Untitled

Nathalie Baptiste at HuffPost:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted Monday to rescind decades-old guidance that helps employers ensure their workplace is equitable and inclusive. In a press release the next day, the agency claimed the guidance had violated civil rights law and Supreme Court precedence, referring to a unanimous high court decision from last year that made “reverse discrimination” easier to prove. “As our nation approaches its 250th birthday, we are reminded that the Founders’ vision rested on the enduring principle that every individual is created equal and therefore is entitled to equal treatment under the law,” EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas said in a statement. “This week’s action reaffirms that Title VII’s protections apply equally to all American workers and that equal opportunity remains a defining commitment of our democracy.” There was no public comment period, even though agencies typically do ask the public for their input.

In 1979, the EEOC issued a memo for employers who wanted to comply with affirmative action laws that mandated making the workplace more equitable, while still not violating civil rights laws. The rule was called the “Affirmative Action Appropriate Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as Amended,” referencing the section of the landmark legislation that prohibits discrimination based on race, color, sex or national origin. “The EEOC is choosing to get rid of a tool that is intended to help remedy discrimination to try and reduce barriers to opportunity so that workers can have a fair chance to compete for jobs based on their qualifications and merit and not be excluded because of who they are,” said Katie Sandson, senior counsel on education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center. For example, she said, if a university’s employment practices were leading to an underrepresented and underpaid group among its faculty, they could turn to the memo to help figure out how to address the issue.

[...] The EEOC was created in 1964 as part of the Civil Rights Act to fight workplace discrimination, but there has been a drastic shift in what kind of complaints the agency has been focusing on since Donald Trump returned to office. Experts say this week’s rescission is just another way for the Trump administration to dismantle civil rights laws that protect workers from discrimination.

“We see this as part of the larger attack by the federal government on anything that they consider to be promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility ― the basic values that underlie our civil rights laws,” Sandon said. “We’ve seen those values under attack from day one of this administration.” The Trump administration has indeed been chipping away at anything it perceives to boost diversity, equity and inclusion. The phrase has become a catch-all for programs at workplaces, schools and public institutes that deal with racial or gender equity. The federal government has barred agencies and departments from using words like diversity and equity, and threatened to pull funding from states with DEI programs, and Trump has repeatedly trashed racial equality programs.

Madeline Peltz at Number Two Pencil:

The Supreme Court wrapped up its term by striking down the Trump administration’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. Trump v. Barbara struck a major blow to the order at the very center of the administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. Still, even by questioning the 14th Amendment, the administration succeeded in getting three Supreme Court justices to say that children born to non-citizens should not have constitutional rights. Conservative female influencers cleverly knit the immigration question into a broader pro-natalist agenda by fearmongering about so-called “birth tourism,” “global surrogacy,” and even framing the decision as a plot to encourage abortion. The Daily Wire’s Isabel Brown claimed the ruling was the “most impactful” decision in a generation, describing it as the “Roe v. Wade of Gen Z’s lifetime.”

“Does being a leftist in America today mean that you must fervently support as many American women killing their children as humanly possible, by the millions, before they are ever even born because ‘human rights,’” she said, adding an air quotes gesture, “while also fervently supporting foreign adversaries hijacking a birth tourism system so that their children can be born in America and take over American culture because ‘human rights?’”

Fearmongering about “birth tourism,” the notion that immigrants are coming to the United States and giving birth to obtain citizenship rights for their children, is a longtime right-wing scare tactic. The administration raised the issue during arguments in Trump v. Barbara. Solicitor General D. John Saucer claimed that “uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades.” But as The New York Times reports, “Scholars at Penn State released a study this week, based on analysis of official data, that found that fewer than 0.3 percent of all U.S. births in any given year were to tourists.”

Fundamentalist podcaster and author of Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, Allie Beth Stuckey, took a similar line. She said the “ruling solidifies a key driver of illegal immigration, baby trafficking, and global surrogacy.” The comments section on this post is flooded with disagreements among her conservative Christian audience.

On her Substack Rethinking Fertility, Emma Waters, the anti-IVF policy analyst for the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, focused her criticism of the Barbara by claiming it will fuel abuse of surrogacy laws.

[...] The administration has responded to their defeat by floating a ban on pregnant immigrants. On X, SiriusXM radio host Megyn Kelly endorsed the idea of terminating the visa of any non-citizen who becomes pregnant and prosecuting doctors who do not report positive pregnancy tests of non-citizens to the government.

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

Rev. Munther Isaac—a Christian pastor and theologian living in Ramallah—has a message for his fellow Christians. That message is this: Christian Palestinians have been living in the Holy Land since the origins of Christianity, but their existence is now at risk because of the Israeli settlers non-stop attacks them together with the policies of the Netanyahu administration. Isaac added—disputing the misinformation of some on the right like Mike Huckabee—”To say the West Bank is a safe country for Christians is wrong.” He continued with this powerful challenge: “I wish people would just come and spend a week with us in Palestine, and then they will understand what Christians go through.”

To be clear, Rev. Isaac does not view Palestinians through the prism of Christian or Muslim. He explained as Palestinians we are “all indigenous people,” adding, “We share the same culture, go to the same schools, we’re business partners, we’re classmates, we live together as one people.” And of course they have to endure the same campaign designed to drive them from their home. But part of his work is to connect with Christians in the West—especially America—so that they understand the plight of their fellow Christians living under a cruel Israeli occupation. And recently that cruelty has exploded.

Over the past two years, Israeli settlers have been increasingly terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank. A recent United Nations report reported that violence by the settlers in the West Bank has reached record levels, with an average of six attacks daily causing casualties or damage. Even the Israeli military—which protects the settlers—reported a huge spike in settler violence with attacks on Palestinian homes, cars and of course physical--often deadly--attacks on Palestinians.

The goal of the Israeli settlers to cleanse from the West Bank all Christians and Muslim to make it Jewish only—just like the massive Israeli settlements are Jewish only. But please understand that these so-called radical settlers are simply carrying out the vision of the Netanyahu government. Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir and other Netanyahu ministers have openly championed the “voluntary” migration of Palestinians Christians and Muslims so it can free from these religions they view as inferior. (These people are Jewish supremacist like we have white supremacists in the US.)

What is lost in the reporting is that some settlers are intentionally targeting Christians in the West Bank and Jerusalem as the Reverend noted. And this is not by accident. Yisca Harani, a Christianity expert and founder of an Israeli hotline for anti-Christian assaults told The Guardian: “What happened with rightwing religious nationalism is that Jewish identity has been growing around anti-Christianity.” He added, “Even if the government doesn’t encourage it, they hint that there will be no sanctions.” But Harani’s comments were made two years ago—it’s far worse now.

[...]

Other right-wing Jews have intentionally spit at Christian clergy and people who appear Christian in Jerusalem. And this vile practice has been defended by Netanyahu’ minister Ben-Gvir as a “tradition” saying, “I still think spitting at Christians is not a criminal case.” The “tradition” per the Armenian Weekly comes from anger over the “Jews in Europe being subjected to forced conversion by the Catholic Church under threat of expulsion or death.” This has caused for some Jews “a collective trauma and resentment toward Christians worldwide.”

👶🤨🤣🤣🤣