Cleveland Bus Driver Uppercuts Girl

Last night many of us watched Vice-President Joe Biden and Congressman Paul Ryan launch verbal bombs at each other (and then heartily congratulate each other and their families after the debate). Nobody used profanity, nobody insulted anyone's mother, and nobody made bloody threats about what they were going to do to the other person.

However on the Cleveland bus system recently a different sort of debate took place, one that evidently started with profanity and threats and escalated to violence. I don't know what started this fracas as the video starts in the middle of an angry tirade from a teen girl young woman against the bus driver (a grown man). It is difficult to even make out much of what she's saying. But she clearly threatens the driver who responds that he will have his daughter or granddaughter handle her. Often times, especially in areas that are EXTREMELY touchy about personal honor and disrespect (any inner city) a mutual exchange of insults and threats would have been enough and both parties, honor having been upheld, could go about their business. I've seen that more times than I care to recall.  For whatever reason though this young lady decided to get physical with the man. And then... well just watch the video.


                    


Now I am not a person who automatically thinks that a man never has reason to hit a woman. There are violent, brutish women out there. Domestic abuse can be a two way street. Self-defense is a human right.

Would I have handled it this way? The fact that the man got up and walked towards the teen woman would seem to indicate that self-defense was not really the case. But on the other hand if you let someone hit you once, they'll hit you again. And if you start a fight, well you never know the capacity or the mindset of the other person. That girl woman is probably comparable to that bus driver in terms of size or strength as I am to Clay Matthews, Ray Lewis, Mike Tyson or Vitali Klitschko. And if I walked up to them talking stuff and then hit them and they retaliated I suspect that once it appeared on various tube sites that people would fall out laughing. I would NEVER hear the end of it from blog partners, other friends or ESPECIALLY relatives. That's why you would never see me do such a remarkably stupid thing. Don't let your mouth write a check your behind can't cash. It's too late for the teen's woman's friends to talk about "that's a female" after she stepped in the ring. People talk a lot about "equality". To steal a line from Inigo Montoya, "People keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means".

I am a traditionalist in some aspects. Men-women relations is definitely one. Men should not hit women but neither should women hit men. Basically everyone should keep their hands to themselves. This is also why I am not a fan of public transit.  People just can't act right. No home training. =)

QUESTIONS

1) Was the bus driver justified? Should he be arrested? Fired?

2) Does the girl have a lawsuit against the City of Cleveland?

3) Should there be police or security guards on buses?

4) Why on earth would that teen hit a grown man?

5) Is this evidence of something wrong in gender relations or just something wrong with a teen girl?

Father Daughter Dances: Gender Discrimination??

I am for the most part on the progressive side of the spectrum. But there are a few places, often involving what are referred to as "social" issues, where I am not. In fact there are some areas where I think self-styled progressives are full of it. This story out of Rhode Island is one such instance.

Father-daughter dances and mother-son ballgames -- those cherished hallmarks of Americana -- have been banned in a Rhode Island school district after they were targeted by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU, the self-proclaimed guardian of the nation's liberty, says such events violate the state's gender-discrimination law. The organization challenged their existence following a complaint from a single mom who said her daughter was prevented from attending a father-daughter dance in the Cranston Public Schools district.

The story has created a furor both online as well as in Cranston, a community located south of Providence and considered one of the safest places in America.

"[Parent-teacher organizations] remain free to hold family dances and other events, but the time has long since passed for public school resources to encourage stereotyping from the days of Ozzie and Harriet. Not every girl today is interested in growing up to be Cinderella -- not even in Cranston. In fact, one of them might make a great major league baseball player someday.

For my money it appears that some people who would make a fuss over a father daughter dance aren't so much trying to prevent "gender discrimination" as they are trying to impose their framework of gender relations upon everyone else. Just for the record I am against "gender discrimination" but I don't think father-daughter or for that matter mother-son activities fall under that rubric. And if they do according to Rhode Island law then the law is stupid and needs to be either ignored or better yet changed. It's little things like this that make people on the bubble withdraw from public society and only engage in their own private social networks. I mean this is ridiculous. A state is actually saying that a father-daughter dance is "gender discrimination". Why would I want my kids to attend public schools if public schools are going to have to submit to that sort of foolishness? I would pull them out to a private school and start agitating 24-7 to reduce teacher pay and school funding. Were I an ACLU member (and I happen to be) I would question making donations.

Not everything is for everybody. If a young girl doesn't have a father in her home or in her life but would still like to attend a father-daughter dance the proper response should be to have an uncle, cousin, grandfather, older brother, in-law or properly vetted family friend or priest stand in to escort the child. The correct response is not to shut down the entire project because someone in the ACLU apparently has issues with traditional gender roles or heterosexuality itself. Maybe these little girls are being trained for future oppression by having a school sponsored dance with Daddy. Oh the horror, the horror!!!!! Are we going to shut down proms because not everyone could get a date?

Sometimes people who are pro gay marriage wonder why opponents even care. Well things like this are part of the reason. The idea that gender is or ought to be irrelevant in almost every instance is an article of faith for a vocal section of the left. This underlying idea is what leads some to enthusiastically support gay marriage but it also leads to some people having barely disguised hostility to cultural artifacts of gender distinction like father-daughter dances. I mean who sits around thinking that we need to stamp out father-daughter dances because otherwise we'll never have any female major league baseball players? Somebody explain to me how that works because I'm not seeing the connection. Whatever happened to if you don't like or can't participate in an activity, don't do it? Right? If you don't like gay marriage, don't marry someone of the same sex. If you don't like abortion, don't have one. If you don't like opposite gender family activities...run to the state and get them shut down because they offend your delicate sensibilities.

The US is the midst of a transition, really a decline, in which for women under thirty most births occur outside of marriage. I don't think this is good for men, women, or children or society as a whole. I may write more about that at a later time. With so many single mothers, there will be many more daughters who may not grow up with their father. That's unfortunate. Good paternal relations can head off a host of problems down the line. But for those daughters who do live with their father or at least have a relationship with him, let's not prevent them from enjoying a happy and harmless little tradition like a father-daughter dance. What's wrong with some common sense?

Thoughts?

Preglimony: A Really Bad Idea??

If a child is born and its parents do not live together the state may intervene to determine which parent should get custody (usually this is the woman) and which parent must pay child support (usually this is the man). There is a lot of bias in the above two determinations. Additionally if a child is born and the man and woman are married, but the husband later discovers his wife was letting another mule kick in her stall, so to speak, and the child is not his it doesn't really matter. Generally speaking a child born within marriage is presumed to be the husband's child and he is responsible for the child's support. So the man pays. Again this seems really unfair and certainly isn't how I would have designed our society's culture and laws but hey I just got here. The overriding rule seems to be that the man pays.


Until relatively recently one could at least say that a man would be paying to support an actual child-that is a human being that was born and had actually exited his mother's body. Because it was only then that science could safely perform the paternity tests and the mother and any number of men could go on The Maury Povich Show and make fools of themselves.

But science is always expanding the realm of what is possible and has advanced to the point that we can learn quite a lot of things, including paternity, about the child before it is born.


For people who do things the right way, i.e. are married and/or committed to each other before children are created, this is no big deal. But for people that aren't married, aren't committed to each other or are in situations in which the man has very good reason to doubt the woman's fidelity, this could be a very big deal. However gender politics being what they are, one law professor thinks that the new science should be used to shake men down for child support money before the child is born. How will "preglimony" make a difference in the child's life while the "child" is still in the womb?

Rather than focusing on the relationship between the man and a hypothetical child, the new technology invites us to change the way we think about the relationship between unmarried lovers who conceive. Both partners had a role in the conception; it’s only fair that they should both take responsibility for its economic consequences.

Former spouses are often required to pay alimony; former cohabiting partners may have to pay palimony; why not ask men who conceive with a woman to whom they are not married to pay “preglimony”? Alternatively, we might simply encourage preglimony through the tax code, by allowing pregnancy-support payments to be deductible (which is how alimony is treated).

The most frequent objection I hear to this idea is that it will give men a say over abortion.  A woman’s right to choose is sometimes eclipsed by an abusive partner who pressures her into terminating or continuing a pregnancy against her will, and preglimony could exacerbate this dynamic. 

And how workable would this be? If there is a miscarriage does the father get his money back? And how would the proper level of support be determined? If a negligent father does not pay child support and his ex and children lack decent housing, food or clothing that is an easy metric for a court to use. But in pregnancy the child is inside the woman's body and literally has all of its needs provided for by its mother. The father could be a millionaire or lack two nickels to rub together. That child will still have the same gestation period. The court can't measure the well being of the unborn child whose mother is not getting preglimony vs. one whose mother is. So giving money for "preglimony" seems a tad on the greedy side to me. The unborn child will never see that money, not one penny. 

And then of course there's the elephant in the room. Abortion. 
If the woman chooses to have an abortion, as is her right, does the father get the money back? Can he sue the mother for breach of contract? Theoretically if a custodial parent is not spending the money on the child or has placed the child in an unsafe environment then the non custodial parent can try to get the child removed and take custody away. This is impossible during pregnancy. More importantly does preglimony mean that the fetus is actually a human being that is deserving of rights and protection? I mean it appears to be logically inconsistent to argue on one hand that the unborn child is not legally protected. The argument is that the mother's right to bodily integrity trumps other considerations and thus the child may be killed by the mother for any reason at all. Yet in the very next breath the professor turns around and claims that the unborn child deserves protection and support because after all the mother didn't create it by herself and women children deserve the financial support of men.
I am, to say the least, not a feminist, and arguments like this are why. Again the only consistent theme seems to be that the woman chooses and the man pays.


Modern women have for whatever reason increasingly decided to have children outside of marriage. More than half of children born to women under 30 are born out of wedlock. Yet many women appear to still want marriage's financial protections. Well the solution is simple. Get married before you have children. Because if you're going to tell me that a fetus is a child and needs financial support from its father I'm going to agree that the fetus is a child and whatever financial support it needs before birth is dwarfed by the need it has for its mother not to kill it. 

What's your take?

Does preglimony make sense in a changing world?

Should we think of pregnancy as something that the woman should be compensated for?

Should married men ever have to pay for children that aren't biologically theirs?

Women in Combat?

You might have missed it but recently two female Army reservists decided to sue to have combat operations opened to women. 

Command Sergeant Major Jane Baldwin and Colonel Ellen Haring, both Army reservists, said policies barring them from assignments "solely on the basis of sex" violated their right to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.  "This limitation on plaintiffs' careers restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits," the women said in the suit filed in U.S. District Court.

I thought this was interesting because it appears at first glance that the women are more interested in their personal career options and monetary gain than they are in a supposed class based grievance. Of course to be fair, their personal interests and the larger class based unfairness would be congruent in this case if you buy their argument, which I don't. However, I am fascinated by hypocrisy as you probably can tell by now and this entire issue is full of hypocrisy on all sides.

I think the differences between races are usually small and often caused by environmental factors.  "Race" itself is often something which is ill-defined and somewhat arbitrary and can change in meaning from time to time or society to society. What is "white" or "black" in Latin America or the Caribbean or the Middle East may not be so in the United States. The racial biological differences simply don't exist to the level some think. But the biological differences between men and women are real. They are also shaped by environmental factors of course as none of us grow up in a vacuum but there are some very obvious irreducible differences between men and women. In a wartime/combat situation this comes down to the fact that men are stronger and more aggressive while women are simply worth more to their society reproductively. There have not been, as far as I know, any successful societies that routinely sent women marching off to war while the men stayed home.  No one ever says "save the men and children first" or angrily points out an enemy's perfidy by claiming "they killed innocent men".  No parent ever asks a prospective daughter-in-law how she will provide for and protect their son.  Men are, by and large, the replaceable gender when it comes to such things. That's not a complaint. It's just a fact.

Now in the modern feminist world we are not supposed to notice such things and if we do notice them we are supposed to believe that they are only and always the product of invidious discrimination. Well maybe. Maybe we really can go against thousands of years of evolution and turn the gender with seven times less testosterone into soldiers and warriors that are just as fierce as their male counterparts. After all, war has changed as the women litigants point out. A roadside bomb doesn't care what gender you are. And considering some of the people we're fighting against or for that matter allying with these days a captured male soldier might be in just as much danger of rape as a female one.

The problem though is that at the very same time that some women are chafing at the bit to be formally assigned and not just attached to combat units, we are also told that violence against women is the worst thing that can happen and therefore we need the Violence Against Women Act, tons of spending on domestic violence and anti-rape programs, etc. In fact the military itself has a big problem with rape. So I have trouble understanding, how if violence against women is such a horrible event, why we would want to place more women into an arena of organized brutal violence. 

The other issue is of course one of standards. Women soldiers do not have to meet the same physical standards as men soldiers. Some of them could no doubt but most could not. Do we believe that the standards are specifically designed to give a soldier and his unit the best chance to survive in combat operations ? Or do we think the standards are created for other reasons. If I were in combat I would want to know that the person beside me could carry their own load and if need be pull, carry or lift me out of harm's way. If I had good reason to doubt that would the unit be as cohesive? 

These pics of Air Force reservists are somewhat NSFW.(nursing mother and partially visible chest) These are not combat troops. But the pics exemplify my worries about women in combat. These images are simply not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of US combat personnel in particular or soldiers/warriors in general. In fact they are virtually the antithesis of what I think soldiers are about. There were no new mothers landing on the beaches of Normandy or making the last stand at Thermopylae. There have been about 1.3 million US military personnel killed in all US wars since the Revolutionary War. From what I can tell somewhere between 1000-2000 of those people were women. Now you will often hear women talk about all the male presidents or CEO's or other people at the top of the heap while intimating that women need to have an equal number of those positions for the next millennium or so. But it's quite rare that you would see women clamoring to make up an equal number of those killed, wounded or maimed in war so perhaps I should applaud the women litigants. Equality and all that.

I believe in legal and actual equality between men and women. I supported the Lily Ledbetter Act and oppose discrimination in hiring or promotion.  I think that every man and woman has some characteristics within that are stereotypically associated with the opposite gender. And I think that by and large women and men are more alike than different. But equality does not mean that men and women are identical. Because we aren't. To quote Meg from Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle In Time, "Like and equal are not the same thing at all". Women do not currently play in the NFL because they are not capable of doing so. There's no shame in that. The vast majority of men are not capable of playing in the NFL (or dare I say of being a combat soldier). But in the NFL, as dangerous as it is, usually your life and the lives of those around you are not at risk. If women don't play in the NFL, which is after all a sport, why would we want women in the exponentially more demanding and dangerous combat arena. It doesn't make sense to me. The military is there to kill people and blow stuff up. It is not there to provide day care, career advancement, nursing stations or anything else along those lines. There are ways for women soldiers to serve their country proudly and with distinction without being in direct combat.

The obvious parallel of course is between the opening up of formal combat roles to black men and the desegregation of the US military. I don't think that's a good analogy. Even before Truman's order to desegregate black men had fought and died in every war America ever had. The battle to lift formal combat restrictions was based on the black male desire to prove themselves as men, get rid of segregation and discrimination in the larger society, including but not limited to voting rights. The lawsuit about women in combat seems to be as I wrote a more personal selfish desire for career advancement and perhaps a larger activist desire to blur or eliminate differences in gender roles.

Well to each his/her own but I actually like distinct gender roles and don't feel that they are automatically oppressive. But as you've probably figured out by now I am not a feminist. Not even close. I do believe in equality and if the women could meet the exact same standards as the men I would tell them to rock on with their bad selves and cheerfully send them off to combat. Yeah right. But I am no military expert and have no military experience. These are just my ramblings.

What's your take?

1) Should women have the right to serve in combat?
2) Should combat groups be gender segregated?
3) Should physical standards between male and female soldiers be made the same?

Desmond Hatchett-30 children and counting

You have probably heard about this Knoxville, Tennessee man of profound potency and vast virility, Desmond Hatchett, who at the time of this writing has acknowledged 30 children by 11 different women. This may be a county or even state record. Just three years ago he only had 21 children so obviously Mr. Hatchett is something of a crosscut saw that some women like to have buried in their wood. Unfortunately for Mr. Hatchett, unlike other noted men such as Clint Eastwood (seven children by five different women) or Ted Nugent (eight children by four different women) Mr. Hatchett has apparently no marketable skills other than his good good loving. He makes minimum wage. He's 33 years old and only earning minimum wage which is $7.25/hr.

There's a saying that you can't get blood from a stone, though you can apparently get some other bodily fluids. So Hatchett recently went to court to try to get the state to reduce the child support payments. State law allows the state to take up to 50% of a non-custodial parent's income for child support but since Hatchett doesn't earn much money in the first place his children don't receive very much assistance-one child's mother is paid just $1.49/month.
Just where is Octodad? That's perhaps the most pressing question -- among the many -- pertaining to Desmond Hatchett, a Knoxville, Tenn., man who reportedly has so many children that he's struggling to keep up with child-support payments.

Hatchett, nicknamed Octodad by various media outlets, gained considerable notoriety last week after WREG in Memphis posted a story and video describing his struggles to keep up with child-support payments for his 30 children.

To say the story went viral would be an understatement. It was republished, reposted, tweeted, shared and commented on thousands and thousands of times. We wrote about it as well on Friday. That story alone was shared more than 26,000 times.

One of the most common questions among readers who have called, e-mailed and commented on the story is this: If Hatchett is having trouble paying child support for these children, who is paying for them? Tennessee taxpayers?

LINK

Original Story

Now in my opinion he is a sad excuse for a man. And of course most of the media or blog coverage of this situation also promoted that opinion. Some people even called for castration or vasectomy.  That's good for a chuckle and allows people to vent their frustrations with this situation. That's fine. I did the same above. But if we can be serious for just a moment we should realize that unless Hatchett forcibly raped a woman or slept with an underage girl (which is rape of a different sort) it takes two, or in Hatchett's case, 12 to tango. The women's names, photos and situations have not been released but I'm sure that they're all upstanding citizens with great jobs who are not on any sort of public assistance. In any event they are just as responsible as Hatchett for their children. If he's a reprobate and a clown, then so are they. We can't demand that Hatchett be more responsible than the women he's running around with. Can we?  But neither Hatchett nor the mothers of his children have broken any laws. One would wonder why a man would want to impregnate so many different women that he can't support or why so many women would want to be impregnated by such a man but I wonder about a lot of things that I'll never figure out.

The moral of this story is that you can't fix stupid. You can't take more than 50% of someone's income. You can't prevent someone from having children they can't afford. You can't stop someone from valuing short term pleasures more highly than the long term costs of bringing another human being into this world. All you can do is show people the costs of stupid behavior and try to change their incentives. That's what freedom means.

QUESTIONS

1) Should the state be able to take more than 50% of your income for child support?

2) What would happen if we just got rid of all assistance to unmarried women or children born out of wedlock?

3) Should the state be able to force sterilization on irresponsible men or women? 

4) How did people's lives become so empty that someone like Hatchett is considered a good catch by so many women? Why wasn't anyone using protection?

Brooklyn False Rape Charges: Darrell Dula

Imagine that you (or a man you love) were wrongly accused of raping someone. You're arrested, fingerprinted and thrown into jail to await formal charges. Now in the 24 hours while you're familiarizing yourself with jailhouse protocol over telephone usage, how to avoid unwanted advances, which gang it would be proper for someone of your race and ethnicity to join, when not to look into another prisoner's eyes, the importance of responding promptly to guard commands and other important orientation action items, the victim admits to the police and prosecutors that she made it all up and actually signs a document stating so. 
Well that's lucky for you yes? You won't have to stay a minute more in jail and perhaps you can see about getting everything expunged from your record. No harm no foul. These things happen and maybe you and the arresting officers can have a beer summit at the White House some day.
But wait, now imagine that the prosecutor decides to go ahead with charges anyway because either they think the supposed victim is lying or because they don't like you very much or maybe they figure they need to keep their conviction rates high and you look like an easy win. And in addition they don't tell you or your attorney that the victim lied. And they keep you in jail for a year...
Such things couldn't happen in this country could they?

But sadly of course they do.

A Brooklyn man spent nearly a year behind bars on charges he raped an Orthodox Jewish woman — even though she recanted her accusation a day after making it.
Darrell Dula, 25, was released Tuesday and will likely have the case against him dropped after being in jail since June 28, 2011.
“I feel good. Thank God,” Dula told the Daily News Tuesday night as he played with his 3-year-old son for the first time in a year in front of his Crown Heights home.“I’m glad to be home with my family,” he said. “I’m still in shock. I’m traumatized. It wasn’t a good experience. They took me away on my son’s birthday. It was heartbreaking.”
The stunning turn of events came after Brooklyn prosecutors turned over a newly discovered statement that Dula’s 22-year-old accuser made to cops in which she says he never raped her. The alleged victim made a complaint to police on March 31, 2010, accusing Dula and his pal Damien Crooks, 32, of being part of a crew who raped, beat and pimped her out since age 13.
A day later, the woman told detectives she was a hooker for five years and made up the rape allegation, records show.
“I once again asked [her] if she was raped,” a detective wrote in a police report after the interview. “She told me ‘no’ and stated to me, ‘Can’t a ho change her ways?’ ”
The woman also signed a recantation, but the case proceeded and in spring 2011, a grand jury voted to indict Dula, Crooks and two others who were allegedly part of the crew.

LINK

And of course the prosecutor who directly handled the case, Abbie Greenberger,  is now blaming her bosses for the situation. I guess that makes sense. No one wants to be the scapegoat. I understand and feel the same way. Of course when I mess up no one spends a year in jail....

Greenberger said she found inconsistencies in the 22-year-old accuser’s account, but couldn’t convince her boss there was a problem.
“When I brought the inconsistencies to Lauren Hersh (chief of the sex-trafficking unit at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office), I was told that I didn’t do my job right and that I’m trying to dismiss the case and that I should work harder,” Greenberger told the Daily News.

See the problem here believe it or not isn't just that the victim lied, although that is bad enough and she ought to face the same criminal penalties that the man faced. No the REAL problem (and perhaps Old Guru and/or The Janitor can weigh in on this) is that the prosecutor did not disclose this information to the defense attorney and/or judge. I'm no lawyer but I kind of thought that the prosecutor had a duty to do justice, not just win a conviction. Maybe not.

Now why did the prosecutor continue with this farce? Could it have been that the District Attorney has gotten a little too cozy with certain elements within the local Orthodox Jewish community? Could the DA have believed the so-called victim was telling the truth before she recanted? Could the DA have believed this fellow was better off in jail, regardless of whether or not he actually committed this crime? Could the DA have been responding to a feminist constituency that doesn't always seem to understand that women are no more moral than men and are just as capable of mendacity?
I don't know. All I know is that I would like to have believed that if I were wrongfully accused and the police and prosecutors knew that then they would take the necessary steps to stop the machinery of justice from moving forward and throw that bad boy in reverse, to right before the time when they told me "You're under arrest". But honestly I knew that was an unreal expectation even before I read this story. All it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time and your life can suddenly change. I don't have tens of thousands of dollars sitting around for bail or attorneys.
How do we fix this?
My ideas are pretty simple. 

• Hold prosecutors and police personally and criminally responsible when they lie or hide evidence. They do a necessary if often unpleasant job. But they should not be above the law or get a free pass for this sort of thing.
• When someone lies about rape and it can be proven as a lie, send them to prison for the same amount of time that the assailant would have served. 
• Stop with the fiction that women never lie about things. They do. The entire point of the adversarial justice system is to hopefully let the truth come out and in such a way that someone is not convicted of a crime without evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. This requires a defense attorney that is going to get after the accuser.
• Stop hiding the victim's (or in this case liar's) name from the public. Perhaps if more people had been aware of who this woman was someone might have come forward earlier. Rape is a horrible crime and should be punished most severely. But in order to do that we must ensure we're punishing the right people. That's why we need as much transparency as possible within the system.

What are your thoughts?

Man, Woman or Other: Miss Universe Pageant

Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up muddled up, shook up world
Except for Lola, L-L-Lola

-"Lola" The Kinks

What does it mean to be a man or a woman? For me it's pretty simple. Either you were born with a set of XX chromosomes or a set of XY chromosomes. There are other obvious biological differences and of course a tremendous number of environmental differences which may cause and/or be caused by the biological differences. Other environmental differences may be totally arbitrary. There are some people who don't fit into this basic binary pattern but for the overwhelming majority of humanity, man or woman is a baseline accurate though incomplete description of who they are. I don't believe this is all that fiendishly complicated, really I don't.


So when someone has gone through the time and trouble to set up a beauty pageant specifically to celebrate, enjoy and judge female beauty, I don't think it's too much to ask that the would be contestants, actually, well be FEMALE.  Looking for the male beauty pageant? Take a left at the next light, drive two miles down and on the passenger's side you'll find the gathering for the male beauty pageant right beneath the giant sign marked "Who gives a rat's $$$?". But times change and apparently at least one pageant will now let transgender "women" compete. Imagine that.

The Miss Universe organization announced Tuesday it is ending its ban on transgender contestants after coming under scrutiny recently when a Canadian competitor was told she would be disqualified because she was born male.

 Miss Universe officials insist the change is in spite of, not because of, legal threats from women's rights lawyer Gloria Allred made on behalf of contestant Jenna Talackova. 

"We made the decision two days before we even heard that (Allred) was involved," pageant owner Donald Trump told CNN Monday. "Had I known she was involved, maybe I wouldn't have made that decision because she's easy to beat."  

Allred launched a blistering attack on Trump at a news conference a week ago, saying his pageant had no right to question Talackova's sexuality. "She did not ask Mr. Trump to prove that he is a naturally born man or to see photos of his birth to view his anatomy to prove that he was male," Allred said. In a Twitter posting Monday, Trump called Allred a "third rate lawyer" who "actually hurts Jenna." "Is Gloria a man or a woman????---- few men would know the answer to that one," Trump tweeted in a personal retort to Allred.

LINK
Kate Upton and Ariel Meredith are both attractive women. But only one of them would have been eligible to compete for Miss Black America if she so chose. An avowed atheist won't be able to lead the local Bible reading club. If you can't read music or play an instrument you can't be first violin in an orchestra. Men's heavyweight boxing is for male professional athletes above a certain weight. If you're a man, don't bother asking to join the Belizean Grove.
And so on. Sometimes certain characteristics, even if they are biologically set, really are essential to a particular job, association or social exercise. If a heterosexual man asks a buddy to set him up on a blind date with someone who is good looking, young and attractive he is not going to be happy if he shows up for the date and another man is sitting across the table from him. It doesn't matter that the other (gay) man may be good looking, young and attractive; he's not a woman and is thus excluded from a heterosexual man's realm of romantic possibility. That's not discrimination, or at least not the kind that ought to be illegal, shunned or discouraged. Now would anyone take seriously a complaint of discrimination from the gay man in this situation? I would certainly hope not.

I think there are some people that are literally hellbent on making everyone else accept their definition of themselves at all costs. You can call yourself whatever you like and I don't mind. You can alter your body to add or remove things at your pleasure and I'll cheerfully defend your right to do so. It should go without saying that I don't support calling people nasty names or committing or tolerating violence against them for their appearance or the choices that they make. We're all imperfect humans trying to make our way in this world. It's a free country. Rock on with your bad self! Wave your freak flag high! Live your life exactly how you want to!

But if you ask me to pretend that a man is a woman or vice versa I won't do that. If you wish to live by a set of delusions, fine. But don't think you can make me do so.

There are already beauty contests for transgender people. There is no need for a transgender person to try to crash someone else's contest. I don't see such things as a struggle for rights so much as I see them as (per Reg in A Life of Brian) a struggle against reality.  Not everything is for everybody. Pretending that a man who surgically and chemically altered his body to possess natural female secondary sex characteristics is a "woman" makes about as much sense as pretending that Sarah Silverman is black. You can do so if you want to but just leave me out. I think such things are thoroughly ridiculous and do violence against language, logic and simple common sense. But that's just me. What are your thoughts?


Questions
1) Should beauty pageants have the right to limit entry based on biological sex?
2) Are beauty pageants even relevant in 2012?
3) Should Gloria Allred have "ambulance chaser" and "professional virago" engraved on her business cards?

Limbaugh: He Said it First!!

We all know that recently right-wing radio show host Rush Limbaugh said some viciously ugly slurs about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke. Fluke spoke before a Congressional panel to advocate for a government forced change in the insurance benefits covered by Georgetown University and Law School.

I disagree with Fluke's policy POV but that's not important here. What is important is that Fluke rejected Rush's apology (in part because she thought it insincere but MUCH more because Rush didn't back off his opposition to her policy prescriptions).

Bill Maher jumped in this mess to say that the apology rejection made liberals look bad and that he didn't like the tactic of going after advertisers to shut people up. I guess he would say that, having had experience of losing his "Politically Incorrect" show due to advertiser abandonment after he made comments about 9-11 that were, well, "politically incorrect". Brent Bozell, who you may have just heard saying the President of the United States looked like a "skinny ghetto crackhead", decided to launch a "I stand with Rush" website, and piously chastised liberals for trying to shut down free speech.

Well.
Hypocrisy all around folks. I don't like hypocrisy. I think it is part of being human. We all have it. But I think we should try to minimize it, not embrace it.
If you're going to get upset when Limbaugh maligns Fluke with ugly hateful language that is meant to insult and demean then you also have to get upset when Maher does the same thing to Palin or Bachmann. It doesn't mean you have to LIKE these people.  You may disagree with their ideas. You may think they are wrong on everything, not very smart and immoral to boot. That is a different thing entirely from calling someone a "dumb t***" or a "dumb c***". You may think that Carrie Prejean is wrong to hold that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. That doesn't mean that it's okay for Perez Hilton to call her a "dumb b****" or that Keith Olbermann and Michael Musto get to question her femininity or make fun of her breasts.

If standards and logic mean anything then they must apply to everyone. That means that Rihanna can't get offended when a Dutch magazine uses racial stereotypes against her and then turn around and use racial stereotypes against another woman. That means black people can't get upset when the clueless Republican racist of the day makes a racialized joke about Obama or Black people and then be quiet when a liberal Obama supporter does the same thing.

If something is wrong then it's wrong. It doesn't matter that someone is more popular so his words are heard by more people or someone else is sponsor free so feels entitled to say things that are raw. Those may be reasons why they are able to avoid certain consequences or their audience expects to hear such things. But it doesn't make it any less wrong.

To be clear I believe that the overwhelming majority of this ugly language does come from the Right. That's a provable fact. I do not think, to put it charitably that Limbaugh is a good person. I think that Bachmann and Palin are often misguided and regularly vile. But that doesn't mean that people should turn a blind eye to ugly language when it comes from their team. Or does it?

h/t Rippa
QUESTIONS
1) Is this a false equivalence between Limbaugh and Maher? 
2) Is it ever okay to call a woman a c*** or t***?
3) Where is the line between comedian and political figure?
4) Can you disagree without insulting people?
5) Do some people just invite or deserve insult?

Free Birth Control!!! (Whether you want it or not)

Conversation between Federal Government and citizen.

Maybe I should use a different finger to make my point

Well hello there subject citizen! I’m here to help you. From now on all of your birth control pills are gonna be free!! No co-pays or deductibles. Isn’t that special? You can thank me later.

What’s that friend? You say you don’t need or use birth control pills? Hmm. Well that’s no problem because future HIV screenings, breast pumps, sterilization procedures, domestic violence counseling and screening, well-woman tests, and STD counseling are gonna be free!!! Isn’t that wonderful? Aren't you just quivering with joy and gratitude? I know I would be. 

Oh. You say you’re an XY human being and not an XX human being. Well see I’m afraid these benefits apply only to people with XX chromosomes.  You XY's will just have to continue to pay on your own for gender specific issues. I think that’s fair. Since I’m the Federal government, what I say goes. I got your equal protection right here pal.

Ehh. Speak up sonny it’s hard to hear you with my head in the clouds. Oh, you say you have firm and deeply felt religious, financial or moral objections to paying for other people’s birth control? I thought we went over this before. That’s just too bad partner. Life is not fair. I think it’s a good idea. You will just have to violate your religious objections. What’s the big deal anyway?  So your premiums rise so that other people can have “free” birth control? It’s “free” to them isn’t it? And that’s a heck of a selling point, you must admit.

Yes I know that virtually all plans already provide birth control, 99% of women who have had sex have used at least one contraceptive method, impoverished women are covered by Medicaid and most teen mothers said lack of access to birth control was not a problem. I read that new study which showed that higher income women (who were presumably paying co-pays for their birth control) had much lower rates of unplanned pregnancies than poor women (who were often covered by Medicaid)  So? Shouldn't you be ecstatic to pay more so that they can pay less? Stop mumbling about the inefficiency of subsidizing something someone was already doing.

Oh cut out that blubbering. So you have diabetes or colon cancer or prostate cancer or black lung or heart disease or optic neuritis or MS or Parkinson's or high cholesterol or obesity or any number of other LIFE THREATENING conditions. Tell it to someone who cares. You will still have to pay out of pocket for office visits and co-pays for medications related to preventing or treating those conditions. Those diseases either disproportionately impact men or impact men and women equally. I certainly can’t preen as the great savior of women’s health if I’m trying to reduce costs for both genders now can I sport? Any of this getting through to you kid?

Yes, that's right, everyone has the absolute individual right to use or not use birth control as they see fit. I'm glad you're finally seeing the light there buddy. I knew this would get through your thick skull eventually!! We agree on something. Finally!!

I want YOU to pay for birth control

Eh. No. Just because everyone has the individual right to use or not use birth control as they see fit doesn't mean that you have the individual right to pick a plan that doesn't include birth control OR that you have the individual right not to pay for other people's birth control. They have the right to choose; you have the duty to pay for their choices. What are you some sort of nutty libertarian? How dare you express preference as to what goods and services you want to buy with your own money. You say you have nothing against anyone using birth control you just don't want them to reach into your pocket to pay for it? Stop oppressing me with logic. The same people who smugly shout if you don't like abortion don't have one also say if you don't need birth control pay for mine anyway. And that makes all the sense in the world to me. Yes it sure does. No I won't explain how.

Say you'll sue? Yeah, so what I just lost in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC where I tried to argue that there was no ministerial exception to federal employment laws. That's a completely different case. I don't see any issue with church and state coming together as long as the state gets to tell the church what to do. And I do so love telling churches what to do. I know I said if you liked your health plan you could keep it but you know I said a lot of things. And stop whining about the Amish or Christian Scientists getting religious exemptions. I like them. You, I don't like.

So you say you might drop insurance coverage or close up shop rather than pay for coverage that violates your deeply held ethical, religious, philosophical or moral beliefs? Well that is a road you don't want to travel down my friend. If you're smart you'll get with the program. I have this handy dandy new indefinite detention law that I can't wait to try out. Go ahead. I dare you. I double dare you. I double DOG dare you.

QUESTIONS
1) Do you think the new HHS policy is a good thing? If so why?
2) If people who object decide to pay fines or drop coverage what should the Federal government do?
3) Is this a threat to religious freedom and/or freedom of conscience?
4) Do you recognize the "double DOG dare" reference?

Battered Woman Syndrome-Real or Not

What does self-defense mean to you?

To me it's a pretty simple concept. Someone is threatening your life, the lives of those you love or of innocent bystanders and the only way to end that threat is to use deadly force against the person or persons making that threat. This means that either you can't leave, you are under no reasonable obligation to leave (i.e. you're in your home or your car) and the threat is imminent or immediate.

This last to me is pretty important. It's not really self-defense in a legal or moral sense of the term in my non-lawyerly mind if someone threatens you on Monday and on Saturday you see them and shoot them in the back while they're unarmed. Now of course they may have deserved it but that's not really self-defense. Or is it?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York jury cleared a woman who shot dead her retired police officer husband of murder on Thursday in a case that had been seen as a test of the battered-woman defense.

Barbara Sheehan, 50, was acquitted of second-degree murder after three days of deliberations by the jury in state Supreme Court in Queens but was found guilty of a lesser charge of gun possession.

Sheehan's lawyers successfully argued that she fired only after her husband threatened to kill her, and Sheehan and her grown children had testified about the violent household ruled by Raymond Sheehan, 49, a former New York City Police sergeant. Both the prosecution and defense said the beatings and bruises came to an end on February 18, 2008, when Sheehan shot her husband 11 times in their Queens home.

Legal experts said the case was a test of the battered-woman defense, in which the history of abuse is explored to explain a woman's mental state at the time she is accused of committing a crime.

Key to the battered-woman defense is the issue of self defense. New York state law justifies the use of lethal force in response to an immediate threat to life. Under the battered-woman defense, lethal force can sometimes be justified even if the threat may not appear immediate. Court documents said the shooting happened after Sheehan refused to go on vacation with her husband. She testified she was scared because he had threatened to kill her if she didn't go.

Prosecutors said Sheehan shot her husband 11 times using two guns the former police officer had at home. Her husband was in the bathroom shaving before Sheehan shot him.

Story

I don't doubt that abuse was going on. Likely these two people didn't need to share the same home any longer. And I have never ever ever understood how anyone can go to bed and sleep if their partner is SERIOUSLY upset. Because after all, sleeping in front of someone who is seething with anger at you just doesn't seem super prudent on anyone's part, no matter their gender.

There was no abuse in my immediate family though I have since known people who were either abusers or abusees and sometimes both. It's a tricky situation. The best rule imo is to say "no hands for any reason at any time". On the other hand I know that people do have fights and each person has the right to defend themselves. Everyone's tolerance for intimate violence is different. I simply can't imagine staying in a situation where someone was verbally, let alone physically abusing me.

That said, I do not like one bit the concept of "battered woman syndrome".

From afar, it appears as if a few of these woman kills man stories aren't about self-defense as much as they are about someone deciding they aren't going to take it any more or being angry over past humiliations and abuse. And I really don't like the idea of any sort of syndrome being available as a defense to someone only depending on their particular inalienable characteristic. The law -especially laws around killing people- should be blind to that sort of thing as much as possible. I've been on the planet a while now and one thing that I know is that although men and women differ in some key ways, morality isn't among them.

Shooting someone eleven times while they're shaving and then saying they deserved it because of previous incidents, I don't know. Is there a "battered man defense"? Would anyone seriously believe or sympathize with a man who killed his wife or girlfriend because he was "battered" and felt threatened? I don't think so. What's YOUR take?

QUESTIONS

1) Do you believe that battered woman syndrome should be permissible as a defense?

2) Is there ever any reason for a woman or man to hit each other?

3) Should abused spouses have to try to leave the situation before they can kill the other and claim self-defense?

4) Should you be able to kill people for what they might do as opposed to what they are doing?