In the words of Canada’s Human Rights Commission’s senior counsel Ian Fine, the commission is necessary because "there can’t be enough laws against hate."  This during a panel on human right’s commissions in which Fine was caught twice in lies - or glaring ignorance - about the commission’s activities.  Actually, a single law against hate is too many.  But what can Canadians expect from a government agency that believes that "Freedom of speech is an American concept" and has no value as a principle in Canada?  Read it all.

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James Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s campaign advisers back in the day, wrote this dead-on piece as a post-mortem to the sad little affair of Samantha "Monster" Power.

To prevent her candidate from further embarrassment, Ms Power performed the ritual act of American political hara-kiri and resigned. The problem is that calls for resignation are becoming cries of “wolf” in US politics today.

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Harvard University has accepted a Muslim group’s petition to close the school’s Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center to me for an hour a day so that Muslim women can work out without the presence of men in the gym.

Men have not been allowed to enter the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center during certain times since Jan. 28, after members of the Harvard Islamic Society and the Harvard Women’s Center petitioned the university for a more comfortable environment for women.

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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports that even after a national outcry against its Orwellian program of thought policing shut down the Residence Life office’s efforts at the University of Delaware, the ResLife office is still trying to reenact the program. So far, the Faculty Senate appears to have had enough and is rejecting the program, but the lack of awareness among the ResLife officials indicates that the problem will be recurring. (more…)

If a Mississippi legislator were to get his way, such signs would move off of redneck bumpers and on to restaurant entrances. (more…)

Politico takes time out from hatcheting candidates to cast a skeptical eye on changes in Capitol Hill eating options mandated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The results give insight into the rather peculiar and nanny-ish authoritarianism that lies just beneath the surface of the “progressive” program to force people to share their environmental ideologies. (more…)

Acting in the name of academic freedom, the Modern Language Association, a professional association of professors largely from English departments, has substituted moderate resolutions for at least some of its usual slate of radically leftist causes. What makes this a “man bites dog” story is that an organization that has recently been interested in academic freedom only as rhetorical underpinning for those causes selected and favored by its “radical caucus” as politically correct has abruptly turned a corner and chosen instead to place the general principle ahead of selective partisan causes. Specifically, where the MLA once joined the charge against pro-Israel speakers and advocates while claiming the mantle of academic freedom for opponents and critics of Israel, it has now approved a substitute resolution that explicitly refuses to favor either side of the political divide over Israel: (more…)

From the NY Times:

For three years the Philadelphia council of the Boy Scouts of America held its ground. It resisted the city’s request to change its discriminatory policy toward gay people despite threats that if it did not do so, the city would evict the group from a municipal building where the Scouts have resided practically rent free since 1928.

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Municipal officials said the clash stemmed from a duty to defend civil rights and an obligation to abide by a local law that bars taxpayer support for any group that discriminates. Boy Scout officials said it was about preserving their culture, protecting the right of private organizations to remain exclusive and defending traditions like requiring members to swear an oath of duty to God and prohibiting membership by anyone who is openly homosexual.

This violates a fundamental principle on which the Scouts were founded and the organization refused to compromise in order to maintain a financial arrangement favorable to the group.

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Kathleen Parker says that Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard President, is the prototypical example of this generation’s McCarthyism - political correctness in academia.

Summers, you’ll recall, was driven out of his university post in 2005 after he suggested at a conference that gender differences might account for an under representation by women in science, math and engineering.

Never mind that scientific evidence suggests as much. One simply doesn’t say — ever — that men and women aren’t equal in every way. (more…)

Melanie Phillips’ latest article is entitled “The drowning of common sense“. It was written after a young boy named Jordon Lyon drowned while emergency workers allegedly dithered rather than trying to save him. Not surprisingly, the police have a different understanding of the tragedy. Somehow it seems difficult to lay blame on the police now and from this distance, though Phillips believes otherwise.

Melanie goes on to write brilliantly about a problem in British society that is prevalent here in the U.S. as well - the “compensation culture” that demands that someone be made to pay for every unfortunate event that happens. (more…)