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California Can Now Jail People For Misusing Gender Pronouns
ANDERS HAGSTROM
Justice Reporter
9:42 AM 10/06/2017
California can now start jailing people that refuse to use the preferred gender pronouns of nursing home residents after Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill Thursday.
The law’s effect is limited to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, but mandates that those who “willfully and repeatedly” refuse “to use a transgender resident’s preferred name or pronouns” can be slapped with a $1,000 fine and up to one year in prison, according to the California Heath and Safety code.
Known as the “LGBT Senior Bill Of Rights,” the legislation also requires nursing homes and care facilities to allow residents to use the bathroom of their choice, regardless of biological sex. The bill’s author, state Sen. Scott Weiner, argues that religious views don’t hold weight in public areas.
“Everyone is entitled to their religious view,” Wiener said. “But when you enter the public space, when you are running an institution, you are in a workplace, you are in a civil setting, and you have to follow the law.”
“Our LGBT seniors built the modern LGBT community and led the fight for so many of the rights our community takes for granted today. It is our duty to make sure they can age with the dignity and respect they deserve,” Wiener wrote. “I want to thank Governor Brown for joining our coalition in supporting this bill, which will make a real difference in people’s lives. The LGBT Senior Bill of Rights is an important step in our fight to ensure all people are treated equally regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
How is that even constitutional? I can totally see it being a fireable offense but not a criminal one. Does this bill have any legal ground to stand on if it was challenged?
Does this bill have any legal ground to stand on if it was challenged?
I honestly don't know.
On the one hand, the courts have generally taken a very permissive interpretation of the 1st in matters such as hate speech.
On the other hand, the courts routinely uphold restrictions on forms of expression (making cakes, for instance) which run afoul of civil-rights legislation concerning protected groups (race / ethnicity / age / sexual orientation / etc.)
This is the first case I can think of in which a law imposes prior restraint with criminal penalties against the actual, literal speech of an entire class of private citizens.
Apparently it is now possible to be jailed for the actions of your children in the State of New York.
Parents in New York town could face jail, fine under new anti-bullying law
Victoria Crago began advocating for the law in North Tonawanda, New York, after she said her eighth-grade son was attacked by a classmate right in front of her.
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“This young man just sucker-punched him right in the face and hit him as hard as he could,” she told ABC News of the May incident. “What really alarmed me about the situation was the brazen act of violence in front of a parent.”
Crago said “It was really traumatic for both of us.”
The student accused of attacking Crago's son was charged with third-degree assault. His case was transferred to family court and he is now working with a probation officer, court records show.
The probation officer did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Crago created a Facebook page to call out pervasive bullying in her town. The outrage made public by Crago's Facebook group prompted lawmakers to pass the anti-bullying law that puts pressure on parents.
Parents could be fined $250 and sentenced to 15 days in jail, according to North Tonawanda City Attorney Luke Brown. Parents could face punishment if their child violates the city's curfew or any city law, including bullying, twice over the course of 90 days.
"In reality, what we're looking for is to engage the parents in the process and try and work on a solution," Brown said.
The new law is modeled after a similar push in Wisconsin to hold parents accountable, according to Brown. The law went into effect in North Tonawanda Oct. 1.
“We hope to never need to use this law but it's there in extreme cases,” North Tonawanda City School District Superintendent Greg Woytila said. “But we need to do a better job and we are continually trying to do that.”
Nearly 30 percent of students from sixth- to 12th-grade say they have been bullied, according to StopBullying.gov, a bullying prevention and awareness website run by the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Justice.
Bullying is most common in middle school, the website reports.
The law has received some backlash from parents who claim it goes too far.
“You can’t make parents parent their kid,” one commenter wrote on Facebook.
Crago hopes the new law sends a clear message to parents that they will pay the price for their kids’ behavior.
“Watching your child harmed in front of you is a terrible thing,” she said. “I don’t wish it on anyone."
Ah yes, we didn't feel teenagers had enough power in the family dynamic so we thought we would make it possible for them to send their parents to jail. What could go wrong? I assume these charges will not be utilized very often but the precedent these laws set are insane.
Evergreen State College just can’t stop being in the news, and it’s never for anything good.
According to recently uncovered reports, the beleaguered liberal college banned criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement—a group that has recently been designated a domestic terrorist organization by the FBI.
It did so through its Bias Response Team, which claimed that posters criticizing the movement “diminish the disparities experienced by people of color,” and violated the school’s policy against racism. The determination was made in 2016.
It’s bad enough that Black Lives Matter shuts down conservative speakers. But now, they’re even getting help from college administrators.
This week, the president of the publicly-funded Texas Southern University intervened to aid members of Black Lives Matter disrupt an event with Republican state Rep. Briscoe Cain at the TSU law school.
The event, which was hosted by the school’s Federalist Society, was crashed by protesters who yelled “When a racist comes to town, shut it down,” alongside a host of other slogans. Cain, a member of the conservative Texas House Freedom Caucus, was not given a chance to speak because of the protesters.
Although the protesters were initially ushered from the auditorium, TSU president Austin Lane arrived to invite the protesters back in, and forced security to escort Cain from the historically black college under the pretext that it was for the sake of his personal security. In effect, Lane enabled the Black Lives Matter protesters to perform what’s known as a “heckler’s veto” by preventing him from speaking.
Having spent$85 million since 2005, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger announced the school will spend another $100 million in the name of “diversity”.
Campus Reform reports Bollinger wants to increase the number of professors that come from backgrounds that “traditionally have been underrepresented” in academia.
According to the Teachers College, Columbia University can currently boast that 25% of its faculty members come from a minority background and 60% of them are women. Not only that, it’s ranked the 8th most diverse college nationwide, according to College Factual.
The Swarthmore Indigenous Students Association (SISA) at the college wants the school to fund flights “to and from home” for students.
SISA issued an entire list of demands on flyers posted in the campus dining hall calling for the college to “admit and recruit native students,” asserting that “Swarthmore has consistently had a student body that is less than 1% indigenous,” because it “does not recruit on any reservations or at any of the Native schools.”
Campus Reform reports the students also demanded an “indigenous studies special major,” as well as insisting the school should “actively encourage classes on indigenous people in all departments.”
It didn’t stop there.
The students also demanded the removal of “the U.S. flag from Parrish,” a building on campus, because “Indigenous students have died in the name of this flag” and “international students suffer the effects of the American neocolonialism of this flag.”
While demanding the college create a fund to pay for flights “to and from home,” the group claimed, “Indigenous communities are where our identity is built.”
“Severing our ability to return home severs our identity just as international students,” SISA added.
The demands were revealed to the public during a flag burning event in the woods outside of campus.
“We burn the American flag not just for ourselves, but for our ancestors who died because of that flag,” the group said in a statement published in the student publication Voices. “We burn it for our indigenous siblings across the globe and for all of the people across the globe exploited by the United States and other Western imperialist states, caught in between their wars.”
“We burn the flag for our kinfolk here on these lands we love, the other marginalized groups we are offering our solidarity to, hoping they offer it in return,” the statement continued. We burn this flag because we want you to know it’s not just you who is angry and fighting against this broader oppressive apparatus: we are too.”
According to the statement, flag burning “was not the first chosen route to have [their] needs met,” but the school apparently forced them to take this route as it “unfortunately time and again invalidated our existence and without apology, upheld settler-colonialism.”
SISA also requested students “wear all black” on Columbus Day to mourn those that were killed by him. They also interrupted a scheduled musical performance on campus by hosting their own “anti-Columbus Day” event before refusing to let the expected performance take place.
"It feels like something has shifted," she told the talk show host. "It's too bad that it's probably because so many of the women that were assaulted by Harvey Weinstein are famous and white and everybody knows them. This has been going on a long time to black women and other women of color and it doesn't get out quite the same."
I honestly feel a great deal of sympathy for people who think like this, because they are the product of my generation's parentage. We raised them in an emotional bubble, segregated from reality. And for this, on behalf of all Gen-Xers, I apologize to the future generations which will inherit their legacy.
A subset of these folks seem to seriously believe that they are going to spark a revolution.
The 1960s weep in shame...
The antifa apocalypse is coming this weekend, if you believe the hype By Kyle Swenson November 1 at 5:44 AM
Police try to contain antifa protesters in Portland in September. (Natalie Behring/Getty Images/AFP)
For anyone logging time on the far right corners of the Internet, this coming Saturday is not just another autumn weekend but the potential start date of an apocalyptic showdown.
Infowars has warned “Antifa Plans ‘Civil War’ to Overthrow the Government.” The John Birch Society put out two recent videos warning Americans to “stay home and tell your children to do likewise” on Saturday. YouTuber “A Glock Fanboy” notched more than 400,400 views for a clip raising the alarm about “the first day of the revolution or whatnot.”
“Honestly, I’m happy,” the YouTuber told his followers. “Dude, we’ve been on the verge of the great war for what seems like forever and I’m just ready to get it going.”
While Nov. 4 has become a rallying point on the conservative landscape — complete with a hashtag “civilwar2017″ — down on the other far end of the political spectrum, the reality is equally significant. The left-leaning group Refuse Fascism is planning rallies across the country on Saturday, the first step in a large-scale, long game demonstration organizers hope will achieve nothing less than the unseating of the Trump administration.
“We formed this organization around two main points,” Andy Zee, one of the group’s organizers, told The Washington Post. “One is that the nightmare must end, and second, in the name of humanity we must refuse to accept a fascist America.”
Zee maintains that Refuse Fascism is committed to nonviolent protest, and scoffs at the ideas floating through the far right of antifa super-soldiers waging war on mainstream society. If anything, the jarring disconnect over Nov. 4 shows how easily facts are eaten alive by social media and regurgitated as conspiracy theory. The possible violence coloring that disconnect illustrates how truly ideologically isolated the two sides are from one another.
“It’s absurd. Calling for a civil war?” Zee said. “Pick a date for a civil war? Honestly, what do you say to this?”
Zee’s group does have big plans for the weekend — and beyond. He tells The Post the group is organizing demonstrations on Saturday in more than a dozen locations, including New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco.
Tapping the same kind of energy unleashed in the Occupy Wall Street movement and Women’s March, Refuse Fascism hopes to spark regular protests against the administration, daily actions that will snowball until “every day there are tens of thousands of people protesting, creating a political crisis in the country with international repercussions, and where you do get a reaction from those in power that they have to do something about it,” Zee said.
The blueprint here, Zee told The Post, is the South Korean mass protest movement that began in October 2016 and eventually led to President Park Geun-hye’s removal from office in March. “What we are trying to unleash is a process of continuous protest,” Zee said. “We can’t just wait for the other shoe to drop. We’ve been saying from the beginning, with fascism, it can be too late.”
Zee is admittedly less clear on what that peaceful regime change would look like in the United States. “Impeachment, the 25th Amendment — they will determine the means and ways when it becomes clear there is a tremendous crisis of confidence,” the organizer said. The key is sending the message.
That message, however, so far has largely been lost in translation online. Rumbles about planned Nov. 4 demonstrations began circulating on the Internet this summer, according to Will Sommer, the Hill editor who pens Right Richter newsletter. In September, a small group of Refuse Fascism organizers made a splash when they blocked traffic on Highway 101 in Los Angeles and held up signs reading “NOV 4 IT BEGINS,” LA Weekly reported.
Video clips of the demonstration accelerated the online panic over what could be planned for Nov. 4. More speculation was fueled by the involvement of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and many began to label the outing as an antifa event.
“On their website, they are calling for an open civil war that they will start here in the United States in November,” a YouTuber named Jordan Peltz said in a clip that went viral. “They are fundraising for weapons, training, ammunition, suppliers. They are not hiding this. They are openly fundraising so they can attack.”
“The end game here is martial law,” one video warns, “is provoking Republicans, patriots, whatever, you and me, into this huge battle, whether it’s just fighting or whether it’s guns. What they will do is they will throw up their arms and say, ‘I told you so, they’re violent’ . . . They want us out there, with our weapons so the government will commence with martial law. And then, I believe, serious gun control-slash-confiscation.”
“Make sure you got enough ammo, make sure your guns are ready,” another poster advised in a clip with more than 110,000 views. “You have to understand these are vicious, vicious people. Your life means nothing to them. In fact, if you’re a white man, you don’t deserve to live.”
[‘Black bloc’ protests return for Trump era, leaving flames, broken windows from D.C. to Berkeley]
Infowars provocateur Alex Jones announced in a video that antifa was “going to lose on November 4 and every day after that, because they’re a bunch of meth-head pieces of crap.”
Refuse Fascism’s Zee denies all that speculation.
The organization is engaged with a broad coalition of groups, including the Revolutionary Communist Party, but it has committed to Refuse Fascism’s nonviolence stance.
On its website, Refuse Fascism also makes clear it sees “NO moral ‘equivalence’ between those seeking to impose white supremacy and fascism, and those fighting against this nightmare.”
Zee told The Post his group does “uphold the legal right to self-defense, but we don’t initiate violence and we oppose violence.” He added violence would only feed into the negative image of the group. “We are not looking to get involved in that kind of situation,” he said. “We are in the fight for hearts and minds of people to recognize the stakes.”
Still, the online hysterics over Nov. 4 have put the potential demonstrations in the crosshairs of extremists.
“It’s utter lunacy on these sites. If you read their stuff, and people are believing it,” the organizer added. “They are calling for people to bring their weapons to the demonstrations. We just have to outnumber them.”
10-10-2017, 08:12 AM
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