Showing posts with label DOD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DOD. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Louis Farrakhan on Rudy Giuliani

Louis Farrakhan on Rudy Giuliani

 The Reverend Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam in America, took umbrage at Rudy Giuliani's assessment of Barack Obama's formative years.  In response,  Farrakhan launched into a pejorative racial ad hominem attack on America's Mayor as well as all Americans of European descent.

    

 This invective is rather ironic as President Obama's lineage does not include ancestry of slavery.  Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was a Kenyan and  Stanley Ann Dunham was a white woman hailing from Wichita, Kansas. So the Reverend Farrakhan is conflating the struggle against someone who neither suffered from the disadvantages of slavery nor really lived in society which did not seek to redress those iniquities.

 Rudy Giuliani could point to Barack Obama's two autobiographies, which chronicle how the future President was raised in Indonesia during formative years in which the love of country tended to be instilled.

Where was Louis Farrakhan drawing for his assessments?  Well, it seems that the Rev. Farrakhan has again shifted from knowing Issa (Jesus) better than Christians back to a ministry of rage with a racially apocalyptic eschatology. 

Last week, the White House conducted a three day summit on Countering Violent Extremism, which contorted itself so as not to associate religious motivations to terrorism, especially towards Islam. However, at the same time voices from the Obama Administration  have been quick to point out the Lord's Resistance Army in Central Africa as an example of Christian militant terrorism.    And a 2014 PC DOD presentation listed Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, evangelical Christians and Islamaphobes along with Al Qaeda as examples of "extremists groups".

 No wonder why we currently have such a whacked weltanschauung in the District of Calamity (sic).

h/t: Michael Ramirez 

Friday, December 19, 2014

Eric Holder's Odd Interpretation of Civil Rights Law



In a memorandum, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder proclaimed that the Department of Justice will consider Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as including trangedered individuals as well as those with gender identity issues (e.g. transvestites).   Holder rationalized that the federal government's approach to the issue had evolved over time.  So even though such classes were not contemplated by Congress when the law was enacted, they ought to be covered despite the plain text reading and 50 years of DOJ precedent. Or it should be affirmatively decided by the highest court in the land.

Holder invoked the logic of Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Servs. (1978), a Supreme Court decision which purports that statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils".  A complication with relying upon this language as it focuses on acts which applies to discrimination on women and men. Holder's ukase is that it establishes new classes of Civil Rights coverage, namely for cross-dressers as well as transgendered people.  Such unilateral Administrative action was anticipated by Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James.



However, Congress did not pass the Employers Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) because of concerns in the House whether the bills prohibitions on discrimination on sexual orientation would also include gender identity. ENDA did not pass Congress, but no matter for the Obama Administration to fashion its own law.

Although this holding supposedly only extends to the Federal Government, the limited scope of the Federal Gay Marriage applicability in U.S. v. Windsor (2013) was not respected.  In addition, consider how Attorney General Holder's logic of juridical evolution could be liberally applied.

Does America still have the rule of law or the rule of men?  This is a hard question to give a straight answer.

h/t: Michael Ramirez