About 35 years ago, abortion replaced religion as the principal creed for all fierce feminists and their liberal male or female lovers. Since the early 1970s, at each two-year interval that coincides with an election cycle, the girl and boy apostles of abortion have run out into the streets screaming. Having achieved the unenviable pinnacle of un-embarrassibility, the apostles of abortion cry that evil Americans are conspiring to kill their God-given right to abort. The acidity of the protest rhetoric is ratcheted so high in each election season that you are certain it cant get worse. Proving the creativity of man is bottomless, it does. On next months ballot, the eminently sensible Prop. 85 forbids an underage girl from having an abortion until 48 hours after her parents have been notified. The wonderful, morality-free minds over at politically pluperfect Planned Parenthood have take their opposition to Prop. 85 through the basement floor. Surely no one will ever improve on this crooked path of reasoning by the balmiest man-hating mamas this side of a mental hospital. Prop. 85 discriminates against women, P. Parenthood says in one of its advertisements. If passed, 85 would put into the California Constitution the only law which regulates the actions of one gender. It is discriminatory. No one would dare pass a law that would restrict the health care of men or suggest benefit packages based on gender. Labor has fought long and hard to guarantee gender equity in pay and benefits. This law says nothing about boys reporting to their parents. Labor must resist any attempt to discriminate, ever, on the basis of gender. Please consider this 86-word message closely. Even, dear reader, if you are militantly opposed to Prop. 85, I trust you are offended by P. Parenthoods choice of certain politically correct terms, by the absence of sober reasoning and by the transparency of their ultimate message, which we shall discuss below.
A Jewish Editor Who Should Think About Converting Out
It hurts to be a Jew in Los Angeles today. Not because the 26-hour fast of Yom Kippur is about to begin. Los Angeles Jews, like the black community, the citys other leading minority, suffer from intellectual vacuity and weak leadership. The most influential Jews in Los Angeles are cerebral paraplegics, lacking the two most important assets of their forefathers, will and courage. Just as the billboard of the black community, the Los Angeles Sentinel, is an embarrassing, unprofessional, uninformative enterprise, the Jewish communitys lone newspaper, the Jewish Journal, is ignored by the vast majority of serious Jews for the same failings. Anti-religious Jews, by the thousands, like to boast about how they wore their hearts on their feet when they marched with Dr. King in the 1960s. That passes for cultural bravery in the present morality-free environment. Whether Dr. King won or lost, it did not affect the non-blacks who marched with him, so they could brag about their civil rights-style courage.
Help Wanted in the Black Community Only Thinkers Need Apply
If the besieged King/Drew Medical Center, the showcase hospital of the black community, fails in the coming months, as feared, the principal cause may be blind cultural loyalty. Too many influential persons in the black community genuinely believe that fellow blacks cannot logically be held accountable for betraying the integrity of King/Drew. The leaders get away with their anti-intellectual reasoning because they run the black community with their hearts rather than their minds. Except on the most parochial level, serious leadership has been missing in the black community of Los Angeles for decades. Among visible blacks in Los Angeles, I can hardly think of anyone I would want to spend 5 minutes with, engaged in sober, meaningful dialogue. Two exceptions are Los Angeles City Councilman Herb Wesson and Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas. They represent a refreshingly adult departure from the carnival queens of clowndom, Congresswomen Diane Watson and Maxine Waters, and the wildly over-rated County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke. These three obnoxious lightweight ladies are as useless to the black community as a new Lexus with a full tank of gas in the middle of the Pacific. Their inattentive, immature leadership partially explains why King/Drew is lurching toward its death bed.
Mommy, Theyre Picking on Me Cause Im a Girl
Culver Citily speaking, isn’t it ironic that on the day Susan Evans’ honorable departure as chief of redevelopment is announced that a girl misfit in the Los Angeles Fire Dept. sits on the curb and cries her eyes out? Her ice cream cone melted. “Mommy, they are picking on me again ‘cause I’m a girl.” Fire Capt. Alicia Mathis sounds like a pip who should be heading a one-woman housecleaning service on the moon. How would you like to be saddled with this babe close enough to breathe on you every day in the workplace? Some people have their tribulations now. Others, later. Alicia Babe, a 17-year veteran, has enough age on her to know better. But she doesn’t. Taking time out from her busy and obviously important life, Alicia Babe, utilizing debatable femininity, gracefully ascended the steps of Los Angeles City Hall yesterday morning. Illustrations of her presumably un-masculine ascension are not expected to bob up next month in Playboy. Field and Stream maybe. Demonstrating before the world that she can’t take a joke, Alicia Babe declared that she has forwarded a bulky complaint to the California Dept. of Fair Housing and Employment. Using one hand to keep her face straight, Alicia Babe, in her best, stentorian Gloria Allred tones, opened with a harumph, the way fat, old Major Hoople did in the funny pages when Alicia Babe was even more of a girl. Alicia Babe could have saved the boys in the media precious time by truncating her gripe into those 11 beautiful words: “Mommy, they are picking on me again ‘cause I’m a girl.” Whatta guy you are, Alicia Babe? The kind of he-woman I wish I were lucky enough to serve with but, fortunately, never have married.
Black Is Beautiful, but Nigger Is Not
What a strange world we inhabit where:
- Point I: Erin Aubrey Kaplan, a black woman with virulently racist convictions, makes a provocative suggestion this morning in her weekly essay in the Los Angeles Times. She argues that you honkies are saying the notorious King/Drew Medical Center is a failure because it is a black institution and you are anti-black.
- Point II: The New York Times, which loves to titillate readers with racial pornography, predictably has joined the crowd of East Coast liberals vowing to destroy the re-election campaign of U.S. Sen. George Allen of Virginia. The crowd is furious with Mr. Allen, a son of the late coach of the Rams. They say that after Mr. Allen learned within the past month, at age 54, that he is a Jew, he was too slow to cop to being a Jew. The crowd also is mad at him because he is a conservative and openly religious. The subject of discrediting Mr. Allen arose again yesterday. The New York Times reported that two people who claimed they knew the senator in his younger days suddenly had miraculous twin visions. The race-conscious Times identified two white fellows who claimed they used to know the senator, one in the 1970s, one in the 1980s. It seems that both Democrats recalled that on one occasion Mr. Allen disparaged blacks. In its eagerness to savage Mr. Allen, the politically correct Times charged that Mr. Allen uttered a bad word, which it could not repeat because it fears offending black liberals. The word is nigger.
Tap, Tap: I Still Am Waiting for One Culver City Muslim Apology
Sadly, my good colleague Frederik Sisa remains unconvinced that the threat to the world by a sizable segment of Muslim society is anything more substantive than a sophomoric prank by President Bush, his mortal adversary. It would be easier to prove to Mr. Sisa and his fellow skeptics the earth is flat. That would be bad enough. In response to my call for members of the King Fahad Mosque of Culver City to stand up like moral men, plant their feet and speak out against Muslim terrorists, Mr. Sisa became an apologist for dishonest Muslims. He wrote at length about several un-credible Muslim groups issuing fatwas. Meaningless. That is crouching behind organizational skirts. It shows cowardice not strength or moral leadership or accountability. The evidence of apologies Mr. Sisa offered in his latest essay (The Myth of Muslim Silence, 25 Sept.) would not stand up in a courtroom run by either the former Police Chief Ted Cooke or by the late Buster Brown. Hundreds of gentlemen pray regularly at the King Fahad. Where are leaders today? You know where they are. Okay, fellows, who will be the first to raise his hand, publicly and speak out? Do not do it while standing behind a telephone pole or in a cornfield 50 miles from the next human being. Condemn what your thousands of criminal brothers are perpetrating. Just as with my synagogue and with your church, there is a hierarchy within the mosque. Whether it starts with the imam or someone else, surely there is one legitimate member of the mosque, a gentleman with detectable gravitas, who will demonstrate the moral muscle to take a brave stand. I am not interested in hearing a squeaky mea culpa, you will forgive the linguistic diversion, from the member of the King Fahad with the least standing. As of this moment, every gentleman of stature at the King Fahad is behaving in the manner of the uncourageous Mr. Cooke. He became infamous in his last days as Police Chief for diving under his roomy second-floor desk at the Police Station when he heard that I was on the other end of the telephone line.
A Naughty Lady Who Gives the Rest of Us a Soiled Name
The most fascinating and disgusting story of the political campaign season took its ugliest twist this week. I do not know Peggy Fox. I do know she is a journalistic punk. She plies her trade on a television street corner in Washington, D.C., for WUSA, channel 9. A political liberal, she is ignorant, mean or, likely, both. Last Monday, she appeared on a debate panel with Sen. George Allen of Virginia and his Jew-hating opponent in Tysons Corner, Va. Questioning the incumbent, Ms. Fox asked: Could you please tell us if your forebearers (sic) include Jews, and at what point your Jewish identity ended? To their strong credit, the stunned audience of 600 business persons responded with boos for Ms. Fox. This ignorant question might have been asked of a slave in the South in 1850. Or of a suspected Jew in Berlin in 1935. But from a Democratic reporter this week in Virginia? Hours before Rosh Hashana begins this evening at 6:32, isnt it remarkable to realize that a stinking stigma still attaches to a (conservative) political candidate if he is suspected of being a Jew? I dont think its relevant, whatever one person believes, the 54-year-old Mr. Allen answered. Id like to ask you, why is that relevant? My religion, (my opponents) religion, or the religious beliefs of anyone out there? Honesty, the cunning little lady replied with practiced dishonesty. The genesis of the story goes back to last month to a few self-hating liberal Jews in New York at the Jewish newspaper The Forward. They seem to have vowed revenge on Mr. Allen because of an earlier incident. With self-loathing Jews, their political beliefs govern their lives, always trumping their scanty to anti religious or cultural loyalty. That is the answer to the question of why secular Jews routinely turn against fellow Jews, hoping to embarrass them. Early in August, Mr. Allen, in a campaign speech, committed a major gaffe. Many candidates assign truth squads to the campaigns of their opponents. Their objective is to catch lightning with just such an incident as occurred to the Virginia senator. Spotting one of his opponents very familiar truth-squaders in the back of the room, where he hung out at many Allen events with camera in hand, the senator hurled an epithet at the young idealist.
An Unfunny Traveling Circus Soon May Come to Your Town
Apparently the main moral dilemma in Los Angeles this week is whether a suspected lawbreaking Episcopal priest in Pasadena should consent to a government demand to turn over church records because of alleged tax law violations. On the eve of the Presidential election two years ago, the previous, semi-legendary rector, a firebreathing liberal, raged against the re-election of President Bush. The IRS said that speech and the political fumes that drive the big Episcopal church imperiled its tax-exempt status. Now, instead of crying “Bush!” they are crying wolf. I feel a martyr story coming on. The Rev. Ed Bacon, who, by all accounts, considers the spotlight one of his closest friends, has 9 days to decide whether to cooperate with the IRS. Oh dear, oh dear, he says every afternoon, according to insiders. I walked out into the cool morning a few minutes ago, and the foul odor in the air smells familiar. Remember how Christians and Jews blindly rushed to defend “our Muslim brothers” during the anti-terror rally by a patriotic group at the King Fahad Mosque a week ago Sunday?
Handals Next Store Why It Still Is on Hold
Just like some fat people, the onetime Culver City entrepreneur Jay Handal, decidedly more gaunt than corpulent, has a wait problem. Four months and a few days after he ended a decade-long run as the ringmaster of the popular San Gennaro Café, and three months and a few days after he said he would be opening a new store in Beverly Hills, Mr. Handal is tapping his toes. But not all ten simultaneously. I am keeping busy at the Brentwood Village store, also called San Gennaro, making some renovations, he said. Negotiations with the owner of the still-new Beverly Hills emporium he seeks to take over evidently are being revived. They broke down last spring, after San Gennaro was closed. Just last Friday evening, Mr. Handal said, the owner we have been negotiating with called. He said that he is ready to sit down and have the meeting to finalize Beverly Hills. It is my hope that in the next week or two we will sit down. Hopefully, the owner has now seen that the restaurant business (which is new to him) is not the same as the aircraft parts business (his previous profitable enterprise). I hope that he is ready to make the deal that, basically, we made many, many months ago but never finalized. Assuming that I can get in there within 20 to 30 days, my goal would be to have a soft opening. Get it out there and let people know we are around. Then I would throw a big bash later, toward the end of the year or the first of the new year.
Call Him Arnold, Please
If I say Arnold, I dont imagine your answer will be Toynbee, Stang or even Eddy. Presently in the English-speaking world, Arnold conjures up only one image, Mr. Schwarzenegger. You would think Arnold was a bad word. The Los Angeles Times assiduously has avoided using Arnold in a headline since he was elected governor three years ago. The newspaper detests him. Your black feelings for a former spouse wilt by comparison. The Times reasoning goes this way: Using Arnold in a headline connotes not only familiarity but, in a more base way, implies approbation. Therefore, thousands of Times headlines the past 36 months have used the awkward abbreviation Gov. A rudimentary rule of journalism is to make a headline accessible. Gov. does not. Arnold does. Yesterday, when I wrote a headline for a story introducing a first-time Assembly candidate, I chose not to use either the first or second name of Jeffers Dodge. He is not known. But if I say Bass Opponent, recognition will dawn more quickly.