Hey @JohnCornyn, it's impossible to separate sex discrimination from sexual orientation discrimination.
Discriminating against an LGBTQ employee or hiring applicant, is treating a man differently than a woman that does the same thing, or vice versa. It's that simple.
Like, it's stunning how badly conservatives have failed to think through this argument.
If discriminating based on sexual orientation is okay, what else is okay? Can you discriminate against men for acting too feminine? At what point does it become sex discrimination?
If LGBTQ protections are not covered by the CRA, the entire premise of what is sex discrimination becomes up for debate. Are you discriminating because she's a woman, or because she's acting too much like a man? Suddenly one's okay but one's not. Even though they're the same.
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Actually, it's bad that California's average property tax rate is that low. Really bad.
Excessively low property taxes is a big reason why California is so unaffordable for middle-class workers, and why so many of them are moving to Texas.
Ever since Proposition 13 set hard limits on property taxes in California, cities there have had a big problem. Previously when they had budget deficits on infrastructure, education and public services, they could raise property taxes to plug the gap. But now, they can't do that.
So what these cities do is, instead of taxing the people who own the houses, they tax the developers building the houses. It's called "impact fees." Developers have to pay cities tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for every unit of housing they build.
Sigh... every year I have to explain this. THIS PART OF THE TAX CODE HAS A VERY GOOD REASON FOR EXISTING.
Of course the IRS doesn't expect criminals to follow it. The idea is that when they DON'T follow it, they can then get charged with tax evasion on top of their other crimes.
Organized crime bosses are hard to prosecute because they can kill, threaten, or intimidate any witnesses to their crimes.
But it's MUCH harder for them to beat tax evasion. Because they clearly have the money, and clearly didn't file a tax return and declare how they earned it.
That is why this provision exists. So that in the event that a mobster silences anyone who could prove their murder, racketeering, etc, the IRS can still nail them for not reporting how they got their ill-gotten gains.
Neither side wants "a secular binational one state solution for Jews AND Palestinians" because both sides are (rightly) terrified of what would happen if the other elected a majority to rule over that combined country.
The *only* path to peace is both of them getting a state.
What's maddening about the whole Colorado decision is that tons of people aren't even trying to argue the court erred — they're just saying, "we should ignore what the plain text of the Constitution says and let Trump run anyway for the sake of avoiding political controversy."
If you want to argue Trump didn't really participate in an insurrection, go for it — the trial court found mountains of evidence that he did, and even Trump's *own lawyers* have called January 6 an insurrection, but you're welcome to argue why the trial court is wrong.
Likewise, if you want to argue the President of the United States isn't an "officer" as intended by the 14th Amendment, that's a stretch, but hey, the trial court judge ruled that, that's probably what the Supreme Court will rule, so you're in good company, go for it.
Caroline, Hamas *filmed themselves* committing rape. They are literally boasting about doing it. And many of the recovered bodies of women from 10/7 show clear sexual trauma.
Okay but... "a terrorist organization well-established to have committed mass rape violated its ceasefire agreement to return all the women in its captivity" is in fact already reason enough to continue war operations against them. We don't need "proof" they're still being raped.
It's absurd to compare racist tropes of sexual violence used to justify the lynching of Black men, to military operations against a *literal terrorist organization that tortured and killed over a thousand people*.
In summary: at least half the people Florida's new education standards cite as slaves who learned useful skills in slavery weren't even slaves, and most of the rest didn't learn their skills from slavery.
Also, as I pointed out yesterday, even if some slaves DID learn skills from slavery, this whole framing misses the point: Skills or no, Black people had little freedom in labor in the South post-Emancipation, and many effectively were kept in slave-like states by the Black Codes.
The narrative of Black Americans going from bondage on Southern farms to successful entrepreneurs might have been true in some cases, but it was not the norm, and that's a direct result of racist laws passed post-Reconstruction, most of which are barely even discussed in school.