The D.C. Council has stripped religious schools of legal protection against certain discrimination lawsuits, voting unanimously to repeal an exemption that had been in place for decades.
Under city rules, it is an “unlawful discriminatory practice” for a school to limit any use of facilities, services, or programs to someone based on “sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.”
However, an amendment inserted by Congress in a federal appropriations bill 25 years ago offered an exemption for religiously affiliated schools or schools “closely associated with the tenets of a religious organization,” allowing them to restrict funds, facilities and endorsements based on their religious convictions regarding homosexuality.
This provision, dubbed the “Armstrong Amendment,” came after Georgetown University refused to recognize a pro-gay student group, explained Michael Scott of the D.C. Catholic Conference.
Sen. William Armstrong authored the exemption, called the Nation’s Capital Religious Liberty and Academic Freedom Act, which allowed religiously affiliated schools in D.C. to withhold funds, facilities and approval from people and groups “that are organized for, or engaged in, promoting, encouraging, or condoning any homosexual act, lifestyle, orientation, or belief.”
But that exemption is now gone, thanks to a Dec. 2 vote by the council to overturn that provision. The council voted “unanimously without comment or changes” to pass the Human Rights Amendment of 2014, which included the repeal of the code, Mr. Scott explained.
Washington, D.C. is one of the most Democrat-dominated cities in the United States. So if you are wondering who pushes through an anti-Christian agenda like this one, it’s no mystery.
I want to make a few points about this latest multiple-victim public shooting, and I’ll do it with several links.
My friend Conway posted this article from National Review showing that multiple-victim public shootings are common in gun-free zones.
Excerpt:
Gun-free zones have been the most popular response to previous mass killings. But many law-enforcement officials say they are actually counterproductive. “Guns are already banned in schools. That is why the shootings happen in schools. A school is a ‘helpless-victim zone,’” says Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff. “Preventing any adult at a school from having access to a firearm eliminates any chance the killer can be stopped in time to prevent a rampage,” Jim Kouri, the public-information officer of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me earlier this year at the time of the Aurora, Colo., Batman-movie shooting. Indeed, there have been many instances — from the high-school shooting by Luke Woodham in Mississippi, to the New Life Church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo. — where a killer has been stopped after someone got a gun from a parked car or elsewhere and confronted the shooter.
Economists John Lott and William Landes conducted a groundbreaking study in 1999, and found that a common theme of mass shootings is that they occur in places where guns are banned and killers know everyone will be unarmed, such as shopping malls and schools.
I spoke with Lott after the Newtown shooting, and he confirmed that nothing has changed to alter his findings. He noted that the Aurora shooter, who killed twelve people earlier this year, had a choice of seven movie theaters that were showing the Batman movie he was obsessed with. All were within a 20-minute drive of his home. The Cinemark Theater the killer ultimately chose wasn’t the closest, but it was the only one that posted signs saying it banned concealed handguns carried by law-abiding individuals. All of the other theaters allowed the approximately 4 percent of Colorado adults who have a concealed-handgun permit to enter with their weapons.
“Disarming law-abiding citizens leaves them as sitting ducks,” Lott told me. “A couple hundred people were in the Cinemark Theater when the killer arrived. There is an extremely high probability that one or more of them would have had a legal concealed handgun with him if they had not been banned.”
Lott offers a final damning statistic: “With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.”
There is no evidence that private holders of concealed-carry permits (which are either easy to obtain or not even required in more than 40 states) are any more irresponsible with firearms than the police. According to a 2005 to 2007 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Bowling Green State University, police nationwide were convicted of firearms violations at least at a 0.002 percent annual rate. That’s about the same rate as holders of carry permits in the states with “shall issue” laws.
And another point to make is that the shooter was a liberal Democrat who opposed George W. Bush and supported Barack Obama.
Shooter was a pro-Obama, anti-Bush leftist
Here’s the news clip from CNN:
And the story from center-right Breitbart News about the clip:
Tuesday, on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” Michael Ritrovato spoke at length about his friend, suspected Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis. After expressing his condolences to the victims and their families, Ritrovato then expressed his shock over the actions of a man he described as being “like a brother to me” and a “good-natured guy.”
Ritrovato went on to explain that two of them had a close relationship based in part on their differences, specifically race and politics. Alexis was black, Ritrovato is white. Ritrovato described himself as conservative and Alexis is “more of a liberal type” who supported Barack Obama:
I would say things like, ‘You know, you are my brother from another mother.’ And he would say things like, ‘You’re my Italian mafia guy from New York.’ So we had things we joked about: Aaron wasn’t conservative like I am. He was more of a liberal type; he wasn’t happy with the former [Bush] administration. He was more happy with this [the Obama] administration — as far as presidential administrations.
So he is a leftist just like the Fort Hood shooter was a leftist. Just like Tsarnaev was a leftist. Just like the FRC shooter Corkins was a leftist. Just like the Gabby Giffords shooter was a leftist. Just like Jared Loughner was a leftist. These people are all Democrats. (See below for links). If gun control is for anyone, it should be for leftists. They are the crazy ones who prefer violence to debate. They aren’t used to debate, because they aren’t used to hearing other points of view.
The non-existent AR-15
Finally, the radically leftist Washington Post reports that the mainstream media invented an imaginary AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in their biased coverage, in a blatantly partisan attempt to push for more gun control.
Excerpt:
CNN correspondent Pamela Brown just reported on air that Aaron Alexis, the deceased suspect in the Navy Yard shootings, entered the facility yesterday armed with a shotgun. Citing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as well as law enforcement sources, Brown reported that the gunman had tried to purchase an AR-15 at a gun shop in Northern Virginia but was turned down. Two pistols were also recovered.
He had a shotgun and two handguns – no AR-15, because he was turned down for an AR-15.
But radically leftist CNN reported that he had an AR-15:
This morning, CNN’s John Berman said on the network’s program “Early Start”: “Alexis is the only gunman now, officials say. Yesterday, there was word that there was maybe a second, a third possible person involved in the attack. That is no longer the case. Officials say that Aaron Alexis was a lone gunman. This is what we know about him this morning. We know that he had an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle. He also had a different rifle and a glock, that is a handgun with him. It’s believed that the AR-15 was the main murder weapon used from the atrium above. That is also the weapon you’ll remember used by Adam Lanza in the Newtown massacre and James Holmes in Aurora. That’s the Colorado movie theater massacre.”
Other leftist “news” sources kept the lie going:
[…]The Associated Press:
Alexis carried three weapons: an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun that he took from a police officer at the scene, according to two federal law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation. The AR-15 is the same type of rifle used in last year’s mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school that killed 20 students and six women. The weapon was also used in the shooting at a Colorado movie theater that killed 12 and wounded 70.
The Washington Post notes that about a half-dozen leftist news sources reported on the fictitious AR-15, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
You would think these left-wing media people would learn from previous retractions not to let their left-wing politics determine the narrative, but they don’t. It’s the same thing every day, over and over. This is what happens, though, when newsrooms are packed full of radical leftists. There is no diversity of opinion, no debate, no critical thinking. It’s an echo chamber.
Andrew J. Coulson of the Cato Institute explains how he got the Census Bureau to revise their numbers.
Excerpt: (links removed)
Four years ago, I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post revealing that DC spent nearly $25,000 per pupil during the 2007-08 school year. I calculated this figure from the public budget documents of the District of Columbia, which I subsequently summarized and linked on this blog.
No education reporter followed up on my findings, and much lower per pupil figures continue to be reported to this day. My $25,000 figure was even greeted with skepticism by analysts at free market think tanks. One state education policy analyst wrote to say that my figure was “out of line with credible information,” and that I gave my critics “too much ammunition with this clearly questionable set of statistics.”
Indeed, the Census Bureau figures for DC’s total K-12 expenditures were substantially lower than mine. I made a note to track down the discrepancy, but other projects intervened. When I updated my calculation to use DC budget estimates for the 2008-09 school year, I found that District spending had risen to over $28,000 / pupil. The comparable number for that year reported by the Bureau of the Census was just $18,181 (which you get by dividing the total expenditure figure in Table 1 by the enrollment figure in Table 15).
So you can see why most folks were skeptical. Skeptical, but wrong.
Back in March of this year I asked my then research intern to contact the Census Bureau and ask where they got their total spending data. It turns out, they got them from a DCPS official. We presented evidence to the Bureau that that DCPS official had missed a few line items when completing the Census Bureau’s forms—to the tune of about $400 million. The Census Bureau agreed and is in the process of obtaining corrected data for the 2008-09 year. In the meantime, they made sure to ask DC officials to include all relevant items when filling out their forms for the 2009-10 school year. The result: Census Bureau data now show DC spent a total of $29,409 per pupil (obtained by dividing total expenditures in Table 1 by enrollment in Table 15). This is just a bit higher than my calculation for the preceding year.
Kudos to the Census Bureau for taking the initiative and getting DC to accurately report its public school expenditures. Now that education reporters can simply open a Census Bureau .pdf file and divide one number by another, I wonder if any will report what DC really spends per pupil? I suspect that they still will not, continuing to mislead the general public, but I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
Oh, and, BTW, this spending figure is about triple what the DC voucher program spends per pupil—and the voucher students have a much higher graduation rate and perform as well or better academically.
He’s talking about the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship voucher program which Obama dismantled and defunded in order to appease the teacher unions.
South Dakota, Nebraska, and Washington, D.C. performed the worst, with some of the worst student test scores and college readiness indexes in the nation.
Keep in mind that D.C. votes 92.5% to 6.5% for Obama in the 2008 election. This is where leftism in education comes from.
We ought to care about this, because the students in Washington D.C. are some of the poorest students in the nation – and they are often minority students. What sort of opportunity to succeed are we giving these children when we allow leftists like Obama to destroy voucher programs that are their only hope?
WINTERY KNIGHT 