Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Legal discrimination against heterosexuals now in place in Australia

This is a rather fun ruling. It would seem to open the way for bars in working class areas to exclude homosexuals on similar grounds -- that they make the heterosexual patrons feel uncomfortable. After that, what is to stop homosexuals being sent to the back of the bus? The body responsible for the ruling below is however as bent as a pretzel so any consistency or application of principle cannot be expected from them. They are guided by Leftist politics not law. It is they who prosecuted two Christian pastors for quoting the nasty bits in the Koran!

A MELBOURNE pub catering for gay men has won the right to refuse entry to heterosexuals in a landmark ruling at the state planning tribunal. The owners of Collingwood's Peel Hotel applied to ban straight men and women to try to prevent "sexually based insults and violence" towards its gay patrons. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal last week granted the pub an exemption to the Equal Opportunity Act, effectively prohibiting entry to non-homosexuals.

VCAT deputy president Cate McKenzie said if heterosexual men and women came into the venue in large groups, their number might be enough to swamp the gay male patrons. "This would undermine or destroy the atmosphere which the company wishes to create," Ms McKenzie said in her findings. "Sometimes heterosexual groups and lesbian groups insult and deride and are even physically violent towards the gay male patrons." Some women even booked hens' nights at the venue using the gay patrons as entertainment, Ms McKenzie said. "To regard the gay male patrons of the venue as providing an entertainment or spectacle to be stared at, as one would at an animal at a zoo, devalues and dehumanises them," she said. "(This exemption) seeks to give gay men a space in which they may, without inhibition, meet, socialise and express physical attraction to each other in a non-threatening atmosphere."

The Peel manager Tom McFeely [McFeely -- interesting name for a homosexual!] told the tribunal the plan to refuse entry had been advertised at the hotel, with no objections received. Mr McFeely said most of the regulars at the hotel had responded positively.

A spokeswoman for the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Lobby Group said she believed the ruling made the Peel one of only two men-only venues in Melbourne. "This exemption was not sought to exclude members of the community but to try to maintain a safe space for men to meet," the spokeswoman said. She said gay men at the Peel had recently been ostracised and made to feel like "zoo animals". "It's sad that members of our community would have to go to the VCAT to preserve their rights," the spokeswoman said. "This is one of the only free venues with live music in the area, so certainly some people may feel a bit unhappy about the decision."

The Peel attracted criticism in April over an ad for a gay Anzac Day party that showed a near-naked man in a slouch hat. The hotel used a Shrine of Remembrance guard as the unwitting star of an ad for an Anzac Day eve bash. The ad was published in gay magazines and on the venue's website. It was withdrawn after intense criticism from the Victorian RSL, which called it a "desecration of the Anzac spirit".

Source



Official sex abuse of little kids in Sweden

I was planning to take a break from writing about Sweden, but I just couldn't help it. Swedish journalist Kurt Lundgren had a noteworthy story on his blog this week. A friend told him about a magazine published by L,rarf"rbundet, the Swedish Teachers' Union, the largest union for teachers and heads of schools in the country. The magazine, aimed at preschool teachers who take care of children between the ages of 0-6 years old, included recommendations to not only promote "gender equality" but also "sexual equality" at this tender age. Mr. Lundgren considers the suggestions that are sent out to kindergarten and preschool staff to be clear-cut sexual abuse of children:

"A three-year-old doesn't have to learn queer theory, a four-year-old shouldn't have to be force-fed lectures on gay sex by some sex freak from the Teachers' Union. Children are supposed to play and discover their roles entirely on their own. Children are defenseless and shouldn't be exposed to indoctrination, neither regarding sex nor politics.. (.) One wonders whether parents are aware of the abuses against preschool children that that Teachers' Union's magazine Pedagogiska magasinet is encouraging."

In a kindergarten in Stockholm, the parents were encouraged by the preschool teachers - apparently ideological pioneers - to equip their sons with dresses and female first names. There are now weeks in some places when boys HAVE TO wear a dress. Lundgren considers this sexual indoctrination as worse than the political: "The political nonsense is seeking to alter opinions - the sex freaks seek to alter the children's personality, their mentality and their entire constitution."

After posting this, Lundgren soon received a threatening email: "I have been in touch with the Teachers' Union. They are considering reporting you to the police for what you wrote about queer and gay sex as abuse of children."

Lundgren wrote in reply: "To give sex education to preschool children, to force them to have an opinion on gay sex and queer (lesbians, transsexuals, bisexuality, fetishism, cross over, sex change etc.) I regard as abuse of children. (.) Little children, we are talking about three to six-year-olds here, cannot in the preschool protect themselves from these sexual assaults. Their parents are not there, the children are totally left to themselves. (.) Little children need to be left alone, they are supposed to play without adult supervision."

Some comments left by his blog readers:

"There won't be a police report about this. The Socialist Teachers' Union will probably think twice before doing so. There could be a backlash if the media start writing about queer [theory] directed against children and the parents will open their eyes to what's going on with their loved ones."

"My 11-months-old son will never be allowed to go to a kindergarten. I and my cohabitant reserve the right to raise our son into a thinking, rational and independent individual. He will definitely be allowed to wear a Superman costume, play with cars and build wooden houses if he wants to. I will never force him to wear a princess costume against his will. Presumably it won't be long before parents like us will have our children taken away from us, to be raised in accordance with sound, Socialist doctrines."

"My 13-year-old son had `equality day' [in school] and had to listen to a transvestite. I have myself never encountered or talked to one during my considerably longer life. Why is this important? Today's children know nothing about the crimes of Communism, but everything about the sexual orientation of transvestites."

This last comment is quite literally true. A poll carried out on behalf of the Organization for Information on Communism found that 90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 20 had never heard of the Gulag, although 95 percent knew of Auschwitz. "Unfortunately we were not at all surprised by the findings," Ander Hjemdahl, the founder of UOK, told website The Local. In the nationwide poll, 43 percent believed that Communist regimes had claimed less than one million lives. The actual figure is estimated at 100 million. 40 percent believed that Communism had contributed to increased prosperity in the world. Mr. Hjemdahl states several reasons for this massive ignorance, among them that "a large majority of Swedish journalists are left-wingers, many of them quite far left."

Meanwhile, Antifascistisk Aktion in Sweden, a group that supposedly fights against "racists," openly brag about numerous physical attacks against persons with their full name and address published on their website. According to AFA, this is done in order to fight against global capitalism and for a classless society. They subscribe to an ideology that killed one hundred million people during a few generations, and they are the good guys. Those who object to being turned into a minority in their own country through mass immigration are the bad guys.

British historian Roland Huntford wrote a book in the early 1970s about Sweden called The New Totalitarians. Huntford notes how equality between the sexes was aggressively promoted from the late 1960s and early 1970s:

"When sexual equality was promulgated, and it was decided that a woman's place was not at home but out at work, there was a rapid change in the language. The customary Swedish for housewife is husmor, which is honourable; it was replaced by the neologism hemmafru, literally `the-wife-who-stays-at-home', which is derogatory. Within a few months, the mass media were able to kill the old and substitute the new term. By the end of 1969, it was almost impossible in everyday conversation to mention the state of housewife without appearing to condemn or to sneer. Swedish had been changed under the eyes and ears of the Swedes. Husmor had been discredited; the only way out was to use hemmafru ironically. Connected with this semantic shift, there was a change in feeling. Women who, a year or so before, had been satisfied, and possibly proud, to stay at home, began to feel the pressure to go out to work. The substitution of one word for the other had been accompanied by insistent propaganda in the mass media, so that it was as if a resolute conditioning campaign had been carried out. Very few were able to recognize the indoctrination in the linguistic manipulation; in the real sense of the word, the population had been brain-washed."

This was closely linked to a campaign for sexual liberation:

"Indeed, the word `freedom' in Swedish has come to mean almost exclusively sexual freedom, product perhaps of an unadmitted realization that it is absent, or unwanted, elsewhere. Through sex instruction at school for the young, and incessant propaganda in the mass media for the older generations, most of Sweden has been taught to believe that freedom has been achieved through sex. Because he is sexually emancipated, the Swede believes that he is a free man, and judges liberty entirely in sexual terms. (.) The Swedish government has taken what it is pleased to call `the sexual revolution' under its wing. Children are impressed at school that sexual emancipation is their birthright, and this is done in such a way as to suggest that the State is offering them their liberty from old-fashioned restrictions."

By old-fashioned restrictions, read Christianity and Christian morality. Huntford notes that this came together with efforts to downplay or attack Western culture prior to the French Revolution. According to Mr. Olof Palme, who was Swedish Socialist Prime Minister until 1986: "The Renaissance So-called? Western culture? What does it mean to us?"

"The State," in the words of Ingvar Carlsson, then Minister of Education, "is concerned with morality from a desire to change society." Mr. Carlsson, who was Swedish Prime Minister as late as 1996, has also stated that "School is the spearhead of Socialism" and that it "teaches people to respect the consensus, and not to sabotage it."

"We have no ethical standards in education, and no rules for sexual behaviour," in the words of Dr G"sta Rodhe, the then head of the department of sexual education in the Directorate of Schools, and thus in some ways the executive officer of government sexual policy. "You see, since there's a lack of tension in Swedish politics, younger people have got to find release and excitement in sexual tension instead."

This was in the early 1970s. Things have gotten worse in the two generations since then. Socialists and state authorities present this policy as liberation of women and sexual liberation. What it is actually about is breaking down rival sources of power: The traditional Judeo-Christian culture and the nuclear family. This leaves the state more powerful, since it can regulate all aspects of life and, most importantly, can indoctrinate the nation's children as it sees fit, without undue parental influence. The state replaces your entire nuclear and extended family, raises your children and cares for your elderly.

- - - - - - - - - -

As writer Per Bylund observes: "A significant difference between my generation and the preceding one is that most of us were not raised by our parents at all. We were raised by the authorities in state daycare centers from the time of infancy; then pushed on to public schools, public high schools, and public universities; and later to employment in the public sector and more education via the powerful labor unions and their educational associations. The state is ever-present and is to many the only means of survival - and its welfare benefits the only possible way to gain independence."

Socialist pioneer Alva Myrdal is the hero of the modern Swedish preschools. She wanted comprehensive education for special child carers who could provide children with competent guidance all day long. What the social engineers discovered later was that despite decades of state-sponsored gender equality propaganda, boys and girls still behaved differently. This disturbed them. Instead of concluding that maybe there are genuine, innate differences between the sexes, which sensible people would do, they decided to indoctrinate children more thoroughly, starting at an even earlier age, to eradicate gender differences.

Toy researcher Anders Nelson at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology has warned that toys have become increasingly gender-segregated over the past fifteen years: "People often explain [their toy purchases] by saying that boys and girls want different things. But in order for children to be able to reflect on [the toys] they receive, adults have to open their eyes to [inherent gender] structures. To children, these [gender] roles are more unquestioned and instinctual." Mr. Nelson encouraged parents to give more gender neutral Christmas presents. In other words, no Barbie dolls for girls and no cars for boys.

The Swedish Consumers Association reacted angrily to a star-shaped,pink ice-cream because it represented gender-profiling. "Girlie, GB's new ice pop, is pink and has make-up inside the stick. It says a lot about what GB thinks about girls and how they should be," the association said in a statement. According to them, Sweden does not need more products that reinforce existing prejudices about sex roles, so they asked the producer to make the product less gender specific.

Again, this has thus absolutely nothing to do with "tolerance or diversity." It's done in order to break you down and to mold you into a new human being. Great emphasis is placed on destroying the Christian heritage of the native population. Pupils are taught that they have been liberated from the superstition and oppression of Christian nonsense. However, while Christianity has been ridiculed and demonized for generations, so much that some Swedish Christians complain about persecution, Islam is presented in textbooks as a benevolent and tolerant religion, and Islam is granted a high degree of respect in the public sphere.

A bus driver in the increasingly Muslim-dominated Swedish town of Malm" has been fired from his job following revelations that he stopped a woman from boarding his bus because she was wearing full Islamic face-covering, which made her hard to identify. In Sweden, it is thus unacceptable if girls are presented with pink ice-creams or Barbie dolls because this reinforces gender stereotypes, but the burka is just fine. Meanwhile, Sweden is in the midst of the most explosive rape wave in Scandinavian history, largely caused by immigration. While Swedish girls are called "whores" by Muslim immigrants, Swedish boys are told to wear a dress and study queer theory.

Sweden is supposedly the most "gender equal" country in the world. It's also one of the nations most eagerly (at least officially, all other viewpoints are banned) embracing Multiculturalism. Promoting "sexual equality" alongside a rapidly growing Muslim minority is going to become an increasingly challenging balancing act. Sharia-supporters and transvestites of the world unite!

Source



Mainstream media still trying to trash the Duke Lacrosse players

The Washington Post's Mike Wise most unwisely celebrated the Memorial Day Weekend by trashing the members of the 2005-2006 Duke University Men's Lacrosse Team, in a tasteless article entitled "Continuing Conflicts" (apparently without a care about the undeserved anguish that it inflicts). With the current Duke Men's Lacrosse Team in the national collegiate semi-finals, Mr. Wise reported:

"Mike Pressler and his family are planning on moving into their newly purchased home in Rhode Island this weekend. The only event that may tear him away is a trip to Baltimore on Monday to watch the lacrosse team he led for 16 seasons play for a national title.

"Remember Pressler? He was the original fall guy in an unseemly American docudrama that pitted the privileged frat-boy culture of a private university against a black single mother, a college student who made a poor career choice to support her children. Stirred by a bungling prosecutor -- and a media contingent overzealously ready to believe him -- a cauldron of race, sex, class and law boiled over and scalded everyone."

Mr. Wise's agenda is obvious: (1) trash the Duke lacrosse scholar athletes for "a poor entertainment choice" (hiring strippers and stripping for hire are legal in North Carolina, even though I wish they were not); (2) extol the false accuser as a loving parent whose only mistake was "a poor career choice" (nothing about her criminal history, mental history or her prior claim to have been gang raped); (3) whitewash the white guy who shamelessly played the race card to win a Democrat primary by suddenly becoming a hero to Durham County, North Carolina's blacks (District Attorney Michael B. Nifong) as "bungling" (as though his grossly prejudicial, pre-primary pretrial public statements, refusal to consider exculpatory evidence and to question Ms. Mangum, agreement with Dr. Brian Meehan to exclude exculpatory evidence from a report on DNA testing and various misrepresentations to judges and defense counsel and threats to defense counsel were simple clumsiness instead of contemptible calculation); (4) excuse the media's rush to misjudgment as the result of overzealousness; and (5) make "everyone" victims.

Give Mr. Wise his due for trying to sell this baloney: "When Duke plays Cornell in today's NCAA semifinal, the focus will be on a team emerging from a travesty, how a group of kids who did not have a lacrosse program to call their own a year ago are two wins away from everything Pressler always wanted for them. But after everything has played out -- from the kids who went from vilified to exonerated, from the D.A. who went from legal crusader to Keystone Cop -- the story of the Duke lacrosse team still doesn't feel right. The more you think about it, the more it conjures up all these conflicting feelings."

Mr. Nifong as Keystone Cop? NOT! (The man is cunning. Example: as I reported last October, Mr. Nifong was so concerned about the then upcoming "60 Minutes" Duke case expose to be broadcast on October 15, 2006 that even before it was broadcast, he demanded that Durham police detectives arrest someone for the killings in a Durham quadriple murder case to deflect local attention from the "60 Minutes" Duke Case expose. Shameless, yes. A Keystone Cop? NO!)

Mr. Wise did include some sympathy for "those kids": "It's not right what Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong did to those kids, and it's not right former and future players have to bear that burden. Their names should have never been sullied like that. It's hard to imagine being the parent of a son wrongly accused of a heinous crime such as rape, the hurt they had to endure. And every letterman affiliated with Duke lacrosse the past few years, whether or not he attended that fateful party, is going to have an indelible stain on his resume."

But Mr. Wise crassly continued: "At the same time, it's hard to embrace everyone as a victim. With all due respect to those 'INNOCENT' bracelets worn around Durham this year, this isn't 'To Kill a Mockingbird II.'"

All of the members of the team WERE victims, Mr. Wise. They were either blamed or even prosecuted for imaginary crimes without good cause (because they were white males from well-to-do or wealthy families). They were accused either of kidnapping, raping and sexually offending or covering up for kidnappers, rapists and sexual offenders. FALSELY accused.

Fortunately, there was no trial. There was not a good reason for a trial of those indicted and to date no authority has had the gumption to try the false accuser for false accusation or the rogue prosecutor for any crime he may have committed in connection with the Duke Hoax. Fortunately, the North Carolina Attorney General, Roy Cooper, publicly acknowledged that Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and David Evans were innocent of all the felony charges against them. That's exactly what the bracelets proclaimed. (The bracelets set forth the numbers of the indicted players together with the word "INNOCENT," an obvious reference to the pending felony charges against those players. The words "perfect" and "sinless" were not included on the bracklets.)

Much more here



Multiculturalism entrenched discrimination for Australia's blacks

In 1967, a constitutional referendum gave Aborigines full Australian citizenship -- a bit like America's civil rights act of the same era



THE 1967 referendum, rather than propelling Aborigines into the national mainstream, was followed by an apartheid-like regime in which Aborigines descended into a world of poverty, illiteracy and violence, according to economist Helen Hughes. In a new book, Lands of Shame, Hughes, a former senior director of the economic analysis department at the World Bank and senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, argues that after 1967, two main approaches towards Aboriginal people were emerging, one liberal and the other socialist.

"Those liberally minded considered that with the referendum's end to legislated exceptionalism, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders would be able to integrate into the economic mainstream," she writes. "It was thought that Aboriginal lives would be enriched by participating in the technological and social advances that led to high living standards." Values such as individual freedom and equality between men and women were evolving. Immigration was leading to an ethnically plural society with a reduction in racial discrimination. Aboriginal art, dance and music were being embraced in a broader Australian culture, enabling indigenous traditions to flourish. "Thus it was thought that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders would not only be able to look back to enjoy their traditions and links with the country, but also look forward to participating in the life of reason that would free them from sorcery and fear of spirits."

Instead, she writes, the Whitlam and Fraser governments steered Aborigines towards the socialist "homeland" model championed by former Reserve Bank governor HC "Nugget" Coombs that wove together anthropology and Marxism. Rather than ending discrimination, it would be "the culmination of 200 years of exceptionalist and separatist indigenous policies". Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser said last night it was "totally and absolutely absurd" to suggest his government allowed a form of apartheid to develop. He said his government had tried to "respect and understand the difference" between indigenous and non-indigenous people.

One of the leaders of the referendum campaign, Faith Bandler, said she had "tended to support" the Coombs approach, but generations of social engineering by governments had rarely taken account of Aboriginal opinion. "It's difficult for one group of people, whose skin is white, to plan and make decisions for another group, whose skin happens to be black," she said.

But confronting critics, including Mr Fraser, who say policies of assimilation and integration from the 1930s to the 1970s not only failed but contributed to the destruction of Aboriginal families, Hughes writes: "It is not true that various policies have been tried and have failed. Policies have always been discriminatory, treating Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders differently from other Australians. "Sadly, the most damaging discrimination in Australia's history has been the exceptionalism of the last 30 years that was intended to make up for past mistreatment."

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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