Simply a Return ro Mainstream Liberalism

(Image from US Catholic)

Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Erika Bachiochi pushes back against the extremes (radical feminism to women's inferiority) of Catholic views about women by asking Catholics to take another look at the "feminist" Pope John Paul II (1920-2005): [bold added]

As a Catholic legal scholar, I have been an outspoken critic of a radical feminist ideology that treats transgenderism and elective abortion as core elements of “gender equality.” I agree with ["The Case for Patriarchy" author Tim] Gordon that those ideas are antithetical to Christianity. But by misreading fringe views as central to the early cause of women’s rights, he and other like-minded reactionary Catholics now claim that all feminism is “diabolical” or, in the words of the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, “one of the worst things to ever happen to Western civilization.”

John Paul II would beg to differ. Thirty years ago he called on women to “promote a ‘new feminism’ ” and thereby transform “culture so that it supports life.” Seven years earlier in his apostolic letter “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women,” he corrected historical interpretations of Scripture that had assumed women’s inequality. Affirming husbands’ responsibility as leaders, the pope wrote that “in the relationship between husband and wife the ‘subjection’ is not one-sided but mutual.” The “new feminism” he described wouldn’t imitate “models of ‘male domination’ ” but rather work to “overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.”

It would be disrespectful of the thought that went into Pope John Paul II's letter to excerpt a phrase or two, so your humble blogger won't do that. Let's just say that the apostolic letter spends some time on Genesis 3:16 ("Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you") and why the interpretation that women are inferior to men is incorrect.

In politics, religion and culture much of what people call "conservatism" is simply a return to mainstream liberalism as it was 15 to 30 years ago.

The Ultimate DEI Hire

Former President Trump sat for a scheduled interview before the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention, and the fireworks started with the opening question and answer:

Former President Donald Trump attacked Vice President Kamala Harris over her race, baselessly suggesting his election rival only began identifying as a Black woman in recent years.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said Wednesday at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention. “So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?”

He continued: “I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person. And I think somebody should look into that, too.”

Following the interview (PBS / YouTube at the bottom of this post), partisans leapt immediately into the fray attacking and defending President Trump's answers to various questions, with the main focus on whether Vice President Harris self-identified as "Black" or "Indian". There are videos supporting both positions, but my own take is that this contretemps will blow over when the Democratic convention begins on August 19th.

Also, the immediate negative reaction to President Trump's statements about Kamala Harris' race was understandable but self-defeating. The great American public, including myself, was unaware of how often she emphasized her Black or Indian heritage to the press, depending on which position was more advantageous. That's no crime, just opportunism.

President Trump made a smart chess move because:

1) It reminded us that Vice President Harris was selected as President Biden's running mate because of her sex and race, the ultimate DEI hire. (There are various speeches by candidate and President Biden declaring this to be the case.) DEI is becoming a dirty word in corporate circles.

2) Both white and black journalists later stated that they were highly offended by this latest example of Trumpian racism. Reporters should grow a pair, because the story isn't about them. Rational voters don't care about TV personalities' feelings, especially if the latter are rich and successful.

3) President Trump wasn't trying to convert the mostly hostile crowd who wasn't intending to vote for him anyway. He was going after the 10-20%, of all races,who are not enthusiastic about identity politics and who are staying silent because they're afraid of being cancelled if they strayed from the dominant narrative.

Let's first see what Kamala Harris does with the naming of her running mate and actually being declared the nominee of the Democratic Party before delving too deep into the dynamics of a Trump-Harris contest.

MEI, not DEI

(Image from Diversio/Linkedin)

There's a new Human Resources acronym to learn about: [bold added]

From tech to tractors, companies are dialing back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Instead, a DEI alternative endorsed by Elon Musk could alter the fate of your next job application.

It’s known as MEI, short for merit, excellence and intelligence. As described by Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang, who helped popularize the term, MEI means hiring the best candidates for open roles without considering demographics.

The George Floyd riots of 2020 kickstarted the whole Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement, and companies raced to install DEI programs that would diversify their work forces, diversity being typically measured by the number of people they would hire who were not white, straight males.

Four years later the lack of a return--or perhaps even a negative return--on their investment have caused some companies to renounce DEI in favor of merit-based personnel policies.

Your humble blogger finds it important to note that one major organization that wholeheartedly embraces DEI is government, which has few performance metrics and no competition to show whether an alternative might be better.

By the way, expect DEI to be a hot-button topic this election year:

That tension is now in the brightest of spotlights, after President Biden abandoned his re-election bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden picked Harris as his running mate four years ago, after vowing to consider only women for the job. Almost immediately, some political opponents began painting Harris, who is Black and South Asian, as a “DEI hire.”

Fox News:

Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost said on Tuesday that calling Vice President Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, a "DEI hire" was like using a "racial slur."

The race card has already been played, and there's still over three months to go to the election.

Don't Hold Them Back Became Let's Give Them an Advantage

Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) received
the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The 2016 film Hidden Figures was based on the true story of African-American women mathematicians who were crucial to the success of NASA's early missions. They had to overcome extreme race and sex discrimination, accompanied by condescending attitudes, to be taken seriously.

By the end of the movie their skill and reputation became so widely known at NASA that John Glenn insisted that the numbers be checked manually by Katherine Johnson, one of the "hidden figures," before his historic flight. She also performs emergency calculations to bring John Glenn home when one of his capsule's heat shields broke loose.

It's a popular theme in fiction and real life: the talents of a person who is discriminated against are so outstanding that the powers-that-be must call on the person to solve an important problem. Anti-discrimination narratives appeal to both the heart and the head: the former because the victims are treated unfairly and the latter because society's potential is unrealized by holding back skilled people.

60 years later the pendulum has shifted too far in the other direction. Anti-discrimination has given way to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas. DEI is especially damaging in the technological contest with China: [bold added]

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported this year that China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, including advanced aircraft engines, electric batteries, machine learning and synthetic biology. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Dan Wang, an expert on China’s technology landscape, wrote that “China now rivals Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in its mastery of the electronics supply chain.” In 2007, the Chinese added less than 4% of the value-added costs of iPhones made in that country. Now it’s more than 25%...

Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken.

Where it once was taken for granted that expanding knowledge was more important than a scientist’s sex or skin color, anyone adhering to that approach in the U.S. now must fend off charges that it is racist, patriarchal, colonial, or a tool of oppression. As a group of 29 scientists and academics contended in a recent paper for the Journal of Controversial Ideas, scientific progress in the West “is being hindered by a new, alarming clash between liberal epistemology and identity-based ideologies.”...

The U.S. will only find it harder to compete with China if activists and administrators are allowed to bully scientists into caring more about artificial diversity goals than about their work. To quote the 29 authors who stood up for merit, “for science to succeed, it must strive for the non-ideological pursuit of objective truth.”

In the liberal arts and social sciences, the DEI crowd can advocate for individual revealed truths and personal lived experiences. By contrast, those who work in STEM fields believe that there are objective truths, and the goal of science is to discover these truths. I am 100% sure that the mathematicians who worked for NASA would agree.

Diversity in Appearance But Not in Thought

Tabia Lee (Chron photo)

The director of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at De Anza College in Cupertino has been fired. Tabia Lee, a Black woman, had served less than two years on the job. [bold added]

Tabia Lee received a letter in March saying her contract would not be renewed in June because she was uncooperative with colleagues, unwilling to accept constructive criticism and unlikely to change. Lee is a vocal critic of many of today’s diversity and inclusion practices, and many colleagues at the school said she belittled their racial justice initiatives...

Lee said she will fight to keep her job as faculty director of De Anza’s Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education, which she has carried out remotely since the fall of 2021. Her job description at the public community college of 16,000 students is to promote a “commitment to equity, social justice and multicultural education” and create an “inclusive campus environment” within an “institution-wide transformation.”

Critics said Lee sought to transform the college in the wrong direction. Groups representing Latino and Asian Pacific American employees urged the district’s Board of Trustees to remove her, contending that she subverted anti-racism initiatives by opposing everything from their efforts to gain more say in campus governance to their use of the gender-neutral term “Latinx.” In a letter to the college, Lee cited research suggesting the word has little support among Latinos themselves.

Debates on its merits can fill volumes, but my own take is that the vast majority of community college students have little use for DEI. They come to De Anza, Foothill, and the College of San Mateo to learn practical skills that they can use on the job today.

Racism and social justice may be important to some people, but those are distractions for students who are trying to learn computer programming or accounting or chemistry. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both of whom went to De Anza College, seem to have done just fine without DEI.

Small Town Mess

Kylie Clark (LinkedIn photo)

Two months ago we noted how the Los Gatos City Council censured planning commissioner Kylie Clark for writing to the State that "rich, white, anti-housing men” controlled housing policy in Los Gatos. The ACLU threatened to sue the town for violating Ms. Clark's free-speech rights, and the City Council removed the censure.

Los Gatos caved to the ACLU because its planning commissioner purportedly was speaking as a private citizen.

[Los Gatos Town Attorney Gabrielle] Whelan said the lawsuit would potentially have cost the town upwards of $400,000.

Since Clark identified herself as a planning commissioner in her email to the state but said she was speaking as a private citizen, she is protected from being disciplined by current case law, the ACLU argued.

To this non-attorney it seems disingenuous to claim that she was speaking as a private citizen on a subject (housing) that fell under her purview as a planning commissioner. Where does this stop? Whenever a politician makes a controversial statement, he or she could walk it back by claiming it was a personal opinion as a private citizen.

But there are further complexities. In real life Ms. Clark has a conflict of interest.

Councilmember Matthew Hudes voiced concerns about Clark’s role as assistant manager of advocacy and public policy at West Valley Community Services (WVCS) overlapping with her role on the planning commission. WVCS provides food, housing and support services to low-income and homeless people in South Bay communities including Los Gatos.

Paid advocacy for a social service organization would seem to color (in a manner of speaking) Ms. Clark's opinion.

But here's the best part:

Clark is in a relationship with Councilmember Rob Moore, who chairs the policy committee, and Hudes said it’s not appropriate for Moore to provide feedback.

Los Gatos, home to Netflix, is very wealthy, but it's still a small town of 33,000, and this is a small-town mess of its own making. Whether Los Gatos continues to chew on this problem or not should not make a difference to the rest of the Bay Area.

It Started with Racism, but Ending it Would be Racism

Cardi B (CBC photo)

The bottom story of last year: the decade-long cultural obsession with big butts was ending.

Since admiration of large backsides had racist origins, ending this trend should have been a good thing, but alas, dear reader, you are wrong:

After almost a decade of our cultural obsession with twerking, peach emojis and Brazilian butt lifts, 2022 apparently marked the end of the era of the big booty.

On TikTok, users speculated that Kim Kardashian had her butt implants removed (a procedure she never confirmed having in the first place). Cardi B recently shared that she had her own implants removed and cautioned others against getting butt injections. And the New York Post ran a headline that said "Bye-bye booty" and declared that heroin chic was back.

Some critics swiftly shot back, saying that women's bodies should not be reduced to trends. They also pointed out the inherent racism in declaring that a particular physical attribute that many women of colour have naturally is no longer desirable.

If men say that they like a certain physical attribute of women, they're being sexist or racist or both. If they say they don't like it, they're still being sexist and racist.

Guys, keep your traps shut. This advice is no guarantee you'll stay out of trouble, but it will help.

Language Pushback

We're accustomed to hearing accusations of racism, class-ism, and sexism thrown about in any discussion of housing; what's unusual is that this time there was pushback:

Kylie Clark (LinkedIn photo)

Los Gatos Town Council censured a planning commissioner for using “divisive language” in a letter to the state, in which she said “rich, white, anti-housing men” organized the referendum on the town’s plan for future growth.

Council voted unanimously Feb. 15 to censure Commissioner Kylie Clark, an action that serves as a formal disapproval of her comments.

The City of Los Gatos is 72% white, and the median house value is $1.8 million, so Ms. Clark may well be factually correct that leaders of the housing referendum were rich, white men.

But by describing them as such to the exclusion of other attributes, she is strongly implying that their decision-making is due to their race, class, and sex and not to other factors, for example, environmental considerations, traffic, and infrastructure.

If she had evidence to support her claim, she should have presented it. In its absence, the Town Council was right to call her on it.

Unconstitutional and Unnecessary

Related: NASDAQ's annual board diversity matrix.

A judge has ruled that a California law that required boards of directors to set aside seats for women is unconstitutional. [bold added]

California’s first-in-the-nation law requiring corporations to include women on their boards of directors, enacted at a time when women made up fewer than one-sixth of corporate board members in the state, violates the constitutional rights of men, a judge in Los Angeles has ruled.

The law, passed in 2018, required publicly traded corporations based in California with five members on their boards to have at least one female member by the end of 2019. By the end of 2021, at least two women were required on five-member boards, and three women on six-member boards...

“The Legislature’s actual purpose was gender-balancing, not remedying discrimination,” Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Maureen Duffy-Lewis said Friday. She said the state, in defending the law, had failed to offer evidence that corporations had discriminated against women in selecting board members. Instead, she said, the usual causes were a lack of open board seats and the inclination of boards to choose someone they already knew, such as a corporation’s chief executive.

In any event, Duffy-Lewis said, “there is no compelling governmental interest in remedying discrimination in the board-selection process.” A “compelling interest” was needed, she said, to justify sex discrimination — against either sex — in the California Constitution.

The judge could have added that the law was unnecessary. Smart and competent women have been my bosses, professors, doctors, lawyers, and professional colleagues. They all achieved their station in life without quotas.

It's indeed tough to get past the "old boys' network," and there's no doubt that some men do have sexist beliefs that women can't do the job (I've heard some of them say so). Fortunately, such people are fading into the sunset, and if there are still corporations whose leaders share those beliefs, they'll fade away, too.

Have Faith, Churches: Just Be There

Zaina Qureshi, 16, says gender
equity, immigration rights and
racial justice are important. (WSJ)

Not exactly a shocking conclusion from a report on the views of teens and young adults: "Young People Say Disconnect Keeps Them From Church". So what are the issues that young people do care about? [bold added]

Half of young people ages 13 to 25 surveyed said they don’t think that religious institutions care as much as they do about issues that matter deeply to them, according to a report released Monday by the Springtide Research Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit. Those issues include racial justice, gender equity, immigration rights, income inequality and gun control. Springtide tracks the views of American teens and young adults. It has done research work in conjunction with the Princeton Theological Seminary and the Mennonite Church, among others.

The biggest disconnect involves LGBT rights. About 71% of youths said they care about gay rights, but feel that 44% of religious communities care about the same issue, according to the survey of 10,274 people across the country representing various faiths.

‘I was afraid to live my life,’ says
dancer Amethyst Rose. (WSJ)

If you asked me and my peers what we cared about as college freshmen, we would have said: the war in Vietnam, race discrimination, sex discrimination, the military/industrial complex, the Bomb, police brutality, and freedom of speech. 50 years later those issues have either gone away or have shifted leftward--I don't mean the latter in a pejorative sense--equality of opportunity has mostly been replaced with equality of result.

The main point is that, as a young person, I was too busy making plans pursuing worldly goals, though I never completely disengaged from organized religion. I only started drifting back due to: 1) more frequent reminders of my own mortality; 2) attainment of some objectives did not achieve fulfillment and raised the is-that-all-there-is question; 3) the Christian perspective really did prove insightful at crucial turning points.

Because I am not a priest or have a personal stake in keeping every religious institution alive--let's face it, there is overcapacity given the demand--I am not worried about the decline in membership. This is a temporal trend that will reverse; just study the history of American great awakenings,

The goal of churches should be just to stay alive, to be available to individuals for when the inevitable personal crisis arises and they find that the answers do not lie with politics or their racial or gender identity.

Have faith: they'll come back, they'll need you, so just be there.

Closer to the Funny Bone

(Deadline image)

Further proving the Streisand effect (when Barbra Streisand tried to suppress a photo of her Malibu mansion, her action just called more attention to it), the protests surrounding Dave Chappelle's comedy special on Netflix caused me to check it out.

Comedy is very subjective--what one person finds uproarious can elicit alarm, disdain, or indifference in another.

To your humble blogger standup comedy is about the only free-speech zone left in America; people are free to laugh at thoughts that could not be expressed anywhere else. And yes, I do find some humor offensive, especially when targeted at my race, faith, or sex (but not when it's clever, another subjective measure), but that's the price we pay so that we can listen to humor that offends others, a kind of mutually assured suspension of civility.

So I watched The Closer and found most of it humorous. Let me caution at the outset that many black comedians pepper their monologues with the "n" word, the "b" word, and sexual and scatological references that most people have automatically suppressed from their speech.

David Chappelle is no exception, and it took a minute or two for this listener to become desensitized. He was playing to a mainly black live audience, who didn't mind that a black speaker was using the "n" word. After a while I realized that he was calling every guy in his stories, regardless of race, a n*****, and every woman was a b****.

In the best comedic tradition he brought up patterns and contradictions in the way we think. Because liberal and progressive values are dominant, he had riches to choose from.

Just one example: people are angered, or at least bemused, by blackfaced whites pretending to be black, but why aren't people allowed to have a similar negative reaction to men pretending to be women? They aren't real women, a declaration received to much applause.

Of course, we know that one can have a serious discussion about the differences between the two situations, but comedy is built upon often-unfair juxtapositions. Once the thought is expressed, the laugh is generated, and it's off to the next quick take. Yes, it's unfair, just like linking anti-vaxxers with anti-abortionists (so now you want to control your own body?). Tough, conservatives have had to sit there and listen to these quick takes for 20 years on at least five nightly shows, and the oft-heard response is they shouldn't be offended because it's just comedy.

Comedians often close their act on a serious note. Dave Chappelle spoke of a transgender comedian whom he befriended. She rose to his defense when he provoked "T" activists, who turned on her. She committed suicide shortly thereafter, though Dave Chappelle was careful not to attribute the death to the braying Twitter mob.

My standup favorites are old-timers Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Seinfeld, and Dana Carvey. In terms of funniness I place David Chappelle below that group but above the majority of standup comedians currently on Netflix. But IMHO the Closer is worth watching also to see where the ever-moving lines of our culture are drawn today.

Good and Bad News: Religious Needs Are Unmet

Rabbi Ari Lamm

Americans' participation in organized religion has never been lower, but Rabbi Ari Lamm believes that

The Prospects of American Religion Have Never Been Higher

A recent Gallup poll included some grim news: Less than 50% of Americans belong to a religious community such as a church or a synagogue, the lowest since the organization began asking the question in 1937. As an Orthodox rabbi, I might feel gloomy about the future of my profession. But the prospects of American religion have never been brighter....

This isn’t news for those of us who have dedicated our lives to the rabbinate or priesthood. The reasons for the decline in synagogue and church attendance range from the changing nature of cities to competition with digital communication. Congregating with others in a physical space is a cornerstone of most faiths—I happily do it three times daily—but there’s much more to religion than sitting quietly on a wooden bench and listening to a sermon.

Seen this way, the new Gallup survey should be read not as an obituary but an opportunity. Religion is ripe for disruption, to borrow a term from Silicon Valley: Plenty of Americans still love the product—just not its current platform.

For centuries critics have claimed that organized religion diverts attention from the fundamental teachings of faith. Churches and synagogues had placed their priorities on soul-numbing procedures, meetings, fund-raising, and socializing.

Lately the emphasis has been on social justice, global warming, systemic racism, and other issues, which, however important, make churches just another political advocacy group. That's not what most people want from their religion.

People attend religious services because they want a spot of religion. Yet worshipers hear too much about climate change, systemic racism and transgender rights and not enough about Abraham, Sarah and Isaac or Luke, Matthew and John. Treating religion like the Academy Awards or the National Basketball Association—which also don’t draw the same attention they used to—has left Americans suspicious about traditional faith. This can be rectified by focusing on what business-school types call the core offering.

Your humble blogger has posted frequently on how the Episcopal Church seems to pursue social justice over spreading the Word in its public pronouncements. Since I composed the above in 2012, it has only become more involved in partisan politics.

COVID-19 upended worship-as-usual and caused churches to initiate or improve virtual services. It offers them a chance to reset. Will my church and other religions seize the opportunity to turn away from the path they were on and go back to basics? Rabbi Lamm is hopeful.

Father Mike Schmitz’s “Bible in a Year” became one of the most downloaded shows in Apple’s podcast app. Tens of thousands of Jews who hadn’t been to a shul in years now tune in weekly to listen to “Unorthodox,” the world’s most popular Jewish podcast. This is as an invitation to every rabbi, priest and minister in America to do as good spiritual shepherds have always done and come meet their flock where they graze...

Services offered during the pandemic were just that—religious services. They were not, as so many felt compelled to offer before the pandemic struck, social gatherings with thin religious veneers. For decades houses of worship had flourished with the American suburb, serving as a focal point of communal life. In Jewish circles, this is known as “a shul with a pool,” suggesting that congregants should see the synagogue as the destination for everything, from Sunday school to a quick swim. This model is fading, and organizations that focus on the heart of the matter—the prayers and rituals and rites—are likely to reap the rewards.

Church conventions that I've attended have always been more about politics than the spiritual needs of the members. Perhaps some of the passion has dissipated now that the Federal and State governments are controlled by politicians whom the church agrees with. So I'm hopeful.

A Little More Humility

Philipp Strack

Yale Professor of Computer Science and Economics Philipp Strack on his research into prejudice: [bold added]

Recently I’ve been researching how to explain prejudice in society. In a working paper with Paul Heidhues and Botond Köszegi, we explore the idea that overestimating yourself can generate prejudice. Suppose I think I’m great, even though I’m not; when I look at my outcomes in life, I am unhappy and think I deserve more. To explain why I’m not receiving what I think I deserve, I may believe there is discrimination against me. This leads me to overestimate discrimination against the groups I’m a member of, while underestimating discrimination against groups with which I compete.

This can create prejudice and specific patterns in people’s beliefs. For example, if you ask Black and white people which group is discriminated against, there are huge gaps between the perception of different groups. The same is true for men and women. But standard theories of discrimination — that people discriminate because they don’t like certain groups, or believe them to be less qualified — don’t predict these large differences in beliefs about discrimination across groups.

While there have been voluminous studies on discrimination and prejudice, this is the first time I have read about research into how an individual's mis-apprehension--specifically he thinks he is better than he is--of his own abilities exacerbates prejudice against other groups.

A little more humility is in order, not only from an ethical and philosophical standpoint, but because it will lessen intergroup conflict.

Strained Relationship

Levi's Stadium: not much revenue these days (NBC photo)

In this unusual political season the locals are talking about a single $3 million contribution to a campaign, not for a House seat or State Proposition or a seat in the State Assembly but to replace the Santa Clara City Council: [bold added]

This week’s decision by Santa Clara County not to allow fans at 49ers games, despite getting the OK for limited ticket sales from California’s health department, is the latest blow in a strained relationship between the football team and its hand-selected locale...

Team owner Jed York has poured an astounding and unprecedented $3 million into the upcoming city-council election, backing four candidates and opposing four other candidates — including two female incumbents who have stood up to the 49ers on several issues. It’s a mind-blowing amount of money to infuse into a local race in a city of 130,000 people, and has some worrying that the 49ers are trying to turn the city into “Yorkville.”

(Note: the City of Santa Clara shouldn't be confused with Santa Clara County, which btw is home to prominent cities like Palo Alto, San Jose, and Mountain View.)

California's COVID-19 policies have been among the strictest in the nation, yet Santa Clara is saying that these are not strict enough. The 49ers attendance issue was initially about the tradeoff between health risk and business, but in California it quickly devolved into interest-group and identity politics:

[Mayor Lisa] Gillmor and the council, which is majority female (four council members) want to maintain oversight over the stadium. York’s influx of campaign funds, both for and against candidates of his choosing and which dwarfs the backing of any other funds coming into the race, appears to be an effort to change the dynamic.

The 49ers want to make the race an argument about diversity and describe York’s preferred candidates as an effort toward better representing the makeup of the city (40% of Santa Clara residents identify as white). Three of York’s preferred candidates are Asian American.

Rahul Chandhok, the 49ers’ vice president of public affairs and strategic communications, said in an email that York’s support was a “swift, open and transparent” response to seeing Gillmor “orchestrate her developer allies to funnel money through the Police Union PAC” and to “the outcry from civic institutions like the NAACP and the Asian Law Alliance.” Chandhok charges that Gillmor is “supporting a slate of all white candidates” and has worked to “upend voting rights to dilute minority representation.”

The 49ers are bringing out the big guns by stressing the female majority of the City Council (subtext: women don't care about a sport that men love) coupled with the Council's all-white make-up (bunch of Karens!).

Introduce the sex and race angle, now add in a dollop of negative-association words ("developer", "PAC", "union"), and so it goes in California politics.

For the record your humble blogger is in favor of the 49ers position, but c'mon, man, don't trash city council candidates.

Justice Ginsburg (1933-2020)

We take a break from the partisan wars to honor the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Chief Justice John Roberts: “Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her—a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”

Former President Barack Obama: "Over a long career on both sides of the bench — as a relentless litigator and an incisive jurist — Justice Ginsburg helped us see that discrimination on the basis of sex isn’t about an abstract ideal of equality; that it doesn’t only harm women; that it has real consequences for all of us. It’s about who we are — and who we can be."

Time:

1958: Martin, Ruth, and 3-y.o. Jane (Time photo)

The longer she lived, the wider her reach and the deeper the appreciation for her years on the bench. At the opening concert of the National Symphony Orchestra in Sept. 2019, Kennedy Center chair David Rubinstein introduced the dignitaries in the audience. When he got to the justice, women rose to applaud her. Then, the men quickly joined in until everyone in the hall was standing...

This wasn’t an audience of liberals, but a cross-section of the capital touched by a once-young lawyer who saw unfairness and quietly tried to end it during her 60 years of public service.

Proclamation by President Donald Trump:

In India with the late Justice Scalia (Instgm)

Today, our Nation mourns the loss of a trailblazer, not only in the field of law, but in the history of our country. Ruth Bader Ginsburg served more than 27 years as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was a loving wife to her late husband Martin, and a caring mother to her two children Jane and James.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an inspiration to all Americans. Having lost her older sister and mother before graduating high school, she entered law school as both a wife and a mother, and one of the few women in her class. After graduating from law school in 1959, she worked tirelessly for more than 34 years as a litigator and jurist and, in 1993, she became just the second woman to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States. Renowned for her powerful dissents at the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg epitomized powerful yet respectful argument; that you can disagree with someone without being disagreeable to them. Justice Ginsburg’s work helped bring about greater equality for women, secure rights for the disabled, and will continue to influence our Nation for generations to come. In addition to her quick mind, she brought flair to the bench with her stylish jabots and her warm friendships among colleagues, even those with whom she often disagreed, most notably with the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

A fighter to the end, Justice Ginsburg defeated cancer and the odds numerous times — all while continuing to serve on the Court. Her commitment to the law and her fearlessness in the face of death inspired countless “RBG” fans, and she continues to serve as a role model to countless women lawyers. Her legacy and contribution to American history will never be forgotten.

As a mark of respect for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the United States, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, including section 7 of title 4, United States Code, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and on all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, on the day of interment. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half-staff for the same period at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this eighteenth day of September, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-fifth.

Thank you, Justice Ginsburg. R.I.P.

The New Book of Common Prayer

The 1928 BCP is still sold on Amazon

We're going to have a new Book of Common Prayer in twelve years; trials on a draft version will begin in six.

The General Convention, the chief governing body of the Episcopal Church, met in Austin last week and passed Resolution A068. A summary from Episcopal News:

The resolution directs that any future revision will “utilize inclusive and expansive language and imagery for humanity and divinity” and will “incorporate and express understanding, appreciation, and care of God’s creation."

I have attended Anglican services in many parts of the U.S. and the world, and I have never seen anyone turned away; apparently, however, the sexist language of the 1979 BCP makes people feel unwelcome. Well, let's fix some of that language at the margin (probably at the cost of excising more of the beautiful phrases that have comforted both men and women for decades, if not centuries). We will alienate more old people, but to be honest, they're not the future of the Church.

But gender-neutral references to the faithful are not the major change. Did you notice the "expansive language [for] divinity"?

I have attended a few services where a lady minister would reference "God the Mother" and use the pronoun "She". In another vein, especially when the topic was the environment ("care of God's creation"), priests have called upon Gaia, who is the Greek goddess commonly knows as Mother Earth. In this way they could strike a blow against both patriarchy and monotheism in one fell swoop.

Part of me wants to encourage this project because it's time the Church resolves whether "God the Mother" is consistent with its theology. However, we know the result before it's even started; the cultural Marxists in charge of my church know that changing the language is a prerequisite to changing thoughts.

Note: one source of amusement is the translation of gender-neutral English into Romance languages, where gender is all-pervasive. Here's a Quora thread where Spanish-speaking natives weigh in. Excerpts from different contributors:

this issue is an excellent example of how English speakers love to impose their world view/cultural grid on other cultures. With regards to Spanish, the battle for gender inclusivity is very real in places like Mexico and Spain, both countries in which I lived for a number of years. In Mexico for example, official government publications must refer to “los mexicanos y las mexicanas.” Many ordinary Mexicans, however, feel this is a pointless (and perhaps American-influenced) distraction from real issues that affect the lives of millions of women, such as domestic violence and female indigenous disempowerment.

To truly respect the cultures associated with Spanish and French would be to learn the languages the way they are spoken, written, and taught today and then to engage respectfully in an ongoing dialogue with native Spanish and French speakers and teachers about how to reconcile your Anglo-Saxon political convictions and worldview with the languages that are being shared with you.

nobody who speaks Spanish as a native would care. It's you trying to impose your values in other people. Hundreds of millions of people are not going to change the way they talk just to accommodate you.

It'd be like a native Spanish speakers expecting English native speakers to use three different forms of you: an informal one for singular, a formal one for singular, and a form for plural. Why? Because that's how it works in Spanish, so you and every person that speaks English should change.

"the overwhelmingly gendered nature" of the Spanish language refers to grammatical gender, so if you have any troubles with that, you could think about it as a silly bourgeois convention unrelated to what your mind actually believes of a person's gender or lack thereof.

PS: your teacher is probably trying to teach you Spanish, not impose any kind of socially normative prejudices, so please let him/her/sher/zer/them/whatever do the work. Thank you.

This is a terrible non-issue you are making out of your stubbornness to impose your north american-centric view of culture and the world on peoples who don’t really care. These are things that really don’t make us latin americans at all concerned. Spanish speakers don’t lose sleep over the existence of “gender neutral nouns”. WE DON’T HAVE THAT CULTURE. WE DON’T CARE, AND WE DON’T MIND. WE USE LANGUAGE AS IT IS.

Resolution A068 mandates that "all materials be translated into English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole, following the method commonly called dynamic equivalency". I doubt that any objections by non-U.S. Episcopalians will slow the process down anyway, because it's impossible for the Church, which inveighs against colonialism incessantly, to engage in cultural imperialism.

You Have Not Been Properly Educated

Mark Farrell is sworn in by City Attorney Dennis
Herrera (Chronicle photo)

After SF Mayor Ed Lee died of a heart attack last month, San Francisco Board of Supervisors President London Breed became interim mayor.

Today the Board of Supervisors replaced London Breed with Supervisor Mark Farrell. [bold added]

San Francisco has a new interim mayor: moderate Supervisor Mark Farrell.

The vote to appoint Farrell — led, in a twist, by the board’s progressives — happened twice, after Supervisor Katy Tang withdrew her initial vote of support, saying she had been caught up in the moment.

In the end, Farrell carried the vote 6-3, with Supervisors Malia Cohen, Ahsha Safai and Tang dissenting. It came amid shouts and jeers by supporters of acting Mayor London Breed....

scores of residents had shown up for the public comment in the afternoon, many to support Breed. Some accused the board of racism and sexism — and even of reviving the Jim Crow policies of the 1950s and 1960s — for moving to replace Breed, an African American woman, with an interim mayor.

Former acting Mayor London Breed (Mercury News)

Mark Farrell is a former corporate lawyer and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, a white male with an extraordinarily privileged background, not to mention a beautiful (white) wife and three children. His selection over a qualified African American woman is not blatantly racist or sexist because those labels only apply to Republicans. If you don't understand that, dear reader, you have not been properly educated.