‘We can’t be afraid.’ In a Cincinnati church basement, black women take a class together: learning how to fire guns
‘We can’t be afraid.’ In a Cincinnati church basement, black women take a class together: learning how to fire guns
Ariel Gresham, left, and Nancy Robb, both of the Cincinnati area, hold unloaded revolvers during an all-female concealed carry and weapons class Saturday, February 8, 2020, at New Prospect Baptist Church in Roselawn sponsored Arm the Populace.
Kai Brown of Bond Hill gets instruction on how to hold a gun from Timm Penrod and Henry Ware, right, with Arm the Populace during an all-female concealed carry and weapons class at New Prospect Baptist Church Saturday, February 8, 2020.
By Sharon Coolidge
February 21, 2020
CINCINNATI – New Prospect Baptist Church has one of the largest black congregations in Cincinnati. On any weekend, you’ll find weddings, funerals and three Sunday services.
On Feb. 8, you would have found 179 women firing .22-caliber handguns in the church basement.
The church had opened its doors to what state officials believe is one of the largest women-only, concealed-carry certification classes in the state.
Over and over, the women cited the same reason for taking the class. They were tired of being scared — of guns, of being alone in a home, of walking in some neighborhoods.
Karen Bolden, 56, was so scared of her husband’s guns that she asked him to get rid of them when they married two years ago. He did, but she’s working to conquer her fear. When Bolden’s sister alerted her to the class and suggested they go together, she jumped at the chance.
“This is why this class is so important,” Bolden said. “We can’t be afraid.”
The class was organized by two men: the church’s pastor, the Rev. Damon Lynch III, and Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Pastor, a Republican who appeared at the class sporting a T-shirt reading “All gun control is racist.”
The 179 women showed varying comfort levels with guns. Some had never touched one. Others own a gun but wanted the license needed to carry it. Some came because their mothers or sisters or friends suggested it.
The class was taught by Cincinnati-based Arm the Populace, a certified concealed-carry licensing business. The intense nine-hour class used a shooting range created just for the class in an empty storage area above the church’s community center.
Women paid $25 each to cover the cost of the space; that’s cheaper than the typical $65 class fee.
Arm the Populace donated its time.
A Pew Research Center report in 2017 delved into “America’s complex relationship with guns.” It found that gun ownership varied considerably by race and gender. Among men, 39% said they owned a gun, compared with 22% of women. And while 36% of whites reported that they were gun owners, only about a quarter of blacks and 15% of Hispanics said they were.
In the Cincinnati church class, 169 of the 179 women were black.
The class was broken into five groups, rotating into lessons about safety, laws, how to get a CCW license, which only a sheriff can issue, and then target practice.
Douglas Cooper, Arm the Populace’s founder and chief instructor, started the class by explaining: “The Second Amendment is for everyone,” he said.
Instructor Bill Maltbie then told the class why women-only classes are important.
“We do them so there are no men sitting there ‘mansplaining’ because they’ve played a lot of video games,” Maltbie said. “We’re not here for ‘Call of Duty.’ I just want to make sure I can go home at night and see my family.”
The pastor, Lynch, is not a proponent of guns, but he said: “New Prospect Baptist Church is more than a church. It’s the heart of the community.”
Without a recreation center, the church serves that need.
“I’m not a gun lover; I don’t own any guns, but people have Second Amendment rights to own a gun,” Lynch said. “In the African American community, the conversation is usually about buying guns back. But if people are lawfully trained and learn how to be responsible, they will probably never use one. It sets them on a different course. As opposed to a person who gets a gun and thinks, ‘I have to go shoot.’”
And that, Lynch said, “is a good thing.”
The shooting range was built with input from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It was bare-bones: a sheet of wood tacked to a wall, on which targets were placed.
Tape was passed around. Bolden used it to hang her target on the wall.
Arms straight. Legs apart. Ten shots. An instructor guided her stance. She hit the target within a centimeter of the bull’s-eye.
Her sister, Sonya Jackson, was next. Same stance. An instructor lightly guided her arms into better position. Two bullets hit the target.
“I didn’t have my glasses,” Jackson noted to her sister.
Bolden told her, “You’ll just have to go with me to the range. Practice. Practice. Practice.”
An American woman named Bethany Vierra got a masters degree in Middle Eastern studies and a PhD in human rights, moved to Saudi Arabia, was shocked to discover that women didn’t have the same rights as men, and falsely claimed, “The problem here is not Islamic law”
Bethany Vierra was born in Washington state.
She got a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from the American University in Paris.
Then she got a PhD in human rights at the National University of Ireland.
With such an education, I would think that Vierra would be aware that women in Saudi Arabia didn’t have the same rights as men, and that this lack of equal rights was due to the country following Islamic law.
But I would be wrong.
Vierra moved to Saudi Arabia, married a Saudi Arabian man, and later gave birth – while in Saudi Arabia – to their daughter.
Since doing those things, Vierra and her husband have gotten a divorce, and are now involved in a custody dispute over their daughter.
During this custody dispute, Vierra was genuinely shocked to find out that under Islamic law (also known as Sharia law) in Saudi Arabia, women do not have the same rights as men. Here’s the obligatory “shocked” scene from the movie Casablanca:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME
Vierra was also surprised to find out that she was not allowed to leave Saudi Arabia or to access her own bank account, without her ex-husband’s permission.
During the custody dispute, some of the evidence that was used against Vierra were photographs which showed that she had worn a bikini in public, had worn yoga pants in public, and had had her hair uncovered in public.
And Vierra said of this:
“The problem here is not Islamic law.”
Relative to their level of education, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone as dumb as Bethany Vierra.
Instead of getting all of those useless college degrees, she should have watched the movie Not Without My Daughter. The movie is based on a true story. Here’s the trailer for it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TSmbayUJCo
And here’s a scene from it about how the country enforces its dress code:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm3xv5sosng
Meanwhile, back in the U.S., a woman named Linda Sarsour, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, made four tweets in favor of the U.S. adopting Sharia law.
Sarsour made this tweet, which says the following:
“10 weeks of PAID maternity leave in Saudi Arabia. Yes PAID. And ur worrying about women driving. Puts us to shame.”
She also made this tweet, which says:
“shariah law is reasonable and once u read into the details it makes a lot of sense. People just know the basics”
and this tweet, which says:
“You’ll know when you’re living under Sharia Law if suddenly all your loans & credit cards become interest free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?”
and this tweet, which says:
“If you are still paying interest than Sharia Law hasn’t taken over America.”
These statements prove that Sarsour wants the U.S. to adopt Sharia law.
Sharia law bans women from driving cars, prohibits women from appearing alone in public, calls for girls to have their genitals mutilated, and gives a woman’s testimony in court only half the value of a man’s.
After Sarsour made those four tweets in favor of the U.S. adopting Sharia law, left wing American feminists chose her to be one of the organizers of the 2017 Women’s March.
But any movement which truly cared about women’s rights would not support someone who wants the U.S. to treat women in such a horrible and repulsive manner.
I will say one positive thing about Sarsour: even though Sarsour claims to believe in Sharia law, and says that women in Saudi Arabia are better off than women in the U.S., at least she is not dumb enough to actually move to Saudi Arabia.
In order for the women’s soccer team to be paid as much as the men’s team, at least one of these two things should have to happen
In order for the women’s soccer team to be paid as much as the men’s team, at least one of these two things should have to happen:
1) The women’s games generate as much advertising revenue as the men’s games.
2) The women’s team plays 25 games against the men’s team, and the women’s team wins at least 40% of those games.
San Francisco progressives wage war against women’s right to earn a living
According to this new article from the San Francisco Examiner, the progressives who control San Francisco’s government have ordered strip clubs to treat strippers as employees instead of as independent contractors.
Supporters of this new policy claim that it makes the strippers better off.
However, the strippers themselves say that it has actually made them worse off – so much so, in fact, that many of them have quit their jobs in San Francisco, and sought employment as strippers in other cities that do not have this same policy.
The article cites the following three reasons for how the new policy makes the strippers worse off:
1) The strippers get paid far less. For example, the article states:
A dancer at the Gold Club, who asked to be called Mary, said it had been common for dancers on average to sell around $1,000 in dances a shift and keep $750.
Under the new commission structure at the Gold Club, however, dancers said they keep none of the first $150 they sell in private dances, 40 percent of the next $250 they sell, and 60 percent of sales beyond that.
Some dancers said they must also pay a $100 fee for renting the private room.
Dancers at the Gold Club said they now walk away with only $60 on the first half-hour private dance they sell.
“When I make a customer pay $400 and I see $60 of it, it isn’t computing for me,” Mary said. “We want to do our job, and previously our business was to sell dances. And we still need to make living. But at the same time, where is the incentive?”
2) The strippers no longer get to decide how many days or which days they work each week.
3) When the strippers were independent contractors, they could choose to reject any potential client that they did not want. Now that they are employees, they no longer have this option.
The article also states:
He estimated that 200 dancers have quit their jobs since the change came down at BSC clubs, including Penthouse and Gold Club and said that the change has “dramatically affected the business and the profitability,” costing the clubs “several million dollars” a year.
and
The drastic pay cuts and availability of cheap flights have pushed some dancers to seek work outside of San Francisco, traveling as far as Las Vegas and Reno one or two nights a week while continuing to live in The City.
So there you have it. The elitist progressives, who think they know what’s best for everyone, claim that this new policy makes the strippers better off. However, the strippers themselves claim that this new policy makes them worse off.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/208300-2/
New rules for contractors have unexpected consequences for The City’s strip clubs
January 2, 2019
As some 30 dancers were handed the first employee paychecks ever issued to them by the Penthouse Club one evening in early November, a wave of panic swept the popular North Beach strip club.
“I opened mine in the locker room, and I was shocked,” said a former Penthouse dancer who asked to be identified as Jane. “All the other girls were also freaking out. Me and my friends decided right then that we were done. That was the final straw.”
Historically classified as independent contractors, the dancers were used to walking out of the club’s doors with cash each night — often hundreds of dollars — after their shifts ended. That changed suddenly when clubs across The City began enforcing a California Supreme Court ruling from April in an unrelated industry that set new standards for determining whether or not workers should be classified as employees.
The decision has shaken up the gig economy, but is also having an effect in unexpected places, such as in the hair salons and the adult entertainment industry, where workers have traditionally not been considered employees.
At local clubs, the move to convert dancers to employee status is causing an exodus, with many of them leaving San Francisco establishments.
“This whole business will be completely ruined. The whole point about being a stripper is you go in, get fast cash, no one knows how you’re getting it, it’s not documented and it’s not taken from you,” said a single mother who gave her name as Darla, who also recently cut ties with Penthouse Club. Like other dancers The San Francisco Examiner spoke with for this story, she asked to maintain anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Club owners say the changes are costing them as well.
A sign posted mid-October in the dancers’ dressing room at the Gold Club in the South of Market neighborhood said the club “felt that it was protecting your right and freedom to be an independent contractor.”
“However, as a result of the lawsuits and ongoing demands by the suing dancers and their attorneys, the club is now being compelled by Court order to eliminate the independent contractor option and require all dancers to become the club’s employees,” the sign read.
Axel Sang, marketing director of BSC, confirmed in an email to the Examiner that the dancers were formerly contractors but are now “club employees being paid an hourly wage and commission on dance sales.”
“The BSC-managed clubs now have matching payroll taxes, unemployment compensation, workman’s compensation, Healthy San Francisco costs, Affordable Care Insurance costs, and SF sick leave pay for several hundred new employee entertainers in addition to the hourly wage,” he wrote.
He estimated that 200 dancers have quit their jobs since the change came down at BSC clubs, including Penthouse and Gold Club and said that the change has “dramatically affected the business and the profitability,” costing the clubs “several million dollars” a year.
“A substantial reduction in the number of entertainers performing as well as the substantial increased payroll and other costs makes it very difficult to generate profits,” Sang said.
The California Supreme Court decision pushing the changes in the business came out of a lawsuit brought by two drivers for Dynamex, a same-day delivery and logistics company that converted its drivers to independent contractors in 2004. Under the ruling, workers may now be considered employees if they perform work within the usual course of the company’s business, said David Peer, a labor attorney in Carlsbad who has written about the Dynamex ruling.
“If you are running a strip club, you would think that the dancers are performing work within the usual course,” Peer said. “If the club owners want to play it safe, they should certainly be paying minimum wage and following the wage and hour rules that most organizations follow when they hire an employee.”
Lawsuits alleging improper classification of exotic dancers predate the Dynamex ruling, according to Harold Lichten of Lichten & Liss-Riordan, a Boston law firm representing Uber drivers who claim the rideshare company misclassified them.
“When you improperly characterize someone as an independent contractor you don’t have to pay social security tax, unemployment tax, minimum wage or overtime,” Lichten said, adding that the incentives were “incredibly great” for companies to “misclassify people because they were saving so much money at the workers’ expense.”
Lichten said the Dynamex ruling became leverage in ongoing litigation against Uber, and noted that it should also come as a benefit to the dancers, who now are now eligible for the protections afforded to all employees.
“The concern is that some companies may lower the amount they pay them to make up their losses,” Lichten said. “That would be unfortunate. But on balance, it’s much better to be an employee because you have legal protections.”
However the dancers interviewed by the Examiner said that while they are now entitled to minimum wage, benefits and the option to unionize, the reclassification has done more harm than good.
“Not one of those girls had a check for two weeks over $300. There was a lot of upset. A lot of girls packed up to leave that night. I was one of those girls,” Darla said.
“I can go work at McDonald’s for $15 an hour, and not take off my clothes, and not put up with the crap I put up with as a dancer,” Darla added, noting that all of the Penthouse dancers “have considered leaving.”
The vast majority of the strip clubs in San Francisco — 10 out of 12 — are owned or managed by BSC Management. The only exceptions are the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre and The Crazy Horse.
Sang said the company is not paying dancers more than minimum wage because they “are paid commissions on dance sales which in most cases far exceed the hourly wage.”
But dancers said the commission structure for private dances has also been significantly cut.
Policies can vary for each club, but before the reclassification, dancers said if they arrived to their shift early enough they would keep 75 percent of their dance sales — which is where they made the majority of their money.
A dancer at the Gold Club, who asked to be called Mary, said it had been common for dancers on average to sell around $1,000 in dances a shift and keep $750.
Under the new commission structure at the Gold Club, however, dancers said they keep none of the first $150 they sell in private dances, 40 percent of the next $250 they sell, and 60 percent of sales beyond that.
Some dancers said they must also pay a $100 fee for renting the private room.
Dancers at the Gold Club said they now walk away with only $60 on the first half-hour private dance they sell.
“When I make a customer pay $400 and I see $60 of it, it isn’t computing for me,” Mary said. “We want to do our job, and previously our business was to sell dances. And we still need to make living. But at the same time, where is the incentive?”
Some dancers also feared being classified as employees would mean not being able to pick and choose which customers to serve.
Joe Carouba, an owner of BSC, declined to speak with the Examiner for this story because of pending litigation. But in a deposition he gave in October in connection with a lawsuit filed by Olivia Doe, he said he “firmly believed” dancers should be independent contractors so they can assert more control over which customers they will and won’t serve.
“I think they should control their own sexuality, they should control their own bodies,” he said. “The difference there being, of course, if you’re an employee, you don’t have a choice who you perform for, as an independent contractor you get to choose how you perform, whom you perform for, and what level you’re comfortable at.”
Dancers said many of them were poorly informed and caught unaware when the new contracts were rolled out.
Jane said she was one of the first Penthouse dancers to sign the new contract amid confusion, and wasn’t given a copy or time to review it.
At the Gold Club, Mary said management called dancers into the office in the middle of their shifts, still dressed in bikinis and eight-inch heels, and told them to look at a new contract on a computer screen and immediately sign it. Some dancers had been drinking during their shift, she said.
“We were given no opportunity to look at the contracts or have paper copies beforehand,” Mary said. “There’s really been no communication, no transparency.”
Sang denied the allegations, and said cameras were installed to protect the clubs from legal challenges over the new contracts.
“Signs were posted clearly that the areas were under video and audio surveillance. Each contract signing on video and audio clearly shows each entertainer was required to fully read the contract before signing,” Sang wrote in an email. “On camera, each entertainer was clearly given a copy of the contracts that they signed.”
Dancers said morale has plummeted at clubs across The City. Many are unhappy with how management announced and rolled out the change, but fear losing their jobs if they complain.
Because BSC has a virtual monopoly on San Francisco strip clubs, dancers said if they are blacklisted at one club, they are afraid they won’t be able to work anywhere else in The City.
While dancers across the country have sued clubs saying they should have been classified as employees instead of independent contractors, those who spoke with the Examiner said not everyone wants to be an employee. There are advantages to being independent contractors — so long as they are actually treated as contractors.
Mary said being treated as a contractor would mean being able to negotiate dance fees with clients directly rather than have the club set prices, and to pick which dates and times to work. Previously, as contractors, dancers could pick which days to work, but not which hours.
“Contractors should have autonomy,” she said.
An often-touted perk of being an employee is access to benefits, such as health insurance. But to qualify, employees must work enough hours to be considered full-time — which isn’t practical for most people dancing at a strip club. Dancers said even working three days a week is physically exhausting.
“You do what you need to do to maintain your boundary while making sure they have a good time. It takes a lot of emotional labor to do that,” Mary said. “I don’t think people realize that’s the most difficult part of our job. It’s not really talked about in the public perception of stripping.”
The drastic pay cuts and availability of cheap flights have pushed some dancers to seek work outside of San Francisco, traveling as far as Las Vegas and Reno one or two nights a week while continuing to live in The City.
“Girls are scrambling to find a job to fit their lifestyle or even make ends meet,” Jane said.
California Women’s March cancels upcoming event for being “overwhelmingly white”
The California chapter of the Women’s March has canceled an event that had been scheduled for next month, because it would have been “overwhelmingly white.”
The group’s official statement on the cancellation says (the bolding is mine):
“The local organizers are continuing to meet and discuss how to broaden representation in the organizing committee to create an event that represents and supports peoples who live here in Humboldt. Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community… Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the organizing team will take time for more outreach. Our goal is that planning will continue and we will be successful in creating an event that will build power and community engagement through connection between women that seek to improve the lives of all in our community.”
The way that Planned Parenthood treats its pregnant employees is cruel, illegal, and extremely hypocritical
The New York Times just published this article, which is titled, “Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees.”
The article cites numerous examples of how Planned Parenthood has given absolutely horrible treatment to its pregnant employees.
Not only are these actions on the part of Planned Parenthood cruel, some of them are also illegal, and all of them are extremely hypocritical.
If there’s any one organization that should treat its pregnant employees with kindness and respect, as well as obeying the laws regarding pregnant employees, it’s Planned Parenthood.
Here are some excerpts from the article, along with my own comments:
Ms. Hairston told the human-resources department for Planned Parenthood’s clinic in White Plains, N.Y., that her high blood pressure was threatening her pregnancy. She sent the department multiple notes from her nurse recommending that she take frequent breaks.
Managers ignored the notes. They rarely gave her time to rest or to take a lunch break, Ms. Hairston said.
“I had to hold back tears talking to pregnant women, telling them to take care of their pregnancies when I couldn’t take care of mine,” she said. “It made me jealous.”
That is just downright plain mean.
Planned Parenthood… has been accused of sidelining, ousting or otherwise handicapping pregnant employees, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
In interviews and legal documents, women at Planned Parenthood… described discrimination that violated federal or state laws — managers considering pregnancy in hiring decisions, for example, or denying rest breaks recommended by a doctor.
These are the exact same kinds of illegal treatment of employees that left wing feminists have always claimed to be against. The fact that Planned Parenthood did this to its own pregnant employees is inexcusable, illegal, and terribly hypocritical.
… at Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading provider of reproductive services, managers in some locations declined to hire pregnant job candidates, refused requests by expecting mothers to take breaks and in some cases pushed them out of their jobs after they gave birth, according to current and former employees in California, Texas, North Carolina and New York.
Most Planned Parenthood offices do not provide paid maternity leave
How many zillions of times have left wing feminists said they were in favor of paid maternity leave? And can anyone name an organization that is more left wing feminist than Planned Parenthood? I dare say that these pregnant employees would have been treated far better if they had been working at one of the conservative, right wing, for-profit corporations that left wing feminists are always accusing of being “sexist” and “misogynist.”
A dozen lawsuits filed against Planned Parenthood clinics in federal and state courts since 2013 accused managers of denying workers rest periods, lunch breaks or overtime pay, or retaliating against them for taking medical leave.
Managers have discriminated against pregnant women and new mothers, according to interviews with the current and former Planned Parenthood employees and with organizers from the Office and Professional Employees International Union, which represents some Planned Parenthood workers.
In Miami, one current and two former employees said that women at a Planned Parenthood office were scared to tell managers they were pregnant. One of them said that, in conversations with supervisors, colleagues would often volunteer that they were not planning on having children or were gay or single.
“It was looked down upon for you to get pregnant,” said Carolina Delgado, who worked in the Miami office until 2012. “I don’t think that any supervisor had to literally say it for us to feel it.”
Apparently, Planned Parenthood would rather spend money fighting lawsuits than treat its pregnant employees with respect. Absolutely disgusting.
A former hiring manager at a Planned Parenthood in California said that when internal promotions came up, supervisors openly debated whether candidates were likely to get pregnant in the near future and preferred those who were not. They declined to hire one pregnant woman and to promote one new mother, the employee said. (Under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act, it is illegal to consider whether a job candidate is or will become pregnant.)
The former manager said her colleagues felt they couldn’t afford to promote someone only to lose them for several weeks.
Completely despicable. It was left wing feminists who fought so hard to pass the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in the first place. How dare they violate the very same law that they expect everyone else to obey.
49 of Planned Parenthood’s 55 regional offices — which each manage a set of local clinics — do not provide paid maternity leave
89% of Planned Parenthood’s regional offices do not give paid maternity leave to their employees. So why do they even call themselves “Planned Parenthood” in the first place?
Tracy Webber, the former director of clinical services in White Plains, sued the organization for pregnancy discrimination in 2009, saying she had been fired four weeks after giving birth. Planned Parenthood settled for undisclosed terms.
Planned Parenthood fired an employee because she became a parent? That’s mean, and it’s illegal, and especially, it’s the height of hypocrisy.
A woman who worked at Planned Parenthood’s New Rochelle, N.Y., clinic and who declined to be named said in an interview that, when she got pregnant last year, managers ignored her doctor’s note recommending frequent breaks. Her manager asked her to delay her maternity leave and, after she gave birth, pressed her to return early.
The fact that Planned Parenthood ignored a doctor’s note from one of its own pregnant employees makes me wonder about the quality of the medical care and advice that Planned Parenthood gives to its own clients.
A medical assistant at the same clinic was fired in May 2018, the day she returned from maternity leave, according to a former human resources manager who oversaw the clinic. Jonas Urba, the woman’s lawyer, said she reached a confidential resolution with Planned Parenthood.
Once again, Planned Parenthood fired one of its employees because she became a parent. This kind of behavior by Planned Parenthood is extraordinarily hypocritical.
When Ms. Hairston asked for regular breaks, including 30 minutes for lunch, her supervisors brushed her off. Ms. Hairston said she sent multiple notes from her nurse at Full Circle Women’s Health to the regional office’s human resources department, stating that the extra breaks were medically necessary. No one responded, and nothing changed, according to Ms. Hairston and the former human resources manager.
Ms. Hairston’s hands and feet swelled; the clinic’s plastic gloves no longer fit. Her blood pressure got so high that her doctor put her on bed rest when she was seven months pregnant.
She returned to work on strict orders to not work more than six hours a day and to take regular breaks. One day in March, she worked a much longer shift. She soon became so sick that her doctor told her to go back on bed rest. A few days later, on March 23, she went to the hospital. Doctors performed an emergency C-section. She was 34 weeks pregnant.
When she had been on maternity leave for eight of the 12 weeks guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, Planned Parenthood’s human resources department called her multiple times and urged her to return to work early, Ms. Hairston said. She emailed the department and said she felt “discriminated against.” She resigned in June.
So this is how Planned Parenthood treats pregnant women. This is astoundingly horrendous. Shame on Planned Parenthood for treating women the exact opposite of the way Planned Parenthood tries to depict itself in its publicity material.
So, there you have it. Planned Parenthood is mean to its pregnant employees, it breaks the very laws that it claims to support, and it apparently has no interest in helping its female employees who “plan” to become “parents,” despite that being the organization’s very name.
New York Times: Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees
Not only are these actions on the part of Planned Parenthood cruel, some of them are also illegal, and all of them are extremely hypocritical.
If there’s any one organization that should treat pregnant employees with kindness and respect, as well as obeying the laws regarding pregnant employees, it’s Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees
Employers that champion women face accusations of discriminating against their pregnant workers, showing how widespread the problem is in American workplaces.
December 20, 2018
As a medical assistant at Planned Parenthood, Ta’Lisa Hairston urged pregnant women to take rest breaks at work, stay hydrated and, please, eat regular meals.
Then she got pregnant and couldn’t follow her own advice.
Last winter, Ms. Hairston told the human-resources department for Planned Parenthood’s clinic in White Plains, N.Y., that her high blood pressure was threatening her pregnancy. She sent the department multiple notes from her nurse recommending that she take frequent breaks.
Managers ignored the notes. They rarely gave her time to rest or to take a lunch break, Ms. Hairston said.
“I had to hold back tears talking to pregnant women, telling them to take care of their pregnancies when I couldn’t take care of mine,” she said. “It made me jealous.”
Discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers remains widespread in the American workplace. It is so pervasive that even organizations that define themselves as champions of women are struggling with the problem.
That includes Planned Parenthood, which has been accused of sidelining, ousting or otherwise handicapping pregnant employees, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
In interviews and legal documents, women at Planned Parenthood and other organizations with a feminist bent described discrimination that violated federal or state laws — managers considering pregnancy in hiring decisions, for example, or denying rest breaks recommended by a doctor.
In other cases, the bias was more subtle. Many women said they were afraid to announce a pregnancy at work, sensing they would be seen as abandoning their colleagues.
Some of those employers saw accommodating expecting mothers as expensive and inconvenient. Others were unsympathetic to workers seeking special treatment.
At Natera, which sells genetic tests for pregnant women, two former employees, Melissa Blain Johnson and Judit Rigo, said they were demoted while on maternity leave. Ms. Johnson, who has sued Natera, also said that she was left feeling like a “guinea pig” when her boss suggested that she and another pregnant employee pose as patients and get genetically tested by a rival company.
“Ms. Johnson’s employment at Natera was not influenced inappropriately by her pregnancy or subsequent maternity leave,” said Anna Czene, a Natera spokeswoman. “The same was true for Ms. Rigo.”
At Avon, which calls itself “the company for women,” two employees in a cosmetics-testing lab have sued for being forced to handle toxic chemicals while pregnant. A marketing executive, Caroline Ruiz, also said she was fired four days after announcing her pregnancy.
Paige Cali, a spokeswoman for Avon, said the company “strongly denies claims of discrimination.”
At Mehri & Skalet, a progressive law firm suing Walmart for pregnancy discrimination, three lawyers have accused a founding partner, Cyrus Mehri, of mistreatment. Heidi Burakiewicz said Mr. Mehri pressured her to return early from maternity leave. Sandi Farrell was told to participate in a performance review during her leave, and when she asked to postpone it she was fired. Taryn Wilgus Null said Mr. Mehri questioned her child care arrangements in a performance review after she returned from leave.
Mr. Mehri said he strongly denied the accusations and that no one was mistreated after giving birth. He said that Ms. Burakiewicz’s allegation “is a lie, plain and simple,” that Ms. Farrell had performance problems and that Ms. Null, now a lawyer at the Justice Department, misinterpreted his comments.
And at Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading provider of reproductive services, managers in some locations declined to hire pregnant job candidates, refused requests by expecting mothers to take breaks and in some cases pushed them out of their jobs after they gave birth, according to current and former employees in California, Texas, North Carolina and New York.
Most Planned Parenthood offices do not provide paid maternity leave, though many let new mothers take partially paid disability leave.
“I believe we must do better than we are now,” Leana Wen, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. “It’s our obligation to do better, for our staff, for their families and for our patients.”
Ms. Wen said the organization was investigating the allegations of pregnancy discrimination reported by The New York Times. The organization also is conducting a review to determine the cost of providing paid maternity leave to nearly 12,000 employees nationwide.
Vincent Russell, the regional chief executive who oversees the office where Ms. Hairston worked, denied her accusations.
While Planned Parenthood’s clinics and regional offices brought in about $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2016 — half from private donations and half from the government, to reimburse treatment provided to Medicaid patients — conservative lawmakers routinely threaten to kill its taxpayer funding. With their finances precarious, the clinics pay modest salaries to the employees who provide health care — abortions, cancer screenings, prenatal care, disease testing — to 2.4 million mostly low-income patients every year.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America has its headquarters in Manhattan. The clinics that serve women are run by 55 regional affiliates with their own chief executives and human resources policies. They receive some money and support from headquarters.
Tight budgets sometimes created punishing workplace conditions, employees said. A dozen lawsuits filed against Planned Parenthood clinics in federal and state courts since 2013 accused managers of denying workers rest periods, lunch breaks or overtime pay, or retaliating against them for taking medical leave.
Managers have discriminated against pregnant women and new mothers, according to interviews with the current and former Planned Parenthood employees and with organizers from the Office and Professional Employees International Union, which represents some Planned Parenthood workers.
In Miami, one current and two former employees said that women at a Planned Parenthood office were scared to tell managers they were pregnant. One of them said that, in conversations with supervisors, colleagues would often volunteer that they were not planning on having children or were gay or single.
“It was looked down upon for you to get pregnant,” said Carolina Delgado, who worked in the Miami office until 2012. “I don’t think that any supervisor had to literally say it for us to feel it.”
Dannette Hill, Planned Parenthood’s head of human resources, said that most parents who work in the Miami office have been promoted after returning from leave.
A former hiring manager at a Planned Parenthood in California said that when internal promotions came up, supervisors openly debated whether candidates were likely to get pregnant in the near future and preferred those who were not. They declined to hire one pregnant woman and to promote one new mother, the employee said. (Under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act, it is illegal to consider whether a job candidate is or will become pregnant.)
The former manager said her colleagues felt they couldn’t afford to promote someone only to lose them for several weeks.
Financial pressures also explain why 49 of Planned Parenthood’s 55 regional offices — which each manage a set of local clinics — do not provide paid maternity leave. Employees in about 20 of those regions can use short-term disability to earn a portion of their salaries while on leave. The New York headquarters provides six weeks of paid parental leave.
Last year, Christine Charbonneau, who runs the regional office in Seattle, asked her human resources department to find out how much it would cost to cover maternity leave for the region. The estimate: $2 million a year. That is the entire annual budget of some clinics.
Ms. Charbonneau’s office, which oversees 27 clinics in the Northwest, generates $77 million a year in revenue. But states like Washington and Idaho have cut government funding in recent years. Paying for maternity leave, Ms. Charbonneau said, could force her to close clinics.
“It is easy to accuse someone of hypocrisy if you’re not the one trying to find $2 million out of thin air,” she said. “You try to be the Planned Parenthood that donors expect, and yet it is unattainable.”
Planned Parenthood’s policies, though, can make it hard for employees to scrape by after giving birth.
In August, Marissa Hamilton, an employee at Planned Parenthood in Colorado, gave birth to a baby boy. He was eight weeks premature, weighed less than four pounds and spent weeks in neonatal intensive care. The office doesn’t provide paid maternity leave.
In September, she started a fund-raiser on GoFundMe. On the appeals page, Ms. Hamilton wrote that she was under financial strain because “On top of medical bills I cannot work.” She set the goal at $15,000. So far she has raised $1,995.
Multiple Planned Parenthood executives said in interviews that they were eager for The Times to publish an article about the lack of paid maternity leave because they hoped it would lead to changes in the organization’s policies.
Ms. Hairston, the former medical assistant, took the job in 2015 because she believed in the group’s mission. “Planned Parenthood helped me give women a voice to do what they wanted with their bodies,” she said.
Ms. Hairston, 27, counseled women who wanted abortions and checked up on those carrying to term. She said she rarely took lunch and often spent 10-hour shifts on her feet.
She figured that there would be no better place to work while pregnant than a clinic that dealt with expecting mothers every day.
But Planned Parenthood’s Westchester County clinics, overseen by a regional office in Hawthorne, N.Y., had a history of issues with pregnant employees.
Tracy Webber, the former director of clinical services in White Plains, sued the organization for pregnancy discrimination in 2009, saying she had been fired four weeks after giving birth. Planned Parenthood settled for undisclosed terms.
A woman who worked at Planned Parenthood’s New Rochelle, N.Y., clinic and who declined to be named said in an interview that, when she got pregnant last year, managers ignored her doctor’s note recommending frequent breaks. Her manager asked her to delay her maternity leave and, after she gave birth, pressed her to return early.
A medical assistant at the same clinic was fired in May 2018, the day she returned from maternity leave, according to a former human resources manager who oversaw the clinic. Jonas Urba, the woman’s lawyer, said she reached a confidential resolution with Planned Parenthood.
The former human resources manager, who requested anonymity, said that executives assumed that when a pregnant worker brought in a doctor’s note, it was an excuse to work less. People who took sick days were perceived as lacking commitment.
“All the individuals identified in the article were treated fairly and equitably, free of any discrimination,” said Mr. Russell, the head of Planned Parenthood’s Hawthorne office.
When Ms. Hairston asked for regular breaks, including 30 minutes for lunch, her supervisors brushed her off. Ms. Hairston said she sent multiple notes from her nurse at Full Circle Women’s Health to the regional office’s human resources department, stating that the extra breaks were medically necessary. No one responded, and nothing changed, according to Ms. Hairston and the former human resources manager.
Ms. Hairston’s hands and feet swelled; the clinic’s plastic gloves no longer fit. Her blood pressure got so high that her doctor put her on bed rest when she was seven months pregnant.
She returned to work on strict orders to not work more than six hours a day and to take regular breaks. One day in March, she worked a much longer shift. She soon became so sick that her doctor told her to go back on bed rest. A few days later, on March 23, she went to the hospital. Doctors performed an emergency C-section. She was 34 weeks pregnant.
When she had been on maternity leave for eight of the 12 weeks guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, Planned Parenthood’s human resources department called her multiple times and urged her to return to work early, Ms. Hairston said. She emailed the department and said she felt “discriminated against.” She resigned in June.
“I didn’t get into the medical field to be treated like this,” she said.
The last she heard from Planned Parenthood was a letter asking her to donate money. She threw it in the trash.
Linda Sarsour’s favorite country arrests seven feminists for speaking out against Sharia law. They could get the death penalty.
Linda Sarsour organized the Women’s March in January 2017.
Sarsour made this tweet, which says the following:
“10 weeks of PAID maternity leave in Saudi Arabia. Yes PAID. And ur worrying about women driving. Puts us to shame.”
She also made this tweet, which says:
“shariah law is reasonable and once u read into the details it makes a lot of sense. People just know the basics”
and this tweet, which says:
“You’ll know when you’re living under Sharia Law if suddenly all your loans & credit cards become interest free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?”
and this tweet, which says:
“If you are still paying interest than Sharia Law hasn’t taken over America.”
These statement’s prove that Sarsour wants the U.S. to adopt Sharia law.
Sharia law bans women from driving cars, prohibits women from appearing alone in public, calls for girls to have their genitals mutilated, and gives a woman’s testimony in court only half the value of a man’s.
I just found out that three months ago, Saudi Arabia arrested seven feminists because they spoke out against Sharia law. They could get the death penalty.
Linda Sarsour, apparently, supports this.
Using a gun for self defense is real female empowerment in action, and I invite anti-gun activists and left wing feminists to explain why this particular example should be illegal
I’ve posted this meme before – it’s one of my favorites. (I would give credit to the person who created it, but I don’t know who that is.)
Update: Thanks to gdruzek for posting the following in the comment section:
The lady is Betty and the photographs are by Oleg Volk. I hope you can amend your article to reflect that. Oh, and he also writes for the Dillon Precision “Blue Press.”
I used google and found this link, which does indeed give Oleg Volk credit for the image:
http://www.militia-of-florida.com/rkba_images2/index2.html
This article from Fox News descrbes a real life example of the meme in action. You can even see it in the security video at the link (which can’t be embedded here.)
And please note that the trigger was never pulled. Just showing the gun was enough to scare the bad guy away.
In the video, the guy is clearly pissed off that the woman had a gun.
This is real female empowerment in action, and I can’t understand why anyone who calls themself a feminist would be against it.
If anyone here opposes the use of a gun in this particular instance, then please offer an alternative (in the comment section) for what the innocent people should have done instead. And please keep in mind that during the several minutes it takes for the police to respond, this scumbag could have killed this innocent person.
Watch: Pistol-packing waitress defends George Webb co-worker during attack
July 8, 2018
A waitress with a concealed carry permit defended her co-worker after an irate customer went behind the counter and punched her, newly released video reveals.
The attack at George Webb restaurant in Milwaukee on June 28 could have been much worse, according to Alderman Bob Donovan, who made the footage public.
“I thank God the other waitress had a concealed carry weapon, has a permit… I shudder to think, had she not been there and had she not had this weapon, what this guy might have done,” Donovan told Fox 6.
The suspect, who is a regular at the restaurant and reportedly had been cursing at his server throughout the night for taking too long with his order, came behind the counter and punched her in the face.
Within seconds, the woman’s colleague pulled out a handgun from her waistband and pointed at him until he backed off.
Although the suspect has not been arrested, Fox 6 reports that Milwaukee police know who they are looking for and that the man is allegedly a drug dealer.
According to local media, the victim is back at work and she said the restaurant’s owner allows employees to carry a concealed weapon as long as they have a permit.
“It is sickening to see this unsuspecting worker assaulted so brutally by this individual,” Donovan said. “For a man to do that to some innocent woman, it’s just beyond me.”
Poll: Should professional tennis continue or abolish its policy of gender segregation?
I came up with the idea for this poll after reading John McEnroe’s recent claim that if Serena Williams had to compete against men, she would be ranked at about #700 instead of her current position of #1.
Totalitarian feminist Sarrah Le Marquand: It should be illegal to be a stay-at-home mum
Sarrah Le Marquand: It should be illegal to be a stay-at-home mum
By Sarrah Le Marquand
March 20, 2017
There’s one issue guaranteed to trigger hysteria across the nation every time it comes up in the news, and it has nothing to do with Pauline Hanson, international terrorism or Married at First Sight.
It’s the topic of stay-at-home mums. More specifically, the release of any data or analysis that dares recommend Australian women should get out of the living room/kitchen/nursery and back into the workforce.
So the outcry has been predictable in the wake of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) recent report which had the audacity to suggest stay-at-home mums would be better off putting their skills to use in paid employment.
“One of the areas of greatest untapped potential in the Australian labour force is inactive and/or part-time working women, especially those with children,’’ concluded the landmark study. “There are potentially large losses to the economy when women stay at home or work short part-time hours.’’
Right on cue, hysteria ensued, with commentators from coast to coast howling in indignation at the very idea that the uppity OECD would insinuate Australia might have a tiny bit of a problem with our female workforce participation rates.
For days you couldn’t walk past a television, radio or computer screen without encountering a defensive rant about how the most valuable work a woman can do involves nappies, play-doh, and a strict adherence to only leaving the family home during the hours of 9am to 5pm to attend playgroup or a similar non-work sanctioned activity.
And then we wonder why Australia continues to languish in the bottom third of OECD member states when it comes to female employment. It’s no mystery; our collective support for working women makes Donald Trump’s cabinet look like Women’s March HQ by comparison.
First, a few facts. Anyone who has a child — and this goes for both mothers and fathers — knows that everything else in life becomes a distant second to that child’s welfare, happiness and wellbeing. So this is not a discussion about the importance of parenting — that is beyond dispute.
And yes, the role played by parents in the early months and years following the birth of a child is vital and irreplaceable. It also stands to reason that for many (but certainly not all) families, it is the mother who opts to take time off work during this period to solely focus on caring for her baby.
Once again, there is nothing wrong with this. In fact, that time at home should be a privilege afforded to more new mums, which is why a few years back I was a lone voice in supporting Tony Abbott’s grossly misunderstood and thus ill-fated paid parental leave scheme, which proposed all female employees receive their normal salary for six months.
So it’s not as simple as suggesting that the OECD’s rallying call to utilise the potential of stay-at-home mums is an insult to mothers — on the contrary, it is the desperately needed voice of reason that Australians cannot afford to ignore.
Rather than wail about the supposed liberation in a woman’s right to choose to shun paid employment, we should make it a legal requirement that all parents of children of school-age or older are gainfully employed.
The OECD was right to criticise the double standards applied to Australia’s work-search rules regarding welfare benefits. While young people face strict criteria when seeking to access the dole, those aged over 50 can still receive it despite not looking for a job by citing 15 hours volunteer work a week.
The double standards are even greater for stay-at-home mums, with governments of all persuasions traditionally wary to tackle the unfair tax concessions enjoyed by one-income households for fear of inciting voting fury. (No doubt they refer to Abbott’s aforementioned paid parental leave scheme as a cautionary tale).
But it’s time for a serious rethink of this kid-glove approach to women of child-bearing and child-rearing age. Holding us less accountable when it comes to our employment responsibilities is not doing anyone any favours. Not children, not fathers, not bosses — and certainly not women.
Only when the female half of the population is expected to hold down a job and earn money to pay the bills in the same way that men are routinely expected to do will we see things change for the better for either gender.
Only when it becomes the norm for all families to have both parents in paid employment, and sharing the stress of the work-home juggle, will we finally have a serious conversation about how to achieve a more balanced modern workplace.
Only when the tiresome and completely unfounded claim that “feminism is about choice” is dead and buried (it’s not about choice, it’s about equality) will we consign restrictive gender stereotypes to history.
So long as we as a nation cling to the lie that only a stay-at-home mum is best placed to assume the responsibilities of caregiver then working fathers will continue to feel insecure about stepping off the corporate treadmill to spend more time with their children.
It’s not good enough — and only when we evenly divide the responsibility for workplace participation between the two genders will we truly see a more equitable division between men and women in all parts of Australian life.
Hypocrite liberal women are accepting money from men, to prove that women don’t need money from men
Recently on Interstate 40 between Winston-Salem and Greensboro in North Carolina, an anonymous party paid to have a billboard put up which says “Real men provide. Real women appreciate it.”
Here’s a photograph of the billboard (which comes form this website, and which I am showing under fair use):
Two women who disagree with the message on the billboard – Paula Atwood and Kathryn Rende – have set up this GoFundMe page to raise money to put up a billboard with their own message to counter the message on the original billboard.
However, according to the the list of people who have donated to their fundraiser, these two women, who are trying to disprove the claim that “real men provide – real women appreciate it,” are themselves accepting and appreciating money from men.
So while the intent of these two women was to disprove the claim that was made on the original billboard, the actual result of their actions was that they ended up reinforcing the claim.
Georgetown Islamic Studies Professor: Slavery OK, So is Non-Consensual Sex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpFatRwdPm0
Georgetown Islamic Studies Professor: Slavery OK, So is Non-Consensual Sex
February 10, 2017
A professor at Georgetown University is teaching his students that men do not need consent to have sex with women, and that slavery is justifiable under Islamic teachings.
Islamic Studies professor Jonathan Brown recently lectured at the International Institute of Islamic Thought, where he shared his alarming beliefs with students in attendance in his lecture, “Islam and the Problem of Slavery.” Freelance writer Umar Lee expressed his shock over the 90-minute lecture, which included explicit endorsements of rape and slavery.
Brown himself uploaded the lecture to YouTube.
According to Lee, Brown’s lecture was supposed to revolve around slavery in Islam, but the lecturer moved its focus to criticize the United States, United Kingdom and China. Brown described slavery in these non-Muslim societies as brutal, which they were, but lauded the historically inhumane practice in Arab lands and Turkey.
“Indeed, according to Brown, slaves in the Muslim world lived a pretty good life,” wrote Lee. “I thought the Muslim community was done with this dishonest North Korean style of propaganda. Obviously not.”
Brown decried the use of prison labor in the United States and highlighted other problems inherent in Western society, but refused to address the abuse of foreign laborers in the Gulf or the ghastly treatment of prisoners in the Middle East. It was a one-sided lecture that glorified his religion while demonizing Western society.
The Islamic Studies professor said that in Muslim societies, “slavery wasn’t racialized,” unlike the United States. Lee points out that this is untrue, given that in the Arab world, black people are referred to as “abeed,” the Arab word for “slave.”
Brown stated that slaves were “protected by Sharia,” omitting the various atrocities committed by slave-owners. Girls and women were forced into the sex trade and their male counterparts were often castrated.
“In general you don’t find the brutality that you see in American slavery,” said Brown, who described the historically common practice as “investments” and “walking venture properties” for slave-owners.
The soft-pedaling and revisionism of historical atrocities is deplorable, to say the least.
Historically, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams conducted warfare against vassal states of the Ottoman Empire to end the Barbary slave trade, in which North African pirates conducted constant raids into European coastal towns to capture men and women for slavery.
Brown defended slavery, stating, “It’s not immoral for one human to own another human” by comparing it to marriage—a quid pro quo arrangement in which both slave and master benefited from the arrangement.
“I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody because we own lots of people all around us and we’re owned by people,” said Brown.
A female attendee asked Brown about the permissibility of sex with slaves, to which the professor stated that “Consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex,” and defined consent as a Western concept that emerged with women’s suffrage and female body autonomy. Brown, he said, believes that marital rape was an invalid concept in Islam.
Had Prof. Brown’s words been spoken by a practicing member of any other religion, they would’ve lost their jobs and shunned out of the academic world.
Women’s march speaker Donna Hylton spent 27 years in a maximum-security prison for being an accessory to the kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder of a gay man
Women’s march speaker Donna Hylton spent 27 years in a maximum-security prison for being an accessory to the kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder of a gay man.
Which is not surprising, given that we already knew that women’s march organizer Linda Sarsour wants the U.S. to adopt Sharia law.
This image proves that 2017 women’s march organizer Linda Sarsour wants the U.S. to adopt Sharia law
I have created the following image, which proves that 2017 women’s march organizer Linda Sarsour wants the U.S. to adopt Sharia law:
Video shows the U.S. president groping a woman. But the President is Clinton, not Trump, so the political left is perfectly OK with it.
Here’s a video of the U.S. President groping a woman, when he mistakenly thought the camera was turned off.
If this was President Trump, the political left would, justifiably so, be very upset.
But it’s not President Trump. It’s President Clinton. And to those on the political left, that makes it perfectly acceptable.
Also, note the ABC News logo on the bottom right corner. The video’s description at YouTube refers to the video as “uncovered ABC footage,” which suggests that it was never aired at all, on any local or national news broadcast. If this had been Trump, the national mainstream media would be playing this clip all across the country, day and night, for a very long time. But since it’s Clinton, that kind of media exposure didn’t happen, so almost no one knows about it. Media bias at its finest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1loRkVW0fys
Women’s march organizer Linda Sarsour says Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women “puts us to shame”
Linda Sarsour organized the recent women’s march.
Below is a screen capture of a tweet that she made, which says the following:
“10 weeks of PAID maternity leave in Saudi Arabia. Yes PAID. And ur worrying about women driving. Puts us to shame.”
And this woman is a role model for millions of U.S. women?
In my opinion, that’s pretty scary.
She also made this tweet, which says
“shariah law is reasonable and once u read into the details it makes a lot of sense. People just know the basics”
and this tweet, which says
“You’ll know when you’re living under Sharia Law if suddenly all your loans & credit cards become interest free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?”
and this tweet, which says
“If you are still paying interest than Sharia Law hasn’t taken over America.”
So there you have it. Millions of U.S. women support a woman who wants the U.S. to adopt a legal system that bans women from driving cars, prohibits women from appearing alone in public, calls for girls to have their genitals mutilated, and gives a woman’s testimony in court only half the value of a man’s.
Of course, immigration patterns prove that women overwhelmingly prefer living in the U.S. over Saudi Arabia. I’ve never heard of any woman who was born in the U.S. who chose to permanently move to Saudi Arabia. But I have heard of plenty of women who were born in Saudi Arabia who chose to permanently move to the U.S.
Sarsour herself was born in Brooklyn. I’m glad she was born in the U.S., because she has far more rights and freedoms here than she would in Saudi Arabia. It’s too bad that she mistakenly thinks that women women are better off in Saudi Arabia than in the U.S. I hope she will reconsider her position.
Huffington Post says it’s “Islamophobic” to say women’s march organizer Linda Sarsour supports Sharia law, but doesn’t mention her tweets that support Sharia law
The Gateway Pundit recently published this article about Linda Sarsour, who organized the recent women’s march against Donald Trump. The article states that Sarsour supports Sharia law, and as evidence, includes these two tweets:
The Huffington Post responded by publishing this article, which says that the Gateway Pundit and other websites had
“… deployed classic Islamophobic tactics in trying to discredit Sarsour, claiming… that she supports the spread of Sharia in the U.S….”
Nowhere in that article does the Huffington Post actually say anything about Sarsour’s two tweets.
The women’s march against Trump was organized by a woman who supports Sharia law
Organizer For DC Women’s March, Linda Sarsour Is Pro Sharia Law with Ties To Hamas
January 21, 2017
Approximately 200,000 people participated in a ‘Women’s March’ in D.C. on Saturday. One of the organizers of the march, Linda Sarsour is a Pro-Palestine Muslim activist.
She also advocates for Sharia Law in America and has ties to terrorist organization, Hamas.
Linda Sarsour is very active on Twitter. She is pro Sharia law and a couple of her tweets even have a seditious tone to them where she romanticizes Sharia law and hints at it taking over America whereby we would have interest free loans.
Here’s a five minute interview with a refugee who fled an Islamic hellhole so she could come to the U.S.
This whole thing is great, but the best part – I think – is when she asks why “western feminists” want their own countries to import the same kinds of scumbags that she came here to get away from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhSQLmfbQ6Y
London’s new Muslim mayor gives speech where women are forced to stand in the back
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/06/16/women-sent-back-khan-remain-speech/
London’s Muslim Mayor Hosts EU ‘Remain’ Rally With Hijab-Clad Women Forced To Stand At The Back
June 6, 2016
London Mayor Sadiq Khan gave a speech in Manchester on behalf of the EU ‘Remain’ campaign, with women noticeably absent from the front of the crowd.
In an effort to bolster the ailing Remain campaign, newly elected London Mayor Sadiq Khan has gone on a road trip across the country to try and boost support for remaining in the European Union (EU).
A photograph from one of Mr. Khan’s speeches in Manchester posted on the Guido Fawkes blog reveals that in at least one of his speeches, meant to galvanise Labour voters in the north of England, women were excluded from the front row and relegated to the periphery of the event.
Mr. Khan is said to be attempting to distance himself from the government’s official campaign that has been dubbed “project fear”, and is expected to tell Labour voters in the party’s northern heartlands that voting to remain in the EU is the “positive, proud and patriotic thing to do,” the Evening Standard reports.
The London mayor said: “I am backing Remain because it’s by far the best option for protecting working people’s jobs, wages and rights…the world won’t end if we leave Europe — but it won’t be in Londoners’ interests or the interests of working people.”
It is not the first time that a Labour event has seen the segregation of women. The party has often been accused of pandering to hard-line Muslims, with a number of incidents being revealed last year.
The Mayor has also been in hot water before when it comes to questions over his links to Islamist groups and those who practice a more traditional form of Islam that often sees women segregated at events from men. Adding further fuel to the accusations that Mr. Khan is attempting to enforce a more traditional role of women in public life is his new ban on sexualised advertising on London’s public transport.
According to Mr. Khan, the ban on sexualised advertisements was to prevent exposure to images of scantly clad models making women feel “ashamed” of their own bodies. Though the move plays into the desires of feminists who want to see a more prudish take on women in public life, it also plays to the views of Islamists and Islamic traditionalists who desire women to cover up for reasons of “modesty”.
The speeches in the north of England see Mr. Khan team up with not only Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose engagement in the campaign has been lackluster so far, but also Prime Minister David Cameron who merely weeks before the London mayoral election referred to Mr. Khan as an extremist. Mr. Cameron and Mr. Khan appeared at a rally together at the end of last month in London to extol the virtues of the EU and the benefits of staying in the political bloc.
The north of England tour is scheduled to see Mr. Khan make speeches in Manchester, Oldham, Leeds and possibly Bradford. After the tour he will return through the Midlands to London on Sunday ahead of a BBC debate with former London mayor and pro-Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson at Wembley Arena on Tuesday evening.
Police arrest husband because he saved his wife from being raped
This is disgusting.
Apparently, in New York City, it’s illegal to defend your wife from the scumbag who is trying to rape her.
What was the husband supposed to do – call the police so they could fill out the paperwork after his wife was raped?
http://nypost.com/2016/05/31/husband-charged-for-beating-would-be-rapist-to-death/
Husband facing assault charges for beating would-be rapist to death with tire iron
May 31, 2016
Bronx cabby Mamadou Diallo was looking for a parking spot outside his building when he got a call from his wife that filled him with shock and fury.
She said a stranger had just tried to rape her in their apartment — and was still upstairs.
Diallo grabbed a tire iron and did what most husbands in the same situation would do: He rushed to his wife’s aid and then bludgeoned the pervert.
The attack killed career criminal Earl Nash, 43 — and left Diallo facing assault and weapons charges Tuesday.
“He threatened my wife,” Diallo explained as he was led out of the 42nd Precinct station house in handcuffs.
“He threatened my wife,” he said again.
Nash first knocked on the Diallos’ apartment door in Claremont Village at about 9:15 p.m. Monday. The livery cabby’s wife, Nenegale — who was home with a female cousin — assumed it was her 16-year-old son.
When she saw it was a stranger, “she went to shut the door, and the guy pushed in the door and then punched her,” said Mamadou’s brother, Ibrahima, 52.
“I don’t want money — I’m going to rape you,” Nash told her, according to an account Nenegale gave to DNA Info.
Nash slugged her in the face several times before ripping off her clothes and tossing her to the floor, police sources said.
“Please, anything you want, I give you,” Nenegale remembered saying, while being pummeled by Nash. He even hit her with a chair, she said.
“He broke all of my clothes. I had no clothes at the time,” Nenegale explained. “[I was] very dizzy at the time.”
Nenegale’s cousin helped fight Nash off, and the half-naked woman called her husband.
“I took my phone and see my husband’s number first,” Nenegale said. “I pressed the number. I made a loud noise, screaming, ‘Please, help me! Help me! Call the police!’ Then he slapped me again. The phone [was] falling, but I was making noise so my husband could hear the noise.”
Mamadou Diallo — a native of Guinea and a longtime livery driver — was hunting for a parking spot on the street and ran inside with the tire iron, fearing for his wife’s life.
He took an elevator to the sixth floor — where he came face to face with Nash, who was shirtless in the hallway.
Surveillance footage shows Mamadou walk past Nash, but wheel around when Nenegale pointed him out as the attacker.
The enraged husband swung the weapon at Nash — driving him into the elevator. He followed with several more blows, in a beating that lasted up to two minutes, sources said.
Nash fought back with a belt, but the pounding left him with a fractured skull, sources said.
Emergency responders rushed Nash, who also had severe body trauma, to Lincoln Hospital, where he died from his injuries.
Diallo was initially charged with manslaughter by cops, but during his arraignment at Bronx Criminal Court, the charges were dropped to two counts of assault, harassment and criminal possession of a weapon.
“This was not an offense where the defendant committed an aggressive act,” defense attorney Anthony Michaels said. “This was an attack on his family, in his house under extreme circumstances.”
At the hearing, which was attended by more than a dozen members of Diallo’s family and mosque, prosecutors didn’t ask for bail, and instead said they would agree to whatever Judge Julio Rodriguez thought was best. He released Diallo on his own recognizance.
“It was self-defense,” said his 22-year-old son, who didn’t give his name. “Anyone would have done the same to protect their family. You’re going to defend them. Who wouldn’t do that to protect their wife or mom?”
Diallo’s brother agreed — saying he, too, believed his sibling’s actions were justified.
“I don’t think he’s going to be charged,” Ibrahima said. “Somebody comes to your house to kill you, what do you do? It’s your last minute — you do everything to survive.”
Diallo’s nephew described him on Tuesday as a devoted family man, saying he made a tragic mistake in the heat of the moment.
“My uncle, he didn’t intend to take anybody’s life,” the nephew said, refusing to be named. “Any one of us in that position would do the same thing to protect their family.”
A close friend of Diallo’s said he was a “good guy” who worked hard as a livery cab driver for 20 years.
“He’s been in this country 27 years and never had a problem with anyone,” said the friend, adding that Diallo is “innocent.”
Diallo’s neighbor said that “he did what he was supposed to do.”
“I saw him right after it happened,” he said. “He saw his wife with the blood and screaming for his help, and he did the right thing.”
Melbourne University advertises female-only jobs in bid to remedy gender imbalance in maths
There is no academic subject that is more meritocratic, and less discriminatory, than math. What this college is doing is wrong.
For their entire careers at this university, these women will be known as the math professors who got hired not because of their abilities at math, but because of their gender.
What this school is doing is condescending and sexist, and it reinforces the false stereotype that woman are not good at math.
Melbourne University advertises female-only jobs in bid to remedy gender imbalance in maths
May 18, 2016
The University of Melbourne has taken the extraordinary step of opening up jobs to female applicants only in an attempt to drive change in the male-dominated area of mathematic academia.
Only about a quarter of all mathematics academics in Australia are female, and the university is now advertising three positions in its School of Mathematics and Statistics for female applicants only.
It is believed to be the first time it has limited applications to women only for permanent academic positions.
The jobs, in pure mathematics, applied mathematics and statistics, may range in level from lecturer, to senior lecturer, to associate professor, depending on the candidate’s experience.
The head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Professor Aleks Owczarek, said the decision had been taken to promote change.
“We clearly have an issue with attracting female applicants appropriately to our workforce,” Professor Owczarek said.
“So this is an agenda to attempt to address that.” Reaching gender equality in maths stubbornly slow
Women are notoriously underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but mathematics has the lowest representation of all studies.
Lesley Ward, an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of South Australia, and chair of the Women in Maths Special Interest Group of the Australian Mathematical Society (WIMSIG), told ABC’s PM it gets worse the more senior the rank.
“At the first academic rank of associate lecturer it’s still only 30 per cent women, by the time you get up to the second highest rank of associate professor it’s down to under 20 per cent women,” Professor Ward said.
“At the highest rank, of professor, it’s 9 per cent women, according to the most recent data we have from 2014.”
She said there were many reasons for the low percentages, but a key cause was unconscious bias which sees men promoted more often than women.
Because of that, Professor Ward welcomed The University of Melbourne’s move, saying change so far had been slow.
“There have been many measures taken by universities and by individuals and by professional societies to help the advancement of women and the achievement of gender equity in these disciplines,” she said.
“In some disciplines it’s been harder than others and in mathematics it’s one where it’s taken a particularly long time.”
Equal Opportunity Act allows for positive discrimination
The University of Melbourne positions have been advertised using a special measure of the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act.
“The use of this kind of special measure that we’re using has been used with regards to Indigenous employment,” Professor Owczarek said.
“For this kind of positions, permanent continuing academic positions, I believe it might be the first time it’s been used,” he added.
Discrimination lawyer Rowan Skinner said the Act allows organisations to take actions to promote equality.
“The Act specifically permits an organisation to engage in what is overtly a discriminatory act, but for the purposes of ensuring that there is equal opportunity overall,” Mr Skinner said.
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