March 22, 2005
Guilty: The SPLC And The Atlanta Courtroom
Massacre
Steve Sailer blogged last week
about the Atlanta courtroom massacre:
“…the
6'-1" 200 pound defendant […] shot up an Atlanta
courtroom after overpowering the 5' grandmother assigned
to guard him and stealing her gun. ‘Women are capable of
doing anything men are capable of doing,’ the D.A.
proclaimed after the killings when questions were
raised about having women guard bad dudes.”
Real-Life Babes Not as Buttkicking as in Movies
Michelle Malkin added her take on
it here:
What's wrong with this picture? The picture
showed a female officer detailed to escort Nichols
after he was recaptured.
Here’s the rest of the story: the
policy of having short females as police officers
is thanks to our old friends at the
Southern Poverty Law Center—always concerned about
the faintest hint of “discrimination,” never
concerned about the
public interest.
Here's a list of the various
decisions that led to female police officers being
required by law to do the same job as an officer
literally twice their size:
Decision with Regard to Women, Affirmative Action and
Law Enforcement.
One of the leading decisions in the
SPLC's campaign against common sense was the abolition
of "Strength/physical fitness tests and requirements"
for police officers in
Dothard v. Rawlinson (1977).
The SPLC supported the 5'3", 115
lb,
Dianne Rawlinson in her attempt to become a
correctional employee in Alabama:
“At trial, the Law Center argued
that the height and weight requirements had no actual
relationship to the job requirements, and 33% of women
would be excluded from employment as prison guards and
state troopers by the statutory height requirements and
22% by the minimum weight requirements.”
At the same time, another woman was
challenging the Alabama State Troopers requirement that
a Trooper must be 5'9" and 160 pounds. Both won their
cases. With others, this has changed the nature of
women's participation in police work. Policewomen no
longer specialize in investigating women's issue crimes
and guarding, yes, other women on their way to
court.
Instead, in 1982
Detective Mary P. McCord became the first woman
police officer in Alabama to be shot to death on duty,
and on 9/11 one of the police officers killed was Officer
Moira Smith, who won the NYPD's
Medal of Honor.
You might also remember the case of
Kathleen Conway, in
Cincinnati, which I wrote about in 2003:
“Daniel Williams
flagged down
Kathleen Conway's police cruiser on Feb. 2, 1998.
When she stopped, he hit her in the face and fired four
shots from a .357 Magnum into her legs and abdomen
before seizing the steering wheel and shoving her into
the passenger seat.”
[Conway fired back, killing him. Officer Conway, now
retired due to her injuries, is a
heroine, but Williams’s death was nevertheless one
of the 15 that black rioters were
protesting in 2001.]
So feminism has enabled women to
get killed the same way men do, or worse. But the
abandonment of height and weight requirements, in the
name of anti-discrimination, puts them in an extra
kind of danger.
The philosophical principle seems
to be that since
women are as good as men, (and the Supreme Court
always
acts as if the
ERA had passed) then strong must be as good as weak,
and short as good as tall.
I personally wouldn't be able to be
a police officer unless I could find a police department
with no eyesight requirements at all. When I close my
good eye, the world turns into a blur. I couldn't tell
across the room if the man in my gunsights was wearing a
policeman's uniform.
Police forces feel strongly about
eyesight, because the officers have to shoot, drive at
high speeds in the dark, and act as eyewitnesses in
capital cases.
I see pretty well for all civilian
purposes, so I'll have to live with it.
Liberals apparently don't feel that
way, though. According to overlawyered.com’s
Walter Olson, when advocates for the disabled are
told that putting people who can't walk, talk, or see
properly in the workplace is going to get someone
killed, they say
things like "even if there is an increased risk,
society must accept it as the price of creating a
fairer workplace for the disabled."
This results in qualified applicants out
of a job, usually—by an
odd coincidence—white
men, but it can get the
unqualified applicants killed, and frequently others
with them.
The decision to put women in danger
like this is caused partly by what
Thomas Sowell calls
"Vision of the Anointed," that utopian ideals
trump physical reality. And partly it’s the feminist
butt-kicking fantasies so well described by
Steve Sailer. For example, Maureen Dowd says she
fantasizes, before writing a "tough" column,
that she's "Emma
Peel in a
black leather catsuit, giving a kung fu kick to any
diabolical mastermind who merits it." In fact, what
Ms. Dowd does for a living is
nag and
whine.
But the fact that police forces are
required by various laws to hire women who
can't handle the physical requirements of the job,
is thanks in large part to the
legal activities of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Perhaps someone could sue them.
