Big-time bigotry

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Big-time bigotry

Thomas Sowell

May 20, 2005

Maybe the non-stop denunciations of judicial nominees by Senate Democrats will seem relevant to some people but it is in fact wholly beside the point. Senators who don't like any particular judicial nominee -- or any nominee for any other federal appointment -- have a right to vote against that nominee for any reason or for no reason.

That right has never been in question during the more than two centuries since it was conferred by the Constitution of the United States. So all this unending talk about what Senate Democrats don't like about Justice Priscilla Owen of the Texas supreme court or Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California supreme court is completely irrelevant. Senators who don't like them can vote against them.

The real issue is whether those Senators have the right to deprive all other Senators of the right to vote on these nominees. Nothing that is said for or against Justice Owen or Justice Brown has any relevance to the issue of some Senators denying other Senators the right to vote.

The essence of bigotry is denying other people the same rights you have. For generations, it was racial bigotry which provoked filibusters to prevent the Senate from voting on bills to extend civil rights to blacks. But bigotry is bigotry, whether it is racial bigotry, religious bigotry or political bigotry.

People who say that the right of unlimited debate in the Senate "has served this country well" can seldom, if ever, point to any specific benefit that has come from any specific filibuster.

The detriment includes years of denying equal rights to minorities, when the majority of the people in this country were ready to grant equal rights but Southern Democrats prevented the Senate from carrying out the will of the majority by preventing other Senators from voting.

Although this was the bigotry of the right, the bigotry of the left has since become pervasive, not just in politics but also in our educational system and in much of the media. Again and again, the left has claimed rights for itself that it denies to others.

Schools and colleges that bombard students with propaganda in favor of homosexuality often stifle any contrary views with rules against "hate speech" that prevent any criticism of either homosexuality itself or the policies advocated by gay activists.

Environmentalists who are against development think their views on this subject are a sufficient reason for unelected zoning boards and planning commissions to prevent other people from building homes or offices, even though there would not be any issue unless other people thought otherwise.

Indeed, the left in general has increasingly favored unelected institutions which impose their views, whether the federal courts, environmental agencies, or such national bureaucracies as the National Park Service or international agencies like the United Nations or the International Court of Justice at the Hague.

The left has for decades condoned or "understood" riots and violence that fit the vision of the left and even condemned police action to restore order and the rights of other people to go about their business unmolested. The New York Times published a sympathetic account of one of our domestic left-wing terrorists on the very day when international terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. Violence is of course the ultimate in imposing your views on others by forcibly over-riding their views.

Although scholarship is supposed to be the search for truth, there is no need to search for truth when you are dogmatically certain that you have already found it. That is too often the mindset of the left in academia, where contrary views are penalized by restrictive speech codes and faculty hiring decisions include ideological litmus tests, while even visiting public speakers are limited to those acceptable to the left.

Ideological bigotry has become the norm on even our most prestigious campuses, where students can go for years without reading or hearing anything that challenges the left vision.

The ideological bigotry of the left is currently holding center stage in the United States Senate, where those who favor one view of judicial nominees argue as if that view justifies preventing Senators with other views from voting.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomass...s20050520.shtml

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As Usual, Thomas Sowell is ten years ahead of the rest of us.

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As Usual, Thomas Sowell is ten years ahead of the rest of us.

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Actually, he's behind. He said nothing when Republicans could prevent a vote if just one Senator opposed a nomination. Now, if 50 may oppose it, he calls that bigotry?

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The essence of bigotry is denying other people the same rights you have.

So when does Sowell come out against Duncan Hunter?

Women's khaki ceiling

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ArchiveBy ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist

Published May 22, 2005

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America's first G.I. Jane was Deborah Sampson, who at 21 bound her breasts and enlisted in the army under the name Robert Shurtleff, claiming to be a 15-year-old boy. The year was 1782, and Sampson fought alongside men in the Revolutionary War until a fever forced a trip to the hospital where her gender was discovered. She was granted an honorable discharge and later a veteran's pension.

Today, women don't have to go all Yentl to join the military. According to Maj. Elizabeth Robbins, an Army spokeswoman, 91 percent of all Army jobs are available to women. Yet, more than 200 years since Sampson, women are still legally barred from the infantry and other ground combat posts. Call it the khaki ceiling.

Conventional thinking says women are not supposed to face the enemy on the battlefield. Women soldiers are thought to harm the morale of men by undercutting unit cohesion due to sexual competition - women must pay the price for male lust. And they are considered at a physical disadvantage due to a lack of upper-body strength - although carrying an M-16 and wearing bulletproof Kevlar goes a long way toward compensating for a lack of bulging biceps.

But despite all the carefully written laws and official rules intended to keep women out of land-based combat, the reality on the ground is that women soldiers are increasingly confronting the enemy and taking fire. The terms thrown around for the war theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan are "nonlinear" or "360-degree" battlefields. Whatever the nomenclature, women in U.S. Army uniforms are getting shot at and bombed in the course of their duties. So far, more than 30 women have been killed in Iraq, with at least 23 combat-related deaths.

But rather than applaud the bravery of the 17,000 women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee are trying to throw a roadblock in the path of women's expanding military roles.

As part of the legislation approving the next fiscal year's military programs, the committee added an amendment that would limit the jobs women can perform. The Army would have to report to Congress any time it wanted to expand combat-related assignments for women soldiers. The effort was pushed by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chair of the committee, who said through a statement that "the nation should not put women into the front lines of combat."

President Bush said essentially the same thing in January when he stated flatly that there should be "no women in combat."

These must be laughably out-of-touch statements to the women soldiers serving in Iraq, where the jobs assigned to them are some of the most dangerous.

Women soldiers patrol the streets as military police, entering homes to search for insurgents and weapons stashes. They are assigned to highly vulnerable checkpoints, so that female Iraqis can be searched by a woman. And they move supplies in large convoys, where IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, are a constant danger. Bush's and Hunter's exhortations indicate they have little understanding of the fight we're in. There are no front lines in a battle against an insurgency. Virtually every posting involves mortal danger and the risk of live-fire engagement with the enemy.

Just ask Elizabeth Vasquez, who told the Sacramento Bee that every convoy mission she was on in Iraq took hostile fire. "We had a gun truck on every run, with a machine gunner sitting half in and half out of the top of the Humvee," Vasquez told the Bee. "And sometimes those gunners were women."

Maj. Mary Prophit told the Washington Post how in January, after a roadside bomb detonated as her convoy passed, she placed herself - while firing - between the medic treating the wounded and the insurgents who were shooting at them.

Back in the 1970s, when the Equal Rights Amendment was being considered, the bogeyman trotted out by the likes of Phyllis Schlafly and other opponents was the specter of women in combat. Since then, women soldiers have proved their bravery and valor in just those circumstances. It is time to acknowledge, accept and even celebrate the women in uniform who - regardless of what the rules say - are standing shoulder to shoulder with men, putting their lives on the line.