Freedom Is Depressing. Socialism Is Uplifting
Sir William Gerald Golding
CBE(19 September 1911 –
19 June 1993) was a British
novelist, playwright, and poet.
Best known for his novel
Lord of the Flies, he won a
Nobel Prize in Literature.
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When Obama took office he campaigned on the theme "Yes, we can." He will soon be leaving. thank God. and he should end on "No I didn't." or better yet "I failed to do it."
Also, Obama just withdrew $1 billion from the Pentagon and, because Merkel has allowed Germany to be swamped with Muslims, he gifted the same amount to Mercedes in honor of their pledge to become Green.
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Sean Penn decided to vote for Hillary. When asked why, he replied she was the most likely bet to grant him a pardon for lying, pot smoking, slugging his girl friend and rape because Hillary is for protecting the rights of women. (See 1 below.)
While we are on the subject of Hillary, she attacked Trump for not releasing his tax returns and when he replied he would do so when she released a list of her speaking fees and venues, Hillary responded it was none of his business and, besides, she had shredded them. Donald made another "anatomical accusation," like he did against Megyn Kelly, and called Hillary a bleeding heart liberal. Hillary's husband, Bill, when asked by reporters was he going to defend his wife against these charges replied, there was no need because she was heartless.
The 2016 campaign for president will continue this week with Trump and Paul Ryan appearing on a turkey farm in Vermont and Hillary headed for San Francisco where she will speak from a transgender restroom.
Meanwhile, May employment numbers were just released and 18 males, all illegals, got jobs as waiters at The White House, bringing unemployment down to 5% , the lowest level since GW left office.
After hearing this 'good news,' 87 million unemployed rioted across the nation and destroyed 3,000 police cars, smashed thousands of glass store fronts and walked off with 20,000 bottles of assorted "hooch." In a speech to the nation, Obama blamed Trump and The Republican Party and chastised the marauders but pointed out every cloud has a silver lining because this destruction would lift employment in June
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Professor Swaim has been given a hard time at Vanderbilt because she is a black conservative on an elitist campus.
The most dangerous type of person on the campus of an elite college is an uppity black Christian female who speaks her mind. After all, the last place you want to experience freedom of speech is on the grounds of an educational facility. Conservatives are tolerated as long as they keep their thoughts to themselves and certainly they should be forever forbidden from imparting a different view to students who are expected to drink the liberal/progressive Kool Aid. Colleges exist to prepare students for life and life means think less and drink more.
Conservative thinking is more dangerous than ISIS. The latter take off your head, the former fills it with dangerous ideas that stay with you and warp your sense of right because in the la la land of liberals there is no wrong. Relativism reigns supreme. (See 2 below.)
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Big Brother Obama believes you have no right to privacy when using the bathroom etc. The Justice Department is going to mandate that your "private parts" now be called your "corporal parts." Who can complain about a promotion?
Henceforth,The State of The Union Address will be known as the LGBT Presidential Chat. (See 3 below.)
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Have a great weekend and if you are using a public facility and someone enters that makes you uncomfortable you can always leave and go to the other gender's facility. Isn't it great to be liberated?
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Dick
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1) Sean Penn Backs Hillary Over Trump's 'Masturbatory Populism'
(Getty Images)
"It's masturbatory populism. It's really an opportunity for one man to have a group celebration of his own narcissism."
This description didn't apply to Penn friends Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro?
A one-time Sanders supporter, Penn now thinks Hillary should pick John Kasich as
his vice-presidential running mate.
"It's not a big leap to think of me as a loudmouth, limousine liberal," he admitted.
his vice-presidential running mate.
Penn is somewhat honest about himself.
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2) Darkness Flourishes at Vanderbilt University
In case you missed the hoopla, I was almost run off the Vanderbilt University campus in 2015 by student protesters and petitions denouncing me for bigotry and hatred. This was related to an opinion piece I wrote for The Tennessean about the Islamic faith and the need for Muslims to fully integrate themselves into our society. As a high profile, black, conservative woman on the Vanderbilt faculty, I was a conspicuous target.
During my sabbatical last year, I became the target of harassment and a petition demanding that I be suspended until I submitted to mandatory sensitivity training. That’s a rather odd request of a first-generation college graduate and a person who has overcome poverty, attained tenured positions at Princeton University and Vanderbilt, and had her research cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. My Christian faith, not my race and gender, defines me. It shapes the perspective I now share with you about Vanderbilt, where I have taught for the past 16 years.
Vanderbilt has excelled in many ways during my time here, but in other areas, such as those related to religious freedom and free speech, its policies have led to an unhealthy environment, making it more difficult for some students to thrive spiritually and mentally. On top of all that, there has been a series of unfortunate events that secular-minded people will dismiss as coincidental. The campus has been shaken by untimely deaths. So far in 2016 we have had one current student (Taylor Force) and two former students (Justin and Stephanie Shults) killed in separate terrorist attacks abroad just weeks apart. Force died March 8 in a terrorist attack during, of all things, a school trip to Israel. Two weeks later, the Shultses were victims of the Brussels airport bombing.
That must defy any reasonable actuarial tables for one university, especially one in denial about the threat of radical Islam. But there’s more. In the last three weeks, two undergraduate students have been found dead in their dorm rooms. One death occurred on April 22 (Cheryl Alexandra Morris). Another student (Elliot Meister) was found dead on April 27. We grieve the deaths of these young people and pray for their parents and loved ones. Nevertheless, we wonder if more could have done for Cheryl Alexandra and Elliot.
In a recent Tennessean cover story examining his now eight-year tenure as the school’s top administrator, Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos touched on the deaths, saying, “It’s one of those things where the loss is so heavy. For me as a chancellor to lose a child – it’s really the worst thing to happen.”
That’s not all that’s happened at Vanderbilt in recent times. Going back just a year or two, we can see where the University has witnessed more than its fair share of tragedy and mishaps, to include the rape case involving Vanderbilt football players. There’s even the quirky: last year, a tree fell and injured several people in a group of prospective students and their parents touring the campus. What are the odds of a tree falling on visiting parents and prospective students on an otherwise calm day? Note: it happened right outside the admissions office. Only God knows if this means anything.
In addition to the recent student deaths and the bizarre tree-falling incident, Vanderbilt’s run of bad luck over the years includes problems at its medical school and affiliated hospital as well as an embezzlement case involving an administrator who engaged in inappropriate behavior with a minor. Non-Christians can scoff at all this, ridiculing me for even broaching the possibility of a spiritual connection between the series of unfortunate incidents at Vanderbilt University and its hostility toward orthodox Christians, as evidenced by its 2011 adoption of a “non-discrimination” policy that has resulted in 14 Christian groups losing their recognition as student organizations. The groups no longer recognized on campus gave up their registered group status rather than compromise on Christian values and principles.
At Vanderbilt there apparently is “bad” spirituality (orthodox Christianity) and “good” spirituality (Wicca, Buddhism, and Islam). An example of “good” spirituality (by the University’s definition) is manifested in Vanderbilt’s embrace of Wicca in August 2011, several months after imposing its discriminatory policy toward Christian groups. I wonder if there is a spiritual connection between Vanderbilt’s treatment of the Christian groups and some of its recent tragedies. We will never know for sure. Nevertheless, I would like to see Vanderbilt University reconsider the policy that deprives its campus of the vibrant Christian influence that existed before the University adopted its 2011 “policy. Darkness flourishes where there is no light.
Dr. Carol M. Swain is professor of political science and professor of law at Vanderbilt University. Her most recent book is Be the People: A Call to Reclaim America’s Faith and Promise.
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3)
How Obama Became the Trans-Rights President
While everyone focused on same-sex marriage, the administration moved to ensure the rights of all LGBT people. The right wing has already lost.
By Samantha Allen
First, Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Monday delivered a moving address as she announced a federal lawsuit against North Carolina over HB 2, the controversial state law that requires transgender people to use bathrooms matching their birth certificates—and wipes out all local non-discrimination ordinances for LGBT people. Her speech was unprecedented in its full-throated support of transgender equality.
“The entire Obama administration wants you to know that we see you, we stand with you, and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward,” she said to the transgender community.
Then, early Friday, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education sent a directive to all U.S. school districts, advising them that transgender students should be allowed to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity, rather than the gender they were assigned at birth. That announcement comes amidst nationwide debates at the district-level about accommodations for trans students.
And later Friday morning, while anti-transgender forces were already down for the count, the Department of Health and Human Services announced in a new rule that health-care providers who receive federal funding cannot deny transition-related care. Many private health insurance plans exclude hormone therapy and surgery; now, that practice is considered illegal.
But all three of these major victories have precedents that stretch back years.
The Obama administration’s stance on transgender students in bathrooms is nothing new. All the way back in April 2014, the Department of Education announced that transgender students were protected under Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination. Fast forward to the present day and Title IX is part of the DoJ’s justification for suing the state of North Carolina over HB 2.
The groundwork for Friday’s transgender health-care rule was laid almost four years ago. In August 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would interpret discrimination on the basis of transgender status as a form of sex discrimination. In 2015, the HHS issued a proposed rule along those lines. Friday’s final rule is the logical conclusion of these more gradual reforms.
In fact, the Obama administration was advancing transgender rights two years into his first term, long before they exploded into the mainstream by way of the bathroom debate, with all of its many myths about privacy and public safety.
In June 2010, years before either President Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed public support for same-sex marriage, the State Department began allowing transgender people to change gender markers on passports with a physician’s certification that they had received “appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition” rather than proof of sex reassignment surgery. This paved the way for other government agencies to change their policies around identification for transgender people. The Social Security Administration, for example, followed suit three years later.
And in July 2010, the Department of Housing and Urban Development opened the door for transgender people to file federal housing discrimination complaints by announcing that they would now be covered under the Fair Housing Act’s ban on “gender discrimination.”
The reforms have continued straight through the president’s final term. One of the most notable came in June 2014, when the president signed an executive order prohibiting anti-LGBT discrimination among federal contractors. Most states still do not prohibit employers from firing someone because they are gay or transgender.
There have been cascading court victories over the years, too, along with little touches from the Obama administration: the hiring of the first openly transgender White House staffer; a gender-neutral bathroom in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building; Vice President Biden calling the current fight the “civil rights issue of our time” in 2012; Obama saying the word “transgender” for the first time in a State of the Union address
Obama himself hasn’t always been front and center on the issue but LGBT advocates are keenly aware of his influence.
“He has been the best president for transgender rights and nobody else is in second place,” Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), once told CBS News.
In short, this week’s three transgender victories in Washington were the culmination of years worth of work, not the opening shots of a war to come.
Of course, those just tuning into the debate now because of North Carolina or Target or your uncle’s Facebook page might be expecting a struggle similar in length to the protracted same-sex marriage debate. And, as Jay Michaelson observed in The Daily Beast, the Christian Right is certainly digging in, however hopelessly, for an extended battle over religious freedom and transgender people.
But even if a Republican takes the Oval Office in November and reverses many of Obama’s executive orders, public opinion has already fallen in line with his administration’s policies.
A new CNN/ORC poll found that 57 percent of Americans oppose restrictions on transgender bathroom use while only 38 percent support them. An even more impressive 75 percent support protections for transgender people in employment, housing, and public accommodations. As The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky wrote, “America’s mind is made up on the question.”
For comparison, Gallup polling shows that, shortly before the Supreme Court handed down the Obergefell v. Hodges decision in June 2015, public opinion on the legalization same-sex marriage was 60 percent in favor, 37 percent opposed. Those numbers are almost identical to the current polling on transgender bathroom laws like North Carolina’s HB 2. And with no proof that transgender bathroom protections will lead to an increase in sexual assault, it’s unlikely that public opinion will swing back toward 50-50.
On Monday, after telling the transgender community, “We see you,” Loretta Lynch made another statement that was all the more powerful for its subtlety: “This country was founded on a promise of equal rights for all, and we have always managed to move closer to that promise, little by little, one day at a time.”
The Obama administration has been doing exactly that for years—moving little by little on transgender equality. The far right may be gearing up for another culture war, this time on transgender people, but they lost the war before it even started.
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