Who Defines American Culture?

[Jeanfromfillmore]

The gay lobby tried a broadside attempt to censor criticism by passing a national "hate crimes" law. Fortunately, Congress didn't pass that law, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi will probably try again in the new Congress. Meanwhile, gay activists are trying to achieve much the same effect through political pressure and intimidation.
Scott Bloch, the head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) in the Bush Administration, has been targeted for termination because he removed "sexual orientation" from the list of anti-discrimination laws protecting employment at federal agencies. Bloch discovered that his Clinton-appointed predecessor, Elaine Kaplan, had unilaterally inserted "sexual orientation" in the list without any statutory authorization, so he removed it. The gay lobby retaliated, instigating five investigations against Bloch. After all five cleared him of any wrongdoing, the response by the gay lobby was to initiate a sixth investigation.
There have actually been very few complaints against the Bush Administration about job discrimination against homosexuals. Bush appointed openly homosexual Mark Dybul as U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator. When he was sworn in with the rank of ambassador, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised his "wonderful family" and referred to his partner's mother as Dybul's "mother-in-law."
Luis Padilla, an employee of a large corporation in Virginia, put this message on the rear window of his pickup truck: "Please, vote for marriage on Nov. 7." His bosses ordered him to remove it because some people said it offended them. Padilla then parked his truck on what he thought (apparently incorrectly) was outside of company property, but he was fired anyway. After a couple of state legislators took up his cause, the company reinstated him.
Robert J. Smith, who served (at a small salary) as Maryland's representative on the Washington Metro transit board, mentioned his religious views against homosexual conduct during an appearance on a cable television program. Although probably few saw the show, gay activists demanded that he be fired, and Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich complied.
Michael Campion, a psychologist with the Minneapolis Police Department, was suspended because of his past affiliation with a group critical of the gay lifestyle, despite reports of a good job performance.
If Americans don't resist such assaults on free speech, we may be headed down the Canadian road (where same-sex marriage is now legal). Dozens of Vancouver postal workers just refused to deliver mail they called "homophobic."
In Yale University's student newspaper, a columnist described that institution as "really, really gay. Like, totally gay." Yet, when one email expressed a dissenting view on Yale's gay pride day, gay activists demanded reprisals against the dissenter.
The public schools are a major battleground in the gays' efforts to censor any criticism of their goals or lifestyle. Every year, the National Education Association (NEA) passes resolutions not only demanding that schools not discriminate against sexual orientation, but also insisting that classroom language be monitored to punish "homophobia" and to "promote 'acceptance' and/or 'respect' instead of 'tolerance'" of the gay lifestyle.
Taking their demands for censorship into the courts, the gays have been winning. After the Poway High School near San Diego endorsed the gay project called "Day of Silence," the Ninth Circuit upheld the school in forbidding student Tyler Chase Harper to wear a T-shirt with the words "homosexuality is shameful, Romans 1:27."13 The dissenting judge pointed out the intolerance of those who claim they want tolerance for minority views. But Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who sided with the school, wrote that Tyler's defenders "still don't get the message."
I get the message: for Judge Reinhardt, gay rights means intolerance for free speech.
Clinton apologists once defended his scandalous conduct by saying it was "only about sex." It's increasingly clear that the gay ideology is about far more than sex; it assaults our fundamental right to free speech.

Congressmen Need Constitution Tutorials
Some federal employees are griping because a new law requires them to take a 25-minute tutorial on the U.S. Constitution. Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) sponsored this law, along with a similar law requiring every public school to "hold an educational program on the United States Constitution on September 17," which is Constitution Day. Byrd deserves our thanks for this great idea, but he should have also required a constitutional tutorial to be taken by judges and Members of Congress.
If judges understood the Constitution, they would know that it gives government eminent-domain power to take your private property for "public use," and that judges have no power to change those words to "public purpose" and then define an increase in tax revenue as a public purpose. The Constitution provides an amendment process, but the judges are not part of it.
If ex-Members of Congress John Anderson (R-IL) and Birch Bayh (D-IN) understood the Constitution, they would respect the time-tested superiority of our method of electing U.S. Presidents by the Electoral College. Its rationale and structure are the mirror of the Great Compromise that made our Constitution possible: the combination of equal representation of states with representation based on population.
Anderson, Bayh and their associates in the Campaign for the National Popular Vote know they can't change the Electoral College honestly by passing a constitutional amendment. So they have launched a devious plan to get state legislatures to enact identical bills requiring their own electors to ignore the winner of their state's election and cast all their state's ballots for the candidate whom the state believes received the most popular votes nationwide. That would be organized vote-stealing. It's ridiculous and un-American to force electors to vote against their constituents' wishes.

If current Members of Congress understood the Constitution, they wouldn't be toying with a devious plan to subvert the District Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8, clause 17), which makes the status of the District of Columbia clear: Congress is given the power "To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States."
Our Constitution's framers decided on a separate and independent federal enclave to serve as the seat of the new government, a territory outside of and independent from every state. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 gave Congress complete authority over the District so that it would be insulated from undue pressures and interruptions.
Article I, Section 2, makes clear that "the House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second year by the people of the several States." The District of Columbia is not a state.
This means that the District of Columbia does not have its own Senators and Representatives. That decision was not a mistake or oversight on the part of the Founding Fathers, but was an integral part of the original constitutional design to keep the seat of our Federal Government out of the political process so that it would remain the servant of all the people, and not become our master.
In the 1980s, the people who don't like our Constitution the way it was written tried to eliminate this provision by a proposed constitutional amendment to give Washington, D.C. representation in the Congress "as though it were a state." The "D.C. Representation" Amendment passed Congress, but it was rejected by the American people and died on August 22, 1985, after 34 of the 50 states refused to ratify it.
The 23rd Amendment, ratified in 1961, reaffirmed the District of Columbia as a unique federal territory in the American system. The 23rd Amendment gives the District three votes in the Electoral College and thereby allows residents to vote for President and Vice President just like all other citizens.
That should have been the end of it, but some misguided Members of Congress keep trying to make an end run around the Constitution. In 2006, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) launched a new attempt to bypass the District Clause by pretending the District is something that it isn't. H.R. 5388 would give the District a House seat by stating: "The District of Columbia shall be considered a Congressional district for purposes of representation in the House of Representatives." But the Constitution allows only states to have representation in Congress, and the District of Columbia is not a state.
We urgently need more knowledge about the U.S. Constitution to adhere to what it says, why it has survived for more than two centuries, and why Americans should defeat all mischievous attempts to bypass it with unconstitutional laws.

Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925).
Fields v. Palmdale School District (2005).
Eklund v. Byron Union School District (2005).
Boyd Gay-Straight v. Boyd Board of Education (2006).
Brown v. Hot, Sexy and Safer Productions (1995).
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005).
Evans-Marshall v. Board of Education (2005).
C.N. v. Ridgewood Board of Education (2005).
Crowley v. McKinney (2005).
Harper v. Poway Unified School District (2006).
Guiles v. Marineau (2006).
West Virginia State Bd. of Education v. Barnette (1943).
Harper v. Poway Unified School District (2006).

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http://www.unitedpatriotsofamerica.c...7/default.aspx

[ilbegone]

Apologies, this jumps from gays to "Latinos" concerning American culture and who defines it.

This is from a blog entitled "Ken Burns hates Mexicans".

I am not sure who does this blog, didn't look that far.

It seems that Ken Burns is a film maker of some sort, and the blogger has a axe to grind because he doesn't believe Burns puts enough brown bodies into his movies.

I place this here because on the one hand it has a lot of truth to it, touches on the changes which accompany transitioning from immigrant ancestors to assimilated American, and demonstrates the school pushed notion that the American descendant of immigrants should "remember where we came from" (as if the past without personal memory is somehow a present personal experience), and having pride in a delusional, contradictory notion of belonging to a foreign culture.

The blogger has an intro and a conclusion, separated from film critic Kiko Martinez' commentary by **

05 February 2009
The Pocho is Me

The condition lives on. The in-between state of neither here nor there. The third-gen Brown experience of looking like a real Mexican yet speaking Spanish like a third-grader, of patiently explaining to your parents that it's pronounced Ramones and not Ra-mo-nes, blah-blah-Hybrid-Existence-blah. You know what I'm talking about.

And so does, apparently, Kiko Martinez, in his article about this year's San Antonio CineFestival, the nation's longest running Chicano/Latino film festival, in the latest issue of the San Antonio Current. A must-read:

**

A man running through the forest; a woman diving into a swimming pool; a funeral procession.

That’s all I’m able to grasp from watching the two-minute trailer for Matar a Todos as I scan through the CineFestival website for this year’s film lineup.

I’d like to know more about director Esteban Schroeder’s 2007 political thriller, but the preview is in Spanish (with no subtitles), and the only phrase I can recall my bilingual parents inadvertently teaching me growing up was, “¡Ay, como fregas!” (loosely translated as a way to express frustration).

Yes, I am a third-generation Latino living in the U.S. I like football but not fútbol, refer to snow cones as raspas, cringe at the smell of menudo. I can roll my Rs with the best of them, but I don’t know any of the words when my fiancée sings to her Julieta Venegas CDs in the car.

I’m a living, breathing example of an internal culture clash.

Now, with the 31st annual CineFestival upon us, I suddenly realize I can’t relate to most of the issues depicted in the various feature and documentary films scheduled to screen during the four-day event. I don’t know any undocumented immigrants, nor have I ever found myself caught in the middle of a turf war with a rival gang. I recognize the injustices and corruption occurring across Mexico and Latin America, but don’t consider them more or less significant than the same issues encountered in parts of the world where my ancestry doesn’t extend.

Does this mean CineFestival — the oldest running international Latino film festival in North America — is slowly but surely disconnecting itself from Latinos like me? Are Latinos like me so detached from our indigenous roots that we are indifferent to the struggles of past generations? Are Latinos like me tired of watching Latino filmmakers make movies about the border, day laborers, and poverty-stricken third-world countries?

I sincerely hope not.

As a film critic, I credit CineFestival for selecting some high-quality work on a variety of worldly topics that few other U.S.-based film festivals bother to include in their programs. As a Latino, I credit CineFestival for a lot more. For not losing sight of the festival’s primary focus for over three decades; for being receptive to filmmakers from countries such as Chile, Panama, and Uruguay and allowing them to share their unique Latino experiences; and for proving to Latinos like me that as long as we know where we come from, we’ll never lose pride in our culture.

**

As you can see, minus a list of the upcoming CineFestival film screenings, I've included the totality of Martinez's piece. Apologies. I kept looking for a bite-sized excerpt and couldn't bring myself to edit down to a blog-friendly length. Couldn't do it. Was fascinated throughout.

http://brownstate.typepad.com/ken_bu...n-running.html