Pro-Abortion Activists Call for ERA on 2nd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Reversal
I am rather in favor of the ERA. It would wipe out all the "affirmative action" measures in favour of women and discriminating against men that are now so common. And I don't see that it would impact abortion: Men don't have a right to abortion so I think it could even derail any right to abortion
Pro-abortion activists rallied Monday outside the Supreme Court in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.
“ERA now,” the pro-abortion rallygoers chanted as they held signs reading “Safe abortion is a human right” and “Keep abortion legal.”
Competing pro-life and pro-abortion activists stood outside the court, chanting on the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision and sent abortion back to the voters in their respective states.
The rally, which was backed by the Women’s March, was held “to demand President [Joe] Biden publish the Equal Rights Amendment and restore our constitutional right to abortion.”
The Equal Rights Amendment declares: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
The amendment has been debated for more than 50 years, with individuals such as the now-deceased Phyllis Schlafly leading the charge against the ERA, warning it would harm women’s rights by removing all distinctions between men and women.
The constitutional amendment was sent to the states for ratification in 1972, but fell three states short of winning the support of the requisite 38 states, even though the original seven-year ratification period was extended by Congress for 39 extra months. The final ratification deadline passed on June 30, 1982.
While some women at the pro-abortion rally were passionate about the need for the ERA, others did not even know what it is.
“I’m not too familiar,” one of the women said when asked what the ERA would do. “I just moved to this area. Could you tell me what the ERA stands for?”
“What is the ERA?” The Daily Signal asked another woman.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, noting that she lives in Maryland.
Rosie Couture, director of the Young Feminist Party, clearly defined the ERA and called on Biden to make the ERA “a reality” at the federal level.
“Young people are here on the ground protesting to get us toward justice, to not be just on the defense, but on the offense, but right now, the Supreme Court’s rolling back the clock, and we need federally elected leaders to step up,” Couture said.
**************************************************
Battle Over DEI Is Far From Over
The struggle against ideologies that seek to divide America advances in fits and starts.
This month, we saw great progress in the introduction of a bill in Congress to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates throughout the federal government. But it was a different story a week later, when lawmakers were lobbing rhetorical softballs at the DEI-loving head of the Smithsonian Institution.
The comprehensive Dismantle DEI Act, if passed and enacted, would systematically eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs throughout the federal bureaucracy and among federal contractors. The bill was introduced in the Senate by Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and in the House by Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, co-sponsored by 20 other House Republicans.
That is not a small part of the economy. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, “federal spending was equal to 23% of the total gross domestic product (GDP), or economic activity, of the United States” in fiscal year 2022.
The Vance-Cloud bill takes a blowtorch to DEI. It would dismantle DEI programs (such as the “anti-racist” trainings that have cropped up at offices and schools and all other areas of American life), rescind President Joe Biden’s many DEI executive orders, outlaw DEI loyalty pledges, etc.
The bill has no chance of passing and being signed into law while the Democrats have the Senate and Biden is president. But it becomes an important stick in the ground.
If former President Donald Trump is elected president in November, this bill should be his blueprint, something he already championed as president.
So far, so good. But DEI is just one front in the fight against ideologies that divide us mostly along racial and sexual lines, based on race and gender theories that are Marxist in their origin.
Another important front in the culture wars is that ultimate cultural institution: museums.
Museums have become the battle theater of those who want to “decolonize” the culture—that is, strip it of any reverence for America. The decolonizers want to turn the museums into institutions propagating a cultural counternarrative.
The Smithsonian is America’s museum, for better or for worse (it used to be for better, now it’s for worse). And while Republicans are giving signs that they finally get the DEI part, they are missing in action on the museum part.
Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch’s hearing June 18 before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee was really a replay of the mutual admiration society. Only one Republican showed up, Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., the ranking member, and her most probing question of Bunch was about the schedule for repatriating native art to tribes.
Bunch assured her that the Smithsonian Institution’s repatriation schedule is “very robust. … We want to be able to return what the communities really want.”
For those wondering what this is about, a Biden administration rule has given the nation’s 574 federally recognized Indian tribes effective veto power over what museums can exhibit. If they demand that a museum send back a cultural item, the museum will have to comply. New York’s American Museum of Natural History will close two halls with Indian exhibitions.
This is not something conservatives should want to expedite. They should, in fact, fight this nonsense.
There were no Republicans at the hearing asking about two new museums based on identity politics: the Latino and women’s museums. The first has been criticized by myself and others as a “woke indoctrination factory” that aims to fill Hispanic Americans with grievances, and the second will be no better.
But there were Democrats heaping praise on the effort, and asking for more of the same. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., asked Bunch what the Smithsonian planned to do about the “African diaspora,” that is, Americans born in Africa, or who are the children of such immigrants. They encounter great success in America, but apparently the Smithsonian also will have to instill victimhood in them.
The African diaspora “is really important” to the Smithsonian, Bunch assured Warner. To which Warner, not missing a multicultural beat, replied: “What are you doing on the South Asian diaspora?”
Bunch is a soft-spoken, likable individual, but he’s embraced all these ideologies. DEI, he has written, is “integral to excellence in museum practice. FULL STOP.” DEI, in fact, should “shape museums,” he added.
Bunch was also an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Black Lives Matter organizations, which were set up by Marxists to transform society.
In 2014, at the height of the BLM riots in Ferguson, Missouri, when Bunch was director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, he assembled his curators and ordered them to collect BLM artifacts and create exhibits.
Black Lives Matter, he said, needed to organize for the long term and come up with a legislative strategy.
In 2020, during the costliest riots in American history, Bunch said that “protest is the highest form of patriotism.”
The fight to take back the considerable cultural ground that has been lost to the Left is too often derided as the “culture wars” by those who want to meet no resistance in their scorched-earth advance.
And it is obviously not for the weak-hearted. Stripping out DEI is a great, brave step. But watch what happens with the museums if you want to know who’s winning.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/24/battle-over-dei-is-far-from-over/
************************************************How California’s Paradise Became Our Purgatory
California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.
How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?
The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.
Gov. Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.
Yet in a year, the Democrat turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.
At a time of an overregulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.
Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.
Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.
California hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over a fifth of the population lives below the poverty line. Nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities.
The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous, and increasingly abandoned by businesses—most recently Google—that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police.
Newsom’s California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous southern border.
The result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed and broken health care, housing, and welfare entitlements.
Newsom raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $22 an hour. The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shutdowns and bankruptcies of fast-food outlets.
Fully 27% of Californians were born outside the United States. It is a minority-majority state. Yet California long ago dropped unifying civic education, while the bankrupt state funds exploratory commissions to consider divisive racial reparations.
California’s universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial chauvinism and infighting. State officials, however, did little as its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent antisemitism.
Almost nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on California retail stores. Carjackers and thieves own the night. They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested—and almost never convicted.
Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives that would restore penalties for violent crime and theft.
Gas prices are the highest in the continental United States (given green mandate formulas and the nation’s highest, and still rising, gasoline taxes) and are scheduled to go well over $6 a gallon.
Yet California’s ossified roads and highways are among the nation’s most dangerous, as vast sums of transportation funding were siphoned off to the multibillion-dollar high-speed rail boondoggle.
The state imports almost all the costly vitals of modern life, mostly because it prohibits using California’s own vast petroleum, natural gas, timber, and mineral resources.
As California implodes, its embarrassed government turns to the irrelevant, if not ludicrous.
It now outlaws natural gas stoves in new homes. It is adding new income-based surcharges for those who dutifully pay their power bills—to help subsidize the 2.5 million Californians who simply default on their energy bill with impunity.
What happened to the once-beautiful California paradise?
Millions of productive but frustrated, overtaxed, and underserved middle-class residents have fled in disgust to low-crime, low-tax, and well-served red states.
In turn, millions of illegal migrants have swarmed the state, given its sanctuary-city policies, refusal to enforce the law, and generous entitlements.
Meanwhile, a tiny coastal elite, empowered by $9 trillion in Silicon Valley market capitalization, fiddled while their state burned.
California became a medieval society of plutocratic barons, subsidized peasants, and a shrinking and fleeing middle class. It is now home to a few rich estates, subsidized apartments, and unaffordable middle-class houses.
California suffers from poorly ranked public schools, but brags about its prestigious private academies. Its highways are lethal, but it hosts the most private jets in the nation.
The fantasies of a protected enclave of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and the masters of the Silicon Valley universe have become the abject nightmares of everyone else.
In sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise and turned it into purgatory.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/24/how-californias-paradise-became-our-purgatory/
****************************************************Trump Vows to Combat Agencies Weaponized Against Christians
Citing the federal arrests of pro-life activists, former President Donald Trump vowed to establish a task force to investigate anti-Christian bias if he is elected to another term.
“Joe Biden has weaponized the Justice Department to viciously prosecute pro-life activists,” Trump said of the current president on Saturday during remarks at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 15th annual Road to Majority Conference in Washington, D.C.
“I will also create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias,” Trump later added. “Its mission will be to investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America. It’s taking place at a level that nobody can believe. This is not America any more that we are living in.”
Trump specifically talked about the case of Paulette Harlow, a 75-year-old woman sentenced recently to 24 months in prison for singing in front of an abortion clinic after she was convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act.
Harlow told The Daily Signal earlier this month, “I felt like it was a tremendous privilege to stand in the court on behalf of the unborn, who have no voice.”
For its part, the Biden administration has said the FACE Act is in place to protect the health and safety of women seeking abortions.
Trump delivered a wide-ranging speech, talking almost 90 minutes about the border crisis, the economy and inflation, and crime. He also talked about his own legal problems, which he said were bogus.
He was in front of an enthusiastic crowd that interrupted his speech several times with chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump,” and “USA, USA.”
Trump said he has more political wounds than any other president, but noted Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson come closest.
His remarks come days before the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden on Thursday.
This was Trump’s ninth speech at the Road to Majority Conference.
He is banking on comparing the strong economy under his watch with the lagging economy and inflation under the Biden administration. Biden, meanwhile, is beginning to primarily campaign on Trump’s felony conviction in New York last month.
Trump began talking about the targeting of pro-life activists as a contrast with his position that abortion is a policy that should be decided by the states—not the federal government.
He talked about the three justices he appointed to the Supreme Court who voted with the court’s majority in 2022 to scrap the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal nationwide.
“Thanks to these justices, we have what the pro-life movement has fought for for 49 years and we’ve gotten abortion out of the federal government,” Trump said. “Now, the people will decide, and that’s the way it should be. Some states will be more conservative. Some states will be more liberal.”
Trump insisted Democrats don’t want people in the states deciding.
“If the radical Democrat extremes get their way, they will have a federal law on abortion to rip the baby out of the womb in the seventh, eight, ninth month, or even execute the baby after birth,” Trump said.
The “execute” reference, Trump said, was about former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, who had seemingly supported the idea of allowing a baby who survived an abortion to be killed.
Trump said he is pro-life, but made exceptions for the life of the mother, rape, or incest.
“Every voter has to go with your heart and do what is right. We have to get elected,” Trump told the audience.
Trump is scheduled for a rally in Philadelphia, and wasn’t originally on the conference’s speaking list. Trump said that his campaign staff encouraged him to cancel out of the Faith and Freedom Coalition event, and he joked, “I don’t have the courage to do that.”
Trump told the largely Christian crowd that not enough Christians turn out to vote.
“Christians go to church, but they don’t vote that much,” Trump said. “Do you know how much power you’ll have if you vote? Just this time. In four years, I don’t care.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/22/trump-vows-task-force-investigate-anti-christian-bias/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
***************************************