The sham of sex harassment training

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcpherson21-2008nov21,0,3418432.story

From the Los Angeles Times

Opinion

It’s little more than politically correct indoctrination.

By Alexander McPherson

November 21, 2008

Four years ago, the governor signed Assembly Bill 1825 into law, requiring all California employers with more than 50 people to provide sexual harassment training for each of their employees. The University of California raised no objection and submitted to its authority.

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FOR THE RECORD:
Harassment: A Friday Op-Ed article on sexual harassment training said employers with more than 50 employees had to provide the training to each employee. Only supervisors are required to take the training. —

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But I didn’t. I am a professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at UC Irvine, and I have consistently refused, on principle, to participate in the sexual harassment training that the state and my employers seem to think is so important.

For a while, it didn’t seem to matter much that I had refused. I (and fellow scofflaws) were periodically notified that we were not in compliance, and we were advised to get with the program like everybody else. Then the university began warning me that my supervisory responsibilities would be taken away if I did not promptly comply.

Last month, the university finally followed through, sending me a letter announcing that my laboratory and the students I oversaw were to be immediately turned over to other university officials and faculty. I continued to refuse to take sexual harassment training, and do so now.

I am not normally confrontational, so I sought to find a means to resolve the conflict. I proposed the following: I would take the training if the university would provide me with a brief, written statement absolving me of any suspicion, guilt or complicity regarding sexual harassment. I wanted any possible stigma removed. “Fulfilling this requirement,” said the statement I asked them to approve, “in no way implies, suggests or indicates that the university currently has any reason to believe that Professor McPherson has ever sexually harassed any student or any person under his supervision during his 30-year career with the University of California.”

The university, however, declined to provide me with any such statement, which poses the question: Why not? It is a completely innocuous, unobjectionable statement that they should have been willing to write for any faculty member whose record is as free of stain as is my own. The immediate reply of the administration was that if I didn’t comply with the law, I would be placed on unpaid leave.

So why am I am being so inflexible on this issue? Why not simply take the training and be done with it? There are several reasons.

First of all, I believe the training is a disgraceful sham. As far as I can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed to relieve the university of liability in the case of lawsuits. I have not been shown any evidence that this training will discourage a harasser or aid in alerting the faculty to the presence of harassment.

What’s more, the state, acting through the university, is trying to coerce and bully me into doing something I find repugnant and offensive. I find it offensive not only because of the insinuations it carries and the potential stigma it implies, but also because I am being required to do it for political reasons. The fact is that there is a vocal political/cultural interest group promoting this silliness as part of a politically correct agenda that I don’t particularly agree with.

The imposition of training that has a political cast violates my academic freedom and my rights as a tenured professor. The university has already nullified my right to supervise my laboratory and the students I teach. It has threatened my livelihood and, ultimately, my position at the university. This for failing to submit to mock training in sexual harassment, a requirement that was never a condition of my employment at the University of California 30 years ago, nor when I came to UCI 11 years ago.

Interestingly, I have received many letters of encouragement — about 25% of them from women. The comments have been rich with words like “demeaning,” “oppressive,” “politically driven” and “indoctrination.” Other phrases included “unctuous twaddle” and “sanctimonious half-wits.”

Sexual harassment is a politically charged issue. The people of California have granted no authority to the state to impose narrow political and cultural opinions on individual citizens.

Alexander McPherson is a professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at UC Irvine’s school of biological sciences.

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Recession: When the money goes, so does the toxic wife

As the recession worsens, a lot of rich men are finding their gold-digging wives are taking to their heels

By Tara Winter Wilson
Last Updated: 7:31PM GMT 26 Nov 2008

‘You loser!” screamed Katie, aiming a vase at her husband. “You’ve destroyed my life,” she continued, hurling it. “Just look at my hair, look at my nails! You loser, you jerk, you nobody.”

Katie’s husband, Jack, whose property portfolio disintegrated in the financial crash, had just told his wife that she would have to cut back on her thrice-weekly visits to Nicky Clarke, the nail salon in Harvey Nichols, and the oxygen facials, chemical peels and seaweed wraps at Space NK.

Not only that, but they no longer had the money to pay for an army of bullied Eastern Europeans to wait on her hand and foot.

Worse was to come – the brow-lift would have to be cancelled; her black Amex card would have to be snipped in half; and there was no way, he told her, that he could carry on spending £28,000 a year on Henry’s school fees at Eton.

Chloe, too, would have to leave the marginally cheaper (only £25,000 pa) Wycombe Abbey immediately.

Such was the aggression and verbal and physical abuse that followed that Jack was left with cut lips and blood streaming from a broken nose.

Their eight-year-old child, not yet at boarding school, sat cowering in a corner and dialling 999. When they arrived, they had to restrain Katie forcibly from attacking her husband.

An extreme and isolated example of the global economic meltdown hitting the £1 million home? Sadly no. When the super-rich feel the pinch, inevitably, the Toxic Wife heads off.

The Toxic Wife, first identified in these pages almost two years ago, is a particular and terrifying species.

Not to be confused with the stay-at-home mother who selflessly devotes herself to the upbringing of her children, with all the housework and domestic chores that entails, the Toxic Wife is the woman who gives up work as soon as she marries, ostensibly to create a stable home environment for any offspring that might come along, but who then employs large numbers of staff to do all the domestic work she promised to undertake, leaving her with little to do all day except shop, lunch and luxuriate.

Having married her wealthy husband with his considerable salary uppermost in her mind, the Toxic Wife simply does not do “for richer, for poorer”. Little Dorrit, she ain’t.

Indeed, lawyers and financial advisers have reported a 50 per cent increase in the number of divorce inquiries since the financial markets collapsed in September.

A recent survey conducted by community website makefriendsonline revealed that a third of 10,000 respondents believe that financial hardship will cause a relationship to fail, while matrimonial law specialists Mishcon de Reya have reported up to 300 per cent more inquiries.

Numbers have risen significantly as couples seek to reach an agreement before the recession tightens its grip. But for the Toxic Wife, “agreement” is the last thing on her mind.

There are countless stories of them acting in the most bizarre and inhumane ways. For gold-diggers are materialistic to such an extent that they are emotionally detached from other people.

There’s an inability to empathise with another human being. They certainly don’t ”do” conscience. Money, on the other hand, they both love and understand.

”I told my wife to stop this organic food malarkey,” said Jeremy, a beleaguered hedge-fund manager, another man who fell for an extremely beautiful yet extravagant woman.

“She went ballistic. Organic Hass avocados cost £1.75 each and she wanted me to buy six of them! In the end, I just peeled off the labels that said they were certified organic and put them on ordinary avocados – she didn’t notice the difference. I did the same with bananas…”

”So why did she walk out on you?” I asked.

”She has a very high standard of living,” he said. ”She’s never taken the Tube or a bus; it’s always taxis. And she likes to eat out a lot, at the best restaurants, and she likes to buy expensive gifts for people she wants to impress.

“As soon as the financial wobbles started, she must have joined some upmarket dating agency because somehow she’s found another very rich man pretty damn fast.”

Another case is Sasha who, for the past few months, had been gloating about the £3.4 million chalet in Verbier her husband was about to exchange on, how she’d managed to hire a high-society interior decorator to do it up for a song (”more an anthem, actually”, she’d giggled) and how much she was looking forward to a white, snowy Christmas there.

At the last minute, Husband pulled out of the deal. Never mind that he had lost his lucrative job in the City, she felt he had deliberately traumatised her and is suing him for divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty. ‘

‘She’s got the personality of an overindulged infant,” he sighed, ”a spoilt brat who starts screaming the moment a toy is taken away.”

In the grown-up world that toy is money and what it can buy: status, power, glamour and arrogance. It also has a way of making these particular women precious. ”Because I’m worth it” has become the catch-all legitimiser for any personal indulgence.

According to Susie Ambrose, a marital psychotherapist and CEO of Seventy-Thirty, an upmarket introduction company that takes its name from the work versus free time balance, there has been an unprecedented demand from married women recently.

”We are being targeted by women on the fence between leaving their husbands who are on the brink of losing their wealth, and wanting to meet someone extremely rich straight away,” she says.

Like a frog, the Toxic Wife needs to hop safely on to another lily pad, and a rich one, before leaving her husband. She won’t stand on her own two feet. And finding a job is quite beneath her.

Yet Susie Ambrose thinks such women ”are like businessmen – utterly ruthless”. The rich man is the career path, the meal ticket, and it doesn’t matter how fat, old, balding or unattractive he is – it’s solely about money.

”These particular women know how to fake love,” adds Ambrose. ”They’re actually very good at it.”

She now has a waiting-list for her life-coaching sessions – a course costs between £10,000-£60,000 – on how to distinguish a gold-digger from a genuine woman.

Men, it seems, have got wise to the potential Toxic Wife and don’t want to end up with someone who is going to bolt the moment they experience some financial bad luck.

For men, divorce is one of the most expensive trials in life – emotionally and financially. As the joke doing the rounds among City men goes: “This credit crunch is worse than a divorce. I’ve lost half my net worth and I still have a wife.”

But this is no joke. I’ve seen at first hand how, as soon as money disappears, so does love.

Olivia and Richard had a set of beautiful and expensively conceived twins (we’re talking around £30,000 worth of IVF treatments for the right gender – she joked how she would send them back if they were girls), a fabulous house, great holidays several times a year, two nannies and a lifestyle of which most of us lesser mortals could only fantasise.

How we laughed when Richard, with admiration in his voice, mentioned at a drinks party last year that he’d turned to his wife in the middle of the night and asked her if she’d still love him if he lost all his money.

”F— no!” had been her answer. Such a feisty, amusing (and obviously joky) response delighted him. But today he is scratching his head with abject dejection. She had meant it.

She left him the moment he lost his senior post at an investment bank and immediately hooked up with another rich man.

Worse, she took their boys with her and he rarely sees them because she has since moved to America to start afresh with her new, unsuspecting milch-cow.

As most of us are battening down the hatches and finding inventive ways to cope with the new austerity, some unfortunate men have not only lost their jobs, they are also having the scales ripped from their eyes.

The horrible truth has dawned: they married a woman who wanted them solely for their money.

‘Hate Crimes’ a One-Way Street

Wes Vernon
Tuesday, March 6, 2001

A pattern has emerged in the mainstream media in dealing with “hate crimes,” i.e., violent criminal acts motivated by bigotry. The unspoken, unwritten ethic appears to be: If a white commits a violent crime and the victim is a minority, that is by definition a “hate crime” and worthy of front-page headlines, complete with lead stories on the national TV news shows.

On the other hand, if a minority commits a violent crime and the victim is white, that does not make it beyond the local media.

That is the inescapable conclusion of a NewsMax.com survey of events over a period of months.

The Wichita Rampage

The most egregious recent example concerns a crime rampage in Wichita, Kan.

Two young black brothers, Reginald and Jonathan Carr, have been charged with a quadruple homicide.

The Shreveport Times, one of the few out-of-state media outlets to give this story any publicity at all, described the chronology of the crime in which the two men abducted five white young adults and shot them execution-style, according to the allegations in police reports.

According to police:

It began on a night in mid-December when the brothers kicked in the door of a home shared by three young professionals. Two women were there for an engagement party. While one held the five people at gunpoint, the other loaded up a van with two TVs, a computer, dishes, bedding, luggage, credit cards and wallets.

They also found a diamond ring.

“That was for you,” Jason Befort told one of the young women. “I was going to ask you to marry me.”

The Carr brothers then forced the young people to take them to automatic teller machines and withdraw money.

So that�s a sheer case of robbery, right? Where�s the “hate crime”?

There�s more. Apparently not at all satisfied with the heist, the Carrs then drove their victims to a soccer field and took turns raping the women while the three men were forced to watch. Then the men were forced to commit homosexual acts on each other. Then each was forced to have sex with the women while the Carr brothers drank beer and laughed.

Still nude, all five were ordered to kneel in front of the car�s headlights in the snow. Each was shot in the back of the head execution-style before the brothers drove off and left them for dead.

Four of them did indeed die. But the fifth, Jason Befort�s fianc�e, feigned death, then got up, bleeding from head to toe, and walked a mile in subzero weather to the nearest house, where an elderly couple called 911.

It was later learned that this was the last stop on a crime rampage wherein the two black men had robbed a convenience store, kidnapped a man the next day and pistol-whipped him after forcing him to withdraw money from an ATM before letting him go, and violently robbed a 55-year-old cellist with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra and shot her in the spine. She died about three weeks later.

The district attorney in Wichita has concluded none of these crimes was motivated by racial hatred.

That has drawn a howl of protest from many in the community. Aside from the fact that the victims were of a different racial group from the perpetrators, they note the following:

1. The extreme sadism and violence went way beyond what was necessary to successfully complete a robbery.

2. As far as anyone knows, there was no warrant issued to search the residences of the accused to determine if they may have been motivated by racial hate literature.

3. There is no record of questioning close friends, family, neighbors or associates to determine if the two brothers had at any time expressed anti-white bigotry.

NewMax.com asked the local newspaper, the Wichita Eagle, to send us the original story of the violence involving the Carr brothers, which was done. However, when we later asked for any information as to possible controversy on the “ethnic” or “cultural” angles to the crime, the newspaper did not respond.

The question is relevant in light of the coast-to-coast, wall-to-wall, night-after-night coverage of the outrageous murders of Matthew Shepherd, a gay man in Wyoming, and James Byrd Jr., a black man in Texas. In both of these cases, law enforcement authorities went the extra mile to establish that a “hate crime” had been committed. Why, critics wonder, has there been no publicly acknowledged similar investigation in the Wichita case?

Ignored by the Media

Other examples of a news blackout of reverse “hate crimes” include:

In Arkansas, two homosexuals were charged with sodomizing and killing 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising. The boy died from suffocation after being bound, gagged with underwear in his mouth, blindfolded, taped to the bed, and sodomized by one gay man while the other gay man watched.This happened shortly after the Matthew Shepherd killing. The latter was big national news. For months, the former did not get beyond the borders of Arkansas. Even after the Washington Times ran the story, the rest of the national media did not give it significant coverage.

On Feb. 28, a story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on Mardi Gras or “Fat Tuesday” celebrations in that city wherein 72 people were treated in hospitals, including two with “life-threatening” injuries. The PI story makes no mention of a racial angle. But one of its accompanying photos shows at least five black men surrounding a white woman in what appears to be a threatening manner. Has a “hate crime” investigation begun in this case?

A convicted child molester, Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, was released by Massachusetts authorities only to be nabbed a few years later in Montana, charged with butchering a 10-year-old boy in Great Falls and dining on his remains with unsuspecting friends. Was the nation informed by the national media of this possible “hate crime”?

Most of the world is well aware of the New York City police officers charged with shooting a black man whom they mistook for a wanted rapist. The officers were ultimately acquitted, but not before a long trial filled with political ramifications.Later, when another police officer shot a minority who was not guilty of a crime, the heat of the New York media was turned not on the police officer but on Mayor Rudy Guiliani, a perennial target of racial demagogues such as Al Sharpton. Little, if any, attention was paid to the police officer in this case. I learned later, in reading a column, that this particular officer was himself a minority, a Hispanic man.Question: Does the uneven “justice” meted out to the officers in these two cases in and of itself constitute a “hate crime” of sorts?

In 1999, a gunman entered a Fort Worth Baptist Church and massacred seven people, shouting, “I can�t believe you believe this junk!”ABC�s Dean Reynolds said the FBI found “writings that condemned religion and law enforcement.” But did the media that had tried to connect Matthew Shepherd�s murder with religious conservatives now use that same standard to make a connection in this case with those who castigate religion?No national media outlet mentioned this as a “hate crime.” Instead, this was an opportunity to beat the drum for the old left-wing chestnut, “gun control.”

In June of last year, New York City�s annual Puerto Rican Day parade was the scene of violence against more than 50 women.The Electronic Telegraph reported: “Reeking of alcohol and marijuana, 15 to 25 men surged through the busy south-east corner of the [Central] park � spraying their victims with water and beer, tearing off their clothes and sexually abusing them.”Later, National Review would comment that “the New York Times and liberals in general are bending over backwards to avoid the simple observation that the young men who harassed and assaulted women in Central Park were all blacks and Hispanics.”

No national TV outcry about “hate crimes” here.

The New York police, in this case, were accused of not moving aggressively enough to rescue the women and dealing with the perpetrators. Some believed that with the battering the police had taken from racial demagogues in the city, police officers did not relish another political assault accompanying TV videos of the uniformed police night-sticking minorities. It was as if they were saying, “Next time you need a cop, call Al Sharpton.”

The double standard has extended beyond “hate crimes.”

The Unabomber-Gore Connection

The Oklahoma City bombing, which was, in reality, mass murder, resulted in a Clintonian assault on conservative talk show hosts and the Republican House leadership, notwithstanding the lack of any connection whatsoever.

But when the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski was collared in Montana and found with Al Gore�s “Earth in the Balance” heavily underlined, no dots were connected there in any national news stories or, of course, at the Clinton White House.

Examples are endless. Many thoughtful Americans are wondering when and if we are going to get back to considering a violent crime an abominable act regardless of who is the perpetrator or the victim.

Columnist Paul Craig Roberts says the assault on white males has been going on for three decades. He compares it to the assault on Jews by German intellectuals during the half century before the rise of Hitler.

There are those who note that George W. Bush drew 27 percent of the black vote when he sought re-election as governor of Texas in 1998. This is phenomenal for a Republican and perhaps a sign that the president who says he is “a uniter, not a divider” can finally bring the country together despite his failure to do as well with the black vote in his run for president.

His opposition to a Texas “hate crimes” bill indicates President Bush considers this kind of legislation to be divisive. Judges and juries have the responsibility of determining, case by case, when a violent crime merits extra punishment for an especially evil motive.

Many who have ventured to speculate on the outlook for the 21st century see a picture that is not pretty. They see terrorism on the rise on American soil, to say nothing of threats of nuclear and biological warfare.

It can be argued that at this juncture of our history, Americans need each other as never before, and that we can best help each other with a de-emphasis on “tribal prejudice” and an increasing emphasis on the commonality of our experience as Americans.

Men are getting shortchanged

Monday, November 17, 2008

Men are getting shortchanged

By Bill Taylor

Monday, November 17, 2008

It seems to me that we, as a nation, are increasingly becoming divided into different groups or categories. We find splits between those who live in large cities and those who live in small towns and rural areas, folks who believe they should control how their income is spent and those who think the government should redistribute earnings among those who work and those who don�t – and, well, you get the idea. One such division recently surfaced once again – but it wasn�t easily recognized by most.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month where there is a lot of publicity including TV spots, marches, newspaper ads, pink ribbons, pink T-shirts, and all sorts of activity to highlight this form of cancer – and to raise millions of dollars in the fight for its detection and cure. This highly commendable effort illustrates the concern of our nation for those who are inflicted with this deadly, gender specific disease. (There are a very few, very rare, cases in which males develop breast cancer, but Breast Cancer Awareness Month addresses only breast cancer in women.)

OK, so what does this have to do with these divisions – the separation into different groups or categories? Simple – men also suffer from a deadly, gender specific disease – it�s prostate cancer. So some men are now starting to ask, �Where�s prostate cancer awareness month – or week, or even day? Where�s a postage stamp to raise money for prostate cancer research – the breast cancer awareness one raised over $50 million? Where are the marches, the T-shirts, the TV spots? In short, why doesn�t anyone care about the guys?�

Part of the answer lies in the �everybody knows� body of knowledge. Everybody knows that prostate cancer is neither as prevalent nor as deadly as breast cancer, right? Furthermore, those who have prostate cancer will likely die from something else before they die of prostate cancer. Well, according to the latest figures I have seen from the American Cancer Society, the incidence rate per 100,000 people is 135.2 for breast cancer but is 172.3 for prostate cancer. That�s about 27.5% higher for prostate cancer. Oops! Furthermore, the death rate per 100,000 people is 27 for breast cancer, but is 32 per 100,000 for prostate cancer. That�s about 18.5% higher. Double oops! How about one more statistic? The last estimate that I have seen shows that among new cancer cases (excluding non-melanoma cell skin cancers), prostate cancer is projected to be the most common cancer in the country – outstripping both breast cancer and lung and bronchial cancer. Is there such as thing as triple oops?

Prostate cancer is the only cancer that doctors not only debate how to treat – sometimes leaving the decision to the patient – but are also are in disagreement about whether to treat it at all even though it kills at a higher rate than breast cancer. One reason is that cancer specialists admit they don�t understand what causes prostate cancer. Sounds like a good candidate for research, right? Well, according to the last figures I have seen, government spending on breast cancer research is 180% of that for prostate cancer. As for clinical trials involving newer ways to defeat the cancers, the number of those involving breast cancer patients is four times that of prostate cancer victims. Kinda makes a guy wonder, doesn�t it?

I must admit that I am a bit prejudiced on this subject because I�m a prostate cancer survivor – so far. Regardless, the facts remain – in contrast to the magnificent effort we are making on the behalf of women�s breast cancer, we, as a nation, are shortchanging this male-specific killer. Some fund raisers or increase in research dollars would be nice. Do you suppose we could squeeze out a prostate cancer awareness week somewhere amidst all the other �awareness� celebrations? Not likely – although February 29th might be considered appropriate. Nope, this concern will continue to be largely ignored along with other male-oriented issues – such as men as victims of domestic violence – and, as usual, the guys will be expected to �take it like a man� and get used to it. At least that�s how it seems to me.

Bill Taylor may be contacted at solie1@juno.com.