “march forward together” into some utopian vision. Post, at 26.

What Justice Thomas said.

The Court’s ruling, including Thomas’ concurrence and Brown’s dissent, can be read here.