Tag Archives: Discrimination

Our criminal justice system is no “system” at all

Posted on by |

Law and JusticeWhen we think of the Salem witch trials or Sacco and Vanzetti, our impulse is to discount that anything like that could ever happen now.

Yet it does.

We have all sorts of things going wrong in our judicial “system.”

Nor has it gotten any better in the Trump-Sessions notion of “criminal justice.”

We have too many cases because “stats” drive funding rather than policy driving order and peace.

The more sensational the case, the more winning the case “trumps” doing justice.

The more sensational the case, the more likely that the accused doesn’t have the resources to fight back.

We flood our courts with “drug” cases but not like the ones I handled as a federal prosecutor in New York against large heroin suppliers.

We spend our tax dollars chasing mostly kids and adults who possess to use, in such small quantities, mostly for personal use, and they are arrested on ruses – faux probable cause to toss cars with dogs – a kind of catch and release if they find nothing after the “search” – all so they can affix a stigma to the apprehended for pot or prescription drugs that, by the fact of arrest, may haunt their quality of life, foreclosing opportunities life-long. Continue reading →

Replace that Confederate statue!

Posted on by |
“I may not get there with you,” Martin Luther King.

“I may not get there with you,” Martin Luther King.

In 1908, there was a statue erected of a confederate soldier, rifle drawn, standing vigil before the Loudoun County courthouse, as if an armed sentry demanding that any person approaching the court must first seek permission to proceed any further.

No one asks why this statue was not erected sooner than 40 years after the Civil War.

No one is curious why the citizens didn’t forge a statue of a Union and Confederate soldier standing side by side, at peace, weapons at rest, given that Loudoun County had civil war combatants on both sides of that divisive struggle.

It’s because this statue was never intended to bring us together.

Consider the historical context in Virginia after the Civil War.

In 1868, a Richmond editorial praised the KKK for “not permit[ting] the people of the South to become the victims of negro rule.”

Even the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, granting Black men the right to vote, did not prove an effective remedy.

Racial segregation appeared and persisted. A white dominated political system established itself throughout Virginia. From 1880 to 1930, mobs in Virginia executed seventy blacks.

In 1890, a local Hamilton contingent of blacks formed the Loudoun County Emancipation Association “to work for the betterment of the race – educationally, morally and materially.”

In 1896, the Supreme Court shored up segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson pronouncing that “separate” was just fine for Blacks.

In 1902, the hateful Klan was summoned back into service. Thomas Dixon, Jr., a fiction writer, favoring white supremacy, told the nation that the Klan was an heroic force. The Virginia Constitution was amended to limit the voting rights of Blacks, by requiring screened interviews in order to vote and imposing a poll tax. The number of black voters in Virginia declined from 147,000 in 1902 to less than 10,000 by 1904. Continue reading →

Redefining Bakery

Posted on by |

Have you ever heard of a Christian bakery?

I’ve been to many bakeries in my life. French bakeries, Italian bakeries, European bakeries, Mexican bakeries, but never a Christian bakery. The term just popped up because a so-called “Christian bakery,” Sweet Cakes by Melissa closed over a controversy. The owners refused to bake a cake for a client’s wedding because they thought the “act” of baking the cake violated their religious liberty. In Yiddish, we’d say the act was treif, but treif refers to products, not acts, and that’s where the people who orchestrated this controversy run into trouble.

The Oregon Family Policy Council, sister to our Virginia [some] Families Foundation placed a sign in the closed bakery reading:

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS UNDER ATTACK IN GRESHAM

The late Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries Manhattan Declaration posted an article on its Facebook page that lead to this exchange: Continue reading →

A sci-fi version of “tolerance”

Posted on by |

Crossposted at Equality Loudoun.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.

Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.

The above is science fiction writer and anti-gay fanatic Orson Scott Card (humorously, he once referred to marriage between two people of the same gender as itself “an act of intolerance,” openly advocated the criminalization of “homosexual behavior,” and more recently threatened to “act to destroy [the] government and bring it down” if marriage equality became a reality). Card is upset because some people who might otherwise be his fans have publicized his long history of inflammatory statements targeting LGBT people, and suggested that our money could be better be spent elsewhere. Among normal people, making such informed choices is known as “the free market.” For Card, though, “tolerance” demands our silence regarding his behavior.

Continue reading →

Meet the woman who just told everyone she thinks of herself as a vagina.

Posted on by |

Her name is “Natassia,” at least that’s the name she uses at the Patch. I won’t bore you with the rest of her moronic comment describing “openly homosexual boys” here, but this is how she ended it:

“(And yes, a sexual attraction to the male anus is a disorder.)”

I trust that we can all see the problem.

Usually I try to cultivate compassion for the terminally stupid, but not today. Dehumanization kills people, and there’s been more than enough killing. I hope Natassia is mercilessly ridiculed. I hope the ridicule makes her cry. The only thing that will make a person who would say something this clueless finally pull her head out of her nether regions is for someone who cares about her to firmly grasp her shoulders, look directly into her eyes, and say “Stop. You are embarrassing yourself and everyone else.”

If there is someone out there who knows and cares for this confused woman: Please. For the love of God. Help her.

Little Bobby Marshall’s temper tantrum

Posted on by |

Crossposted at Equality Loudoun

My initial reaction to hearing about Bob Marshall’s highly unusual actions to cause the rejection of Tracy Thorne-Begland’s nomination to the General District Court was “petulant temper tantrum.” The latest admission from Marshall shows just how accurate that first impression was:

“He holds himself out as being married,” said Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William), who is running for U.S. Senate. He said Thorne-Begland’s “life is a contradiction to the requirement of submission to the constitution.”

It’s not good enough, you see, that Thorne-Begland’s marriage is not recognized by the Commonwealth of Virginia. Nor is it good enough that he and his husband can’t even obtain recognition of a civil union, domestic partnership, or any other “legal status that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage” or obtain a status to which are assigned “the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage.”

No, that’s not enough. Like Haman, little Bobby Marshall wants Tracy Thorne-Begland to bow down. Because Bobby Marshall was able to insert his tiny god of fear into the Virginia Constitution, he now believes he is entitled to demand “submission” to it. Those who fail to bow down to his little god must be punished. That is just how stark this is.

Continue reading →

Prejudice is not a Realtor(tm) value

Posted on by |

Crossposted at Equality Loudoun

Can you imagine if a Loudoun Realtor were to argue realtorthat they were helping home buyers make an “informed decision” regarding their home purchase by mouthing derogatory slurs about African-Americans and Jews, and complaining that the local government has required desegregation? Because this is the equivalent of that. Professional Realtors have a code of ethics, in part, due to awareness of how such bigotry has been practiced in the past.

Vivianne Rutkowski is a Realtor with Keller Williams on Catoctin Circle in Leesburg. I have contact information for her Broker and Regional Director, but I don’t want to publish it here. Contact me offline if you wish to communicate with them regarding this matter. Miss Rutkowski is bound by the code of ethics adopted by the National Association of Realtors.

I stumbled by accident across this wildly inappropriate, offensive post (it’s captured as it appeared Wednesday, January 25 at approximately 12:45 am) on her professional real estate business blog. I left a comment indicating that I would make sure no one I know would ever use her as an agent, and telling her why. Here are some screenshots of what she thought was appropriate content for a blog on which she presents herself to the public as a Realtor:

Continue reading →

The first priority of the new School Board: sneer at human rights

Posted on by |

Crossposted at Equality Loudoun

The very first action taken by the newly elected Loudoun County School Board was this:

Regarding the Virginia Human Rights Act:

“I move to amend the Board’s previously adopted Legislative Program by removing the recommendation to expand the protected classifications contained in the Virginia Human Rights Act, Code of Virginia §2.2-3900 and §2.2-3901, to include gender orientation and gender identity and to further amend the Code of Virginia §22.1-78 to allow local school boards to similarly expand the protected classifications contained in local school board policies and regulations and that Staff be directed to make such other changes to the Legislative Program as to conform to the Program language of this motion.”

[from page 5 of the adopted Legislative Program]

Motion: Mr. Kuesters
Second: Mr. Fox

Vote: 6-3-0 (Mr. Reed, Mrs. Bergel, and Mrs. Sheridan opposed)

The only reason for initiating such an action is ideological, and the idea in play is that gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or transgender and gender variant youth are not deserving of having their human rights protected. The Wisconsin School District that was the subject of the film Bullied found out the hard and expensive way that this is not a good position for school boards to take. I hate to being up money when this is a fundamental moral issue, but unfortunately that’s the only language some people seem to understand.

Continue reading →