I should clarify it’s discrimination on the part of the bake sale for basing their prices on race/gender.
It is? How so? By making white males pay more?
That’s taxes, that’s not discrimination.
Ah, but to people of what sex and ethnicity? Inquiring minds want to know!
Also, I wonder how their price list works - if I was a black and hispanic woman, would they pay me to take their cookies?
Let’s roll the videotape:
Obviously, Mr. Houston is unaware that affirmative action is based on race. That’s sort of the whole point. Preferences aren’t given for tall people, or people with red hair, or hairy people. They aren’t even given based on the socioeconomic background or political viewpoint. They’re given on race and race alone. In this case, race is a proxy for diversity. Thus, when Mr. Houston says affirmative action is not based on race, he clearly demonstrates his own failure to grasp the nature of affirmative action. **
Would you like some lumber to build that cross for yourself?
Criticizing one of your remarks every now and then is not tantamount to me being “on your back.” It’s not like I’m following you from thread to thread, picking at every little word you write. I view you as just another poster, and if you post something I think warrants criticism, I’m going to do so. You don’t get a free pass just because you’re thin-skinned.
I am not out to get you. You are not that special. Take a valium and relax, f’rcryinoutloud.
Maybe yes, maybe no. I would be willing to bet my lunch that SMU recieves a substantial amount of federal money. As such, they may very well be restricted in their ability to restrict 1st amendment rights. They aren’t exaclty a private club.
Actually, probably not. After all, the “M” does stand for “Methodist.” Religious-affiliated schools do have significant restrictions on monies they can receive from government agencies (although, contrary to some popular opinion, it’s not true that they can’t receive any money from the government).
My impression of the wage-inequality isn’t that women are being paid less than men for doing the same jobs, but that men are responsible for more than half of the total amount of income in this country.
If $1.72 represented the total amount of money being earned all over the US, men would be earning $1.00 of it and women $0.72. Men would be responsible for about 58% of earnings, and women roughly 42%.
In other words, women are not equally represented in the workplace when measured by their contribution to the overall earned income. It’s not that they’re paid less for the same job, but they don’t collectively bring in as much money, implying that a) more men work than women, b) men tend to have higher-paying jobs than women, or c) some combination of a) and b).
Here is one example.
Here is another.
I am sure there are more out there…I don’t want to get into a constitutional debate about funding and limits on free speech, I’m just saying that it isn’t enough, in this case, to say that SMU is a private institution and can do what it wants re speech. It may be that they can do so, but they may be putting their federal funding at risk. That is all.
Personally, I think this is an excellent example of restrictions on speech backfiring. This has gotten far more press because they shut it down than it ever would have otherwise.
Not race alone. Remember: White women have been the biggest beneficiaries of this “racist” policy for years.
People conveniently forget this.
I invite you to pay for one semester at SMU and then tell me that it isn’t a private school.
You made the extraordinary assertion that SMU is somehow bound to follow the 1st Amendment in terms of prohibition of speech. Care to back it up, or are you just blustering?
Rhum: Yes, but those are grants. Government grants make up an extremely small proportion of a school’s budget, and they are always for very specific projects, not for general operations. I can’t imagine that NASA, or any other government agency made their grants contingent on “free speech” outside of the specific projects that they funded.
I searched in vain for the budget figures for SMU, but I can tell you that for the (also religious-affiliated) university I work for, government grants make up less than 5% of our operating budget. We received much more from private donations, as I suppose SMU has (they’ve done really well in fundraising in the past few years). Should private donors have a say in SMU’s speech regulations, since they contribute more money to the school?
I said they "may’ be bound. I didn’t say they were bound. Please don’t put words in my mouth. I recognize that the fact that a private orginization receives some federal money does not automatically make them a “state actor” for purposes of the first amendment. Kohn 457 U.S. at 840-843. But see Lebron v. Nat’l R.R. Pass. Corp., 513 U.S. 374, 397 (1995) “It surely cannot be that government, state or federal, is able to evade the most solemn obligations imposed in the Constitution by simply resorting to the corporate form.” Say SMU adopts a policy of not allowing any liberals (however they may define that term) to speak out on campus. While they may have the ultimate right to do so, would that not at least jeapordize their federal funding? I don’t believe that the government should be allowed to fund actions it could not accomplish itself. You could also look at Bob Jones University, another SCOTUS case. None of these are really 100% on point, and I don’t have time to write any more, but this is the idea I was getting at. Also, I couldn’t find a reported decision, but I believe that a CA lower court invalidated Stanford’s speech code some years ago on Constitutionall grounds. Not the most binding authority, I’ll grant you.