New York Rejects The Notion That Tolerance Should Allow Deviant Behavior
Common sense prevailed as the New York state senate decisively rejected a proposal to allow same-sex marriages in New York.
Washington Post — Opponents of gay marriage celebrated a decisive vote in the New York State Senate, where a proposal to legalize same-sex marriage was defeated 38 to 24 on Wednesday.
“I think you put it all together and it most likely spells the end of the idea that you can pass gay marriage democratically anywhere else in the United States,” said Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage, which spearheaded opposition in Albany. “I think the gay marriage lobby will have to go back to a court-based approach.
“I think Upstate Democrats had to be feeling the heat on this deal,” said Jason McGuire, executive director of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, a lobby that represents many evangelical and Pentecostal churches. “New York 23 really showed that conservatism is not dead.”
A European Union ban on the manufacture and import of 100 watt and frosted incandescent light bulbs, in use since the 19th Century, has come into force.
The EU wants the bulbs to be replaced mainly by longer-lasting compact fluorescent lamps.
The Energy Saving Trust says fluorescent lighting uses 80% less electricity than traditional bulbs.
The ban will be extended to all incandescent bulbs by 2012.
Both Europe and the United States now have plans for the eventual phaseout of the energy inefficient incandescent light bulb, a relic that has been virtually unchanged since its invention by Thomas Edison. Given the high cost of energy and the long lead times to develop alternative energy sources, banning the incandescent light bulb is a quick and painless way to conserve energy and reduce home owner’s energy costs.
The merits of the compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) had been explored in a previous post - A Bright Idea - CFL (Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs)
The Energy Department announced new lighting standards that are expected to reduce the nations energy bill by $4 billion annually when implemented in 2012.
The change that will affect the average American the most will be the ban on the sale of standard incandescent light bulbs in 2014. Huge energy savings are already immediately available to every American by simply replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent. One has to wonder, why would the Energy Department take another 5 years to ban the energy wasteful incandescent bulb?
Replacing just one incandescent bulb with a CFL can save a homeowner roughly $90 over four years in electricity cost. Incredibly, many Americans still chose the much more costly incandescent bulb over the much less expensive and energy efficient CFL because of the cost difference up front. An incandescent bulb can cost 25 cents while a CFL can cost $2 to $3.
Given the facts involved, why would most people still use the much more costly incandescent light bulb? Is it simply a case of consumer ignorance - or is the average American budget simply too tight to afford the right choice?
“No Individual Should Face Workplace Discrimination Based on Race”
Part of the appeal of American culture has always been the sense of fair play and equal opportunity offered by our political and economic system. What has attracted so many immigrants to our shores for hundreds of years was the notion that, given a level playing field, those who worked the hardest could achieve the most.
This system has worked well, creating a vibrant and diverse American culture in which success is largely blind to race. No system is perfect, of course, but until something better comes along, it has worked well enough to make America’s economic and social system the envy of many other nations. Fortunately, but by a very slim margin, common sense ideas of achievement recently prevailed in a Supreme Court ruling on workplace bias.
Justices Rule for White Firemen In Bias Lawsuit
The Supreme Court yesterday restricted how far employers may go in considering race in hiring and promotion decisions, a ruling that puts workplaces across the nation on notice that efforts to combat potential discrimination against one group can amount to actual discrimination against another.
The court ruled for white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who said city officials violated their rights when it threw out the results of a promotions test on which few minorities scored well. The case drew outsize attention because President Obama’s nominee for the high court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, had been part of a unanimous panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that endorsed a lower-court ruling upholding New Haven’s decision.
“No individual should face workplace discrimination based on race,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the five-member majority.
The case has been used by Sotomayor critics as evidence that she allowed her personal preferences to influence her rulings
Those who oppose Sotomayor contrasted the court’s 89 pages of opinions, concurrences and dissents with the 134-word summary judgment from Sotomayor and the other judges on the panel. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the Supreme Court’s decision a “victory for evenhanded application of the law” and said that “all nine justices were critical of the trial court opinion that Judge Sotomayor endorsed,” an assertion the White House rejected.
Kennedy said that New Haven’s test — 60 percent of the firefighters’ scores were based on a written test and 40 percent on interviews — properly evaluated what candidates would need to know to perform their jobs, and that it was equally applied to candidates of all races and ethnic backgrounds.
“The process was open and fair,” he said. “The problem, of course, is that after the tests were completed, the raw racial results became the predominant rationale for the city’s refusal to certify the results.”
More On This Topic
On Race, The Slog Goes On - George Will
Although New Haven’s firefighters deservedly won in the Supreme Court, it is deeply depressing that they won narrowly — 5 to 4. The egregious behavior by that city’s government, in a context of racial rabble-rousing, did not seem legally suspect to even one of the court’s four liberals, whose harmony seemed to reflect result-oriented rather than law-driven reasoning.
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