Sunday, May 22, 2016



Another multicultural charmer in Britain


Mohammed Anwaar was jailed for 28 months at Sheffield Crown Court, South Yorkshire.  Why can't these animals be left to harass one-another in the Middle East where they belong?


A boyfriend has been jailed for forcing his girlfriend to undergo a grueling fitness regime and controlling what she ate as though she was a lab rat to make her look like Kim Kardashian.

Mohammed Anwaar told Gemma Doherty even sent her pictures of the women he thought looked better than her, which also included his 'favourite' model Graceyanne Barbosa.

Anwaar would threaten to beat her if she did not do as she was told during a reign of terror that lasted more than a year, a court heard.

Miss Doherty said: 'He treated me like an animal - almost like a guinea pig in a laboratory. He wanted me to have abs and a huge ass - a big one like Kim Kardashian.

'His favourite model was Graceyanne Barbosa and he would make me look at her fitness routines and practise them. If I didn't he would beat me.'

Anwaar was today jailed for 28 months at Sheffield Crown Court, South Yorkshire, and one of the ten charges was the new crime of controlling or coercive behaviour, brought in at the end of 2015. 

Police believe today's sentence - which carried 12 months for that charge alone - could open the floodgates for many more prosecutions.

In a victim statement read out to the court yesterday, Miss Doherty said the relationship had started out 'perfect' but everything changed in May 2015.

'I knew how quickly his mood could change over the smallest thing,' she said.

The court heard how Anwaar told mother-of-two Miss Doherty, 30, who she could see, what she was allowed to wear and what not to eat.

She told the court she was forced to eat 50 cans of Tuna a week and run on a treadmill every day to meet his demands, and he would not let her see her friends - who noticed her drastic weight loss.

Anwaar made her burn 500 calories every single day on the treadmill, despite her telling him that it was not the best way to achieve a body like the women he showed them.

She said: 'He would sit on the toilet while looking at pictures of Graceyanne and would tell me I needed to do more sit ups and do more squats.

'I told him that by losing 500 calories a day on the machine would not achieve that - but he wouldn't listen. He would force me on the treadmill until I achieved the daily target.

'One time I had stopped because he had fallen asleep. I had got to 425 calories, he woke up and because I had stopped - he made me start again.'

She added: 'He would only let me eat tuna and beetroot. I would see my friends out and they told me to eat more.  'I was wasting away when I was forced to lose all these calories every day. I felt like a zombie on autopilot and was at his beck and call - whatever and whenever.'

Mixed in with Anwaar's controlling behaviour were violent attacks, the most serious of which in August last year brought a charge of assault causing actual bodily harm.

After an argument over money, Anwaar first smashed Miss Doherty's iPhone before attacking her with slaps and kicks, choking her and causing her to fall unconscious.

He assaulted her on five other occasions, often in front of her young sons. The most recent attack was on March 5 this year, again after an argument, and this was when police were called.

The court heard Anwaar slapped Miss Doherty two or three times around the back of the head, put his hands around her throat so she fell to the floor and choked her in a headlock. He continued the assault, hitting her again and calling her a dog.

Nicola Quinney, prosecuting, said Anwaar had held a knife to Miss Doherty's throat, asking her if she wanted him to kill her, and saying he wasn't scared of a life sentence.

During the attack, Miss Doherty's son Ethan, three, was hiding under the bed.

She added: 'When I told the police that I didn't mind a slap or being roughed about, the officers told me it wasn't normal.  'But I had been sucked into Mo's life of him being a King - and I thought I couldn't get out.'

Miss Doherty finally left Anwaar on March 5 this year following a nine-month tirade of abuse.

Anwaar had allegedly paid men to wait inside Gemma's workplace and make sure she was not flirting with men.

He also forced her to wear male jumpers with long-sleeved arms, not just to cover bruises but to stop other men looking at her.

She was pushed to suicide and took an overdose of 18 pills after the horrendous abuse became too much for her. She survived, but was beaten again by Anwaar for trying to take her life.

Speaking about some of the harrowing incidents from her friend's home today, she said: 'Some of the things he made me do were totally disgusting and I wouldn't like to say.

'I was forced to wear men's clothes and jumpers in summer. He made me get the bus so he could drive my car.

'I finally decided to leave and get out when he tried to force me to do something that I declined to do. He then beat me in every single room of the house.

'The next day I told him I was going to the shop with my son but instead I ran to a pay phone.

After he was jailed, she talked of her relief, saying she has 'finally been brought back into the real world', after withdrawing from the world, falling out with her mother and friends.

But Miss Doherty described how she no longer had any self confidence and was worried because Anwaar had a large family and she didn't want to go out in case she saw them.

'He ruined my daily life,' said Miss Doherty, who had to be put into a safe house after going to police for fears of reprisals from his family.

The judge took into account his previous convictions - which included several assaults causing actual bodily harm to other men - when sentencing Anwaar.

SOURCE






Black Leaders Trash Obama's Transgender Agenda

Black Americans are sick and tired of being used as a tool to advance the radical gay and transgender agenda, and they have a message for President Obama: knock it off!

Conservative black leaders have criticized the Obama administration's comparison of North Carolina's transgender law to Jim Crow edicts, saying it trivializes the importance of the civil rights movement, Christian Post Politics reports.

When the Justice Department last week filed a lawsuit against North Carolina for its law requiring people to use bathrooms in government buildings that match their birth sex, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said: "This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation.

The comparisons were too much for some to take. Project 21, a nationwide group of black conservative leaders, issued a statement saying they disagreed with opposition to the North Carolina law itself, but were even more outraged by the analogy.

Project 21 member Nadra Enzi said that "as a Black Southern man who grew up fighting what I call 'Jim Crow-lite' in the 1970s-1980s, in Savannah, Georgia… I find the ridiculous transgender/civil rights movement comparison insulting and disrespectful.

"Middle-and upper-income whites in search of artificial oppressed person status can do so without using our history to prop up delusional defenses.

Another member, Derryck Green, said: "Attaching this insanity to the legacy of civil rights… trivializes everything the brave men and women experienced and sacrificed in the pursuit of social, economic and legal equality…", while Christopher Arps added that "Civil rights champions were not spat upon, beaten with police batons and sometimes murdered for the right of men to go to the same restroom with little girls.

SOURCE






Our Constitutional Right to Privacy Is Missing From Bathroom Debate

It should be common sense that every person is entitled to privacy when using the restroom, changing, or showering, but unfortunately, some have eliminated common sense from the discussion.

What else can explain the decision by dozens of school districts across the country, retailing giant Target, and even the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice to voluntarily adopt and promote policies that strip away privacy for everyone, allowing men into women’s restrooms and locker rooms, and vice versa?

Why does privacy even matter? Sure, our courts have recognized that it’s a constitutionally protected right. And our society has long structured itself around the need to allow privacy for the sexes in intimate settings. But why?

When discussing freedom of speech, one of our most precious rights, the Supreme Court has often emphasized that the right is most important for those whose speech is most vulnerable to censorship.

The majority’s views aren’t the ones that need protection. The minority’s views, the ones that may subject the speaker to abuse, are the ones that the First Amendment was designed to protect.

The same is true of the right to privacy. So who are the vulnerable ones in our society most in need of privacy?

Stephanie has several children that came to her through a foster program. Her children are beautiful, vibrant, and overflowing with joy.

If you met them on the street, you would never suspect that two of her daughters had suffered severe molestation and rape by men that they trusted. For these girls, feeling safe and secure in private settings—such as bedrooms, bathrooms, and locker rooms—is necessary to heal. And to feel safe, these girls need to know that their private spaces will not be invaded by a male.

You would think that the school these girls attend would be especially protective of them. You would be wrong.

The school voluntarily adopted a policy that would allow boys into the girls’ restrooms, locker rooms, and even hotel rooms on school trips. The school callously ignored Stephanie’s explanation that the presence of a boy in these private settings would be a trigger event for her daughters, causing severe psychological harm and setting back the progress they had made.

Stephanie was told, “It isn’t a big deal.”

Another mother, Verity, has a daughter with Down syndrome. As parents of these precious souls will tell you, their children are the best thing that has ever happened to them. But parenthood comes with challenges.

Verity wants her daughter to have independence and to be able to take care of herself. Her daughter, unfortunately, doesn’t always know how to handle every situation she encounters.

Verity naturally worries that, if her daughter is forced to share a restroom or locker room with a male, her daughter could be easily taken advantage of.

Separate facilities for boys and girls add an extra layer of protection for Verity’s daughter by preventing those with ill motives from taking advantage of open access to enter into women’s restrooms unquestioned.

There are millions of stories like Stephanie’s and Verity’s, millions of people for whom privacy is especially important in order to heal and to feel safe. By protecting privacy for everyone, we protect privacy for the most vulnerable among us.

So before we sacrifice this constitutionally protected right at the altar of gender identity politics, let us consider the consequences, especially when options exist to accommodate everyone without violating anyone’s privacy.

Let us consider the victims of sexual abuse, those with mental and physical challenges, and the young girls who simply do not want to be forced to change next to a boy.

For them, privacy is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

SOURCE







Punching down

The elite are using new laws to express their contempt for  ordinary people

On January 20, a federal appeals court heard arguments in the highly publicized case of Kimberly Jean “Kim” Davis, county clerk of Rowan County (population 23,000) in mountainous northeastern Kentucky. There were many legal issues at stake—discrimination, sexual equality, religious liberty—but the whole affair had another component, rarely noted in popular accounts: Society’s winners, those who believe themselves on the right side of progress and have the success to prove it, think little of humiliating and attempting to ruin those who are less fortunate and cling to old beliefs.

Davis, age fifty, served five days in jail in September 2015 over her refusal on grounds of her Christian conscience to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. That decision, released on June 26, 2015, found a fundamental right to marry that the high court’s five-justice majority said extended to same-sex as well as opposite-sex couples under the Constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses.

Davis’s lawyers at Liberty Counsel proceeded with their appeal of Bunning’s injunction, arguing that while Obergefell v. Hodges might have established a fundamental right for same-sex couples to marry that states were bound to recognize, it did not establish a fundamental right to have a marriage license issued by a particular person in a particular county. Furthermore, the lawyers argued, Kentucky’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (enacted in 2013 and modeled after a similar 1993 federal law) required the state of Kentucky to accommodate Davis’s sincerely held religious beliefs—which, her lawyers argued, could have been easily accomplished if Beshear had simply allowed Davis to leave her signature off the same-sex licenses to begin with. Indeed, Beshear left office while the appeal was pending (Kentucky law forbids a governor from serving more than two terms), and his newly elected successor, Matt Bevin, a Republican, signed an executive order on December 22, 2015, that removed county clerks’ names from marriage licenses.

You might think that Bevin’s stroke of the pen—honoring the Christian faith of Davis and two other Kentucky county clerks who had taken similar ­stances (neither was subjected to litigation), while allowing same-sex couples to proceed to their wedding ceremonies—would have ended the matter in an amicable compromise. It did not. The ACLU continued to press forward against Davis, contending that a Kentucky statute required that Davis’s signature and title appear on the licenses, and it was a statute that could not be nullified by a governor’s executive order. This was certainly a valid legal point, except that the ACLU’s way of making it was to request Bunning to issue a second contempt order that would send Davis back to jail for failing to comply with his original September 3 injunction. The ACLU made much of the altered license form that Davis had authorized (it had the word “clerk” systematically crossed out) and was still seeking to have her re-incarcerated even as the Kentucky Senate was moving along a bill in early 2016 that would amend Kentucky law along the lines of Bevin’s executive order (and thus render the ACLU’s argument moot), and as the Sixth Circuit was reading briefs and hearing arguments in Davis’s appeal.

In the end, Bunning did not give the ACLU what it wanted on this second contempt go-around. After a hearing on February 9, 2016, he ruled that Davis had not in fact interfered with her office’s issuance of marriage licenses and that there was “every reason to believe” that the altered licenses her office had issued would “be recognized as valid under Kentucky law.” An ACLU spokesman said the organization has no immediate plans to contest Bunning’s ruling, although ACLU staff attorney Ria Tabacco Mar issued a statement complaining that it was “inappropriate for any government official to force changes to her job duties—and those of every other person with that job throughout the state—based on personal religious beliefs.”

At the heart of the autumn 2015 brouhaha over Miller v. Davis was that yawning class gap between the plaintiffs with their advanced degrees, university connections, and comfortable salaries, and the non-college-educated Davis, with her pioneer-woman skirts, trailer-trash backstory, and practice of throwing her arms up in public prayer in an enthusiastic fashion that would be deemed mortifying by most of today’s suburbanized and hypo-expressive mainline Protestants and Catholics. The media alternated between scoffing at Davis as a “bigot” and “homophobe” and explaining in condescending detail the tenets of her Apostolic Pentecostal denomination, with its immersion baptism and its requirement that members exhibit external signs of “holiness”—hence the long dresses and uncut hair for women. Clair Jones, a writer for the Huffington Post who had grown up in Morehead and attended Morehead State, hastened to reassure her readers that she and her friends were nothing like that “small-town court clerk” Kim Davis: “Morehead is also home to a thriving theatre community, amazing bluegrass musicians, talented local artists, and tons of absolutely brilliant, kind people who live there not for religious reasons, but for their profound connection to the land and Appalachian culture.” Although not, apparently, their connection to the aspect of “Appalachian culture” that has made Evangelical Christianity Rowan County’s predominant faith.

This is not the only instance of academic aggression against working-class religious people. The leitmotif is also part of the long-running litigation involving Barronelle Stutzman, a seventy-year-old florist in Richland, Washington, who was sued over her refusal, on grounds of the “relationship with Jesus” that her Southern Baptist faith afforded her, to provide custom floral arrangements for the wedding of a gay couple, Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed, in 2013. Washington had legalized same-sex marriage in 2012.

There is a certain similarity to the divergent Kim Davis demographics: Plaintiff Freed is vice president for instruction at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington, and plaintiff Ingersoll, according to his LinkedIn profile, manages a Goodwill Industries store in Seattle. According to the Washington State Employee Salary Database, Freed earned $118,830 at Columbia Basin College in 2012, and his salary for 2013 was $200,856 (he moved to Whatcom CC in summer 2013). Defendant Stutzman is the sole owner of the small flower shop that her mother turned over to her when she retired. Ingersoll and Freed had been customers for years at Stutzman’s Arlene’s Flowers, and she knew all about their relationship.

But when she balked at active participation in a marriage ceremony that her religious beliefs deemed invalid (she gave the couple the names of several other florists) and Ingersoll posted his dissatisfaction with her stance on his Facebook page, both the ACLU, representing Ingersoll and Freed, and the Washington state attorney general’s office filed lawsuits against her under state civil-rights laws. In 2015 a judge ordered Stutzman to pay a $1,000 fine and issued a permanent injunction ordering her to service same-sex weddings in the future or risk similar fines. The judge also ruled that Stutzman would be personally liable to Ingersoll and Freed for damages and attorney’s fees—an amount that hasn’t been set yet but that could potentially cost Stutzman her business, her home, and her retirement savings. Those rulings are currently on appeal with the Washington Supreme Court. Meanwhile, according to the ACLU, Ingersoll and Freed went through with their wedding ceremony, perhaps indicating that they could live without Stutzman’s custom floral arrangements after all.

There has been a distinct theme of class warfare in a significant number of the lawsuits that have been brought seeking to compel operators of small businesses peripheral to the wedding industry—florists, bakers, photographers, and proprietors of picturesque wedding venues—to offer their services in same-sex ceremonies that their sincerely held Christian beliefs deem invalid. The same-sex couples who pursue the litigation are often highly educated professionals, the ACLU is ubiquitously at hand to offer them free legal representation, and the relief sought in court is typically far broader than simply making plaintiffs claiming injury whole by providing them a one-off service. It typically involves a blanket court order requiring the Christian florist or baker or photographer or innkeeper to ­provide those services in perpetuity to every same-sex couple that darkens his doors or face financially ruinous consequences. In a few cases, such as Stutzman’s, the defendant faces a court order plus financial ruin, because many progressive judges lend sympathetic ears to same-sex plaintiffs’ claims of humiliation and severe emotional harm. Typically as well, militant gay-rights sympathizers—and there are apparently plenty of them—flood social media and review sites such as Yelp with one-star comments about wilted flowers and cupcakes that gave them food poisoning, all in obvious efforts to put those holdout Christians out of business.

One of the most publicized of the lawsuits involves Jack Phillips, prop­rietor of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, a sprawling and, until ­recently, rural suburb of Denver. Somewhat like Kim Davis, Phillips had led an out-of-control life during his twenties that included heavy drinking and two out-of-wedlock children before he “found Christ,” as he told a reporter. He cited his Christian belief that marriage is between a man and a woman as the basis for his refusal in July 2012 to make a rainbow cake for the reception of a gay couple, Charles W. Craig and David J. Mullins, who had traveled to Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a wedding ceremony because same-sex marriage was then illegal in Colorado. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission and, later, a state appellate court found that Phillips had violated a state anti-discrimination law, and the case is now pending before the Colorado Supreme Court. A law firm representing Craig and Mullins in tandem with the ACLU did not respond to email and phone requests for occupational information about its clients, but an online search revealed that two men in their thirties with the exact same names share a house in a Denver neighborhood where sales prices of single-family homes are in the half-million-dollar range. And Craig and Mullins got their rainbow cake fairly quickly from one of the dozens of gay-friendly bakers who swamped them with offers after the story broke. As for Phillips, his shop stopped making wedding cakes altogether, a move that he says has cost him 40 percent of his business revenues.

Another highly publicized wedding cake case involves Aaron and Melissa Klein, owners of the Sweet Cakes by Melissa bakery in Gresham, Oregon. They were the subject of complaints to two separate Oregon state agencies after they declined to provide a cake for the 2013 commitment ceremony of lesbians Rachel Cryer and Laurel Bowman (the two now share the hyphenated surname Bowman-Cryer). An administrative law judge found that the Kleins had violated a 2008 Oregon law forbidding discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. The Kleins were also ordered to pay a $135,000 fine for causing “emotional distress” to the Bowman-Cryers, a ruling that is now on appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court. Rachel Bowman-Cryer leads a Portlandia-like lifestyle as a “musician and poet” (so reports Willamette Week), and you can listen to some of her songs on her MySpace page. By contrast, the Kleins, who have five children, were obliged to close their storefront operation and move the bakery to their home.

The phrase “punching down” comes to mind. We have an array of court cases in which the arty, the academically inclined, and the nicely fixed avail themselves of free legal services from the ACLU and arrange themselves in a thick phalanx—their ranks bolstered by an army of liberal wits, journalists, professors, media nabobs, and amateur social-justice warriors on Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp—to crush small-time entrepreneurs and local officials in flyover states who profess brands of Christianity that the elites find not just laughable but dangerously retrograde. And those retrograde Christians who can’t keep up with rapidly changing elite social dicta almost always lose.

The Kim Davis case has happened to be the most widely covered of those cases, partly because it came in the immediate wake of Obergefell and has functioned as a test of the full scope of that sweeping Supreme Court ruling, and partly because the class gap between Davis and her opponents in court has been so glaringly dramatic. Liberal intellectuals and pundits pride themselves on their identification with a beleaguered underclass—but when it comes to a clash between a genuine beleaguered underclass and fashionable ideology, it seems that liberals will choose the ideology every time.

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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 INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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