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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; gender</title>
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		<title>Rushing the National Defense Authorization Act</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/rushing-passage-of-the-national-defense-authorization-act/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rushing-passage-of-the-national-defense-authorization-act</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2014 05:10:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[National Defense Authorization Act]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[quota]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[social engineering]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246741</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A lame-duck Congress puts military lives on the line. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Army-legs.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246742" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Army-legs-450x300.jpg" alt="Army-legs" width="363" height="242" /></a>A lame duck Congress is on the verge of <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/hughhewitt/2014/12/03/memo-to-the-senate-gop-class-of-2016-what-are-you-nuts-n1926861/page/full"><span style="color: #1255cc;">sticking it</span></a> to America’s troops. Before they leave for recess they will attempt to pass the FY2015 version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It is a compendium of ill-advised ideas seemingly aimed at advancing the Obama administration’s continuing effort to “fundamentally transform” the finest fighting force in the world into something more closely resembling a social-outreach organization. Sadly, Republicans, apparently oblivious to the mandate just handed to them by the electorate, are on board.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Unsurprisingly, the effort to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/us/politics/pentagon-plans-to-shrink-army-to-pre-world-war-ii-level.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">shrink</span></a> the military to its smallest size since WWII will be borne in large part by those who do the fighting and dying. A scheduled pay raise of 1.8 percent will be <a href="http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/benefits/pay/allowances/2014/12/02/ndaa-deal-pay-raise/19784183/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reduced</span></a> to one percent, there will be reduced growth in the troops’ Basic Housing Allowance (BHA) for those who cannot be accommodated on military bases, and a $3 copay will be added to the cost of prescription medication. For Americans who think this is no big deal, here is the <a href="http://www.militaryrates.com/military-pay-charts-e1_e5_2014"><span style="color: #1255cc;">2014 Military Pay Chart</span></a> revealing the troops’ relatively meager pay levels, even for those with decades of service to our nation.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet it is the ever-reliable Center for Military Readiness (CMR) that <a href="http://cmrlink.org/content/home/37616/problematic_proposals_in_national_defense_authorization_act_for_2015_ndaa"><span style="color: #1255cc;">details</span></a> the far more pernicious agendas advanced in this bill. While troops bear the aforementioned reductions, pork still prevails. Sections in a version of the bill conceived by the Senate Armed Services Committee would establish a feminist-oriented entity to be known as the &#8220;Defense Advisory Committee on Investigation, Prosecution, and Defense of Sexual Assault in the Armed Forces.&#8221; As the CMR explains, this &#8220;would establish yet another power base in the Pentagon for feminists who believe that a person accused of sexual misconduct is automatically guilty, unless he is somehow (against all odds) found innocent because of &#8216;anti-women&#8217; legal procedures that must be ‘fixed.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Even as the military is enduring cuts that shrink every branch of our armed forces, a large increase in gender quotas, aimed at increasing the recruitment of women into military service academies by an additional 20 percent, is also part of the agenda. There is nothing wrong with recruiting women, but as indicated by both the Defense Department and the left-leaning RAND corporation, there has been no evidence of insufficient efforts to do so. What this is really all about is the ongoing effort to integrate women into direct ground combat (DGC) units, despite extensive <a href="http://www.cmrlink.org/data/sites/85/CMRDocuments/InterimCMRSpecRpt-100314.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">evidence</span></a> that standards of effectiveness would be compromised in the process. Regardless of biological reality, the Obama administration has embraced “gender diversity metrics,” allowing more qualified personnel to be replaced by those meeting minimum standards laughably referred to as “lower but equal.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">An October article in The Hill<a href="http://thehill.com/policy/defense/219685-enlisted-women-to-begin-serving-on-submarines"><span style="color: #1255cc;"> announcing</span></a> the effort to integrate a fixed percentage of women onto ballistic missile submarines, is illustrative of the current thinking. Navy Cmdr. Renee Squier, head of the Office of Women&#8217;s Policy for the Chief of Naval Personnel, explains that &#8220;the goal is to have each unit have 20 percent,” in order to build a &#8220;good ecosystem&#8221; for female submariners. As the CMR <a href="http://www.cmrlink.org/articles/print/35896?author=0&amp;image=0&amp;domain=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reveals</span></a> this is being done despite evidence that submarine “ecosystems,” that include &#8220;prolonged exposure to chemical contaminants in the constantly recirculated air” pose unique health risks for female sailors. As told to Front Page by CMR president Elaine Donnelly, her organization filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to determine whether female sailors had been made aware of those potential health risks. In keeping with this administration’s contemptible track record, the CMR was stonewalled.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The CMR also blows up the notion that women need to be in direct ground combat units to advance their careers. &#8220;For decades, women have been promoted at rates equal to or faster than men,” CMR explains, further citing a Defense Department report submitted to Congress in 2012 that states<i> &#8220;</i>there is no indication of women having less than equitable opportunities to compete and excel under current assignment policy…&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Quotas are only part of the equation here. As <a href="http://dailysignal.com/2014/12/02/congresss-sneaky-tactic-grab-u-s-land-government/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">revealed</span></a> by the Daily Signal, the 2015 NDAA may also include a provision adding as much as &#8220;250,000 additional acres of wilderness, four new national parks and seven national park studies (future parks-to-be)” to the federal government’s real estate portfolio. That would be a portfolio of federally-owned property that, <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/4/this-land-is-whose-land-ranch-standoff-reveals-ext/?page=all"><span style="color: #1255cc;">according</span></a> to a 2012 Congressional Research Survey, now totals approximately 640 million acres comprising approximately 28 percent of the nation’s entire land mass. As the Signal notes, &#8220;the importance of the NDAA to the defense budgeting process and its traditional status as a &#8216;must-pass&#8217; piece of legislation makes it an inviting target for pet projects and wasteful spending,” one where &#8220;lawmakers are trying to end-run the normal legislative process in a rushed, closed-door approach.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Why the rush? Vanity appears to be an integral part of the equation. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI), both of whom are retiring, are reportedly jamming this bill through the lame duck session &#8212; so the bill can be named after them. To further that effort, a mechanism known as <a href="https://www.senate.gov/reference/glossary_term/unanimous_consent.htm"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Unanimous Consent</span></a>, defined as setting aside a specified rule of procedure so as to expedite proceedings—as in everyone agreeing not to add amendments to the bill that would require time-consuming votes—is being employed.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Ms. Donnelly was critical of the lack of transparency that has surrounded passage of the NDAA in previous cycles, in addition to this one. &#8220;A process that is not transparent, like the ObamaCare bill for example, invites big policy mistakes which have serious consequences,” she warned. &#8220;The primary offense is not what’s there but what’s not: appropriate oversight.” With regard to many of the sexual issues that concern the CMR, Donnelly see an ongoing “emphasis on social change,” much of which is being pushed using what she refers to as “perception management,” a term <a href="http://davidbaldacci.com/book/the-whole-truth/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">coined</span></a> by author David Baldacci. “The military is attempting to create a (gender-based) reality that doesn’t exist and getting people to believe it,” she explains.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Nothing illuminates that perception management better than the aforementioned phrase “lower but equal,” and one is left to wonder why Republicans, who will have far more leverage over the process in January, are collaborating with Democrats to rush the passage of the NDAA before then. The American electorate, and the men and women who have volunteered to defend this nation, deserve more thought, more transparency and more pushback against an Obama administration and a Democratic Party all determined to make the American military virtually indistinguishable from politically correct American society. In a world fraught with danger, it is a fatal mistake to do so.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<item>
		<title>Life Under the Victimocracy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/life-under-the-victimocracy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=life-under-the-victimocracy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/life-under-the-victimocracy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2014 05:38:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oppressed]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oppression]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[victim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Victimocracy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245168</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The biggest and angriest whiner wins.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/victim.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245171" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/victim.jpg" alt="victim" width="298" height="241" /></a>In America there are two types of people; the oppressed and the oppressors.</p>
<p>The oppressed oppress the oppressors. And everyone including the oppressors agrees that this is only fair because the oppressors deserve to be oppressed. After all they are the oppressors.</p>
<p>They deserve to have the money they earn taken away. They deserve to be sent to the back of the line when applying to a college or looking for a job. They deserve to be beaten, robbed, raped, and taunted with slurs that would lead to national outrage if it were directed at the oppressed.</p>
<p>But they’re the oppressors. They deserve it.</p>
<p>If they complain, they deserve to have their speech censored. They are the oppressors. There’s no telling how much oppression they might dish out if the oppressed don’t keep them down.</p>
<p>That’s just life in the Victimocracy.</p>
<p>With one sob story too many, one whine too great, one more PBS special, special report about the plight of the oppressed and episode of Donahue, the country changed. The oppressors still had the democratic refuge of elections where they could by sheer numbers vote to retain their civil rights, but most of the other mechanisms of governance had ceased to be democratic and instead became victimocratic.</p>
<p>To have real power you had to be a victim or one of their protectors.</p>
<p>The Victimocracy is a lot like any other tyranny. In an aristocracy, power belongs to the nobles, in a theocracy, power belongs to the clergy, in a meritocracy, to anyone with skill and a work ethic.</p>
<p>But in a Victimocracy the biggest and angriest whiner wins.</p>
<p>In a Victimocracy, suffering is the exclusive privilege of the elites. No one else is allowed to suffer except them. No one else has ever been oppressed, has felt pain, been insulted, abused, degraded, enslaved and ground down into the dirt except the very people who are grinding you into the dirt now.</p>
<p>Victimhood is what entitles them to special privileges, it’s what ennobles them as a superior class of people and gives them the right to rule over you. They are the victims. What they say goes.</p>
<p>Victimization is the currency of their power. They have 1/16 Cherokee blood and high cheekbones. They are ‘triggered’ by loud noises and differing opinions. They spent their twenties “coming to terms” with something because of the lack of sitcom role models for their favorite sexual preferences or skin color. They are all survivors of something or other. They were activists and someone once said mean things to them. And if all else fails, they are deeply passionate about the plight of the oppressed.</p>
<p>Like, seriously.</p>
<p>Now stop oppressing them and educate yourself by recognizing their right to oppress you.</p>
<p>The Victimocracy is based around the superior moral power of their suffering. That is why no one else is allowed to suffer except them. Their convoluted theories of social justice eliminate the very possibility that the source of their exclusive moral power can be experienced by anyone else. They have strived to warp language around their political narcissism to define suffering as an experience unique to them.</p>
<p>They will assert, for example, that anti-white racism cannot exist because racism is not interpersonal but a structural product of power relations. Since everyone knows that America is a white male patriarchy, white people cannot be oppressed. They can only be the oppressors. Because of the patriarchy, men cannot be sexually assaulted. Christians cannot be religiously discriminated against. Americans can’t be blown up by Muslims. Any claim otherwise is a lie intended to oppress our oppressed oppressors.</p>
<p>Victimocrats are narcissistically infuriated by the suffering of others. Many tyrannies applied the whip and the lash, the prison cell and the gulag, but they at least left those they abused in possession of their suffering. The Victimocracy denies its victims even their suffering. Victimocrats reject the humanity of their victims as thinking and feeling beings with the same needs and boundaries as themselves.</p>
<p>The Victimocracy rations empathy. Empathy is the election of its system. The biggest victim wins and his suffering licenses his abuses. The bigger the victim, the bigger the abuses he is entitled to commit. If the empathy flows the wrong way, then power shifts and the entire system collapses. To take over a society, the Victimocrats must control its education and entertainment to structure its empathy flow their way.</p>
<p>Victimocrats must appear weak to gain power. They must always seem beleaguered, under siege, abused and threatened from a thousand different directions. They must be made to seem underdogs. Even if a Victimocrat sits in the White House, unilaterally dispensing with the lives and fortunes of a nation with phone and pen, he must remain a vulnerable victim of a terrible history of racism.</p>
<p>The Victimocrat must always be seen as a weak victim in need of rescue from those he oppresses.</p>
<p>Never able to argue a thing on its merits, the Victimocrats shift the debate to the moral high ground of their own oppression.  It is impossible to disagree with them without somehow invoking stereotypes, flashbacks and the return of the white male patriarchy riding back into town on the last thing you said.</p>
<p>The Victimocrats are always in need of rescuing. No matter how much power they have, someone is always abusing them. And once that happens people of good will are called upon to condemn the abuse and to reinforce their power structure of the oppressed oppressor and the oppressive oppressed.</p>
<p>Victimocrats don’t win arguments. They convince others that they are entitled to avoid the argument.</p>
<p>In the Victimocracy the illusion of weakness is power. The weak are entitled to disproportionate power to protect themselves from the rest of us. The weaker they are, the more power they need. And the more power they get, the weaker they grow until we live under a tyranny of the absolutely powerless who wield absolute power.</p>
<p>Sometimes the oppressors wonder where their incredible power is supposed to be. They don’t have all that much money and no one seems to have taught them the secret handshake that will unlock the heavy iron doors of the heteronormative patriarchy where the patriarchal plutocrats sit around the table drinking the tears of Obama, Oprah and various Hollywood celebrities from human skulls.</p>
<p>Their oppressors tell them about their privilege, an invisible power to oppress others that they never even knew they had, but the privilege never really explains why they have to work harder, die sooner and be berated constantly for even existing. And they die and their oppressors take what they have.</p>
<p>There is no end to the oppression because the Victimocracy has to grow. America is always more bigoted than it was last year because the Victimocrats need more power this year. The more oppressed Americans become, the more they must be denounced for victimizing all the nice people running their lives and robbing them blind.</p>
<p>The Victimocracy rules by manufacturing an urgent crisis of oppression. It demands special measures to deal with the crisis. The temporary measures become permanent. Rolling them back would be an act of oppression. The permanent measures turn out to be insufficient. They must be redoubled.</p>
<p>Each Victimocrat victory is “a significant step forward” but there is always “more work to be done.”</p>
<p>And like all lust for power, the work never ends.</p>
<p>The oppressed want more. The oppressors make do with less. The protectors of the oppressed, who actually run the Victimocracy, announce that more speech must be censored, more wealth redistributed and more must be made unequal to achieve equality. A better world is around the corner, but first the one we have must be destroyed. Only when the balance shifts permanently and the new world is born, will the oppressors be allowed to see for the first time that they had been the oppressed all along.</p>
<p>And then it will be too late.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Andrew Klavan: What Gender Are You?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-what-gender-are-you/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-klavan-what-gender-are-you</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-what-gender-are-you/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Oct 2014 04:29:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Klavan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Female]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Male]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242798</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><span style="color: #000000;">In this special episode, our always sensitive host takes a look at the exciting world of gender diversity, where the unusual is normal, even though that can&#8217;t be right and doesn&#8217;t make a lick of sense. See the video and transcript below. </span></strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/nNDJD_RRpEY" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Many of you may remember a time when women were tender and nurturing and modest and men were strong and protective and courtly.  Actually, you might be remembering the movie Meet Me In St. Louis&#8230; but I’m sure reality also used to be great.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Today, though, all across America, gender norms are coming under question, laws are being passed to allow people to choose their gender identities, and Time Magazine, always on the cutting edge of irrelevance, has declared transgenderism the new civil rights frontier.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">What’s it all about?  Let’s get at the revolting truth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Gender theorists today believe that the different behaviors and capabilities of men and women are not a reflection of their natural propensities and desires but were imposed on them by the gender stereotypes of society which were created at the conference of the Gender Stereotype Society, held in 1817 at a secluded chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva.  It was there that it was determined by secret ballot that from now on, men would be able to invent things and lie convincingly about their sexual conquests while women would talk a lot about clothes and then make dinner.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">These oppressive and confining stereotypes were imposed on the population of the entire globe through repeated exposure to televised football and the movie Cinderella as well as Archie comics dropped from planes on primitive villages where, up to that point, people had been living lives of complete gender equality.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Once we remove these imposed stereotypes, gender theorists believe there will be no inherent differences at all between men and women so that, for instance, someone who felt he was a woman inside a man’s body wouldn’t actually be able to tell the difference and then he wouldn’t have to have his penis cut off and maybe these nightmares I’ve been having would finally stop.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">According to U.C. Berkeley’s Gender Equity Resource Center, there are actually a wide range of gender identities. There’s “cisgender,” a person who conforms to society’s expectations of his sex; “gender diverse,” which could include a boy who breaks free of gender norms in order to enjoy musical comedy and get punched in the face out in back of the gym; and there’s “transgender,” a person who changes from, say, male to female in hopes of sneaking into the girl’s bathroom or winning every race at women’s track meets.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">To insure respect for these otherly-oriented individuals — or “oddballs” — the Center provides gender neutral pronouns which can be used to refer to a person without giving away the fact that he’s just some guy in a dress.  For instance, instead of he or she, you can use “ze” and instead of him or her you can use “here”&#8230;  as in the sentence, “Ze is here&#8230;”  although actually it should be “ze is ze,” unless ze is actually here&#8230;  but that’s neither here nor zare.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Though some different gender identities are unusual, gender theorists consider them all normal, a word which the dictionary defines as “usual.”  So though to call something unusual normal would be unusual it’s not unusual among gender theorists who are abnormal.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So I hope that’s clear. Or zere.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">[Sings plaintively:]  Meet me in St. Louis, Louie, meet me at the fair&#8230;</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Don’t tell me the lights are shining anyplace but there&#8230;.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Progressive Paradigms Lost</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-progressive-paradigms-lost/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-progressive-paradigms-lost</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Apr 2014 04:50:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223847</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the central myths animating the Left are losing their credibility. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Obama-teleprompter-speech.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223858" alt="Obama-teleprompter-speech" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Obama-teleprompter-speech-366x350.jpg" width="256" height="245" /></a>The progressive mind functions in terms of fossilized paradigms into which every crisis and problem are fitted, no matter how many qualifying or contradictory facts are left behind. These paradigms are part of a worldview, a picture of human existence that gives it coherence and meaning, and a narrative that gives people an identity and a morality. With these paradigms we can sort out the good from the bad, the saved from the damned, the political goals we should pursue, the ones we should avoid––and who gets the power to decide. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Every human community from the most primitive tribe to the most advanced civilization functions in terms of some sort of worldview. For nearly 2000 years Christianity provided the dominant paradigms of Western civilization. Modernity, however, developed a new and dangerous twist on this eternal human behavior. With the rise of the natural sciences, people began to dream of a new paradigm based on science, not the irrational myths and superstitions of religion. Whole new disciplines arose to teach and institutionalize these new “scientific” truths about human identity and behavior. Soon anthropology, psychology, sociology, and political science displaced the old philosophical, traditional, and theological understanding of human life.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Isaiah Berlin describes this historical process and its consequences: “The success of physics seemed to give reason for optimism: once appropriate social laws were discovered, rational organization would take the place of blind improvisation, and men’s wishes, within the limits of the uniformities of nature, could in principle all be made to come true . . . The rational reorganization of society would put an end to spiritual and intellectual confusion, the reign of prejudice and superstition, blind obedience to unexamined dogmas, and the stupidities and cruelties of the oppressive regimes which such intellectual darkness bred and promoted.” The progressive worldview is easily recognizable in this description. Just let technocrats armed with science and backed by the coercive power of the state take over the organization of society from the myths of religion and the superstitions of tradition, and we will achieve the utopia of prefect freedom, justice, and equality.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This whole notion, of course, is itself a myth, one whose bloody consequences stain every page of modern history with genocides and gulags. Humans are not material things in the world that can be understood by the laws of nature so reliably that people can be organized and controlled like the cogs and wheels in a watch. People are too complex and intricate, too mysterious in their motives, too spontaneous in their actions, and too unpredictable because of their radical freedom to chose. Yet from Freud and Marx down to today’s evolutionary psychologists, this myth of the “human sciences” is marketed as real science, beyond discussion or qualification as much as the laws of gravity or the heliocentric solar system.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Whenever progressives address an issue, one is subjected to these mythic paradigms dressed up in spurious science, and delivered with the arrogance of the “enlightened” who patronize or demonize their opponents as ignorant or evil or both. Of course, these attitudes bespeak the mythic origins of the paradigm, its source in faith rather than reason, its tenacity resulting from the careful selection of evidence that confirms it, and the equally careful discarding of evidence that challenges it. In this respect many progressives resemble the members of a cult, with the same demand for orthodox dogma never to be challenged, the same uncritical deference to scientific authority, and the same intolerance of heretics or infidels who dare to question that orthodoxy and refuse to conform to its revealed truths.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The random perusal of any daily newspaper or cable news show will provide numerous examples. The great feminist myth holds that sex identity is a socio-political construct. The traditional behaviors and preferences of men and women, once understood to reflect their different natures, have been imposed on women by men whose power depends on the “patriarchy” that subordinates women in order to serve male power and privilege. Hence any disparities between men and women must reflect not nature, but the lingering effects of this unjustly constructed sex identity. Given that modern “science” has unmasked this regime of oppressive power, the state must be enlisted to rectify the inequalities “patriarchy” inflicts on women.  The government must create laws and use its coercive power to punish those who break them. Any challenges that contradict this paradigm must be silenced, shunned, or demonized, for they concern not just disparities between men and women, but violate an important metaphysical belief of the left––radical equality, the notion that equality of result is more important than equality of opportunity available to all, which traditionally was defined as the freedom for people to rise as far as their particular talents and virtues can take them.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hence Obama’s recent speeches on the lingering differences in income between men and women, in which he peddled the long-exploded canard that women make only 77% of what men make. The truth is, when one controls for type of job, length of service, hours worked, how dangerous the job is, and whether women have children or not, most of that disparity disappears. Indeed, educated women under 30 earn more than their male peers in most cities in the U.S. But those qualifying details don’t serve the paradigm that holds all people are equal and only fail to achieve equal results because of injustices in social, cultural, political, and economic structures. The authority for asserting this ideological, not scientific, position comes from the spurious “77%,” which implies a rigor and precision beyond discussion or challenge except by the evil or ignorant.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Another theme of Obama’s recent speeches has been income inequality, which he asserts is growing worse and unfairly limits the opportunities for advancement of the less privileged. This “crisis” is also about the dogma of radical equality. It reflects a pre-modern, zero-sum vision of wealth as fixed and limited, so that the abundance of one necessarily demands the penury of another. It also seemingly does not get the dynamism of capitalism, its “creative destruction” that generates and distributes new wealth, and that over time continually reshuffles people and families in and out of income levels as the talents of individuals find opportunities to better their lot and transcend their origins.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But, like the magical 77%, simplistic statistics are paraded as scientific evidence supporting an ideological preference. So we are told that the incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans grew $59 (adjusted for inflation) from 1966 to 2011, but the incomes for the top 10% rose by $116,071. But for most of those 45 years the people in each cohort weren’t always the same. As Stephen Moore and James Pierson </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://spectator.org/articles/58135/dont-eat-rich">point out</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, “The myth is that the super-rich stay at the top of the income ladder year after year, and few new entrants are allowed to break into the elite club. Wrong. The IRS found that only four of the 400 (1 percent) made the cut every year. There were 3,672 different taxpayers who made the top 400 list at least once over the seventeen-year period studied. Over half of them made the list only once or twice. Three quarters of the individuals who rose to the heights of this top 400 list were there for six years or less. There is no permanent upper class in America.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for the lower income cohorts, a Treasury Department </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/Income-Mobility-1996to2005-12-07-revised-3-08.pdf">study</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of income mobility between 1996 and 2005 showed that over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile, about half of taxpayers in the bottom quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group in 2005, and only a quarter of the “super rich,” the richest 1/100 of 1% in 1996, were still that rich in 2005. What has slowed this movement is the historically sluggish economic growth that has followed the Great Recession, a consequence in large part of Obama and the Democrats’ statist and redistributionist economic policies. Implementing policies that spur economic growth obviously would help to restore the income mobility seen in times of high growth like the 1990s.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet all Obama can propose is raising the minimum wage, a symbolic gesture at best, and one repeatedly demonstrated to kill jobs for those most in need of work. We see again the progressive paradigm of radical equality dressed up as a rational response to statistical facts. As Thomas Sowell </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/011110-517702-how-media-misuse-income-data-to-match-their-preconceptions.htm?p=2">writes</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, “Only by focusing on the income brackets, instead of the actual people moving between those brackets, have the intelligentsia been able to verbally create a ‘problem’ for which a ‘solution’ is necessary. They have created a powerful vision of ‘classes’ with ‘disparities’ and ‘inequities’ in income, caused by ‘barriers’ created by ‘society.’ But the routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the ‘barriers’ assumed by many, if not most, of the intelligentsia.” In short, serving the paradigm trumps growing the economy.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Radical equality is one of the key paradigms of the progressive worldview, a leftover leftist dogma based not on reason or the possible, but on a Manichaean worldview in which greedy capitalists unjustly appropriate more than their fair share of wealth, a problem to be solved by a technocratic government using its coercive power to redistribute wealth and punish the “malefactors of great wealth who defraud and exploit the people,” as the 1936 Democratic party platform put it. Those who challenge this dogma and the policies it engenders are vilified as selfish and evil, while those who champion it are anointed as the generous and good. The paradigm is in its D.C. heaven, and all’s right with the world of the progressives.</span></p>
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		<title>Muslim Cleric Urges Homeless Women to Become Sex-Slaves</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/muslim-cleric-urges-homeless-women-to-become-sex-slaves/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslim-cleric-urges-homeless-women-to-become-sex-slaves</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Apr 2014 04:29:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Slavery]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222686</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the name of “altruism.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mn.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222687" alt="mn" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mn.jpg" width="278" height="202" /></a>Within the context of keeping the Syrian jihad alive, it seems there is no end to the attempts of some Islamic clerics to legitimize otherwise forbidden behavior in order to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/allahs-sword-of-terror/">gratify the sexual urges of the jihadis</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and keep them fighting Syrian president Bashar Assad.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">First, there was the now infamous “</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/sex-jihad-and-western-disbelief/">sex-jihad</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">” fatwa, which holds that any Muslim woman who willingly allows her body to be used by the sexually-deprived jihadis becomes herself a jihadi, if not a “martyr,” deserving of all the honor and rewards associated with those titles.  (Much has been written about the sex jihad, including </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/islamic-doctrines-justify-sex-jihad-with-video/">videotaped testimonials</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">—and how one teenage girl, after copulating with countless jihadis, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/aids-and-pregnant-tunisian-girl-recounts-her-sex-jihad-in-syria/">got pregnant and contracted aids</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">—even as pro-Syrian war Western entities like </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/foreign-policy-magazine-covers-up-syrian-sex-jihad/"><i>Foreign Policy</i> try to deny it</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Another fatwa permitted the jihadis in Syria to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/new-fatwa-permits-rape-of-non-sunni-women-in-syria/">enslave and rape any non-Sunni women</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">—including Alawites (Assad’s sect), Christians, Druze, and all Shia—in the context of their status as </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">melk al-yamin</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> or “</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_malakat_aymanukum">right hand possessions</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">,” per Koran 4:3 (a verse that permits the enslavement and sexual use of conquered “infidel” women). </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Now, the same Islamic cleric who issued this last “rape fatwa” has issued another fatwa urging destitute women in war torn Syria to become the “right hand possessions” of any man willing to support them—basically, to sell themselves into sex-slavery.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2_ek8H6OVw">video</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that appeared in December 2013, Jordanian Sheikh Yassin al-Ajlawni, who says he lived in Syria for 17 years, asserted that “the needy, disenfranchised Syrian woman is permitted to ask the Muslim man who is capable of supporting her, to enter into a “right hand possession” contract with him, whereby she becomes his right hand possession.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ajlawni’s logic is that, because Syria is in a state of war, and the numbers of men are dropping, needy and displaced women are permitted to seek out support by selling themselves into concubinage.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the Muslim sheikh’s own words:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We hereby give fatwa permitting the Syrian woman who desires to be married to a Muslim man, via a “right hand possession” contract—whereby he becomes her master and she becomes his slave—that all this contract needs is for the woman be clean of her menstruation period, and that this contract be registered with the sheikhs or other authorities, either in a Sharia or civil court…  Afterwards, once the woman says, “I give you possession over myself,” via contract of “right hand possession,” this woman becomes his loyal servant, and he her lord; she becomes a slave and concubine to him, and he must support her according to a previously agreed upon monetary fee … thus they become governed by the rulings of “right hand possession,” and there is no problem with this, Allah willing.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To bolster his fatwa, al-Ajlawni referred to a few hadiths (recorded words and teachings of Islam’s prophet Muhammad), </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://library.islamweb.net/newlibrary/display_book.php?idfrom=10810&amp;idto=10863&amp;bk_no=79&amp;ID=257">including</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">: “One of the signs of the [final] hour is that knowledge will decrease, ignorance will increase, adultery will appear, women will grow in numbers, while men will grow less, so that fifty women will be worth one [man].”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Al-Ajlawni also cited a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://library.islamweb.net/newlibrary/display_book.php?idfrom=9565&amp;idto=9566&amp;bk_no=52&amp;ID=2916">hadith</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from the canonical </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sahih Bukhari</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, which has the prophet saying: “whenever </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">fitna</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> [sedition from Islam] becomes widespread, Allah distinguishes his followers, so that 50 women follow one man, saying, ‘Oh Abdullah [“slave of Allah”], take care of me,’” adding that in the same narrative the woman says, “O Abdullah, have sex with me.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In closing, the sheikh said: “We call on the ulema of Syria to adopt this [fatwa], for it is the only legitimate way to guarantee that displaced Syrian women who have no one to rely on but Allah are not physically or sexually exploited or beaten in ways that contradict Sharia.  All prayers and blessings upon our prophet.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While one may rationalize such fatwas away in the context of the chaotic situation in Syria, the fact is, the same fatwa, the same logic, was earlier issued in Egypt, soon after Muhammad Morsi became president in 2012.  Then, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/egypts-first-sex-slave-marriage/">Egypt’s first “sex slave” marriage</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> took place, when a woman declared before her future master-spouse,” “I enslave myself to you,” before they kissed to an applauding crowd. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The justification for “right hand possession” marriages in Egypt was not displaced and destitute women, but rather young, sexually-frustrated men not able to afford wives, and women who wish to dress promiscuously—since the rules governing female “right hand possessions” forbid them from wearing the hijab (as sex-slaves, they are required to be partially naked, differentiating them from Muslim women, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/muslim-woman-seeks-to-revive-institution-of-sex-slavery/">as explained by this Kuwaiti woman</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">).</span></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Wage Gap Myth</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/obamas-wage-gap-myth/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-wage-gap-myth</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Apr 2014 04:26:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Men]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[myth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222443</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An agenda built on a tissue of lies.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/218821_5_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222446" alt="218821_5_" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/218821_5_-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>During his State of the Union address, President Obama </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/01/no-women-don-t-make-less-money-than-men.html">restated</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a long-discredited factoid. “Today women make up about half our workforce,&#8221; he declared. &#8220;But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.”</span></p>
<p>What&#8217;s truly embarrassing is a president who seeks to once again divide Americans against each other using inaccurate information as his vehicle. The so-called wage gap is <a href="http://blog.heritage.org/2014/01/17/gender-equality-isnt-myth-wage-gap/">based</a> on calculations done by the <a href="http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf">U.S. Census Bureau</a>.  Yet when the Bureau compiled those calculations, it made no distinction between professions, lumping them all together. Thus, as the Heritage Foundation explains, &#8220;if high school teachers make less than congressmen&#8230;and there are more women who are teachers and more men in the U.S. Congress, then yes, the numbers will show that men make more than women.&#8221;</p>
<p>On the other hand, when an apples-to-apple comparison is made, as in controlling for occupation, experience, hours worked per week, education and other choices, a 2009 <a href="http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf">study</a> commissioned by the Department of Labor reveals that the so-called wage gap narrows to approximately five cents on the dollar. This corroborates a 2005 <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w11240.pdf">study</a> compiled by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which concluded that the gender gap &#8220;largely stems from choices made by women and men concerning the amount of time and energy devoted to a career, as reflected in years of work experience, utilization of part-time work, and other workplace and job characteristics.&#8221;</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/01/no-women-don-t-make-less-money-than-men.html">report</a> by the left-leaning Daily Beast adds another factor to the list. The website cites a <a href="http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/whatsitworth-complete.pdf">document</a> compiled by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce entitled, &#8220;What&#8217;s it Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors,&#8221; that does in fact reveal a gender gap &#8212; in the choice of majors. In the list of the ten &#8220;most remunerative majors,&#8221; the percentage of men overwhelmingly dominate those of women in nine of the ten categories:</p>
<p>1.   Petroleum Engineering: 87 percent male</p>
<p>2.   Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration: 48 percent male</p>
<p>3.   Mathematics and Computer Science: 67 percent male</p>
<p>4.   Aerospace Engineering: 88 percent male</p>
<p>5.   Chemical Engineering: 72 percent male</p>
<p>6.   Electrical Engineering: 89 percent male</p>
<p>7.   Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering: 97 percent male</p>
<p>8.   Mechanical Engineering: 90 percent male</p>
<p>9.   Metallurgical Engineering: 83 percent male</p>
<p>10. Mining and Mineral Engineering: 90 percent male</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">By contrast, the ten least remunerative majors are dominated by women in nine out of ten categories:</span></p>
<p>1.  Counseling Psychology: 74% female</p>
<p>2.  Early Childhood Education: 97% female</p>
<p>3.  Theology and Religious Vocations: 34% female</p>
<p>4.  Human Services and Community Organization: 81% female</p>
<p>5.  Social Work: 88% female</p>
<p>6.  Drama and Theater Arts: 60% female</p>
<p>7.  Studio Arts: 66% female</p>
<p>8.  Communication Disorders Sciences and Services: 94% female</p>
<p>9.  Visual and Performing Arts: 77% female</p>
<p>10. Health and Medical Preparatory Programs: 55% female</p>
<p>The difference in wage scales is dramatic. For example median earnings for those with a degree in metallurgy and petroleum engineering range from $80,000 to $120,000. By comparison, the median earnings for careers in early childhood education and social work range from $36,000 to $39,000. Doubtless a certain level of cultural conditioning factors in those choices. As the Daily Beast notes, women are far more likely to be attached to jobs in &#8220;caring professions,&#8221; while men opt for &#8220;people-free zones.&#8221; But they omit what may be the most critical factor of all: selecting a college major is a freely-made, <i>personal</i> choice.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, reality appears to irritate those with a political agenda. Even as a study <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-gap_b_2073804.html">compiled</a> by the feminist group American Association of University Women (AAUW) revealed that the pay-gap between men and women is virtually nonexistent when the aforementioned controls are introduced, they still tried to spin their own data. The <i>Huffington Post&#8217;s </i>Christina Hoff explains how. &#8220;For example, its researchers count &#8216;social science&#8217; as one college major and report that, among such majors, women earned only 83 percent of what men earned,&#8221; she writes. &#8220;That may sound unfair&#8230; until you consider that &#8216;social science&#8217; includes both economics and sociology majors.&#8221; Nonetheless, the AAUW remains wedded to ideology. “Women’s personal choices are similarly fraught with inequities,” that result in women being “pigeonholed” into “pink-collar” jobs in the health and education fields, they contend.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://now.org/">National Organization for Women</a> (NOW) is equally agenda-driven. While they concede that much of the pay gap is driven by personal choice, they insist that powerful sexist stereotypes &#8220;steer&#8221; women and men &#8220;toward different education, training, and career paths&#8221; and family roles. That&#8217;s a rather remarkable statement from one of America&#8217;s foremost promoters of feminism. It suggest that women aren&#8217;t bright enough or aware enough to overcome stereotyping. Is there any doubt that a man making the same observation would be labeled an unrepetant misogynist by the women at NOW?</p>
<p>The Atlantic&#8217;s Derek Thompson also <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/the-biggest-myth-about-the-gender-wage-gap/276367/">concedes</a> that the real gender gap revolves around one&#8217;s choice of profession, but it still irritates him. &#8220;But even if the gender gap disappears after controlling for experience and job selection, it&#8217;s hard to imagine that men thoroughly dominating the highest-paying positions is a good outcome,&#8221; he insists. &#8220;For example, the expectation that women more than men bear the responsibility to raise children gently nudges thousands of highly educated women out of full-time work.&#8221;</p>
<p>That so-called expectation is belied by a Pew Research Center <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/03/14/modern-parenthood-roles-of-moms-and-dads-converge-as-they-balance-work-and-family/#fn-16485-1">survey</a>. It notes that while a nearly equal percent of mothers and fathers say they&#8217;d rather be at home raising their children than working, fathers are far more likely than mothers to say they want full-time jobs. Once again, personal choice is the critical factor. On the other hand, the survey also reveals that those choices are changing. Between 2007 and 2012, the percentage of women who indicated they would rather work full-time has increased from 20 percent to 32 percent.</p>
<p>The devil is in the details, however. Much of that change in attitude may be attributable to a bad economy, as women in the most precarious financial situations are more inclined to desire full-time work. Marital status is also an important factor. In 2007, only 26 percent of unmarried mothers wanted full-time work. By 2012 that number had substantially increased to 49 percent. By contrast, 23 percent of married women wanted a full time job in 2007, and that percentage remained unchanged by 2012.</p>
<p>The Pew Center notes that for those determined to frame the issue in terms of a political agenda, it is one that can cut both ways. They note that in the last recession, the net employment for male workers fell by 3 million jobs, compared to only half that number for women. The reason for the disparity is simple. Far more men than women work in the construction, manufacturing, and finance sectors hit hardest by the downturn. &#8220;No one would assert that anti-male bigotry explains the recession’s disproportionate impact,&#8221; they conclude, even as they state the most obvious reason for the pay gap myth. &#8220;Federal and state laws already prohibit sex-based discrimination,&#8221; they explain.</p>
<p>So why do President Obama and his fellow travelers continue to promote a false agenda? The Beast suggests it may amount to nothing more than being &#8220;taken in by the apologetics of groups like the National Organization for Women and the American Association of University Women.&#8221; Yet at the same time, they note the White House has been alerted on more than one occasion about the error, citing a <i>Washington Post</i> &#8220;Fact Checker&#8221; <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-white-houses-use-of-data-on-the-gender-wage-gap/2012/06/04/gJQAYH6nEV_blog.html">column</a> written in 2012 as evidence that the wage gap has been debunked for quite some time.</p>
<p>Moreover the issue, such as it exists, may be taking care of itself. According to <a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/nlsyth.nr0.htm">stats</a> compiled by the Department of Labor, 32 percent of 27-year-old women have earned a bachelor’s degree, compared to only 24 percent of men the same age. There was a similar disparity between men and women with some college and/or a degree as well. Seventy percent of 27-year-old women had a bachelor’s degree or some college attendance, compared to only 61 percent of men. Personal choice will still figure into the overall picture, but it would appear more women will have more choices to make than their male counterparts.</p>
<p>The real agenda being pursued by Obama and company is the one they have always pursued: winning elections by any means necessary. And if that takes riling up a feminist base already attuned to the Democrats&#8217; war on women agenda with another &#8220;lie repeated often enough,&#8221; so be it.</p>
<p>The president may wish to tread carefully, however. According to the <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/disclosures/annual-records/2013">2013 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff</a>, the White House has its very own gender pay gap. Its 228 female employees received a median annual salary of $65,000 that year, while the 231 male staffers earned a median annual salary of nearly $73,729. That amounts to a 12 percent, or 88 cents on the dollar, disparity. If such an inconvenient reality appears very much in alignment with another cherished progressive value &#8212; as in &#8220;do as I say, not as I do&#8221; &#8212; that&#8217;s because it is.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Washington Purges &#8220;Fisherman&#8221;, &#8220;Freshman&#8221; and &#8220;Clergyman&#8221; From the Dictionary</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/washington-purges-fisherman-freshman-and-clergyman-from-the-dictionary/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=washington-purges-fisherman-freshman-and-clergyman-from-the-dictionary</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/washington-purges-fisherman-freshman-and-clergyman-from-the-dictionary/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 07 Jul 2013 15:10:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Political Correctness]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=195853</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/orwell.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-195854" alt="orwell" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/orwell-265x350.jpg" width="265" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>You know I was a little worried when 1984 came around. I was afraid we would shortly begin living in some creepy tyranny where words wered constantly be purged to control right-thinking and wrong-thinking.</p>
<p>But here it&#8217;s almost 2014 and <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2353938/Farewell-freshman--Washington-State-remove-40-000-pieces-legislation-gender-biased-language--manhole-survives.html">nothing of the kind has happened.</a></p>
<blockquote><p>This week new laws will come into effect in Washington State to form the final piece of a six-year effort to rewrite all state laws using gender-neutral vocabulary.</p>
<p>The politically correct crusade will see terms such as &#8216;fisherman&#8217;, &#8216;freshman&#8217; and even &#8216;journeyman plumber&#8217; replaced with &#8216;fisher&#8217;, &#8216;first-year-student&#8217; and &#8216;journey-level plumber&#8217;.</p>
<p>Signalling an end to hundreds of years of accepted language, the move will now see the state&#8217;s copious laws, including thousands of words and phrases re-written at taxpayers expense.</p>
<p>Lawmakers have passed a series of bills since 2007 to root out gender bias from Washington statutes, though a 1983 state mandate required that all laws be written in gender-neutral terms unless a specification of gender was intended.</p></blockquote>
<p>And of course we all know that gender is just in the mind anyway so we might as well get rid of it and boldly embrace our brave new world of unisex bathrooms and Newspeak words.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . &#8220;</p></blockquote>
<p>Again, it&#8217;s good that we have nothing like that going on today.</p>
<blockquote><p>The measure approved by the Legislature this year mandated that references to &#8216;his&#8217; be changed to &#8216;his or her.&#8217; Other nouns like &#8216;clergyman&#8217; must be changed to &#8216;clergy.&#8217;</p>
<p>&#8216;This was a much larger effort than I had envisioned. Mankind means man and woman,&#8217; said Democratic state Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles of Seattle when the law was passed in April.</p></blockquote>
<p>What about Personkind or Humankind. But those are both Speciest.</p>
<blockquote><p>The new gender-neutral references will now demand and enforce linguistically  &#8216;handwriting&#8217; in place of &#8216;penmanship,&#8217; and &#8216;signal operator&#8217; for &#8216;signalman.&#8217;</p>
<p>&#8216;There&#8217;s no good reason for keeping our legal terms anachronistic and with words that do not respect our current contemporary times,&#8217; Kohl-Welles, the 475-page bill&#8217;s sponsor, told Reuters.</p>
<p>Civil engineering terms such as &#8216;man hole&#8217; and &#8216;man lock,&#8217; also will not be changed because no common-sense substitutes could easily be found, Thiessen said.</p></blockquote>
<p>What about Personhole? Or Kohl-Welles?</p>
<blockquote><p>Crispin Thurlow, a sociolinguist and associate professor of language and communication at the University of Washington-Bothell praised the project in an interview with Fox News in April.</p>
<p>Words matter,&#8217; said Liz Watson, a National Women&#8217;s Law Center senior adviser. &#8216;This is important in changing hearts and minds.&#8217;</p>
<p>&#8216;Changing words can change what we think about the world around us,&#8217; he said. &#8216;These tiny moments accrue and become big movements.&#8217;</p></blockquote>
<p>Change words. Change minds.</p>
<blockquote><p>The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.</p>
<p>Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”</p></blockquote>
<p>Forget 2050. Let&#8217;s shoot for 2014.</p>
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		<title>A Gender-Neutral Army</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-gender-neutral-army/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-gender-neutral-army</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-gender-neutral-army/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 22 May 2013 04:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Affirmative Action]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[COMBAT]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[neutral]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[strength]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=190099</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The battlefield does not discriminate.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2b323e83e5a77802270f6a7067009493.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-190315" alt="2b323e83e5a77802270f6a7067009493" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2b323e83e5a77802270f6a7067009493-450x302.jpg" width="270" height="181" /></a>“Political chaos is connected with the decay of language,” George Orwell wrote. If language is meaning, then political chaos is the destruction of meaning. Political language exists to destroy meaning and to make unpopular policies seem popular by associating them with the very opposite of what they are.</p>
<p>Taxes are opportunities. Spending is stimulus. Amnesty is reform. The left is as good at language as it is bad at governing. It can’t change reality, but it excels at changing the description of reality. Common sense is the enemy of the left and the left defeats common sense by corrupting language so that nothing makes sense and common sense can never come into play.</p>
<p>The proposal to put women into combat is a transparently bad idea for reasons of common sense. Without an ongoing conflict and with deep cuts to the military, there is no shortage of manpower that requires desperate measures and compromised standards.</p>
<p>There is no reasonable reason for it all except the need to transform the military from a warfighting force into a beacon of liberal values. The new military does not exist to win wars, but to show up in beards and burqas and win the hearts and minds of our enemies with gay marriages and abortion clinics. Thousands or tens of thousands may die, but their deaths will be a chance to show how restrained we are in our lack of retaliation. How determined we are to lose the strategic high ground while claiming the moral high ground.</p>
<p>In preparation for giving the green light to female infantrymen, another term that will have to be changed, and female Army Rangers, General Martin Dempsey, who had previously cheered on the introduction of homosexuality to the military, promised “clear standards of performance for all occupations based on what it actually takes to do the job”.</p>
<p>These standards, General Dempsey said, will be “gender-neutral”. But what is gender neutrality exactly? No one really knows except that it will involve being neutral about gender or genders being neutral. If not for the fancifully Orwellian language that the teleprompters of the powerful spew up, it might be taken to mean that there will be the same standards for all soldiers regardless of their gender.</p>
<p>That would be a sensible, if doomed approach. Soldiers in Afghanistan may have to carry 127 pounds on their backs. A study in the heyday of the manpower crunch, when the Army was looking for a few good men, women or anything in between, still found that women could not meet male upper body strength ratios</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/article/get-over-it-we-are-not-all-created-equal">Captain Katie Petronio, who led</a> combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, wrote, “There is no way I could endure the physical demands of the infantrymen whom I worked beside.”</p>
<p>The British version of gender-neutral, gender-free, replacing gender-fair policy, attempted to ignore gender in military training and resulted <a href="http://cmrlink.org/content/article/34424">in a doubling of injuries</a> for female soldiers. <a href="http://cmrlink.org/data/sites/85/CMRDocuments/TimesOnLine-WomenTrng2005.pdf">In gender-fair training,</a> women only suffered four times as many injuries as male soldiers. In gender-free training, women suffered nearly ten times as many injuries as male soldiers. An absurd term like gender-free could be coined, but it couldn’t be implemented because no one can be free of their gender. Gender is not open to regulation or deregulation. It is an absolute reality.</p>
<p>Gender-neutral may sound like gender-free, but it’s actually more like gender-fair. Our leaders may be stupid enough to insist on female Army Rangers, but they aren’t stupid enough to insist on standards that are neutral in the objective sense. Rather they are neutral in the subjective sense.</p>
<p>What does that mean? The gender-neutral standard is embedded in regulations, but it isn’t interpreted to mean identical objective physical metrics, but identical subjective physical metrics within each gender. The gender-neutral standard is actually a partisan gender standard. And it is arranged so that the politicians can have their gender-neutral cake and eat it too.</p>
<p>As the Congressional Research Service explains, “The use of the term ‘gender-neutral physical standards’ raises questions depending on how it is defined.” How do you define gender-neutral so that it isn’t neutral?</p>
<p>“The Services have used this and similar terms to suggest that men and women must exert the same amount of energy in a particular task, regardless of the work that is actually accomplished by either.”</p>
<p>Examples include, “if a female soldier carries 70 pounds of equipment five miles and exerts the same effort as a male carrying 100 pounds of equipment the same distance, the differing standards could be viewed as ‘gender-neutral’ because both exerted the same amount of effort, with differing loads.”</p>
<p>Or, “The Air Force Fitness Test Scoring for males under 30 years of age requires males to run 1.5 miles in a maximum time of 13:36: the female maximum time is 16:22. A female who runs at this slower rate would actually receive a higher score than a male who runs nearly three minutes faster.”</p>
<p>There’s nothing gender neutral about that. But gender-neutral really means <a href="http://www.armytimes.com/article/20130308/NEWS/303080310/Hunter-fears-lax-standards-women-combat">neutral to the gender</a>. And neutral to the gender is another way of saying that there are two differing standards. The standard changes to accommodate the gender.</p>
<p>It’s not what most people imagine that gender neutral means and it’s not what it is supposed to mean because Congress defined gender-neutral as being “evaluated on the basis of common, relevant performance standards, without differential standards of evaluation on the basis of gender.” But by leaving “relevant” in there, the door was open for a debate on the meaning of “is”, and the clear meaning of the rule was inverted so that instead of the standards neutralizing gender, gender neutralized the standards.</p>
<p>“Lifting a 95-pound artillery round must be done by a Marine, either male or female,” a Marine Corps memo noted. 95-pound artillery rounds are a gender-neutral standard. Like anything else on the battlefield, they are a true standard that cannot be graded on a gender curve. Training is meant to prepare soldiers for the reality of the battlefield. And the battlefield does not discriminate.</p>
<p>Affirmative action has lowered standards in most professions, but there are professions where lowering standards is impossible. Colleges can accept poorer students and companies can reserve jobs based on quotas. The cost of unqualified employees in the workplace is financial, but the cost of unqualified soldiers on the battlefield is lethal.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Left’s War on Science</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-lefts-war-on-science/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-war-on-science</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-lefts-war-on-science/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2013 04:49:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[farming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[infertility]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soviet]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=185441</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Progressives follow in the Soviets' footsteps -- but changing the realities of nature is another matter.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-lefts-war-on-science/hi03001/" rel="attachment wp-att-185443"><img class=" wp-image-185443 alignleft" title="hi03001" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/hi03001.jpg" alt="" width="296" height="201" /></a>“We did not come to ask for mercy from nature,”  Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, the Lysenko of Soviet agriculture, once declared. “We must wrest it from her.”</p>
<p>Communist science was guided not by the journey from hypothesis to fact but by the dusty proclamations of Marxist theorists. Soviet scientists were expected to reject capitalist science and formulate a science that matched the Communist worldview.</p>
<p>The Communist worldview insisted that every living creature could be completely transformed into anything. It rejected natural selection as having a competitive capitalist bent that suspiciously resembled a biological version of free market competition. And pseudo-scientists like Lysenko and Michurin matched bad science to bad ideology laying out an official dogma in which transforming the environment could transform any creature and in which intraspecies struggle did not lead to evolution.</p>
<p>The USSR’s politicization of biology crippled its agriculture. Its leaders rejected free market competition on the human level and in the plant and animal kingdoms. They insisted that nature had to follow Marxist dialectical materialism and locked up and murdered the scientists who disagreed. By the time the USSR fell, a land which had once exported wheat to the world had gone deep into debt to buy wheat from the United States.</p>
<p>But bad ideology driving bad science didn’t die with Lysenko and Michurin. The new Lysenkos are Warmunists like Michael Mann and James Hansen. The environmentalists, like the Communists, believe that human beings have total control over the environment and that the environment determines all.</p>
<p>Warmunism, like Communism, originates not from science, but from ideology. The Communists divided industry into two types by ideological classification; the good cooperative Socialist industry and the bad competitive Capitalist industry. The Warmunists similarly ideologically classify two types of industry; environmentally conscious green technology and dirty non-socially conscious brown technology.</p>
<p>The Warmunists, like the Communists, classify science and industry not by outcome, but by ideology, and then paper over that classification with bad science. Green technology is often dirtier and less efficient than the so-called brown technology, but like the collective farms and the idiotic ramblings of Michurin and Lysenko, it’s better because it more closely fits the Socialist vision of how things ought to work.</p>
<p>The Warmunists reject the free market and human industry because, like the Communists, they seek to use science to impose a centralized model of human society as a dangerously fragile existence in which unguided individual efforts are dangerously disruptive and only ideological compliance can lead to a better life for the collective planet.</p>
<p>While the left rejects the pseudo-science of Lysenko and Michurin when it comes to the plant and animal kingdoms, it still argues that people can be remade into any political identity without regard to biology. Lysenkoists believed that just as animals and plants could be transformed over short periods of time by altering their environment, human beings could also be transformed from their greedy and competitive selves by living under Socialism.</p>
<p>The new Lysenkoists place mind over biology. If a man wants to be a woman, then all he has to do is think that he is and he will be. Even the worst Soviet science didn’t insist that biology was so malleable that a man could click his heels three times and think himself a woman.</p>
<p>Like Lysenkoist science, the assertion that the choice of male or female sexual partners is rigidly fixed at a genetic level, but that gender is infinitely transformative, that gay men cannot turn back to straight, but that men can become women and women can become men, makes no logical sense. It makes even less scientific sense. But it makes perfect political sense.</p>
<p>The left’s version of the old racist “one-drop rule” that treated anyone with even one drop of black blood as black is to treat anyone with even the loosest claim to minority status as a minority and to mandate the irrevocable nature of that minority status. That is why Obama is black, rather than half-white, why Elizabeth Warren can be a Cherokee and why a straight man can become gay, but a gay man cannot become straight. It is why a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man and gain an entirely new transgender minority status.</p>
<p>The scientific principle at work here is the conservation of minority status. The left’s policies are meant to diminish the size of the majority and enlarge the size and number of minorities.</p>
<p>Political diversity when applied to science logically leads to immutable homosexuality and mutable gender. It leads to a construct of race governed by a politically correct version of the one-drop rule in which racial identification always trends toward minority status, rather than majority status. The science is bad, but the political calculation is impeccable.</p>
<p>Biology is just as irrelevant in 2013 America as it was in 1923 Russia. In California, a bill has been put forward mandating that insurance companies provide infertility treatments to homosexuals. While normal industry practice is to provide infertility treatments only to natural couples, the modern Marxist Michurins are here to tell nature what latest developments in lefty thinking it is expected to conform to.</p>
<p>“Coverage for the treatment of infertility shall be offered and provided without discrimination on the basis of&#8230; gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information… sexual orientation,” the bill states.</p>
<p>While infertility treatments can be offered without regard to gender, fertility cannot exist without regard to gender. A man can claim that his marriage to another man is just like a marriage to a woman, but no amount of empty words or lawsuits will wrest a child from his body. A man can claim that he is now a woman, but no amount of mandated fertility treatments will enable him to conceive life.</p>
<p>The Lysenkoism of attempting to force science to conform to politics always leads to a biological dead end. Homosexuals are not infertile. They are not in the class of relationships that are biologically capable of conceiving life. Since every homosexual couple is infertile, every such couple would be entitled to infertility treatments. But no amount of treatments will enable them to conceive a child without the biological intervention of a member of the opposite sex at some point in the process.</p>
<p>And no law can mandate otherwise. All the law can do is mandate an expensive policy whose only purpose is to burden the public with the high cost of pretending to defy biology in the name of politics.</p>
<p>Toward the end, the Soviet Union was running low on wheat. The United States and Europe are running low on children and on industry.</p>
<p>The Western left declared war on science and science is winning. The Warmunists demand that the West cut off its industrial nose to spite its environmental face. And while the factories of China boom, Americans and Europeans go jobless and hungry.</p>
<p>The left insisted that family and gender don’t matter, that the ideal society is full of unmarried men and women, men pretending to be women and men shacking up with other men. And the elderly hippies of the establishment are running out of children to pay for their post-gender, post-sexual and post-family paradise. To make up for the gap their countries are filling up with Muslim immigrants whose families are patriarchal and polygamous.</p>
<p>Ideologies have consequences. The Soviet Union found that out the hard way. Now the Socialist republics of what used to be the free world are finding out the same thing. You can replace science with political pseudo-science, and you can convince or compel everyone to pay fealty to its false claims, but you cannot escape the consequences of your actions.</p>
<p>You can declare war on science … but science will always win.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Liberal Professor Says Single Parenthood Crippling Boys and Men</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/liberal-professor-says-single-parenthood-crippling-boys-and-men/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=liberal-professor-says-single-parenthood-crippling-boys-and-men</link>
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		<pubDate>Sat, 30 Mar 2013 20:47:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=182603</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The decline of two-parent households may be a significant reason for the divergent fortunes of male workers, whose earnings generally declined in recent decades.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/?attachment_id=182610" rel="attachment wp-att-182610"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-182610" title="broken family" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/broken-family.jpg" alt="" width="620" height="500" /></a></p>
<p>It&#8217;s not the entire answer, but<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/business/economy/as-men-lose-economic-ground-clues-in-the-family.html?src=twr&amp;_r=1&amp;"> it certainly is an interesting point of view</a>. And what is extraordinary is that it comes from the left and appears in the New York Times.</p>
<blockquote><p>The decline of two-parent households may be a significant reason for the divergent fortunes of male workers, whose earnings generally declined in recent decades, and female workers, whose earnings generally increased, a prominent labor economist argues in a new survey of existing research.</p>
<p>David H. Autor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the difference between men and women, at least in part, may have roots in childhood.</p>
<p>Only 63 percent of children lived in a household with two parents in 2010, down from 82 percent in 1970. The single parents raising the rest of those children are predominantly female. And there is growing evidence that sons raised by single mothers “appear to fare particularly poorly,” Professor Autor wrote in an analysis for Third Way, a center-left policy research organization.</p>
<p>In this telling, the economic struggles of male workers are both a cause and an effect of the breakdown of traditional households. Men who are less successful are less attractive as partners, so some women are choosing to raise children by themselves, in turn often producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners.</p>
<p>“A vicious cycle may ensue,” wrote Professor Autor and his co-author, Melanie Wasserman, a graduate student, “with the poor economic prospects of less educated males creating differentially large disadvantages for their sons, thus potentially reinforcing the development of the gender gap in the next generation.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The conclusion is obvious but ordinarily taboo. But Freakonomics has made it safer for liberals to explore the economic and social intersections of formerly taboo topics like this.</p>
<p>I imagine that there are plenty of furious responses to this out there, but it&#8217;s an obvious point. Children do need a rounded household of parents of different genders and they also need a role model of their own gender.</p>
<p>The frenzied search for role models in the last two generations has been the unspoken result of the dissolution of the two-parent family.</p>
<p>That doesn&#8217;t mean that mothers are to blame. The collapse of the family is the result of economic policies and social mores, not the actions of men or women in general.</p>
<p>And this has obvious implications for the construct of gay marriage as well. An unbalanced family is an unhealthy environment for a child. Artificially creating such environments is selfish and unfair to children.</p>
<blockquote><p>Professor Autor said in an interview that he was intrigued by evidence suggesting the consequences were larger for boys than girls, including one study finding that single mothers spent an hour less per week with their sons than with their daughters. Another study of households where the father had less education, or was absent entirely, found the female children were 10 to 14 percent more likely to complete college. A third study of single-parent homes found boys were less likely than girls to enroll in college.</p>
<p>“It’s very clear that kids from single-parent households fare worse in terms of years of education,” he said. “The gender difference, the idea that boys do even worse again, is less clear cut. We’re pointing this out as an important hypothesis that needs further exploration. But there’s intriguing evidence in that direction.”</p>
<p>Professor Autor’s own explanation builds on existing research showing that income inequality has soared, stretching the gap between rich and poor, and that a smaller share of Americans are making the climb. The children of lower-income parents are ever more likely to become, in turn, the parents of lower-income children.</p>
<p>Moreover, a growing share of lower-income children are raised by their mother but not their father, and research shows that those children are at a particular disadvantage.</p></blockquote>
<p>Obviously race is also a factor in these numbers, though Autor avoids discussing it.</p>
<blockquote><p>For all Americans, it has become much harder to make a living without a college degree, for intertwined reasons including foreign competition, advancements in technology and the decline of unions. Over the same period, the earnings of college graduates have increased. Women have responded exactly as economists would have predicted, by going to college in record numbers. Men, mysteriously, have not.</p>
<p>Among people who were 35 years old in 2010, for example, women were 17 percent more likely to have attended college, and 23 percent more likely to hold an undergraduate degree.</p>
<p>“I think the greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labor market screaming out ‘You need more education’ and have been able to respond to that, and men have not,” said Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. economics professor who was not involved in Professor Autor’s work. “And it’s very, very scary for economists because people should be responding to price signals. And men are not. It’s a fact in need of an explanation.”</p></blockquote>
<p>1. College isn&#8217;t quite the surefire solution to employment that these people imply. It&#8217;s not. Unemployment has hit college grads hard and much of the marketplace&#8217;s demand for college degrees is just an attempt to compensate for the unqualified high school graduate and the employer&#8217;s market caused by the recession.</p>
<p>2. The education system is friendlier to women than it is to men and more geared toward their skillset than the male skillset. That is becoming truer than ever with the arrival of the zero tolerance campus.</p>
<p>3. Working class men still lean more toward working with their hands.</p>
<p>4. It doesn&#8217;t matter who has more degrees, but who works more steadily and whose skills can survive an economic recession. A degree is worthless, as plenty of job-seekers are finding out. A skillset that enables you to work outside the traditional corporate economy is worth its weight in gold. Sometimes literally.</p>
<blockquote><p>“If Democrats have as their goal being the party of the middle class, they have to come to the realization that they’re not going to be able to get there solely through their standard explanations,” said Mr. Cowan, a veteran of the Clinton administration. “We need to ask, ‘How can we get these fathers back involved in their children’s lives?’ ”</p>
<p>But some experts cautioned that Professor Autor’s theory did not necessarily imply that such children would benefit from the presence of their fathers.</p>
<p>“Single-parent families tend to emerge in places where the men already are a mess,” said Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard University. “You have to ask yourself, ‘Suppose the available men were getting married to the available women? Would that be an improvement?’ ”</p>
<p>Instead of making marriage more attractive, he said, it might be better for society to help make men more attractive.</p></blockquote>
<p>Both men largely miss the point. Single parent families emerge where the people are a mess. They&#8217;re not the product of a gender, because men and women don&#8217;t exist in isolation from each other. That is the obvious point of Autor&#8217;s analysis. Trying to argue that men or women are the problem makes no sense when continuity and society is built on the interactions of men and women.</p>
<p>The real question to be asked here is whether as a society we now</p>
<p>1. Economically favor marriage</p>
<p>2. Culturally favor marriage</p>
<p>3. Socially favor marriage</p>
<p>And the answer is that increasingly we do not. What we favor is permanent immaturity and government dependency. The way that men behave and the way that women behave are outgrowths of this phenomenon.</p>
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		<title>Rehabilitating the &#8216;Disposable Sex&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/rehabilitating-the-disposable-sex/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rehabilitating-the-disposable-sex</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Mar 2013 04:35:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Feminism]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Miles Groth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[studies]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=179779</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One professor's effort to undo the damage of feminist man-hatred.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/rehabilitating-the-disposable-sex/groth/" rel="attachment wp-att-179780"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-179780" title="Groth" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Groth-436x350.jpg" alt="" width="262" height="210" /></a>You may not be aware of it, but March 8 is International Women&#8217;s Day (IWD). Though it&#8217;s a bigger deal in much of the rest of the world than in the United States, it&#8217;s actually an American invention, concocted in 1909 by the Socialist Party of America and, during its early years, commemorated on the last Sunday in February. In 1910, the Second International Socialist Women&#8217;s Conference, held in Copenhagen, gave its thumbs-up to IWD, which the next year was celebrated in several European countries on March 19. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin made IWD (the date of which had been shifted, by then, to March 8) an official Soviet holiday; other Communist countries followed suit. The UN began sponsoring IWD in 1977, and in 2011, President Obama, in an apparent attempt to raise its profile in the U.S., called on Americans to mark IWD.</p>
<p>Miles Groth, a psychology professor at Wagner College on Staten Island, recalls that when, at age five or six, he asked his mother, “Why is there a special day for mothers and not one for children?” she replied: “Every day is Children&#8217;s Day.” (As it happens, I had the exact same exchange with my own mother; I guess millions have.) And now, Groth notes, “we have a vocal minority that claims that every day has been Man&#8217;s Day for thousands of years, an idea that would have surprised most women, who were being supported and otherwise looked after by men from birth (their fathers and husbands and the troops of farmers, soldiers and the rest who made the society function) in return for bearing children. Every day was Woman&#8217;s Day (and Children&#8217;s Day). The disposable sex have never had a day off. ”</p>
<p>Who is Groth? In an academy rife with lockstep ideologues who pride themselves on their alleged radicalism, he&#8217;s a true radical. For what he&#8217;s doing – and encouraging – is scholarship and education about a phenomenon that, in the modern academy, has been the object of utter neglect in some quarters and an occasion for reflexive hostility in others: namely, the experience of being male. No, he&#8217;s not aligned with the already well-established field of Men&#8217;s Studies – which obediently and mindlessly echoes every last bit of the shrill Women&#8217;s Studies rhetoric about the evils of the patriarchy. Nor is he out to institutionalize, in reaction to these discipline-free disciplines, a male-boosting course of “identity studies” that&#8217;s every bit as strident and intellectually insubstantial as they are. No political activist he, what Groth is engaged in is precisely the kind of serious, solid, interdisciplinary humanistic study that Women&#8217;s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and their ilk supplanted.</p>
<p>Groth is pursuing his project on many fronts. He edits the journal <a href="http://newmalestudies.com/OJS/index.php/nms"><em>New Male Studies</em></a><em>. </em>He&#8217;s just started<em> </em>writing a thoughtful <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/boys-men">blog</a>, “Boys to Men: The Science of Masculinity and Manhood,” at <em>Psychology Today. </em>He&#8217;s been instrumental in setting up <a href="http://collegemencenters.com/">study groups</a> at colleges in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand in which students can read and discuss books that examine male identity from a perspective free of male-hatred. He&#8217;s involved in curriculum development for an online, degree-granting <a href="http://aimhs.com.au/cms/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&amp;cntnt01articleid=36&amp;cntnt01origid=56&amp;cntnt01returnid=72">postgraduate program</a> that will start up next year, focusing on analysis of “the many common and culturally embedded assumptions that negatively influence male experience and well-being.” And for the last decade he&#8217;s been teaching a course at Wagner on male psychology from infancy to old age, covering such subjects as “the myths of male violence and power,” marriage, male friendship, “the place of the father in males&#8217; experience,” male spirituality and sociology, and – not least – the reflexive hostility toward everything having to do with maleness that, over the last generation or so, has become an all but obligatory element of “enlightened” Western sensibilities.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s no secret that, thanks to the ideological feminism that is the beating heart of Women&#8217;s Studies and that has had an immeasurable impact on society at large, more and more young men are being fed the lie – if not by their parents, then by their teachers and the media – that simply by virtue of their gender identity they enjoy unfair privileges and advantages that women do not; that they are the heirs to a system of brutal and violent sexual oppression for which they are expected to do penance and make reparations; that pretty much all bad things about <em>homo sapiens </em>are the fault of the male of the species, while virtually everything positive about human civilization is attributable to women; and that if humankind wishes to undergo any kind of meaningful progress toward true equality, peace, and social justice, then men need to become more like women, women have to be given more power, and men must voluntarily take a back seat to their sisters.</p>
<p>Groth is rightly concerned about the effect that this indoctrination has had on the shaping of men&#8217;s characters, their views of themselves, and their relationships with others. Young men, he notes, are attending college in smaller and smaller numbers, and young women now represent a majority of undergraduates. This is generally spun as a victory for women&#8217;s rights – but to what extent is it the consequence of an awareness by young men of the sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle anti-male atmosphere that pervades educational institutions nowadays? Also, why is the male suicide rate three times higher than that among women, and why has the suicide rate among boys soared in the last fifteen years, so that it&#8217;s now four to six times greater than among girls? Groth&#8217;s own thoughts: “Males have always been the disposable sex but now they are told told they are not only disposable but superfluous, unnecessary and unwelcome. This begins in the schools, where boys are identified as defective girls&#8230;.In secondary school, they are exposed to an environment that continues to favor girls, unless a boy is an athlete&#8230;.In college or in the post-high school world of work, apart from the really tough jobs that only males can do, they are discriminated against” by quotas. Result: a powerful sense of “being rejected and not feeling welcome” that, in the severest cases, can eventuate in self-slaughter.</p>
<p>Groth isn&#8217;t out to bash women. “Most women do like men, you know,” he points out. Yet he also observes that – owing to the preoccupations our feminism-drenched society have forced upon us – conversations about “the well-being of boys and men” almost invariably, and immediately, turn into conversations about women, and that if you try to discuss with many women “what is good about boys and men,” you will often hear “only of &#8216;problems&#8217; when talking about boys and only of &#8216;shortcomings&#8217; when the talk turns to men.”</p>
<p>Still, there are hopeful signs. A college recently invited Groth for advice on how to “make classrooms and campus life more male-positive.” He&#8217;ll be giving a talk on this subject at Tufts University on March 22. “There is nothing obvious about the psychology of being male,” Groth emphasizes. “This is unexplored territory.” His work represents a small but important step into that <em>terra incognita.</em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama Ignores Deadly Risks to Women in Combat</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obama-ignores-deadly-risks-to-women-in-combat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-ignores-deadly-risks-to-women-in-combat</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:45:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Gender radicalism's attack on the military claims another victory. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obama-ignores-deadly-risks-to-women-in-combat/iraq-war-1/" rel="attachment wp-att-174729"><img class=" wp-image-174729 alignleft" title="Iraq War 1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Iraq-War-1.jpg" alt="" width="267" height="177" /></a>It didn&#8217;t take long for the Obama administration to advance a pernicious piece of its promised radical agenda. Two days after the president laid out his far-left vision during the inauguration, senior defense officials <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/23/panetta-opens-combat-roles-to-women/">announced</a> that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta will lift the military&#8217;s ban on women serving in combat. The move overturns a 1994 provision that prohibited them from being assigned to ground combat units. Panetta has given the various service branches until 2016 to come up with exemptions, and/or make any arguments about what roles should still reman closed to women. Thus, another bit of gender radicalism has been shoved down the nation&#8217;s throat through executive fiat &#8212; and this one is sure to have deadly consequences.</p>
<p>It is precisely those deadly consequences &#8212; especially for servicewomen &#8212; that are irrelevant to feminists and their enablers, who have long pushed the idea that men and women are essentially interchangeable. Nothing could be further from the truth, and combat is where those differences could produce deadly results. Ground combat is arguably the most <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/2012/02/14/failing-culture-puts-women-in-combat/">physically grueling</a> activity in which one can be engaged, and despite what the feminists would like Americans to believe about equality, science says otherwise: men have <a href="http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/human-biology/men-vs-women-upper-body-strength.htm">almost twice</a> the upper-body strength as women.</p>
<p>This is a critically relevant consideration. According to a 2009 <a href="http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2009/October/Pages/Soldiers%E2%80%99BackpacksNotLikelytoGetAnyLighter.aspx">article</a> in National Defense Magazine, a soldier on a three-day mission in Afghanistan carries approximately 130 pounds of gear, and efforts to lighten that load have not succeeded. This is primarily due to the reality that the essentials of food, water, and ammunition cannot be replaced with lighter items. Other equipment, such as sensors, tripods, cold weather clothing, boots, sleeping bags, flashlights, and protective eyewear, have all been made lighter. But the fact remains that the average soldier is expected to carry enormous amounts of weight, simply to better ensure his chances for survival. Furthermore, a soldier must carry that weight even during periods of intense fighting. The overwhelming majority of women are not capable of meeting such standards.</p>
<p>What is the Pentagon likely to do? In New York City, when most female applicants to the Fire Department were unable to meet the strength requirements, feminists <a href="http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&amp;id=5216&amp;news_iv_ctrl=1021">filed</a> a successful lawsuit, altering the standards so that a number of otherwise unqualified women could pass the test. Thus it is likely the Pentagon will pursue a similar strategy of &#8220;gender-norming&#8221; for the entire service that is <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/womens-work/">already part </a>of the Army Physical Fitness Test. That test requires proficiency in push-ups, sit-ups and a two-mile run. For sit-ups both genders have the same requirements. For push-ups and the run, the grading scale for women is easier.</p>
<p>Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, illuminates the folly of pursuing such double standards. &#8220;Revised &#8216;warrior training&#8217; programs sound impressive, but gender-normed standards emasculate the concept by assuring &#8216;success&#8217; for average female trainees,&#8221; she <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/213314/armys-gender-war/elaine-donnelly">wrote</a> in 2005, when the Army began a <em>surreptitious </em>program of putting women in smaller, direct ground-combat units. Donnelly then added the critically proper perspective to the mix. &#8220;Soldiers know that there is no gender-norming on the battlefield,&#8221; she explains.</p>
<p>There is also nothing that will eliminate the natural differences between men and women that play out in a number of other ways. Few things are more important for enduring the rigors of combat than morale and combat unit cohesion. It is ludicrous to believe that mixed units will be immune to the potentially de-stabilizing effects of sexual attraction. And as night follows day, sexual attraction leads to pregnancy. In 2009, Major General Anthony Cucolo, running military operations in Northern Iraq, was forced to deal with the serious downside of that reality. As a result, he <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1237333/Serving-U-S-troops-face-prison-fall-pregnant-active.html">initiated</a> a policy under which troops who got pregnant&#8211;and the men who got them pregnant&#8211;faced a court martial and  possible jail time. Cucolo issued the directive because he was losing too many women with critical skills. &#8220;I&#8217;ve got a mission to do, I&#8217;m given a finite number of soldiers with which to do it and I need every one of them,&#8221; he contended.</p>
<p>Yet consensual sex is only part of the problem. A military report released in January 2012 <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2012/0119/Pentagon-report-Sexual-assault-in-the-military-up-dramatically">revealed</a> a stunning 64 percent increase in violent sex crimes within the U.S. Army since 2006. The most frequent sex crimes for 2011 included &#8220;rape, sexual assault, and forcible sodomy.&#8221; The report further noted that while only 14 percent of the Army is comprised of women, they represent 95 percent of all sex crime victims.</p>
<p>It stretches the bounds of credulity to believe that sexual tension, regardless of the legitimate or illegitimate motivation behind it, would be <em>lessened</em> under front line, life-threatening combat conditions. Nor is it inconceivable to think that close personal relationships of a sexual nature would make some soldiers take the kind of unnecessary risks to save a lover that might not only endanger themselves, but their entire unit.</p>
<p>There is another reality that feminists and their enablers fail to acknowledge. As it currently stands, there is little appetite demonstrated by women themselves for serving in combat units. Army Research Institute (ARI) surveys taken from 1993-2001 <a href="http://www.cmrlink.org/content/women-in-combat/page-8/34470/enlisted_women_opposed_to_combat_assignments">revealed</a> that the majority of military women were strongly <em>opposed</em> to combat assignments&#8211;so much so that the ARI dropped the question from its survey the following year. Less than a month ago, a <em>Huffington Post</em> article regarding interviews with &#8220;a dozen female soldiers and Marines&#8221; <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/05/women-in-military_n_2415748.html">revealed</a> that they had &#8220;little interest in the toughest fighting jobs,&#8221; contending &#8220;they&#8217;d be unable to do them.&#8221; When the Marines asked women to go through their infantry training course last year, only two women volunteered. Both of them failed to get through it. No one volunteered for the next one. Army Sgt. Cherry Sweat, who did a tour in Iraq installing communications equipment, reveals a sentiment that most military women apparently share. &#8220;The job I want to do in the military does not include combat arms,&#8221; she said. &#8220;I enjoy supporting the soldiers. The choice to join combat arms should be a personal decision, not a required one,&#8221; she added.</p>
<p>Lory Manning of Women&#8217;s Research and Education Institute thinks women&#8217;s interest in assuming combat roles will be higher than anticipated. &#8220;If you asked someone in 1985 about going to sea, she would have been thinking: `Girls don&#8217;t do that and so I don&#8217;t want to do that,&#8217;&#8221; Manning contended. &#8220;But when push came to shove, they did it, they loved it.&#8221; That is a ridiculous comparison. Going to sea is hardly the same as front-line combat. Moreover, when &#8220;push comes to shove,&#8221; it is highly doubtful that there is more than a microscopic number of soldiers who &#8220;love&#8221; being in the mortal danger that combat engenders.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, such realities are no match for those who champion diversity. Putting women in combat units &#8220;reflects the reality of 21st century military operations,&#8221; <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2013/01/23/panetta-opens-combat-roles-to-women">said</a> Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), in announcing his support for the program. No doubt he and others see it as the next logical step following last year&#8217;s announcement, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-to-ease-restrictions-on-women-in-some-combat-roles/2012/02/09/gIQAwnL41Q_story.html">opening</a> 14,000 combat-related positions to female soldiers. At that time, the Pentagon still insisted on keeping women out of direct combat roles, even as they noted they were committed to lifting such barriers eventually. At the time, they claimed that making such sweeping changes would be difficult in time of war. Another factor was the lifting of the &#8220;don&#8217;t ask, don&#8217;t tell&#8221; policy allowing gays to serve openly. Allowing women to serve on the front lines at the same time was considered one big social change too many.</p>
<p>No longer. The new policy expands the number of military jobs available to women from last year&#8217;s 14,000 to more than 230,000 positions. Part of the impetus for the change may have been two lawsuits filed last year challenging the combat ban, but according to a senior military official familiar with the discussions by the Joint Chiefs, the ultimate conclusion was that this is the time to &#8220;maximize women&#8217;s service in the military.&#8221;</p>
<p>Writing for the <em>Washington Post</em> three days ago, Elaine Donnelly <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/21/measuring-risks-for-women-in-combat/">reiterated</a> her position that putting women in combat is a terrible idea, presciently noting that &#8220;even the if the results of the Marines’ research do not support unrealistic theories of feminists who consider land combat to be just another career opportunity, administration officials might press their egalitarian agenda anyway.&#8221; She further noted that the &#8220;Pentagon-endorsed Military Leadership Diversity Commission (MLDC) has called for an end to women’s land combat exemptions, based on a new definition of &#8216;diversity.&#8217;”</p>
<p>That egalitarian agenda, like so many other progressive agendas, may produce an unintended consequence. The 1981 Rostker v. Goldberg Supreme Court case <a href="http://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/constitutional-law/constitutional-law-keyed-to-chemerinsky/equal-protection/rostker-v-goldberg/">exempted</a> women from being part of the nation&#8217;s Selective Service System. America no longer drafts civilians into the military, but as Donnelly notes, the elimination of such combat exemptions will involve civilian women registering with Selective Service. She then makes a recommendation, not only anathema to the Obama administration, but one that only three days later was ultimately ignored. &#8220;Congress, which represents the American people, should not be shut out of this decision-making process,&#8221; she wrote. If the draft is re-instated, one wonders how the American public will take to having their daughters every bit as vulnerable as their sons to forcible conscription. A rising tide of Islamist terror in the Middle East and now in Africa could provide the answer.</p>
<p>Once again, elections have consequences. Barack Obama has made it clear that part of his progressive agenda includes forcing gender radicalism down America&#8217;s throat, absent any input from Congress. Once, the United States military was all about projecting lethal power around the globe to protect America&#8217;s interests. Now, it is all about promoting diversity, inclusion and equality of outcome, irrespective of military readiness and cohesion. For progressives, who have elevated political correctness above all else&#8211;national security included&#8211;such radical egalitarianism is cause for celebration. For Donnelly and countless other Americans, it is anything but. &#8220;No one’s injured son should have to die on the streets of a future Fallujah because the only soldier near enough to carry him to safety was a five-foot-two 110-pound woman,&#8221; she contends.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>A Man or a Woman: What’s the Diff?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/a-man-or-a-woman-whats-the-diff/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-man-or-a-woman-whats-the-diff</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Nov 2012 04:41:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=166181</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Social engineering with a vengeance.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/a-man-or-a-woman-whats-the-diff/sol-5/" rel="attachment wp-att-166272"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-166272" title="sol" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/sol-450x230.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="138" /></a>The pansexual Left is daily making deeper inroads into the very heart and soul—and loins—of Western culture, intent, it seems, on sexualizing our children as if they were already mature and capable adults. Along with militant hatred of traditional customs, prurience masking as liberal complaisance has become one more ideological force eating away at the established and time-tested norms and usages that have characterized Western civilization and that have provided for its (now-threatened) durability. Traditional and even biological partitions have grown porous and some have fallen altogether, a phenomenon increasingly symbolized by the prefix “trans.”</p>
<p>One thinks of the European movement to dissolve nation states and replace them with a “transnational” entity, and now of the social and educational recognition of a new category of human beings, known as “transgenders” or the “transgendered.” Cultural and natural distinctions are in process of being wiped out and supplanted by a fetish for collective and undifferentiated existence—which is to say, we are toiling in an untenable paradox. We are all <em>equally</em> different, we all possess the <em>same rights</em> to be what we want to be and to expect the world to acknowledge us as such, in defiance of both social and empirical reality.</p>
<p>This is especially the case for something as biologically given as gender identity. Alluding to Tom Wolfe’s notion of the “Victorian gentlemen” in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Right-Stuff-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312427565/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1353160188&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=tom+wolfe+the+right+stuff">The Right Stuff</a>, Michael Walsh <a href="http://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/author/michaelwalsh/">comments</a> on the unfortunate breaking down of “institutional barriers between men and women… barriers erected not out of sexist animus or irrational prejudice, but in recognition of…biological reality.” Perhaps the most salient instance of the rejection of reality which typifies our pseudo-enlightened epoch involves precisely this issue. Just recently, the Toronto District School Board furnished a prismatic microcosm of the depths of imbecility to which we have plunged, an illustration in little of the larger <em>zeitgeis</em>t.</p>
<p>The fiasco began when the TDSB, for the presumed benefit of its students, provided links to a website that, among other suggestions for sexual experimentation, “<a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/04/zhe-hir-toronto-school-board-guidelines-on-gender-identity-allow-for-non-masculinefeminine-pronouns/">explained how to use vegetables in sexual play</a>.” A carrot a day keeps the doctor away. A week later it issued a set of guidelines noting that all students can use their washroom of choice, since gender identity is supposedly unrelated to “<a href="http://www.torontosun.com/2012/10/03/transgendered-kids-can-use-whichever-school-washroom-they-wish-tdsb">the student’s sex assigned at birth.</a>” According to the poster it distributed, “Masculine and feminine are labels, not definitions”: gender is not assigned at birth but freely chosen. Evergreen State College in the U.S. is clearly in agreement with this pixilated assessment, <a href="http://godfatherpolitics.com/8012/transgender-man-allowed-to-use-same-locker-room-as-young-girls/">allowing</a> a 45 year-old male student who claims transgender status, despite the fact that he is biologically a man, to use the female changing room facilities. Responding to parents’ complaints, the College Administration argues that it “cannot discriminate on the basis of gender identity,” a devious way of begging the question.</p>
<p>The redefinition of gender identity is a godsend for pedophiles and sexual perverts of all stripes. No matter. Students are encouraged to decide for themselves which gender they feel they belong to and are to be perceived as members in good standing of the transgender community, immune to criticism and heroically rebellious against both common sense and the genetic code.</p>
<p>Although transgender students represent an insignificant minority of the school population, their sense of grievance and exclusion, Administration believes, should determine intramural policy for all students, and teachers as well, despite the havoc bound to be unleashed. The travesty doesn’t stop there. As the National Post <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/04/zhe-hir-toronto-school-board-guidelines-on-gender-identity-allow-for-non-masculinefeminine-pronouns/">reports</a>, “Gender identity is currently not a protected status under the Canadian Human Rights Act, but Bill C-279, under debate in the House of Commons, would change that.” Indeed, no less an authority than Joe Biden <a href="http://www.ontopmag.com/article.aspx?id=13419&amp;MediaType=1&amp;Category=26">regards</a> transgender discrimination as “the civil rights issue of our time.” And as we are all aware, when Joe Biden speaks, the age listens with rapt attention.</p>
<p>The larger issue, of course, involves the rejection of the heterosexual norm, including its associations with the traditional family unit, the rearing of children within the family, the proper function of the state, the importance of traditional morality and the assertion of anarchic but also state-sanctioned and regulated non-reproductive sexuality in its place. These elements form part of the Left’s defining project, which is nothing less than culture-change. It is essentially an attack on what it regards as the hetero-patriarchal nature of Western civilization, and the directives coming down from the Toronto District School Board enjoy exemplary status in this respect.</p>
<p>Like many school boards across the nation, it attempts to regulate everything from the traditional usages of the culture to the sexual identity of its students. The TDSB swims with the sewage, not only in the washrooms, but, for example, in renaming Hallowe’en as “Black and Orange Day” in order not to offend wiccans or immigrants for whom the custom of trick or treating is foreign or potentially unsettling in some way. But the TDSB is merely a symptom of the age in which, as I have written elsewhere, “the individual is no longer understood as a nexus of thought, energy, moral conviction and spiritual autonomy, with a biological identity furnished by Nature, but as a malleable lump of helpless suffering and justified desire to be pitied and served.” Our schools in particular have succeeded in turning us into creatures of ideological fashion rather than autonomous agents capable of self-reflection and resistant to social and political manipulation. Forget about math, science, literature or history; it’s all about social activism now. The signs of cultural decadence are everywhere around us, and the educational system has become one of the principal engines of moral and intellectual decay.</p>
<p>This is social engineering with a vengeance. Our schools, like our cultural institutions in general, believe they are breaking down barriers, but what they are really doing is erasing differences—that is, <em>unequal differences</em>, the differences that make us who we are, not who we imagine ourselves as being, and that allow for the preservation of our integrity, in both senses of the word. And in proceeding to gut the culture they despise and to render it sterile, they have even robbed us of our gender.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Oppressed by a Pronoun</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/oppressed-by-a-pronoun/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oppressed-by-a-pronoun</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Jul 2012 04:35:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[What elite universities are teaching our youth. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Ask-About-my-Pronoun-Preference1.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-136890" title="Ask-About-my-Pronoun-Preference" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Ask-About-my-Pronoun-Preference1.gif" alt="" width="375" height="286" /></a>The other day I was sitting here writing and had the Howard Stern Show on in the background.  (I sometimes find it easier to write with background noise.)  Since Howard was on vacation, they were rerunning excerpts from old programs, including one on which he interviewed a prostitute.  She told him about a client of hers who paid her a couple of hundred dollars to give him a good, swift, violent kick in the <em>cojones.  </em>At<em> </em>first<em> </em>she hesitated, not wanting to hurt him, but then, apparently drawing on her high sense of professional honor and duty, she went ahead and did what he asked, whereupon he doubled over in such excruciating pain that he was barely able to stagger out of the room.  As she watched him depart, she was overcome with feelings of guilt for having caused him such agony.  Two days later he came back with another two hundred bucks and asked her to do it again.</p>
<p>It wasn&#8217;t until several hours later that I realized this wasn&#8217;t a bad metaphor for the current relationship between what are supposed to be some of America&#8217;s – indeed, some of the world&#8217;s – very best universities and liberal-arts colleges and the people who send their kids there.  What do I mean?  This: every year, all over the U.S., countless parents cough up not two hundred but more like two hundred thousand dollars so that their pride and joy, their newly minted high-school grad, can go to Harvard or Yale or wherever.  So they pack him – let&#8217;s make it a him – off to old Ivy, and next thing you know he&#8217;s being roundly scolded at orientation for harboring vile prejudices of which he has, until now, been totally unaware.  But don&#8217;t worry, he&#8217;s told: those prejudices aren&#8217;t really his fault – they&#8217;re the natural product of a bourgeois upbringing in capitalist, imperialist America, that fount of all worldly evil and the international headquarters of racism, sexism, and classism.  It is, furthermore, made clear to the kid that he&#8217;s come to the right place: for the next four years, he&#8217;ll undergo a thorough re-education that will liberate him from the misbegotten notions on which he was raised and will set him on a journey down the one and only path to truth.</p>
<p>Four years later, having been marinated all the while in postmodernist twaddle and lockstep groupthink – from queer theory to radical feminism – the kid will be handed a diploma and sent home, where his parents, if they haven&#8217;t already figured out what&#8217;s been happening to their little darling on campus, will get an earful of some of the stuff he&#8217;s been “learning” and will realize that he&#8217;s learned to despise pretty much everything they stand for.  He&#8217;s been taught to hate his country, to hate its history (of which he&#8217;s been given a thoroughly twisted version courtesy of Howard Zinn &amp; co.), and to view its economic system (thanks to a gaggle of post-Marxist profs) as the root cause of all the planet&#8217;s ills.  In short, they&#8217;ve paid good money – a lot of it – for their precious angel to be brainwashed into viewing them as class enemies.  Or, to return to our original metaphor, in exchange for all those staggering checks they&#8217;ve been mailing off to the college all these years, they&#8217;ve been given the equivalent of a powerful kick in the privates.</p>
<p>And so what do these parents – who, in our hypothetical scenario, have other, younger kids – do?  Do they reevaluate their choices?  Do they admit to having learned an expensive lesson and change direction?  No – they go ahead and send kid #2 to exactly the same place to be brainwashed in exactly the same way.  And, in the fullness of time, they do the same thing with whatever other kids they have.  In short, it&#8217;s just like that guy paying the hooker to slam her heel into his groin over and over again – the only differences being (1) the sums of money involved, and (2) the fact that at least the hooker, unlike the college, felt bad about taking money for doing such a horrible thing to a paying customer.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve spent much of the past couple of years working on a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Victims-Revolution-Identity-Studies/dp/0061807370/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0">book</a> about some of these matters, so the ways in which higher education has devolved over the last generation or so are very often on my mind nowadays.  But the immediate reason why I found my thoughts wandering down these byways the other day was an <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/304934/its-barnum-bailey-world-mark-steyn">item</a> by Mark Steyn in which he <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/7/3/vanidy-bailey-bgltq-office/">quoted</a>, first, a <em>Harvard Crimson </em>report that that institution had appointed someone named Vanidy “Van” Bailey “as the College’s first permanent director of bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer student life,” and, second, a follow-up “correction” in which the <em>Crimson </em>noted that “[a]n earlier version of this article used the pronoun &#8216;she&#8217; to refer to Vanidy &#8216;Van&#8217; Bailey&#8230;.In fact, Bailey prefers not to be referred to by any gendered pronoun.”</p>
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		<title>American Gendercide</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frank-crimi/american-gendercide/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=american-gendercide</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Jun 2012 04:03:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frank Crimi]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abortion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Girls]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sex selection]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=134630</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama administration and congressional Democrats work to defeat a bill that would outlaw sex-selective abortions.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/31BEr3NObWL._SL500_AA300_.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-134705" title="31BEr3NObWL._SL500_AA300_" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/31BEr3NObWL._SL500_AA300_.gif" alt="" width="375" height="258" /></a>While the Republican “war on women” may be a mythical creation, the war on unborn baby girls (and boys) is all too real as the Obama administration and congressional Democrats work to defeat a bill that would outlaw sex-selective abortions.</p>
<p>The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), which would have subjected abortion providers to civil and criminal penalties if they knowingly performed or forced someone to obtain an abortion based on the sex of the unborn child, recently <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/31/politics/house-abortion-gender/index.html">failed</a> passage in the House of Representatives.</p>
<p>Despite a strong majority of 246 mostly Republican House members voting to pass PRENDA, 168 mostly Democratic nay votes were enough to ensure that the proposed legislation fell short of the two-thirds margin of support needed for passage.</p>
<p>While supporters argued that PRENDA would protect the civil rights of unborn babies from being exterminated on the basis of being of the “wrong” gender, opponents decried it as part of a broader “war on women” and an assault on legalized abortion.</p>
<p>In fact, others, like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi spokesman, Drew Hammill, dismissed the necessity of bringing up PRENDA for a vote, calling it “yet another distraction and yet another day that this Republican majority fails to act on job creation.”</p>
<p>However, House Speaker John Boehner promptly rejected the accusation of political posturing, arguing that “This type of sex selection &#8230; most Americans find pretty repulsive. Our [Republican] members feel strongly about it.”</p>
<p>One such member was Republican Representative Chris Smith, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Human Rights, who called the practice of gendercide “the real war on women.”</p>
<p>That real war includes an escalating global campaign of gendercide aimed primarily at unborn female babies, an attack which has resulted in the deliberate killing of over 100 million unborn girls worldwide in nations with strong cultural preferences for male offspring.</p>
<p>While the epicenter for female infanticide is relegated to South and East Asian countries, most notably China and India, fears are growing that sex-selective abortions are gaining traction in the United States among parents not happy with the sex of their babies.</p>
<p>That acceptance is being fueled by widespread advances in prenatal sex-determination medical technology, such as the use of ultrasound and sperm-sorting technologies, as well as with the helping hands of America’s largest abortion providers.</p>
<p>That latter assistance was on full display in the days prior to and following the PRENDA vote when the pro-life group Live Action released three undercover <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/31/second-live-action-video-attacks-planned-parenthood-for-female-gendercide/">videos</a> as part of its “Gendercide” project which documents Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation’s (NAF) support for sex-selective abortion.</p>
<p>Two of the undercover videos showed Planned Parenthood staffers in Austin, Texas and New York City offering advice to women on how best to proceed with a sex-selective abortion, while the third <a href="http://liveaction.org/blog/az-abortion-clinics-break-law-to-abort-baby-girls-in-new-undercover-video/">video</a> shows NAF staffers at two clinics in Arizona &#8212; which has outlawed sex-selective abortions &#8212; coaching women to falsify their paperwork in order to conceal their illegal abortions.</p>
<p>It should be noted that since 2008, bills to outlaw sex-selective abortion have been introduced in 13 states but enacted in just four: Arizona, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>While the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/29/planned-parenthood-video_n_1552672.html">responded</a> to the release of the Live Action videos by claiming it “condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender,” it did acknowledge that PP clinics would only deny a woman a sex-selective abortion in states that explicitly prohibit the procedure.</p>
<p>Of course, it’s not surprising that the PPFA would be reluctant to support efforts to ban the loathsome practice of sex-selective abortion, given that the organization has <a href="http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us-/newsroom/press-releases/planned-parenthood-statement-hoax-campaign-39383.htm">stated</a> that such slippery slope efforts could to lead to “curtailing access to abortion,” an endpoint that would dearly affect the organization’s financial bottom line.</p>
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		<title>The Real &#8216;War on Women&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/the-real-war-on-women/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-real-war-on-women</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/the-real-war-on-women/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Jun 2012 04:06:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pay gap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pelosi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War on Women]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=134434</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the "gender pay gap" canard distracts from. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wow.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-134435" title="wow" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wow.gif" alt="" width="375" height="248" /></a>Among the people who are disappointed with President Obama, none has more reason to be disappointed than those who thought he was going to be &#8220;a uniter, rather than a divider&#8221; and that he would &#8220;bring us all together.&#8221;</p>
<p>It was a noble hope, but one with no factual foundation. Barack Obama had been a divider all his adult life, especially as a community organizer, and he had repeatedly sought out and allied himself with other dividers, the most blatant of whom was the man whose church he attend for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.</p>
<p>Now, with his presidency on the line and the polls looking dicey, President Obama&#8217;s re-election campaign has become more openly divisive than ever.</p>
<p>He has embraced the strident &#8220;Occupy Wall Street&#8221; movement, with its ridiculous claim of representing the 99 percent against the 1 percent. Obama&#8217;s Department of Justice has been spreading the hysteria that states requiring photo identification for voting are trying to keep minorities from voting, and using the prevention of voter fraud as a pretext.</p>
<p>But anyone who doubts the existence of voter fraud should read John Fund&#8217;s book &#8220;Stealing Elections&#8221; or J. Christian Adams&#8217;s book, &#8220;Injustice,&#8221; which deals specifically with the Obama Justice Department&#8217;s overlooking voter fraud when those involved are black Democrats.</p>
<p>Not content with dividing classes and races, the Obama campaign is now seeking to divide the sexes by declaring that women are being paid less than men, as part of a &#8220;war on women&#8221; conducted by villains, from whom Obama and company will protect the women — and, not incidentally, expect to receive their votes this November.</p>
<p>The old — and repeatedly discredited — game of citing women&#8217;s incomes as some percentage of men&#8217;s incomes is being played once again, as part of the &#8220;war on women&#8221; theme.</p>
<p>Since women average fewer hours of work per year, and fewer years of consecutive full-time employment than men, among other differences, comparisons of male and female annual earnings are comparisons of apples and oranges, as various female economists have pointed out.</p>
<p>Read Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute or Professor Claudia Goldin of Harvard, for example.</p>
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		<title>The Left&#8217;s War on Tea Partiers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dennis-prager/the-lefts-war-on-tea-partiers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-war-on-tea-partiers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dennis-prager/the-lefts-war-on-tea-partiers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:00:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conservative opposition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dangerous features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[E Pluribus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[female gender]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[intellectual debate]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[moral consideration]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[New York]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[partiers]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[tea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tea Parties]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[World]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=58914</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Disqualifying humans on the basis of race.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/tea-party-protest.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58920" title="tea-party-protest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/tea-party-protest.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a></p>
<p>Opponents of the popular expression of conservative opposition to big  government, the tea party, regularly note that tea partiers are overwhelmingly  white. This is intended to disqualify the tea parties from serious moral  consideration.</p>
<p>But there are two other facts that are far more  troubling:</p>
<p>The first is the observation itself. The fact that the Left believes that  the preponderance of whites among tea partiers invalidates the tea party  movement tells us much more about the Left than it does about the tea  partiers.</p>
<p>It confirms that the Left really does see the world through the prism of  race, gender and class rather than through the moral prism of right and  wrong.</p>
<p>One of the more dangerous features of the Left has been its replacement  of moral categories of right and wrong, and good and evil with three other  categories: black and white (race), male and female (gender) and rich and poor  (class).</p>
<p>Therefore the Left pays attention to the skin color &#8212; and gender (not  just &#8220;whites&#8221; but &#8220;white males&#8221;) &#8212; of the tea partiers rather than to their  ideas.</p>
<p>One would hope that all people would assess ideas by their moral  rightness or wrongness, not by the race, gender or class of those who hold them.  But in the world of the Left, people are taught not to assess ideas but to  identify the race, class and gender of those who espouse those ideas. This helps  explain the widespread use of ad hominem attacks by the Left: Rather than argue  against their opponents&#8217; ideas, the Left usually dismisses those making the  argument disagreed with as &#8220;racist,&#8221; &#8220;intolerant,&#8221; &#8220;bigoted,&#8221; &#8220;sexist,&#8221;  &#8220;homophobic&#8221; and/or &#8220;xenophobic.&#8221;</p>
<p>You&#8217;re against race-based affirmative action? No need to argue the issue  because you&#8217;re a racist. You&#8217;re a tea partier against ever-expanding government?  No need to argue the issue because you&#8217;re a racist.</p>
<p>As a Leftist rule of thumb &#8212; once again rendering intellectual debate  unnecessary and impossible &#8212; white is wrong or bad, and non-white is right and  good; male is wrong and bad, and female is right and good; and the rich are  wrong and bad, and the poor right and good. For the record, there is one  additional division on the Left &#8212; strong and weak &#8212; to which the same rule  applies: The strong are wrong and bad, and the weak are right and good. That is  a major reason for Leftist support of the Palestinians (weak) against the  Israelis (strong), for example.</p>
<p>This is why, to cite another example, men are dismissed when they oppose  abortion. The idea is far less significant than the sex of the advocate. As for  women who oppose abortion on demand, they are either not authentically female or  simply traitors to their sex. Just as the Left depicts blacks who oppose  race-based affirmative action as not authentic blacks or are traitors to their  race.</p>
<p>In this morally inverted world, the virtual absence of blacks from tea  party rallies cannot possibly reflect anything negative on the black and  minority absence, only on the white tea partiers.</p>
<p>But in a more rational and morally clear world, where people judge ideas  by their legitimacy rather than by the race of those who held them, people would  be as likely to ask why blacks and ethnic minorities are virtually absent at tea  parties just as they now ask why whites predominate. They would want to know if  this racial imbalance said anything about black and minority views or  necessarily reflected negatively on the whites attending those  rallies.</p>
<p>And if they did ask such un-PC questions, they might draw rather  different conclusions than the Left&#8217;s. First, they would know that the  near-absence of blacks and Hispanics no more implied racism on the part of tea  partiers than the near-absence of blacks and Hispanics in the New York  Philharmonic implies racism on the art of that orchestra.</p>
<p>Second, they might even, Heaven forbid, conclude that it does not reflect  well on the political outlook of blacks and Hispanics that they so  overwhelmingly identify with ever-larger government. Leftist big-government  policies have been disastrous for black America just as  they were in the countries that most Hispanics emigrated from. But like the  gambling addict who keeps gambling the more he loses, those addicted to  government entitlements keep increasing the size of the government even as their  situation worsens.</p>
<p>Finally, if one eschews the &#8220;racism&#8221; explanation and asks real questions,  one might also conclude that America generally, and conservatives specifically,  have failed to communicate America&#8217;s distinct values &#8212; E Pluribus Unum, In God  We Trust, and Liberty (which includes small government) &#8212; to blacks and  Hispanics.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, however, no real exploration of almost any important issue  in American life is possible as long as the Left focuses on the race, gender and  class of those who hold differing positions. And that will not happen. For when  the Left stops attacking people and starts arguing positions, we will see what  the Left most fears: blacks and Hispanics at tea parties.</p>
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		<title>How Bad Is the Indoctrination in our Colleges?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/indoctrination-in-american-colleges/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=indoctrination-in-american-colleges</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/indoctrination-in-american-colleges/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:10:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Connecticut]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=52661</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Inside a classroom at the University of Massachusetts.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/goldman.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-52662" title="goldman" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/goldman.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="500" /></a></p>
<p>How bad is the indoctrination process in American colleges?</p>
<p>I had occasion to see for myself an answer to this question when I recently visited the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This is a state school with 20,000 students, and while I was there I audited an hour-and-a-half lecture about the Warren Court’s landmark decisions on civil liberties by a well-known and highly respected political scientist named Sheldon Goldman, a nationally recognized expert in the field.</p>
<p>There are no open conservatives on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts and none that the conservative students who were hosting me could identify. My student hosts were political science majors and the absence of conservative professors was a real problem for them given the extreme and abusive nature of many of their professors. One professor gave an exam, for example, that consisted of a speech by President Reagan. The exam question was: Explain why Reagan is wrong. Another professor was a militant leftist who required a paper on the Vietnam War. To avoid the political minefield which confronted him, a student wrote a paper comparing military strategies for the war. The professor rejected the paper with the comment: “We shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”</p>
<p>When I entered Goldman’s classroom I saw that half of my student hosts were taking his course, a relief they told me later from the harassment they experience in other political science courses. Goldman is regarded by these conservative students as the “best” and “fairest” professor on the UMass faculty, someone who every now and then would vent a “liberal” sentiment or prejudice but whose lectures were relatively free from bias and whose classroom behavior was respectful towards them. Political Science departments in my experience are more academic and less politicized than other departments such as Anthropology, Sociology and the various inter-disciplinary fields (“Peace Studies,” “Cultural Studies”) that tenured radicals have invented to establish their ideological claims.</p>
<p>Consequently, I was not prepared for what I encountered in Professor Goldman’s classroom. I had previously suggested in my writings and lectures on universities that professors who use their classrooms as platforms for their political agendas represent a small but significant minority, which I have estimated to be about ten percent of a given faculty. The other ninety percent are scholars who are professional and observe the guidelines on academic freedom which enjoin faculty from presenting students with “ready-made conclusions” on controversial matters. Or so I thought. After auditing Professor Goldman’s course I will have to revise that judgment.</p>
<p>Let me begin by stating what I believe indoctrination to be and what it is not. Indoctrination is presenting opinion to students as though it were scientific fact or as though no rational, decent, and moral person could have any other view. It is the equivalent of presenting students with ready-made conclusions which they cannot realistically feel free to challenge. There are entire fields of study that are in fact programs of indoctrination. For example, all Women’s Studies programs with which I am familiar are programs to train students to be radical feminists and specifically to instill in them the doctrine that gender differences are “socially constructed” – that they are artificially created by male elites to subordinate and oppress women.</p>
<p>The social construction of gender is not a theory that students in Women’s Studies courses are free to adopt or reject. It is taught in the same way university courses in physics teach Newton’s laws of motion. When, at a recent academic conference, I confronted the president of the American Association of University Professors over this very issue, he replied that he did indeed teach the social construction of gender as a scientific fact but because he allowed students to take the opposite point of view it wasn’t indoctrination. But what does it mean to let a student who is seeking a good grade argue against a scientific fact, except that you are allowing him to make a fool of himself?</p>
<p>Professor Goldman is not a radical and his presentation was of much subtler order, but its import was surprisingly similar. Let me be clear at the outset. If Professor Goldman had presented the rulings of the Warren Court along with the conservative objections to those rulings and then said that personally &#8212; and based on his own years of study &#8212; he was of the opinion that the Warren rulings were wise or correct, I would have no problem with his presentation, particularly since the students were confident that he was fair-minded in his treatment of them. But Professor Goldman did not do this. Instead he presented a series of landmark Warren Court decisions as a salesman for Warren Court’s point of view, and without giving the conservatives’ concerns a proper day in his court. To put it more bluntly, Professor Goldman suppressed the conservative argument against the Warren Court so that no one sitting in the class who was not already familiar with it could think that any modern person, or any rational and moral person for that matter, could fail to approve what the Warren Court did.</p>
<p>In discussing the establishment of religion clause in the First Amendment, for example, he made it seem as though the issue was whether saying a prayer in school was a step in establishing religion or whether it was too inconsequential to trigger concern. But this was not the gravamen of the conservative argument. The conservative position is that the establishment clause refers to the establishment of a particular religion not to acknowledgment that a deity exists. After all, the Founders were or were descended from refugees who had fled to American as Christians persecuted by the Anglican Church which, as the established Church of England could therefore use government powers against rival denominations. Mentioning a non-denominational “God” in the classroom may or may not qualify as the kind of establishment the Founders had in mind, but obviously reasonable, and moral, and modern people can disagree on this matter, something no student in Goldman’s class would understand from his lecture.</p>
<p>Goldman then turned to an even more important case, Griswold v. Connecticut, which as he pointed out provided the constitutional basis for Roe v. Wade. This, as he did not point out, was a decision that can be said to have transformed the politics of this country by virtually creating a “religious right” opposition, turning Supreme Court nominations into political battles and causing a polarization of the two major parties.  Nor did he explain why this should be so.</p>
<p>The Griswold case involved a Connecticut law against contraceptives and was resolved when the Warren majority invented a “right to privacy” which Goldman conceded cannot be found in the actual Constitution but then went on to argue in effect that it should have been there and to imply that we can be thankful that it was put there by Justice Douglas under the mysterious doctrine of “penumbras.” Goldman made the case for the ruling easy by making fun of the Connecticut law, acting out an imaginary knock at the door by the contraceptive police coming to look into citizens’ bedrooms. The effect was to insinuate that this was a stupid and dangerous law, and if we have to invent rights that aren’t in the Constitution to get rid of it, well and good. They should have been there and we as enlightened progressives are really obligated to supply them. At no point do I remember Goldman reminding students that actually there was another way to get rid of a stupid and dangerous law, which was through the legislative process. This would avoid having  nine unelected judges, appointed for life, rewriting the Constitution and substituting themselves for the electorate. The closest Professor Goldman came to recognizing this issue was a passing reference to Justice Stewart’s dissent in which he said that the majority decision was like having a constitutional convention every day.</p>
<p>At no point did Professor Goldman explain to students that the conservative opposition to the Warren Court decisions revolved around this absolutely critical point, or as the noted liberal law professor Mark Tushnet acknowledges, “To conservatives, the Warren Court converted constitutional law into ordinary politics….” By circumventing (really subverting) legislatures and the democratic process instead of merely applying the Constitution as written, the Warren Court liberals made the selection of a Supreme Court justice a momentous political act, which is why the Supreme Court nominations have since become such open political conflicts, while the Constitution as written by the Founders has been gravely weakened. That is the conservative argument which was absent from Professor Goldman’s lecture.</p>
<p>All this would have been less problematic if the text Professor Goldman required his students to read for the course was not a partisan liberal view of the Court written by Jeffrey Toobin. It is not as though there aren’t equally accessible conservative books about this very history. Robert Bork a distinguished a law professor and jurist (whose name was mentioned a few times in vain by Goldman) has written one himself, <em>The Tempting of America</em>. How difficult would it have been to assign students to read Bork’s book alongside Toobin’s so that students could familiarize themselves with the arguments that Goldman left out of his presentation?</p>
<p>Here is <a href="http://guru.psu.edu/POLICIES/OHR/hr64.html#A">the relevant passage</a> on indoctrination from the classic 1915 statement on academic freedom:</p>
<blockquote><p>“It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials, which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence, in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without super-cession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.”</p></blockquote>
<p>If Professor Goldman had followed these guidelines I would have had no problem with his personal judgments about the wisdom of the Warren Court. But he didn’t and therefore I do. The larger problem is this: what happens to a democracy when its educational institutions are converted into training and recruitment programs for one political party and its worldview?</p>
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		<title>The Saudi Pedophile Chronicles</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/the-saudi-pedophile-chronicles/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-saudi-pedophile-chronicles</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/the-saudi-pedophile-chronicles/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:03:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=51376</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If you want to rape a 12-year-old girl and have the authorities sanction it, Saudi Arabia is the place for you.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/saudis.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51378" title="saudis" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/saudis.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="483" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/">Pajamas</a></strong></p>
<p>The Saudis really need to get an infomercial out there — and the <em>Nation</em> magazine and other leftist sites <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&amp;location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FUnited-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror%2Fdp%2F1935071602%2F&amp;tag=pajamasmedia-20&amp;linkCode=ur2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325">that apologize for Islamic gender apartheid</a> can feature it on their webpages. It would go something like this:</p>
<p>A Saudi sheikh dressed slickly in Saudi garb would be sitting confidently in a chair, looking into the camera with an excited smile. He would then begin asking, with earnestness and an encouraging tone:</p>
<blockquote><p>Are you a pedophile? Do you like underage girls? Would you like to rape one of them — or several? And get away with it? Even have it legally sanctioned? Then Saudi Arabia is for you.</p></blockquote>
<p>The screen then shifts to a shopping mall filled with niqab-covered women (only the slit of the eyes showing) walking up and down in front of stores. It remains unclear what message this is supposed to denote, but the camera stays focused on these shrouded women for about ten seconds. Then a warning appears that all infidels who are interested must first convert to Islam. This is followed by a phone number appearing over a black background, indicating a contact person who can be reached. A voice then explains that this person lurks within the Saudi religious police and that he will connect interested parties to Saudi fathers intent on selling their underage girls into marriage — a standard practice in Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>Saudi fathers, you see, they know what’s up: it’s better to sell one’s daughter at a very young age to get raped under the sanctioning of Islamic law than to risk her getting older and bringing shame to the family — which can happen in a million ways in Saudi Arabia (i.e., she might go outside without permission or <a href="http://www.globalpolitician.com/21879-saudi">attempt to run out of a burning building unveiled</a>). This all gets too needlessly complicated — as you then have to kill her. So why go through all the trouble when you can make some cash while she’s young and get rid of the problem?</p>
<p><strong>[To continue reading this article, <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-saudi-pedophile-chronicles/">click here</a>.]</strong></p>
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		<title>Thomas Joscelyn: Amnesty International Stands by Jihadist &#8211; The Weekly Standard</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/thomas-joscelyn-amnesty-international-stands-by-jihadist-the-weekly-standard/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=thomas-joscelyn-amnesty-international-stands-by-jihadist-the-weekly-standard</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:18:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=50745</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Amnesty International is at a crossroads. One path leads to a continued relationship with an admitted jihadist. The other is guided by an Amnesty official who has been outspoken in her criticism of Amnesty’s relationship with the jihadist. Thus far, Amnesty has chosen to stand by the jihadist – and chastise the whistleblower. In recent [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Amnesty International is at a crossroads. One path leads to a continued relationship with an admitted jihadist. The other is guided by an Amnesty official who has been outspoken in her criticism of Amnesty’s relationship with the jihadist.</p>
<p>Thus far, Amnesty has chosen to stand by the jihadist – and chastise the whistleblower.</p>
<p>In recent weeks, the human rights organization has been criticized by one of its own officials for its relationship with Moazzam Begg – a former Gitmo detainee who has openly espoused jihadist views – as well as Begg’s organization, Cage Prisoners.</p>
<p>Begg has taken part in Amnesty’s campaign to close Gitmo, including trying to convince some European nations to take in more Gitmo detainees. But earlier this month, the Sunday Times (UK) reported that Gita Sahgal, the head of Amnesty’s gender unit, had complained about the relationship with Begg for two years to no avail.</p>
<p>So, Sahgal went public with her criticisms after penning an email to other Amnesty officials on January 30.  “I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights,” Sahgal wrote, according to the Times.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/amnesty-international-stands-jihadist">Amnesty International Stands by Jihadist | The Weekly Standard</a>.</p>
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