RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama has put the squeeze on school districts across the county: fall in line or else!

CNN has a report:

This latest guidance for schools goes beyond the bathroom issue, touching upon privacy rights, education records and sex-segregated athletics, all but guaranteeing transgender students the right to identify in school as they choose. It echoes what members of the administration have previously said on the topic.

“There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said. “This guidance gives administrators, teachers and parents the tools they need to protect transgender students from peer harassment and to identify and address unjust school policies.”

The letter does not carry the force of law but the message was clear: Fall in line or face loss of federal funding.

This is a big government shakedown, which violates the intent of the Constitution.

Let’s look at it in the big picture. The history of the West can be written on the theme of the Few v. the Many. The Few are the monarchs and the aristocrats and their retainers, and the many are everyone else. Power and money flowed from the Many and toward the Few. It was a centralized government. That’s why Highclere Castle, where many of the Downton Abbey scenes are shot, is so huge and luxurious. Though I like the series, I have to admit the real castle was built on the backs of the Many.

When our Founders saw Old Europe, they realized they had to go in a different direction. Power and wealth had to flow throughout the Many, and the Few couldn’t take it through the piling on of laws and taxes. It was a decentralized government. They also knew, of course, that the Federal Government existed to settle disputes between the States. But whatever was not delineated in the Constitution that was reserved to the Feds went to the States.

This is the cornerstone of conservatism and sets us apart from Obama and the Dems who, ironically, practice the act of power and wealth going to the Few, even though they believe they champion the cause of the Many. Misguided and violates the Constitution.

From Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s commencement address at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich., May 14:

What you do will matter far more than what you say. As the years have swiftly moved by, I have often reflected on the important citizenship lessons of my life. For the most part, it was the unplanned array of small things. There was the kind gesture from the neighbor. It was my grandmother dividing our dinner because another person showed up unannounced. It was the strangers stopping to help us get our crops out of the field before a big storm.

There were the Irish nuns who believed in us and lived in our neighborhood. There was the librarian who brought books to mass so that I would not be without reading materials on the farm. Small lessons such as these became big lessons for how to live our lives. We watched and learned what it means to be a good person, a good neighbor, or a good citizen. Who will be watching you, and what will you be teaching them? After this commencement, I implore you to take a few minutes to thank those who made it possible for you to come this far, your parents, your teachers, your pastor, your coaches. You know who helped you. . . .

Do not hide your faith and your beliefs under a bushel basket especially in this world that seems to have gone mad with political correctness. Treat others the way you would like to be treated if you stood in their shoes. These small lessons become the unplanned syllabus for becoming a good citizen, and your efforts to live them will help to form the fabric of a civil society and a free and prosperous nation where inherent equality and liberty are inviolable.

Editor’s note. The following is a fairly lengthy (3,300-word) essay introducing a new case of bias against a faculty member. Professor Dennis Gouws is a tenured professor at Springfield College in Massachusetts who has run afoul of college authorities who in 2014 abruptly began to find fault with his teaching a long-established course, “Men in Literature.” In 2016, they canceled his course, culminating a long campaign of petty hostility against him because of his scholarly and professional interest in “biological maleness.”

We present this case in detail because it exemplifies a development in the campus culture wars that has not yet come into focus for many observers. The Gouws affair shows the intensification of efforts by campus feminists to use bureaucratic authority to enforce their ideological preferences on the faculty as a whole.

Professor Gouws is an academic engaged in teaching his courses, expressing his opinions through ordinary channels, and advocating for open debate over his ideas. He is not someone who was spoiling for a fight, but his department, his dean, his provost, and his president decided that his views were impermissible. This is his story.

* * *

“The attempt to marginalize, discredit, and silence the views of faculty members who dissent from the current campus orthodoxies never stops. It happens at large universities and at small colleges. It happens in the sciences and in the humanities. It happens on big public issues that everyone cares about and on small matters that could hardly muster a quorum on a rainy afternoon.

It happens explicitly at some colleges and universities that wear their leftist commitments to “social justice” openly, like armbands, and it happens implicitly at other colleges and universities that try to maintain the pretense of intellectual openness while crushing dissenting views behind closed doors.

Put all the pieces together, and the picture of the faculty side of contemporary higher education is pretty grim. Faculty members, no matter their private views, know that the price of open dissent is very high. It doesn’t really matter whether a faculty member has tenure. There are plenty of levers besides the threat of job loss. Course assignments. Teaching loads. Promotions. Salary increases. Sabbatical leaves. Petty harassment. Departmental ostracism.

Varieties of Dissent

A few brave and thick-skinned faculty members dissent anyway. Professor McAdams at Marquette University did so and is now, rather famously, suspended without pay as his university tries to strip him of tenure. Professor Robert Paquette at Hamilton College has fared better. With the help of some financial backers, Paquette relocated his Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization off campus and has kept up a relentless series of ripostes to the enforcers of political correctness at his college. Others such as Professor Bradley C.S. Watson at St. Vincent College have managed to create domains of their own within their institutions that, because they are well-funded and highly respected externally, provide a safe harbor from the institution as a whole.

McAdams, Paquette, and Watson are rare exceptions of men willing to bear all the opprobrium heaped on those who refuse to conform to the ideological fashions on campus. There are many more cases of men and women who, however reluctantly, decide that the costs of nonconformity are just too high. They choose—reluctantly and often with deep misgivings—to play along with what the campus regime demands.

And then there are people like Dennis Gouws.

“Men in Literature”

This is mainly a story of how one small college cancelled an undergraduate English course, “Men in Literature.” The course was taught by Dennis Gouws.

A noted Princeton University professor has attacked the very notion of transgenderism, saying that the belief “that a woman can be trapped inside a man’s body” is ludicrous and superstitious, with no basis in medical fact.

Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, sent out a tweet late Sunday evening questioning the science behind the transgender movement, in reaction to the Obama administration’s threatening letter to educators mandating accommodation of gender-confused teenagers.George, who is also the Chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, sent our another tweet warning of the effects of the Obama letter on parents’ rights to educate their children in a safe environment.

George’s concerns over the transgender movement echo the recent statement by the American College of Pediatricians, which argued forcefully against encouraging young people to question their own biological sexuality.

“A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking,” the doctors stated. “When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.”

The pediatricians noted that children who think they are a different gender than they are suffer from a recognized mental disorder called “gender dysphoria.”

Will the looming conclusion of the Obama presidency lead him to engineer an all-out war by Iran’s terror surrogates, Hamas and Hezb’allah, against the embattled Jewish state? Will that war conveniently occur in December 2016, as Obama serves out the final days of his presidency?

Is it conceivable that the pro-Muslim president of the United States will use such a conflict to predictably and mendaciously blame Israel as a means to permanently fracture the U.S.-Israeli alliance in a manner that would be difficult for any successor to repair? As extreme as this may sound, it is entirely possible in view of Obama’s past acts of blatant hatred toward America’s one and only true democracy and ally in the Middle East.

As should be obvious by now, Obama believes that Islam has suffered from British and European Christian colonization and oppression. After being thoroughly prepared to be receptive to this message by his stridently anti-Western mother and maternal grandparents, such was the indoctrination Obama received from Khaled al-Mansour – a Muslim high-level adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and anti-Jewish hate-monger – during his formative years.

It was al-Mansour who helped Obama gain admittance to the Harvard Law School. Edward Said, an outspoken anti-Israel professor of Obama’s at Columbia University, and Rashid Khalidi, a former press agent for Yasser Arafat’s PLO, served as Obama’s mentor in the former case and friend in the latter.

These figures, whose entire professional adult lives had been essentially dedicated to eliminating Israel, focused on influencing Obama to support the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians – along with their thugocracy known as the Palestinian Authority. These overwhelmingly Muslim terrorists amount to little more than cannon fodder in the ongoing Islamist quest to effectively perpetrate yet another Holocaust.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/18883 “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but [in 1936] in Spain for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie…. This kind of thing is […]

One take-away from the transgender-bathroom wars is that the public ignores arcane academic theory at its peril. For two decades, a growing constellation of gender-studies, queer-studies, and women’s-studies departments have been beavering away at propositions that would strike many people outside academia as surprising — such as that biological sex and “gender” are mere ideological constructs imposed by a Eurocentric, heteronormative power structure. Even though skeptical journalists have regularly dived into the murky swamp of academic theory and returned bearing nuggets of impenetrable jargon and even stranger ideas, the public and most politicians have shrugged off such academic abominations, if they have taken note at all. (Senator Marco Rubio’s deplorable jab at “philosophy majors” during his presidential run demonstrated how clueless your typical politician is about the real problems in academia.)

Now gender theory has leapt from the academy to the real world with the demand by the Obama administration that public schools allow biological boys, bearing their full complement of male genitals, to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms if those boys declare themselves female. How did this happen? A pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media. The products of the narcissistic academy graduate and bring their high theory indoctrination with them into the federal and state bureaucracies and into newsrooms. Even the judiciary is affected. The opinion of the federal district court striking down California’s Proposition 8 (declaring that marriage was an institution uniting men and women), for example, was steeped in the women’s-studies notion that marriage originated as a way to impose a subordinate “gender” role on females.

The most notable aspect of this latest public eruption of academic theory is how quickly the new academically driven moral consensus was formed. The current wave of non-academic transgender activism began last summer, when the New York Times ran a full-page editorial declaring that the oppression of the transgendered by the biologically obsessed heteronormative majority was our most pressing civil-rights struggle. The Times then followed up with a series of news stories documenting the alleged oppression and plight of the “trans community.” Now, less than a year later, any parent with qualms about having his twelve-year-old daughter share a locker room with a 14-year-old boy is branded as the equivalent of someone advocating a return to whites-only water fountains. An issue that didn’t even exist a year ago is now completely settled in the minds of the cultural elite; anyone who opposes the new regime is simply an atavistic, benighted bigot.

Yesterday, May 15, Palestinians and their supporters, as they have done increasingly over recent years, marked the nakba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’) –– the day 68 years ago that Israel came into existence upon the expiry of British rule under a League of Nations mandate.

That juxtaposition of Israel and nakba isn’t accidental. We’re meant to understand that Israel’s creation caused the displacement of hundreds of thousand of Palestinian Arabs.

But the truth is different. A British document from the scene in early 1948, declassified in 2013, tells the story: “the Arabs have suffered … overwhelming defeats … Jewish victories … have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands.”

In other words, Jew and Arabs, including irregular foreign militias from neighboring states, were already at war and Arabs were fleeing even before Israel came into sovereign existence on May 15, 1948.

Neighboring Arab armies and internal Palestinian militias responded to Israel’s declaration of independence with full-scale hostilities. In fact, the headline for the New York Times’ famous report on that day includes the words, ‘Tel Aviv Is Bombed, Egypt Orders Invasion.’ And, indeed, the head of Israel’s provisional government, David Ben Gurion, delivered his first radio address to the nation from an air-raid shelter.

As Israel celebrates its 68th birthday today, even facing talk of a possible new border war, its people are among the happiest on Earth. A look at its founding document helps explain why – and helps show the power of a faith-infused cause, rightly understood.

Even as a confirmed admirer of Israel, I had never read “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” (linked above) until I saw it in a full-page ad in the May 12 Wall Street Journal. It was a revelation.

For those willing to see, it has long been obvious that Israel is a remarkable oasis of human rights in a region notably hostile both to those rights and to Israel itself. It guarantees voting rights not just for Jews but for Arabs, including Muslims, and it protects most of the rights to speech and religious practice that are so central to Western, especially American, republics.

What I didn’t know is that it was founded that way. I had imagined that in its violent beginnings – Arab neighbors attacked it immediately upon the Jewish state being formally constituted on May 15, 1948 – it probably had started as an only semi-free state, aspiring to full republican rights but too beleaguered at the time to guarantee them.

But the Declaration says otherwise. The document says the new nation, from day one, “will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” It appealed to Arab inhabitants by reassuring them of “full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” Finally, rather than declaring hostility towards its neighbors, it said “we extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness.”

Israel has lived up to those pledges. Its courts feature non-Jewish judges. (Surrounding nations, of course, would never consider allowing a Jew to sit in judgment of any matter under law or equity – or, usually, even to openly acknowledge his own Jewishness without fear of arrest.) Its streets teem with non-Jewish merchants. And yes, the non-Jewish holy places operate freely – or, rather, freely for their own adherents, even to the exclusion of Jews and Christians. CONTINUE AT SITE

Sure, people have the right to dress as they wish, within the bounds of decency, of course. And that’s why the vile misogyny of imprisoning women in head-to-foot draperies must be banned: it is a foul and indecent assault on everything our society should stand for.
I’m changing my mind, and that doesn’t happen too often. In an article in the March 2011 issue of Quadrant (“Struggling with the Burka”) I argued from a classical liberal tradition that the way people dress in purely public situations — where no professional interactions are required — is a matter for them and certainly not for the law. I brought in John Stuart Mill (On Liberty), no less, to bolster this position.

I was taken to task in the following May issue by Babette Francis from Toorak, Victoria. In her letter, among other astute observations, she wrote that I arrived at my conclusion “from the comfortable perspective of a male, one moreover who has never had to live as a citizen of an Islamic country.” My reaction at the time was to think that she had misunderstood my position. After all weren’t we on the same side?

The tenor of my article was hardly pro-Islam and, accordingly, I had concluded that the only option available to Western societies was “to limit the size of Muslim populations through selective immigration policies.” But now I don’t think we were quite on the same side at all. I believe that I was on the wrong side when it came to the burka.

Let me be clear, I now believe that the Islamic face veil – the niqab – should be outlawed in all public places, as it is in France. Moreover, I believe that the Islamic head covering – the hijab – should be banned for teachers and students in all schools in receipt of any government funding. Would I extend this ban to other religious symbols? No, I wouldn’t, unless, say, Catholics, Anglicans, Buddhists or Hindus developed supremacist tendencies and turned particularly nasty.