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Posts Tagged ‘discrimination’
July 8th, 2016 at 2:50 pm
Gallup: Clear Majority of Americans Oppose Using Race in Admission Decisions
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On the heels of last week’s indefensible Supreme Court ruling upholding racial discrimination in university admissions (with Justice Kennedy bizarrely reversing his recent position on the other side of the question), there’s good news to report.  In a new Gallup poll, a surprising and overwhelming 70% to 26% majority of Americans believe that applicants should be admitted solely on merit.  Notably, that majority opposed consideration of race “even when it is explained that this could help increase diversity,” as Gallup emphasized:

Overwhelming Majority Opposes Racial Consideration

Overwhelming Majority Opposes Racial Consideration

Although this lopsided disapproval won’t reverse last week’s Supreme Court error, it does suggest that a broad and rare consensus exists to systematically dismantle such discriminatory practices across federal, state and local levels.

December 10th, 2013 at 1:48 pm
How the GOP Can Win Asian Voters

The Los Angeles Times has a fairly one-sided story reporting on the GOP’s nascent attempt to recapture Asian voters ahead of the 2014 elections.

According to the Times writer, while Asians would seem like natural Republican voters since when compared to other groups they are “wealthier and better educated than the general population and have a long tradition of entrepreneurship,” their support for government intervention and loose immigration laws has swung them towards Democrats.

The solution, implies the article, is for Republicans to become more like Democrats.

For obvious reasons I won’t address that argument. Instead, I’ll propose an alternative.

Rather than compete with Democrats over who can give away the most goodies, why not change the frame to who can remove the most obstacles to success?

It’s an open secret that elite universities impose caps on the number of Asian students they will enroll, despite the fact that Asians make up 28 percent of National Merit Finalists even though they are only 5 percent of the population.

For proof, consider the fact that over the last ten years the percentage of Asian students has plateaued at each Ivy League school suspiciously at 16 percent, while enrollment at universities using race neutral admissions procedures – e.g. UC Berkeley, UCLA and Cal Tech – boast percentages around 40 percent, in step with the Asian community’s population increase over time.

Last year, an Asian student shut out of Harvard and Princeton filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. If the findings go public, elite higher education could be exposed to some embarrassing revelations.

All this to say that Republicans – and conservatives in particular – could use the well documented discrimination against Asians in university admissions as a way to reach out to a voting bloc with a message of opportunity for hard work.

Republicans talk a lot about meritocracy and the Opportunity Society. This would be a good issue to make it real.

Let the other party tie its success to parceling out caps and quotas. Republicans can win by helping individuals help themselves.

November 9th, 2013 at 5:58 pm
Obamacare and the Culture Wars

Among other social-engineering priorities, Obamacare’s drafters decided that pricing insurance policies for men and women in relation to the services each group is likely to use is discrimination, since women, unlike men, need access to costly reproductive services.

The solution to this perceived problem is to mandate that all people purchasing insurance under Obamacare – including males covering only themselves – must pay for services like maternity care that they cannot use. The result is another HHS mandate that significantly raises the cost of health insurance on one group (men) for the sake of making it more affordable for another (women).

For a glimpse of where this comes from and where we’re heading, consider the Obama 2012 campaign’s much-maligned “Life of Julia” web video. It shows how a young girl in America progresses through adulthood without ever forming a family. Instead, her entire life requires a series of massive interventions from paternalistic government, including the likes of Head Start, public school, college loans, small business subsidies, child support services, as well as health and pension payments. The creators revel in the fact that all of these programs allow their heroine to live a life completely unimaginable absent such government-coerced public assistance.

My hunch is that many Republicans aren’t brave enough to denounce the Democrats’ “War on Men,” for fear of a feminist backlash. But if no protest is lodged, then the Party of Dependency will be encouraged to continue enacting policies that force traditionally conservative constituencies to pay for the lifestyle choices of consistently liberal voters.

April 26th, 2013 at 8:04 pm
Feds “Mollycoddle” Jihadists But Profile Christians, Pro-Lifers and Veterans

As a follow-on to Quin’s column this week, it’s interesting to learn which people agencies of the federal government think deserve to be profiled, monitored, etc.

On the one hand, as the Washington Examiner (echoing Quin) points out, FBI training manuals were systematically purged in 2011 of all references to Islam that were judged offensive by a specially created five-member panel.” “Nearly 900 pages were removed from the manuals as a result of that review.”

Without a training manual to fall back on for cover, it’s no wonder that FBI agents took a hands-off approach when investigating Tamerlan Tsarnev, one of the two Boston Marathon bombers who posted a pro-jihad video on his Facebook page. Without specific, bureau-approved criteria for monitoring Tsarnev even though he expressed radical views, frontline investigators let a future terrorist roam free.

But not to worry; the Obama administration knows whom to target.

David Limbaugh over at NewsBusters has a sobering round-up of many of the instances of government profiling of Christians, pro-lifers, and Second Amendment supporters.

Examples include military bases blocking access to the Southern Baptist Convention’s website for “hostile content,” a West Point study linking pro-life advocates to terrorism and a Department of Homeland Security briefing alleging that returning military veterans with Tea Party views could pose a security threat.

Branches of the federal government as diverse as the U.S. Army, DHS and the Houston National Cemetery, among others, are part of a seemingly coordinated effort to monitor and marginalize people that not so long ago would have been considered as the patriotic backbone of America. In today’s upside-down world, however, not so much.

Clearly, when it wants to, the Obama administration knows how to keep tabs on individuals and groups it deems dangerous to public safety. Unfortunately, they aren’t the people who are acting like terrorists.

September 19th, 2012 at 4:36 pm
ACLU Forces Ban on Father-Daughter Dances

You read that right.

The Daily Caller’s Caroline May reports that the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union demanded and won a ban on any public school event that limits participation to mothers and sons or fathers and daughters, such as traditional dances.

The reason: the events perpetuate “blatant gender stereotypes.”

As usual, the school sponsoring the offending dance was caught in a legal vice grip:

Although the federal Title IX anti-discrimination law does provide exemptions for such events, state law does not, but rather explicitly bans “sex discrimination in ‘…any and all school functions and activities,’” Superintendent of the Cranston Public School System Judith A Lundsten explained in an August letter sent to “Partner Organizations” and posted in full at WPRO News in R.I.

Already, one Republican candidate for Rhode Island state senate, Sean Gately, has made this a campaign issue, promising to introduce an amendment to the state law so that it tracks Title IX to allow exceptions for events like father-daughter dances.

If Gately can figure out a way to make the ACLU reimburse the school district for the hours spent in responding to this wasteful drain on public resources, he should run for governor.

Of course, the main problem with the ACLU in this and other instances is more than the waste of public resources.  It’s making a living by using the law to harass the very society the law was meant to serve.

No one who passed Rhode Island’s version of Title IX intended it to outlaw father-daughter dances.  Had the ACLU’s position been a publicly acknowledged purpose of the legislation when it was proposed, the law’s authors would have been laughed out of the chamber.  Whenever this issue gets a hearing in court – and Gately willing, it will – the reviewing court should do exactly the same to the ACLU’s argument.

Enough of the madness.  If people really want to stop making every argument political and thus polarizing, we must start by making less of our disputes a cause of legal action.

November 22nd, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Senate Passes Pigford II Settlement Appropriation

The lame duck Congress passed a squealer of an appropriation last Friday: $1.15 billion funding the Pigford II class action lawsuit settlement.  Earlier this year CFIF profiled Rep. Steve King (R-IA), a staunch opponent of this taxpayer-funded giveaway.  As King and others have pointed out, Pigford I & II were initially brought to give black farmers a way to get compensation for past USDA discrimination in farm loans.  To date, however, more black farmers have received payments under the settlement than the Census Bureau has records for.  The result is quite possibly the biggest civil rights litigation scam in American history.

Thanks for picking up the check.

July 24th, 2010 at 7:41 pm
Could Jim Webb Be the Next Daniel Patrick Moynihan?

Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) entered the pathway of clear thinking statesmanship when he authored The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, a landmark study on the forces ripping apart the black family and with it, black society.  The study became known colloquially as The Moynihan Report, catapulting a little known LBJ aide into the serious conversations about national policy.

A similar moon shot might happen to Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) after publishing an article calling for the abolition of affirmative action programs.  Though the entire column should be read, here are words that should ring true to all Americans:

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and in our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

Memo to my fellow politicians: Drop the Procrustean policies and allow harmony to invade the public mindset. Fairness will happen, and bitterness will fade away.

Much like Moynihan’s salvo over the bow of LBJ’s ‘War on Poverty,’ Webb’s contribution to America’s race talks is unexpected.  Webb’s words also echo the color blind sentiments in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Chief Justice John Roberts’ commonsense observation that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
If nothing else, may Eric “(America is) a nation of cowards (on race)” Holder is congratulating Senator Webb for manning up and offering his thoughts…

July 2nd, 2010 at 7:32 pm
Chicago: The City Council That Never Sleeps

Never underestimate the speed and focus possible when the politicos in charge of government set their minds to getting something done.  Less than four days after the United States Supreme Court said that the U.S. Constitution’s 2nd Amendment applied to states and municipalities like Chicago, the Second City’s aldermen rose to the challenge.

Unfortunately, they responded by deliberately passing a law to discriminate against gun owners to the maximum extent the Constitution might allow.  (Lost amid most of the coverage this week on the result in McDonald v. City of Chicago is that Justice Alito’s plurality opinion announces only that the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms applies to Chicago.  It leaves to lower courts the careful work of figuring out which gun control laws are in fact unconstitutional.)

Let’s try a mind experiment.  Suppose a controversial Supreme Court opinion came down applying a universal right guaranteed in the Constitution against states and municipalities that had to do with, oh, let’s say…racial discrimination.  If the losing city in the decision responded in less than four days with an ordinance that deliberately tried to see how far it could still discriminate and pass constitutional muster, would that city council be lauded for its activism?

Maybe there’s a North Coast bias.

April 1st, 2010 at 10:25 am
Obama Administration Promotes Race-Based “Affirmative” Action in University Lawsuit
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After a bloody Civil War that split the nation and killed 620,000, America sought to settle the divisive issue of race once and for all by amending the Constitution to explicitly guarantee “equal protection of the laws.”  Despite that straightforward text, liberals during the past four decades have fomented the Orwellian idea that race-based unequal protection under the law somehow constitutes equal protection under the law.

In a brief filed this month with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Fisher v. University of Texas, the Obama Administration has unsurprisingly opted for the latter, supporting continuation of a racist admission system instead of equal rights.  Currently, the university literally flags each applicant’s file based upon his or her race, in order to undertake what it deceptively labels a “holistic” evaluation process.  In other words, admissions officers assess candidates’ skin color in order to reach whatever racial result they sanctimoniously deem appropriate.

A closely-divided United States Supreme Court sanctioned this discriminatory procedure in one of its more curious decisions of the past decade.  In the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, the Court ruled that universities could consider race as a “plus” factor to achieve what it called a “critical mass” of racial diversity.  Preposterously, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that “we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”  Well, that statement was made approximately 25 years after the Supreme Court condoned the same “holistic” race-based process in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, but somehow 25 more years were necessary.  Moreover, seven years have passed since O’Connor made that statement, yet the issue remains just as divisive despite the election of an African-American President, of all things.

What has changed since that date, however, is that Justice O’Connor has been replaced by Justice Samuel Alito.  Accordingly, a majority may now exist to declare that “equal protection of the laws” means what it says, and fulfill Justice John Roberts’s wise declaration that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”