Yet another 'human rights' farce

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It's funny how they mention Warman on this. His name is now synonymous with frivolity. Good!

Yet another 'human rights' farce

National Post · Mar. 7, 2012 | Last Updated: Mar. 7, 2012 3:02 AM ET

Mark Steyn, call your office. Though battered and bruised by years of bad publicity, the human rights industry continues to present Canadians with jaw-dropping tales of self-entitlement. These stories would be merely funny, if it weren't for the fact that taxpayers are on the hook for the costs of adjudication.

The latest case involves Pamela Howson, who wants the city of Ottawa to allow her to build a parking pad on her front yard. She complains that her car is 2.25 metres wide, but in order to get to her parking space behind her house, she has to pass through a driveway that's only 2.6 metres wide - providing a mere seven inches of clearance per side.

Even by the standards of human rights complaints, this is a weird one: The Ontario Human Rights Code protects citizens from discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, skin colour, religion, sexual orientation and disability. The inability to manoeuvre your car is not on the list of protected classes. Perhaps if Ms. Howson were Chinese, or a diminutive Jewish grandmother, and she were making a laim based on the (offensive!) stereotype that members of these groups can't drive, she might have a nominal case to make. But Ms. Howson doesn't seem to fall into either ethnic class.

Instead, Ms. Howson claims the city discriminated against her because it didn't recognize her "family circumstances" two years ago, when she first asked for permission to park in front of her house. A clerk told her to file an application to have the case heard by a zoning committee. But she didn't bother doing that - and concedes as much, saying she felt it would be a waste of time. She skipped straight to the claim of discrimination, without bothering to determine whether the city would grant her request.

Under this new principle of "assumed discrimination," human rights litigation is set to become a booming industry. According to the Howson Principle, you can sue any business or government agency you like, on the assumption that any putative dealing with them probably would result in the occurrence of something discriminatory.

By "family circumstances," Ms. Howson means that she has three young children. But unless she's been strapping her offspring to her car's side mirrors, what bearing does the size of her family have on the width of her driveway? Ms. Howson claims she needs a wide car to accommodate three child seats. But the decision to buy the car was hers. As National Post editorial board members can attest, you can fit three child seats into a relatively compact Mazda 3, or an Audi A3.

And in any event, the fact is that, big as it may be, her car fits down her driveway. In fact, her driveway, at its narrowest point, is six inches wider than the opening to a standard Canadian garage.

What could possibly explain why a woman would waste thousands of dollars of taxpayer money pursuing this self-pardodic "human rights" complaint before she'd actually exhausted (or even initiated) the proper bureaucratic procedures? Well, here's a clue: It turns out that Ms. Howson is a former investigator for none other than - the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. So maybe she will get to have one of her former colleagues hear her case. (This is part of a pattern: Richard Warman, who has made a career out of bringing complaints under Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, worked for the Canadian Human Rights Commission from 2002 to 2004.)

Even if Ms. Howson does not expect any special treatment, her former job description casts light on her case. If you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. By the same token, if you've spent your life in the human rights bureaucracy, soaking in its culture of grievance-hunting and umbrage, every inconvenience in life looks like a matter of "human rights." No indignity is too trivial that it cannot be cast in the tradition of Nelson Mandela and Rosa Parks.

Ontario's Human Rights Commission, like similar commissions across the country, was set up with the best of intentions - to remedy real and pressing cases of actual bald faced racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and the like. But in the decades since, it has become a bingo parlour for professional whiners and bureaucratic insiders to make cash, pester enemies and former business partners, and short-circuit proper legal and administrative processes. The commissions should be disbanded - or, at the very least, radically reformed to ensure that frivolous complainants are made to pay every cent of the costs they impose on taxpayers.

[backhoe]

"Assumed discrimination?"

Geez, I've been discriminated all my life for

1)- being southern
2)- being sorta-white
3)- being male
4)- having long hair & a beard
5)- riding a chopper
6)- wearing leathers
7)- coming from an Island but living in the City...

...and a few other personal traits. Guess I'd better lawyer up and sue the ass off of everyone...

[mindyrbusiness]

March 7, 2012
Was Boy in K.C. Fire Attack a Victim of His School's Racist Teaching?
By Selwyn Duke

The boy raised his hand, eager to answer the question. "What would you know about it?" exclaimed the teacher dismissively. "You're not our race."

This was not dialogue from a Hollywood movie. According to a woman named Melissa Coon, it was what a teacher at East High School in Kansas City told her 13-year-old son, Allen, when he attempted to answer a question during Black History Month. Coon identifies that teacher as Mrs. Karla Dorsey, who is black; Allen is white.

As has already been reported, Allen was a victim of a vicious racial attack last week in which two older black teens doused him with gasoline and set him alight, saying, "This is what you deserve. You get what you deserve, white boy." Not surprisingly, Coon has pulled her son out of East High and, concerned about further racial violence, intends to leave the K.C. area.

While this crime is making headlines, Coon states that it was merely the horrible culmination of continual racial harassment her son had to endure at East High. Moreover, after conducting an investigation that included extensive interviews with parents and students, I've learned that Coon's son is not alone. Other white students also report a pattern of racial harassment at the high school at the hands of their peers -- and, shockingly, their teachers.

Two of these victims were the twin 14-year-old daughters (first names withheld upon request) of Karin Wildeisen. Ever since their family relocated from Texas, they had endured racial animosity in the Kansas City school system and inappropriate behavior by staff, which included teachers laughing while boys humiliatingly manhandled the girls and a teacher slapping one of them on the backside. But there was far worse to come.

The twins started coming home and talking about the goings-on in an advanced-English class taught by a teacher Wildeisen identifies as Ms. Veda Monday. Wildeisen said that her daughters told her, "There are four white kids in the class; they are being targeted racially." They said that Monday, who is black, was feeding the class racial material, about which Wildeisen notes, "She's teaching advanced English; she has no reason to be teaching civil rights."

But then there was the straw that broke the camel's back. One day, Monday allegedly showed an explicit film involving portrayals of whites lynching blacks and then, reports ex-Texan Wildeisen, "in front of the class attacked my daughters, telling them that 'everybody from Texas is ignorant rednecks'" and that all white people were "responsible for Jasper because [their] skin is white." This reference is to an atrocity in Jasper, TX, in which three white men murdered a black man in 1998.

Where would a teacher get the idea that all whites are responsible for the Jasper tragedy? It's not hard to figure out. Black liberation theology (BLT) instructs, writes the man some regard as its father, Professor James Cone, that "[a]ll white men are responsible for white oppression." And how common is BLT? Well, Cone's books were required reading at Barack Obama's longtime house of worship in Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ.

The end result of this is that Wildeisen, like Melissa Coon, decided to pull her children out of East High. Also like Coon, she intends to leave the area, saying that it and the school are a "powder keg." As for now, her daughters are studying at home via a distance-learning program.

Another white victim is 15-year-old Ashley Miller, whose family had moved to K.C., MO, from Kansas. Subject to racial harassment, she was called names such as "white b****." She also actually shared a class with Allen Coon, and as the only two white students in the room, they became the target of sexual comments. Moreover, she reports the same experience with race-baiting videos as do the Wildeisens: they would be shown, and an onus would be placed on the white students. Her mother Melissa told me that she now fears for her daughter's safety and, you guessed it, is in the process of withdrawing Ashley from East High. And the rest of the pattern is holding, too: the Millers are contemplating leaving the area.

Yet even putting the brutal fire attack aside, Melissa Coon's young boy by far got the worst of it. The tow-headed Allen looks like "the classic all-American white boy," says his mother, and "after the first week [of school] he was nothing but racially harassed." She says that "he was called every racial slur you can imagine," such as "honkey," "cracker," "whitey," and "guero" (a Spanish slang term for whites that can be used in a derogatory way). He was, she reports, pushed into lockers and was jumped in the bathroom. And even before the recent attack, he was sometimes menaced by groups that would follow him part of the way home.

Even more damning, though, is that multiple educators were complicit in the harassment. Mrs. Coon related an incident in which a teacher she identifies as Ms. Carla Kinder called Allen "Casper" and then "got all the students to get involved." Other times, the students would initiate the harassment, and the teachers would pick up the baton. "They would tease him; people would make fun of him, and they'd chime in," said Coon.

Then, as the Wildeisen girls report, as Ashley Miller reports, there were the race-baiting films. Said Mrs. Coon, "They showed a lot of racial movies. And people would make comments -- lots of comments -- especially at him [Allen], during these things."

And this brings us to the fire attack of last week. How is it that two teenagers would douse an innocent boy they don't even know with gasoline and set him alight? Karin Wildeisen has a theory. Referring to Ms. Monday's "English" class, she told me, "I think that the two boys who did this are going to be found in that teacher's class -- or somewhere thereabouts."

It sure seems likely, and what should we say about East High's "teaching" model? Well, imagine repeatedly showing films depicting blacks committing nothing but crimes against whites. Would there be any question about whether it was race-baiting? Even Amos 'n' Andy is frowned upon today.

The fact is that, to paraphrase Lincoln, "if you look for the worst in a group, you're sure to find it." If you display a group's sins to the exclusion of its triumphs ad infinitum, you can make it appear a den of demons. And ever since the advent of video technology, propaganda films have been used the world over to cultivate racial and ethnic hostility. It is Hate 101.

And Indifference 101seems to be a course offering at East High, too. Melissa Coon had been complaining to the school's administration about her son's harassment repeatedly -- only to be ignored and stonewalled -- repeatedly. At one point an administrator told her that her son could have a transfer only to another district school but said that Allen would have "more problems there" and that he should stay at more "racially diverse" East High (which has no more than 20 white students). At another, a vice principal Coon identifies as Ms. Jessica Bassett denied, while shaking and rubbing her hands together nervously, ever having heard about Allen's problems even though they had been brought to her attention on at least five occasions.

And Coon's experience with the local police hasn't been much better. Listening to her testimony I got the feeling that K.C. law enforcement didn't want the arrest and prosecution of two black youths on a hate-crime charge, possibly for fear of the "powder keg." Perhaps this is a job for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division. Oh, yeah, Eric Holder.

As for young Allen, he had the presence of mind during the attack to pull his shirt up over his head and smother the flames. The damage was thus limited to mostly first-degree burns, with his nose suffering second-degree and the possibility of scarring at the top of his lip. Yet the emotional scars run far deeper, and he is in therapy. "He has flashbacks," says Mrs. Coon. "He was in a ball crying. ... He said that no one believes him." And she states that her five-year-old will often ask, "Are they going to burn me today, mommy?"

On an East High staff page created by alumni, there is the Giovanni Ruffini quotation, "The teacher is like the candle, which lights others, while consuming itself." What a contrast between the words of the past and the deeds of the present.

Contact Selwyn Duke

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/ ... z1oRX7O1e5

[styky]

Parking complaint not a human rights issue

By Jon Willing ,Ottawa Sun
First posted: Monday, May 14, 2012 09:33 PM EDT | Updated: Monday, May 14, 2012 10:31 PM EDT
A New Edinburgh mother who filed a human rights complaint against the City of Ottawa for not being allowed to build a parking space in front of her house has lost her case................http://www.ottawasun.com/2012/05/14/par ... ghts-issue

[Faramir]

Yeah, we bought a minivan that is a full 6 inches wider, so getting it through our garage door means you have to really focus and pay attention. I want some compensation. Maybe a payment of redress for my people being called Wily Oriental Peoples (WOPS).

[wildernessvoice]

Richard Warman. Richard Warman.Richard Warman.Richard Warman.Richard Warman.Richard Warman.Richard Warman.Richard Warman.Richard Warman.

He must just hang his head is shame when he finds his name bandied about as if he were some court jester or village idiot.
His wife must slink into the hairdressers and hope like hell that they don't hollar out " Mrs Richard Warman.Mrs Richard WarmanMrs Richard WarmanMrs Richard WarmanMrs Richard WarmanMrs Richard WarmanMrs Richard Warman".

Kids in school bring in a whole new set of embarrassments.

His hand must shake as he googles himself. This too is an embarrassment. Nobody wants to google with Richard Warman so you have to google yourself.

Like picture this:
Richard Warman: "Hi dear. Wanta google?".
Mrs Richard Warman: "After what I went through at the hairdressers? Go google yourself".

[drummer]

Obviously not a human right issue, but anyone wonders why on earth one should need to get approval from the city to build a parking pad on her own property? Most cities have these sorts of illogical intrusions in people's private affairs.

[RedDog]

With respect to the parking pad story, on the street I used to live on the other side of downtown a guy spent a fortune restoring a magnificent character home and adding an attached front garage. Absolutely beautiful work mainly in brick. The garage looks like it always belonged there with carriage style doors and was to accommodate his two vintage Jaguars... until the city stepped in.

The neighbourhood is deemed a heritage district and not zoned for front driveways. He cannot utilize it and they are moving to have the driveway and garage doors removed. I'm not clear how it got to this stage and expense without permits and code inspections along the way during construction. I have no doubt he's put a quarter million into his renovations to the exterior alone.

[ccurrie]

I once lived in a neighbourhood in Toronto where front-yard parking was the subject of a lengthy and quite nasty battle. The houses were narrow 1920s style and in many cases less than a car-width apart. Only a few had driveways. The city sold on-street parking permits, which most people used, and every place where they lowered the curb for a driveway was one less parking spot on the road. The city didn't care so much, but the people who were paying for on-street parking were livid when their parking spots started to disappear. You can build a parking pad in your front yard without the city, but getting the curb lowered and stopping people from parking at the side of the road right in front of it is a little more difficult.