43 Republicans Join Democrats to Support Obama’s Transgender Agenda

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On Wednesday night, 43 Republican members of Congress joined the Democrats to vote for President Barack Obama’s transgender agenda.

Whereas last week Congress voted to reject this proposal—known as the Maloney amendment—last night they voted to ratify Obama’s 2014 executive order barring federal contractors from what it describes as “discrimination” on the basis of “sexual orientation and gender identity” in their private employment policies.

And, of course, “discrimination” on the basis of “gender identity” can be something as simple as having a bathroom policy based on biological sex, not gender identity, as we learned last week from Obama’s transgender directives. And “discrimination” on the basis of “sexual orientation” can be something as reasonable as an adoption agency preferring married moms and dads for orphans, than other arrangements.

Indeed, in the past few weeks we’ve seen additional examples of what counts as “discrimination” on the basis of “gender identity.”

The New York City Commission on Human Rights issued official legal guidance saying employers can be fined up to $250,000 for not addressing employees by the pronoun of their choice—including pronouns such as “ze” and “hir.” As UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh explains, this would require “employers and businesses to prevent [the use of “wrong” pronouns] by co-workers and patrons and not just by themselves or their own employees.”

A public school district in Oregon paid a teacher $60,000 because colleagues declined to use the pronoun “they” to describe the teacher. The teacher, Leo Soell, does “not identify as male or female but rather transmasculine and genderqueer, or androgynous.” As Volokh explains: “Soell wants people to call Soell ‘they,’ and submitted a complaint to the school district objecting (in part) that other schoolteachers engaged in ‘harassment’ by, among other things, ‘refusing to call me by my correct name and gender to me or among themselves’ (emphasis added).”

The 4th Circuit Court has said a Virginia school district must allow bathroom access based on “gender identity” not biology. The school district created a policy that says bathroom and locker room access is primarily based on biology, while also creating accommodations for transgender students: only biological girls can use the girls’ room, only biological boys can use the boys’ room, and any student can use one of the three single-occupancy bathrooms, which the school created specifically to accommodate transgender students. But the court said this commonsense policy was itself “discrimination” on the basis of “gender identity.”

Congress should not be ratifying Obama’s radical transgender agenda and imposing these outcomes on private employers just because they contract with the government.

All Americans should be free to contract with the government without penalty because of their reasonable beliefs about contentious issues. The federal government should not use government contracting to reshape civil society about controversial issues that have nothing to do with the federal contract at stake.

Obama’s executive order and the Maloney amendment treat conscientious judgments about behavior as if they were invidious acts of discrimination akin to racism or sexism.

But sexual orientation and gender identity are not like race. Indeed, sexual orientation and gender identity are unclear, ambiguous terms. They can refer to voluntary behaviors as well as thoughts and inclinations, and it is reasonable for employers to make distinctions based on actions.

By contrast, “race” and “sex” clearly refer to traits, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, these traits (unlike voluntary behaviors) do not affect fitness for any job.

Congress tried to minimize the damage of the Maloney amendment with two provisions last night. One provision, introduced by Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., amended the Maloney amendment to say that it couldn’t violate the U.S. Constitution. Another provision, the Byrne Amendment, attempted to attach existing religious liberty protections to the bill. Neither adequately protects against the damage of Maloney.

Liberal activist judges will do all they can to ensure that sexual orientation and gender identity policies will trump religious liberty protections.

This is why Congress should not be elevating sexual orientation and gender identity as a protected class garnering special legal privileges.

Here is a list of the 43 Republicans who voted for the amendment:

Justin Amash, Mich.
Susan Brooks, Ind.
Mike Coffman, Colo.
Ryan Costello, Pa.
Carlos Curbelo, Fla.
Rodney Davis, Ill.
Jeff Denham, Calif.
Charlie Dent, Pa.
Mario Diaz-Balart, Fla.
Bob Dold, Ill.
Daniel Donovan, N.Y.
Tom Emmer, Minn.
Michael Fitzpatrick, Pa.
Rodney Frelinghuysen, N.J.
Chris Gibson, N.Y.
Joe Heck, Nev.
Will Hurd, Texas
Darrell Issa, Calif.
David Jolly, Fla.
John Katko, N.Y.
Adam Kinzinger, Ill.
Leonard Lance, N.J.
Frank LoBiondo, N.J.
Tom MacArthur, N.J.
Martha McSally, Ariz.
Pat Meehan, Pa.
Luke Messer, Ind.
Erik Paulsen, Minn.
Bruce Poliquin, Maine
Tom Reed, N.Y.
David Reichert, Wash.
Jim Renacci, Ohio
Tom Rooney, Fla.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Fla.
John Shimkus, Ill.
Elise Stefanik, N.Y.
Fred Upton, Mich.
David Valadao, Calif.
Greg Walden, Ore.
Mimi Walters, Calif.
David Young, Iowa
Todd Young, Ind.
Lee Zeldin, N.Y.

(For more from the author of “43 Republicans Join Democrats to Support Obama’s Transgender Agenda” please click HERE)

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The “Palestine” Hoax

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150 years ago, Mark Twain visited Muslim-occupied Israel and wrote of “unpeopled deserts” and “mounds of barrenness”, of “forlorn” and “untenanted” cities.

Palestine is “desolate”, he concluded. “One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings.” The same is true of the Palestinian Museum which opened with much fanfare and one slight problem. While admission is free, there’s nothing inside for any of the visitors to see except the bare walls.

The Palestinian Museum had been in the works since 1998, but has no exhibits. The museum cost $24 million. All it has to show for it are a few low sloping sandy buildings indistinguishable from the dirt and a “garden” of scraggly bushes and shrubs. The Palestinian Museum is open, but there’s nothing inside.

It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for Palestine than a bunch of empty buildings designed by Irish and Chinese architects whose non-existent exhibits were the brainchild of its former Armenian-American director. It’s as Palestinian as bagels and cream cheese. Or skiing, hot cocoa and fjords.

Over the Palestinian Museum flies the proud flag of Palestine, which was originally the flag of the Iraqi-Jordanian Federation before the PLO “borrowed” it, and visitors might be greeted by the Palestinian anthem composed by Greek Communist Mikis Theodorakis. If it sounds anything like the soundtrack from Zorba the Greek, that’s because they both share the same composer.

All of Palestine is so authentically Palestinian that it might as well be made in China. At least that’s where the stained Keffiyahs worn by the stone throwers hurling rocks at passing Jewish families while posing heroically for Norwegian, Canadian and Chilean photojournalists are made.

Palestine is an empty building with nothing in it. It’s a political Potemkin village. There’s a flag, an anthem, a museum and all the trappings of a country. But if you look closer, there’s nothing inside.

The Palestinian Museum’s chairman, Omar al-Qattan, who was born in Beirut and lives in the UK, said that the “Palestinians” needed positive energy so badly that opening an empty museum made sense.

Just think how much positive energy can come from realizing that you have no culture, heritage or history to put in your museum. But actually the Palestinian Museum had to open in time for the Nakba. The Nakba is the annual commemoration of the failed invasion of Israel by foreign Muslim armies. The invasion by Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian and Jordanian forces began on May 15. Egypt’s General Muhammad Haidar declared that the invading Muslim forces would be occupying Tel Aviv in two weeks.

Egyptian forces hit the village of Kfar Darom which had a few hundred residents and a few dozen militia members. They hit it with tanks, armored vehicles, infantry battalions, artillery and bombers. The invading colonial Muslim forces lost two soldiers for every single Jewish militia defender. Instead of taking Tel Aviv in two weeks, they were stuck laying siege to a tiny village for two months. That’s the Nakba. And you can see why the Muslim settlers in Israel have an annual day of mourning over the miserable defeat of their invading armies at the hands of the indigenous Jewish population.

Like its museum, all of Palestine is one long endless fraud. The opening of the Palestinian Museum will be attended by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. Abbas was elected to a four-year term in 2005. It’s been a while since his term expired. The Palestinian Authority is just the PLO in drag. It claims authority over some territories that it doesn’t administer and has no control over.

But the empty Palestinian Museum isn’t about to let setbacks like a complete lack of things to put inside its bare walls get it down. Instead it’s doing what the PLO has always done in troubled times.

It’s invading Beirut.

Even though the Palestinian Museum has nothing to display, it’s opening a satellite museum in Beirut. If this “Palestinian” invasion goes anything like the last one, the satellite Palestinian Museum will be murdering Christians inside of a week. Beyond Beirut, the Palestinian Museum plans satellite museums in San Diego, London, Dubai and Gaza. In the Islamic fashion, the lack of an inner soul is compensated for with external expansionism.

Meanwhile the empty Palestinian Museum had found a prestigious new director, Mahmoud Hawari, a scholar whom it described as “the lead curator at the British Museum”. Hawari though isn’t a curator of anything. He’s a visiting academic. The foundation behind the Palestinian Museum blamed its new director for misleading them with a bad curriculum vitae. But it has yet to change its website. But Palestine has always been based on lies. Why should the Palestinian Museum break that tradition?

Hawari will have to decide what, if anything, to put in the Palestinian Museum. The chairman however thinks that it should celebrate Islamic terrorism and discuss who was living in Israel first. These two topics are the beginning and end of any Palestinian identity. And both of them involve hating Jews.

Eliminate Jews, as the Muslim and non-Muslim champions of the Palestinian hoax have attempted to do, and there is no Palestine left. Palestine is a parasitic political entity that derives its wealth, its water and its electricity from Israel. It also gets its history, its culture and its entire reason for existing from Israel.

The Muslim settlers claim that King David was a Muslim, that Jesus was a Palestinian and that the Star of David, which long predated Islam, is an Islamic symbol. The only Palestinian culture is appropriation.

Palestine can no more exist without Israel than a Plasmodium malariae or an HIV virus can exist outside a warm body. Despite all the whining about an independent state, the only purpose for a Palestinian state that the PLO, Hamas or anyone else has been able to conceive of is attacking Israel.

Palestinian identity has no meaning or context without hating Jews.

The Palestinian Museum is as empty as the souls of a populace that has wholly given itself over to a cult of death. Nothing can be put in there except hatred of Jews.

The echoing emptiness of the Palestinian Museum has been blamed, with utter predictability, on the Jews. The Palestinian Museum had not wanted to taint its walls with the works of the filthy Jews. And so its overseers had to import from outside Israel since the only thing “Palestine” manufactures is death.

The Jews had made it difficult to bring in authentically Palestinian, German lighting fixtures and Australian fire exit signs. But when the lighting fixtures and fire exit signs were finally put up, there was still nothing to put in the museum. And that too was the fault of the Jews.

Omar Al Qattan complains that Israel makes it difficult to import exhibition objects. But you would think that a museum a few miles outside the capital of the Palestinian Authority could find something “Palestinian” to exhibit in what it claims is its historic land. And yet the bare walls testify that it couldn’t.

There is no Palestinian culture. There is no Palestinian history. Instead there’s an empty museum built by an Irish architecture firm. Even the “Palestinian” garden is the work of a Jordanian landscaper.

Palestine is a Potemkin village. It has plenty of Muslim settlers squatting on the sites of historical Jewish towns and villages, but it is as desolate as it was when Mark Twain visited it. Its culture is an empty building. There are plenty of bodies, but there is no soul. Palestine has no past and no future. (For more from the author of “The “Palestine” Hoax” please click HERE)

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World’s Largest Muslim Organization Admits Extremism Problem Springs From Islamic Teachings

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There’s been so much debate as to whether violent extremism—which has triggered numerous terrorist attacks that have claimed thousands of innocent lives—should be attributed to Islam as a religion.

The largest Muslim organisation in the world recently admitted that bad elements of Islam are indeed part of the extremism problem.

During an international meeting of moderate Islamic leaders in Jakarta earlier this month, the Indonesia-based Nahdlatul Ulama group came out with a strong condemnation of their fellow Muslims, particularly extremist groups like the Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qaeda.

“We are like traditional opposition to supremacist Islamism,” Yahya Staquf, an Indonesia cleric affiliated with the Nahdlatul Ulama, told CNN, as quoted by CBN News.

Staquf openly admitted that to be able to combat the global jihadi movement, world leaders and the general public must recognize the fact that extremism originates from Islamic teachings, which are being used by terrorist groups to justify the use of violence. (Read more from “World’s Largest Muslim Organization Admits Extremism Problem Springs From Islamic Teachings” HERE)

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