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niyad

niyad's Journal
niyad's Journal
September 14, 2024

Misogynist Manifesto: Project 2025's Plans to Gut Women's Rights in the Workplace and Classroom Pt 2


Misogynist Manifesto: Project 2025’s Plans to Gut Women’s Rights in the Workplace and Classroom Pt 2
PUBLISHED 9/10/2024 by Carrie N. Baker


Project 2025’s plans for women students and workers would devastate their educational opportunities, harming their careers and earning power.


A woman on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., on Oct. 9, 2016, ahead of the second presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. (Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images)

Gutting Women’s Workplace Rights

Project 2025 eviscerates women’s long-held rights to sex equality in the workplace. It calls for the next president to rescind executive orders signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s that prohibited federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race and sex, and it would weaken Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination in employment. First, it would narrow the meaning of the word sex in Title VII to mean the “biological binary meaning of ‘sex,’” allowing employment decisions based on gender stereotypes. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that an accounting firm violated Title VII when it denied a woman partnership based on partners’ comments that she needed “a course in charm school” and should “walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear make-up, have her hair styled, and wear jewelry.” Project 2025 would reverse this interpretation—which would also exclude LGBTQ+ people from Title VII protections in defiance of the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision, penned by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, in Bostock v. Clayton County.

The plan calls for the next president to eliminate Title VII coverage of disparate impact discrimination, where an employer practice appears to be sex-neutral but falls more harshly on women than men and cannot be justified by business necessity. That would mean, for example, that employers could disproportionately screen out female job candidates by using unnecessary strength, aerobic capacity and endurance tests or height requirements unrelated to the job. Project 2025 directs the next president to issue an executive order exempting religious employers from laws prohibiting sex discrimination, allowing them to discriminate against employees who have abortions or are parents. The plan calls for weakening the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces Title VII. It would end the agency’s long-standing power to issue guidance, technical assistance and policy positions interpreting Title VII, and it would block the agency from entering into consent decrees with employers to resolve discrimination cases. This would mean that women would have to file expensive and time-consuming lawsuits to defend their Title VII rights. Project 2025 also demands a reorientation of EEOC enforcement priorities away from sex and race discrimination to focus instead on claims of religious discrimination.
. . .

*********Finally, Project 2025 calls for the end of all programs designed to eliminate discrimination against women and people of color at the federal, state, local and private-sector levels and directs the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to investigate and criminally prosecute state and local governments that have these programs. *********

. . . .

The plan would increase public funding for religious education through expansion of “school choice” policies, and give federal education funds to states as block grants with no strings attached. On student debt, it would end Biden’s loan forgiveness program, and it proposes student loan repayment programs that would multiply costs for borrowers, increase defaults and end existing programs that allow borrowers to earn cancellation, according to a report from the Center for American Progress. It’s worth noting that women hold 64 percent of all student loan debt.

These proposals and more would devastate the educational opportunities of women and girls, harming their careers and earning power.


https://msmagazine.com/2024/09/10/project-2025-education-women-students-work/
September 14, 2024

Misogynist Manifesto: Project 2025 Says Yes to 'Biblically Based Marriages' and No to Reproductive Rights Pt. 1


Misogynist Manifesto: Project 2025 Says Yes to ‘Biblically Based Marriages’ and No to Reproductive Rights Pt. 1
PUBLISHED 9/9/2024 by Carrie N. Baker



Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, speaks with members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Sept 12, 2023. (Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This is part one in a three-part series about Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the next Republican president that maps out the permanent reversal of more than 50 years of hard-fought gains for American women and girls. Here’s how it would play out.


You’ve probably heard about the Heritage Foundation’s detailed plan for the next Republican president. Called the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project (and funded by the dark money networks affiliated with Leonard Leo and Charles Koch), the plan maps out how to reverse more than 50 years of gains for American women and girls in employment, education, reproductive rights and more. The project has four pillars: an 887-page policy agenda, a personnel data-base of vetted conservatives, a “presidential administration academy” to train these pre-selected individuals to achieve the Project 2025 policy agenda, and a 180-day “playbook”—what the plan’s backers hope to achieve in the first 180 days if Donald Trump takes office again in January 2025. According to Project 2025, “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.”
. . .

In his foreword, Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, makes clear that dismantling women’s rights is central to Project 2025’s policy agenda. “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” he writes. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”


Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow holds up a Project 2025 book at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 19, 2024. (Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)


Promoting the Patriarchal Family and ‘Biblically Based Marriage’

Project 2025 promotes traditional heterosexual marriage, stigmatizing single parenthood and same-sex spouses, and cutting programs to support single mothers and their children. It directs the next president to develop policies and programs to “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” The document explains: “For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father,” reflecting narrow and antiquated ideas of parenting. The Christian fundamentalist idea of a “biblically based marriage” sets men as breadwinners and leaders in the family, while women are subordinate to their husbands and serve them as caregivers of children.
. . .




Destroying Reproductive Rights

Proposals to restrict reproductive rights pervade Project 2025’s policy agenda, focused not only on abortion but also on contraception, sex education and gender-affirming healthcare. The plan would eliminate the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force within the Department of Health and Human Services and replace it with the “Department of Life” to eliminate support for reproductive rights throughout the federal government. On abortion, Project 2025 calls on the next president to direct the Food and Drug Administration to reverse approval of the abortion pill mifepristone (now used in 63 percent of all abortions) and to ban telehealth abortion (used for nearly one-fifth of abortions in the U.S.). Project 2025 directs the Department of Justice to misuse an 1873 anti-obscenity law, the Comstock Act, to criminally prosecute anyone who mails abortion pills and potentially any medical instrument used in procedural abortion—effectively establishing a nationwide ban on abortion.


An advertisement from the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump pro-democracy group, presenting a dark vision of the future for millions of American women if Trump defeats Harris in the presidential election and criminalizes abortion nationwide.

. . . .

https://msmagazine.com/2024/09/09/misogynist-manifesto-project-2025-marriage-women-abortion-bible-divorce-men/
September 14, 2024

Misogynist Manifesto: Fighting Project 2025's Plans to Dismantle Democracy as We Know It Pt 3

Misogynist Manifesto: Fighting Project 2025’s Plans to Dismantle Democracy as We Know It Pt 3
PUBLISHED 9/11/2024 by Carrie N. Baker

Project 2025 is a sinister plan to replace nonpartisan civil servants who enforce laws guaranteeing women’s rights, with trained ideologues determined to undermine these rights.



The Heritage Foundation building in Washington, D.C. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and 140 former Trump staffers put together Project 2025, a roadmap for how to replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

This is the final installment in a three-part series about Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the next Republican president that maps out the permanent reversal of more than 50 years of hard-fought gains for American women and girls. Part one analyzed the misogynist manifesto’s plans for “biblically based” marriages and rollbacks on reproductive rights. Part two broke down Project 2025’s plans to gut women’s rights in the workplace and the classroom. tackle the right-wing vision to “rip and shred” the federal government and democracy as we know it.


‘Ripping and Shredding’ the Federal Government

Many of the Project 2025 policies attacking women’s equality and reproductive rights, as well as other parts of Project 2025’s policy agenda—including plans to eliminate environmental and labor protections, force immigrants into internment camps and then deport them en masse, deregulate business and expand tax cuts for the wealthy—are deeply unpopular with the American people. According to the research firm Navigator, once they’ve been told about Project 2025, two in three Americans say they’re opposed to it, citing concerns “that it threatens rights and freedoms, that it would hurt middle and working-class families, and that it threatens our democracy.”

Some of these policies have been enacted by Republican presidents in the past and later reversed by Democratic presidents. What makes Project 2025 different is the scheme to make these unpopular policies permanent by replacing nonpartisan civil servants who enforce laws guaranteeing women’s rights with trained ideologues determined to undermine these rights. Laws like Title VII, Title IX and Title X (which funds family planning) will be manipulated to be useless or to function counter to their intended purpose of strengthening women’s rights.
The authors of Project 2025 boast about “how to fire supposedly ‘unfireable’ federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of Government.” The plan explicitly seeks to “dismantle the administrative state,” explaining: “The solution… is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. These are problems not of technocratic efficiency but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch.”

. . . . . .

U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) summed up the strategy this way: “They plan to centralize all power in the presidency, exercise political control over the Justice Department, implant Christian white nationalism throughout the government, strip tens of thousands of professional government workers of their civil service protections, create an army of political loyalists and sycophants in government, ban abortion nationwide, set up immigrant detention camps, deport millions of people, repeal all climate safety regulations and exact criminal revenge against reporters, judges and Democrats.”
. . .



Meanwhile, in Congress, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) recently announced the Stop Project 2025 Task Force.

“Project 2025 is more than an idea—it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will,” Huffman said at the announcement. “This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism and religious nationalism orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers. We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late.”

https://msmagazine.com/2024/09/11/project-2025-government-democracy-white-house/

September 14, 2024

Thirty Years After the Violence Against Women Act, the ERA Is Needed to Halt Gender-Based Violence

Thirty Years After the Violence Against Women Act, the ERA Is Needed to Halt Gender-Based Violence
PUBLISHED 3/22/2024 by Naomi Young

By providing an explicit guarantee of sex equality in the Constitution, the Equal Rights Amendment holds the power to transform the underlying power dynamics fueling gender-based violence.



Actor Angelina Jolie joins U.S. senators during a press conference on the Violence Against Women Act in the Capitol on Feb. 9, 2022. Three decades ago, in 1994, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act, putting the full force of the federal government into efforts to stop domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking to help survivors. VAWA has been reauthorized four times since its original enactment; most recently, Congress passed and President Biden signed the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2022. (Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

As the most literal form of patriarchal power and control, gender-based violence has always been a galvanizing subject in gender equality movements. Still, gender-based violence has largely escaped legal treatment as an issue of sex discrimination in the United States. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) will provide an explicit guarantee of sex equality in the Constitution and empower Congress to enforce it and address gender-based violence.

The current reality in the U.S.—that one in three women experiences sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner within their lifetimes—is rooted in the history of a legal system that upheld gendered hierarchies and tolerated, if not promoted, violence within marriages. The 1848 Women’s Rights Convention’s Declaration of Sentiments listed the husband’s “right of chastisement” among its grievances. While courts no longer recognize such a right, its legacy lives on in internalized biases throughout the legal system, which generally minimizes gender-based violence as private, trivial, or normal. Meanwhile, gender-based violence persists in conditions of economic and social inequality. The legal system’s nearly singular reliance on law enforcement to address gender-based violence does more to uphold existing hierarchies of race and sex than to dismantle inequality. Despite these issues, the anti-violence movement has painfully eked out successes, including the recognition of forms of gender-based violence in state law and the provision of a system of social services and resources established 30 years ago when Congress enacted the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).


Then-Senator Joe Biden and Attorney General Janet Reno chat before a press conference on Violence Against Women Act of Crime Bill, outside the Capitol in 1994. (CQ Roll Call / Getty Images)

. . . .

An all-too-likely answer is that the Supreme Court will subordinate the interests of survivors to existing constitutional rights, including those enabling violent behavior. During the last term, the Court overturned a stalking conviction and elevated First Amendment rights over the interests of survivors. In Counterman v. Colorado, a woman’s stalker sent hundreds of Facebook messages, created new accounts when blocked, suggested he was surveilling her, and expressed a wish that she die. The Supreme Court held that the First Amendment protects this behavior unless the state can prove that the defendant subjectively understood that their words could cause fear. The ERA could shift the reasoning of outcomes like this by elevating sex equality rights to the same constitutional status as rights in the First and Second Amendments.

https://cdn-lblif.nitrocdn.com/dGudqkMNFXTXrXjkpgPQKThunaLAxBAM/assets/images/optimized/rev-b523880/msmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/IMG_5364-1-1536x1455-1-1024x970.webp
ERA activists marched from the White House to the Capitol on Dec. 13, 2023, the 100-year anniversary of the national ERA’s introduction in the House of Representatives. (Courtesy of Madelyn Amos)

The Court has also impeded the ability of Congress to enforce gender equality and affirmatively address gender-based violence. At the heart of VAWA was a provision that created a civil rights remedy for survivors to assert their “right to be free from crimes of violence motivated by gender” by suing the perpetrator of violence. In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled this provision unconstitutional, holding that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to enact a law providing a civil right of action in cases involving gender-motivated crimes. But the ERA invites us to envision bolder solutions to gender-based violence beyond VAWA’s civil rights remedy, civil orders of protection, or the criminal justice system. Economic equality and freedom from gender-based violence are inextricably connected. In reality, few survivors have the resources to bring a civil rights lawsuit in federal court. VAWA’s civil remedy was rarely used. In fact, most survivors are unrepresented in family courts. And reliance on the criminal justice system to address gender-based violence has entrenched paternalistic ideas of safety and endangered Black women and all survivors at the margins of power. The potential of the ERA’s constitutional sex equality guarantee lies in its ability to address the power dynamics underlying gender-based violence.

https://msmagazine.com/2024/03/22/violence-against-women-era-equal-rights-amendment/

September 14, 2024

Thirty Years of the Violence Against Women Act Shows Progress Is Possible


Thirty Years of the Violence Against Women Act Shows Progress Is Possible
PUBLISHED 9/12/2024 by Esta Soler

Today, more Americans than ever recognize family violence as a societal problem, worthy of public attention and investment. The Violence Against Women Act helped make that happen.



Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt. with Roya Knock, then age 5, at a National Organization for Women (NOW) and National Task Force to End Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Against Women rally for the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) on June 26, 2012, on the east front of the Capitol. (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call)

On a long list of issues in the newly released YWomenVote survey, women identified domestic and sexual violence as the third most important one facing U.S. women collectively. It’s not a surprise to those of us working to stop this violence that it was behind only abortion access and the economy/cost of living. As we mark the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act on Friday, Sept. 13, at this time of so much cynicism and division, it’s worth remembering one lesson that law teaches: Progress is possible.

VAWA’s passage was truly a turning point for our country. This transformative, imperfect but ever-improving law was well worth the years-long effort to get a recalcitrant Congress to pass it. That work was excruciating at times. We had to listen to lawmakers dismiss brutal murders as “lovers’ quarrels that got out of hand.” Some expected us to laugh when they accused us of “trying to take the fun out of marriage.” Many insisted domestic and sexual violence were private matters best handled by families. Never mind the health and economic costs, the dangerous law enforcement engagements, or the trauma that for many lasted a lifetime. The consensus among Washington powerbrokers—mirroring public sentiment at the time—was that issues of domestic violence and sexual assault didn’t belong in the public domain. That has changed. Policymakers and Americans more broadly now recognize family violence as a societal problem, worthy of public attention and investment. And the Violence Against Women Act helped make that happen.



President Joe Biden during an event celebrating the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, in the East Room of the White House on March 16, 2022. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP via Getty Images)
. . . . . .

Keep looking to improve the law. VAWA provided funds for urgently needed services; improved legal responses; brought health care providers, schools and other institutions into the work; introduced training for judges and law enforcement; launched the National Domestic Violence Hotline; and more. But it wasn’t enough, and we worked continuously to improve and expand the law, making changes to ensure fewer people would be caught up in the criminal justice system, expand it to more communities, provide economic support to survivors, promote prevention, and address the needs of children and youth growing up in homes with violence. We improved VAWA each time it was reauthorized.
. . .

Keep up with the times. New technologies and new circumstances (like COVID-19) pose new challenges, and the public policy response has often been inadequate or slow. As a country, we’ve done a poor job of addressing the online abuse, stalking and harassment that are so common, the human trafficking that is present in too many communities, and the growing isolation of young men that often feeds violence and hate. We need to be more nimble and aggressive in meeting emerging challenges because they won’t solve themselves. Thirty years after VAWA, I am confident we can continue the progress and that a new generation will prioritize and bring passion and creativity to this work. It will take resolve and political leaders willing to put aside differences and work together to make our homes and communities safer—just as it always has.


A pro-women’s rights demonstration on April 9. 1995, in Washington, D.C. (Joyce Naltchayan / AFP via Getty Images)


https://msmagazine.com/2024/09/12/thirty-years-violence-against-women-act/
September 12, 2024

The Daily Bi*ch*: "Calm down, Satan. I'm worth the wait."

*Both a noun, and a verb, depending on usage.

September 11, 2024

Thank you, EarlG and Elad. With all the traffic on DU tonight, there were a few

slowdowns, a bit of waiting sometimes, but this beautiful, wonderful community kept right on fuunctioning.

So here's to our Admins for their fantastic job on this absolutely incredible night!!! CHEERS!!!

September 9, 2024

OFFS!!! "Meanest spice shop in America!" I just read Bill Penzey's email

from yesterday, the day after VP Harris visited his Pittsburg shop.Video, of course, has gone viral. What cracked me up was that ruzzian propaganda network fixed noise was apoplectic about the visit, and about Bill. After calling Penzey's "the meanest spice shop in America", one of putin's stooges then read Bill's comments about "r's" on air. It did, of course, cost Penzey's some outraged customers. However, based on responses I saw here on DU, he gained quite a few.

It is going to be interesting to see how this goes. At least I remembered to put my latest order in yesterday morning.

September 6, 2024

Dear Friends, there is so much news and information ccoming at us

each and every day, it is so easy to just glance at headlines, breeze through stories, and miss important pieces of information. Please take a second to glance at the link, or check the first line of an article. We all know Borowitz and The Onion, but there are other, lesser-known satire sites out there, and they do get posted, and people sometimes miss the information that a posted piece is, in fact, satire. I have done this several times myself, and had to go back and reread something that sounds entirely plausible, only to discover it is satire.

These days, it can be almost imposible to separate fact and satire (pity The Onion, Borowitz, Wonkette), but we can pay a little bit more attention.

September 6, 2024

TRAITOR** as regular church-goer??? I am hoping that this is is a question that NYC

DU'ers might be able to answer. In an earlier OP, I talked bout a young woman who joined in a duscussion some friends and I were having last night, and little alarm bells kept going off in my cynical, suspicious little brain.

One of the things that set me off was her insistence that she actually spent time around TRAITOR** because he attended church regularly, as did she, specifically Marble church (which she said was congregational). She also said that that was where all the "movers and shakers" went. Now, before his embrace of the talibalgelicals, I don't recall ever hearing about any prior pretense at religion from him, no evidence that he ever set foot in a church, let alone regularly. So, can anybody tell me, is this story of his regular attendence at a church something that was known prior to last evening?

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