Tag Archives: Human Rights Campaign

News

Obama administration forces transgender bathroom access in all public schools

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Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign
Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign

This is from The Stream:

Public schools must permit transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their chosen gender identity, according to an Obama administration directive issued amid a court fight between the federal government and North Carolina.

The guidance from leaders at the departments of Education and Justice says public schools are obligated to treat transgender students in a way that matches their gender identity, even if their education records or identity documents indicate a different sex.

“There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement accompanying the directive, which is being sent to school districts Friday.

In issuing the guidance, the Obama administration is wading anew into a socially divisive debate it has bluntly cast in terms of civil rights. The Justice Department on Monday sued North Carolina over a bathroom access law that it said violates the rights of transgender people, a measure that Lynch likened to policies of racial segregation and efforts to deny gay couples the right to marry.

“We must ensure that our young people know that whoever they are or wherever they come from, they have the opportunity to get a great education in an environment free from discrimination, harassment and violence,” [Education Secretary John B.] King said.

Ah yes – the students get their educations in the bathrooms, changerooms and showers. So that’s where they have to be free to pretend to be a sex they are not, or they won’t learn anything in there. It’s part of their education, what goes on in bathrooms, changerooms and showers.

In any case, things are going so well academically in our schools, that of course we can focus on these human rights issues instead. Our public schools are the best in the world, and our students are the most educated, right?

OK, so who is behind this power play? The largest gay activist group in the United States, of course:

The move was cheered by Human Rights Campaign, a gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights organization, which called the guidelines “groundbreaking.”

“This is a truly significant moment not only for transgender young people but for all young people, sending a message that every student deserves to be treated fairly and supported by their teachers and schools,” HRC President Chad Griffin said in a statement.

All of this Obama administration activity is being down with taxpayer dollars. Even if you disagree with it, you’re paying for it. The solution is to shrink the size of government by voting for people who want the federal government to only focus on the responsibilities outlined for it in the Constitution, and push the other responsibilities down to the state level. I can guarantee you that if you live in a red state, you would never have your state government forcing gay activist legislation down your throat. But even then, at least you could move to a more conservative state. When the federal government does it, you’re stuck.

Think of the things that the federal government should be working on like fighting wars, building up our armed forces, detecting and neutralizing terrorists, securing the border, and lowering taxes and regulations on business. But they do none of those things, and instead just do whatever the Human Rights Campaign wants them to do. And this is what people who vote for the Democrat party want.

Ted Cruz campaigned on abolishing the federal department of education, precisely because education is something that should be left to the states. But, unfortunately the Republican primary voters were not looking for someone with good policies. So this isn’t going to get fixed, no matter who wins the election in 2016. It might get fixed in 2020, if we elect a Constitutional conservative.

News

Obama DOJ moving fast against NC HB2 but slowly on Clinton investigation

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Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign
Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign

Here is what your taxpayer dollars are going to pay for at the Department of Justice.

Religious liberty champion David French writes about it at National Review:

At an afternoon news conference, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a “significant law enforcement” action — its own lawsuit. At the same time, Lynch indicated that the DOJ retained the authority to federal funding to key state entities, issuing a not-so-veiled threat of dramatic action before the courts issue a definitive ruling. At the same time, she preposterously compared the act of preserving bathrooms for people of the same sex to, of course, “Jim Crow” and hearkened back to the days of segregated water fountains.

A public-relations battle over bathrooms and showers has transformed into a fight over the meaning and indeed authority of the Constitution itself. In its zeal to advance the sexual revolution, the Obama administration has defied the will of Congress, unilaterally rewritten federal law without even bothering to go through a statutory rulemaking process, and now seeks to bring a sovereign state to heel through a combination of threats and lawsuits.

French explains that there is no support for what the DOJ says in federal law:

Title VII prohibits private and public employers (including state governments) from discriminating on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.” Title IX prohibits federally funded educational institutions from discriminating on the basis of “sex.” Neither statute prohibits sexual-orientation or gender-identity discrimination. For more than 20 years, LGBT activists have sought to amend federal law through the so-called Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would essentially add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes within federal nondiscrimination law. For more than 20 years, LGBT activists have failed. ENDA hasn’t passed even when Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress.

Rather than wait for the law to change, however, federal regulators and lawless federal judges have incrementally changed it by executive and judicial fiat, steadily expanding the scope of Title VII until July 2015, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission unilaterally amended the statute. In a document entitled “What You Should Know about EEOC and Enforcement Protections for LGBT Workers,” the Commission declared that it interprets and enforces Title VII’s prohibition of sex discrimination as forbidding any employment discrimination based on ” (boldface in original).

At a stroke, the EEOC decided that it was going to essentially enforce ENDA — a statute that doesn’t exist. Democracy wasn’t working fast enough for the Obama administration, so it decided to give authoritarianism a try.

So why exactly are social conservatives fighting the gay activists on this? Simple. We want to protect people’s right to privacy, as well as protect them from sexual assaults.

Here’s a case of privacy violated from last week, as reported by CBS News:

Frisco police are looking for a man they say photographed a young girl in a Target changing room.

Benito Valdez with police says it happened at the Super Target on Preston Road. “The man was in a female dressing room at the Target and was seen by the victim, over the wall with his cell phone, taking photos of the victim.”

It occurred at Target, of course- they let you use any bathroom you feel comfortable with, regardless of your sex.

The Toronto Sun reported on an example of sexual assault:

A sexual predator who falsely claimed to be transgender and preyed on women at two Toronto shelters was jailed indefinitely on Wednesday.

Justice John McMahon declared Christopher Hambrook — who claimed to be a transgender woman named Jessica — was a dangerous offender.

Gay rights activists like to ask how many sexual assaults have been committed by transgendered people. The answer is none or few, but no social conservative is worried about that – we are worried about cases like the one above, where a real predator pretends to be trans in order to get access to bathrooms, showers and yes, women’s shelters. But none of this is a problem for the Department of Justice, and besides, they would probably be more considered about the criminal rather than the victim anyway. That’s how liberals think.

But gay rights is a priority for the Department of Justice, under Barack Obama. Do you know what isn’t a priority? Criminal investigations.

This post is from Conservative Review.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s top law enforcement officer declined to give a firm answer on whether or not her department would take any action on the Hillary Clinton email scandal investigation before the end of election season.

At a press conference held to announce the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the state of North Carolina over its controversial bathroom safety legislation, Attorney General Loretta Lynch was asked why the DOJ was able to move so quickly on the latter of the two cases and slowly, in contrast, on the former. When pressed, Lynch would only say that the investigation against the former Secretary of State was simply still “ongoing.”

No need to investigate the IRS for persecuting conservative groups, or to investigate Hillary Clinton’s unsecure private e-mail server in a timely fashion. No! The priority is to make sure that private businesses are forced to allow biological men into women’s bathrooms, because that’s what the gay activists want. Remember that Lynch is also passionate about prosecuting anyone who is critical of radical Islam. Not radical Islamic terrorists, but people who are critical of radical Islamist terrorists.

Commentary

Why are social conservatives unable to exert political pressure?

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Hillary Clinton and her ally, the Human Rights Campaign
Hillary Clinton and her ally, the Human Rights Campaign

Right now, social liberals are having great success pushing through their agenda. Social conservatives seemed to be getting coerced and/or punished so effectively that many are wondering whether the tide can be turned at all.

Ben Shapiro, who writes at the Daily Wire, explains what’s been happening lately:

Leftists, the most tolerant people in America, are now demonstrating their tolerance by boycotting entire states that do not govern in accordance with leftist social policy. On Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he would bar non-essential state-funded travel to Mississippi after the state passed a bill re-enshrining First Amendment protections for freedom of religion and association. Cuomo, who termed the law “sad, hateful,” isn’t the only big government leftist to utilize the power of taxpayer-funded nastiness: the mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee, did the same.

Lee and Cuomo also announced travel bans to North Carolina, where the governor recently signed a bill that mandates that local governments may not allow people to use single-sex bathrooms based on subjective gender identity rather than biological sex; that bill also makes state anti-discrimination law supreme and exclusive over local anti-discrimination laws that would compel businesses to hire people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

It’s not just government, either. Icons like the wildly overrated Bruce Springsteen are cancelling concerts in North Carolina; businesses like PayPal, which do business in countries like Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, which actually prosecute homosexuality. States like Virginia and Georgia have vetoed similar legislation out of fear of corporate and governmental blowback from companies ranging from Apple to Disney.

The left has ratcheted up their pressure on states to crack down on Americans who don’t want their daughters peeing next to grown men, to prosecute businessowners who don’t want to cater same-sex weddings. They’ve utilized their economic power to punish private actors who may or may not even agree with the left in an attempt to coax those actors into putting indirect pressure on their representatives.

Maggie Gallagher, a pro-marriage activists who has written some great books on marriage that I really liked, has some practical advice for social conservatives in National Review.

She has five points – here are four and five:

4) Social conservatives aren’t doing politics.

Before I explain what I mean, let me ask you to answer a simple question: What is the national organization that fights for religious-liberty protections by spending money in federal elections? Currently, there is none. There are many good nonprofits who issue voter guides or get pastors together. There are public-interest law firms galore. These are all good things to have — but there is a hole in the center of our movement.

How big is the hole? For my own amusement, I tried to figure out how much money social conservatives (excluding pro-life groups) spent in national elections in 2014 compared to what they spend on 501(c)3 and other nonprofit strategies. I looked for every organization I could find that has marriage or religious liberty in its mission statement and then compared it with election expenditures by either c(4)s or political-action committees (PACs). Then I asked around to major social-conservative donors I know to see if I had overlooked any major organization.

How big is the hole in the center of our movement?

In 2014 pro-family social conservatives invested $251,633,730 in tax-deductible 501(c)3 efforts (excluding pro-life efforts).

How much was spent on direct political engagement, counting both state and federal organizations? $2,484,359.

That 100-to-one ratio of doing politics by indirect versus direct means explains a lot about the relative powerlessness of social conservatism.

Social conservatives can’t get much out of politics because we aren’t in politics. We just talk like we are on television, when the Left allows us to get on television. Meanwhile, we don’t build political institutions that matter.

Social conservatives need to think like a minority and organize politically to protect our interests. Which leads me to Maggie’s fifth Big Truth of social-conservative politics:

5) The most important thing social conservatives could do in the 2016 cycle is to demonstrate to Democrats that extremism in pushing unisex showers on public schools or oppressing gay-marriage dissenters will cost them the White House.

In theory, this shouldn’t be hard to do: A July 2015 Associated Press–GFK poll showed that 59 percent of independents and 32 percent of Democrats agree that when gay rights and religious liberty conflict, religious liberty should have priority. Social conservatives should use the issue on offense — not just to gin up “the base,” but to persuade soft Democrats to abandon the party of anti-religious aggression. If intensive messaging to Democratic voters in a key swing state could move just 10 percent of them to switch their votes, the whole political dynamic of this issue would change.

But proving that would require raising a significant amount of money — say at least $2 million — and demonstrating in a key swing state, such as Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida, that the Democrats’ anti-religion intolerance against gay-marriage dissenters could cost them something they care about: The White House. Power.

I see no signs yet that any such thing is happening among social conservatives.

But it could.

We should fill the hole in the center of the social-conservative movement by getting into politics for the first time in 50 years. It could happen.

I noticed that Maggie’s web site “The Pulse” is very pro-Cruz. They do not like John Kasich at all on social issues, and they were not fans of Marco Rubio’s tepid response to the gay marriage ruling.