Article here. Excerpt:

'The Obama administration is moving to outlaw public school curriculum establishing single-sex classrooms, where boys are taught about bikes and girls are quizzed about bracelets.

The Education Department issued guidance this month to clarify George W. Bush-era regulations that expanded the use of gender-specific education. 

Groups have increasingly questioned the legality of education policies that have cropped up in the years since the 2006 rule was enacted.  

“As we receive increasing inquiries about single-sex offerings we want to be clear what federal law allows: protect civil rights and promote achievement,” Catherine Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a news release. 

Civil rights groups say they hope the guidance will put an end to unproven practices that have been creeping up across the country.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A week of protests came to a head inGeorge Will’s Saturday morning speech about Michigan State University’s embodiment of what the role of government should be.

Will, a columnist with the Washington Post, spoke to graduates from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, James Madison College and the colleges of Arts and Letters, Business, Education, Music and Social Science.

Will gave a history lesson about the Morrill Act of 1862, which made MSU the first land grant university, and the GI Bill of Rights from 1944, which allowed college enrollment to explode. He said the current toxic political climate in Washington D.C. can be solved if lawmakers look to the past, and places like Michigan State.

“We have had the knack before and we can have it again,” Will said about government passing policies that help its citizens. “But, then, Michigan State Univeristy not only understands this, it embodies this.”

Story here. Excerpt:

'Musician Lenny Kravitz [link added] is being honored for saying something remarkably sexist in an interview. “I personally think women should be running the world...I believe women are so much more sensible, have so much better intuition, and ultimately are stronger.”

Glamour.com raved: “And our favourite celebrity of the day is... Lenny Kravitz! Why? Because he recognises how wonderful us women are. That's right - Lenny Kravitz thinks women should be running the world because they are stronger and more sensible than men.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'Finally! A scientific explanation for Johnny Knoxville — he of “Jackass” fame — and the fans who keep him at his dangerous and moronic antics: Male Idiot Theory.

New research has rigorously tested Male Idiot Theory, which posits that, well, men are idiots and are driven to take ridiculous risks despite the clear prospects for self-harm, and for no defensible reason. Newly published by the venerable British Medical Journal (in its annual BMJ Christmas issue), the landmark study has shown that Male Idiot Theory holds up under strictly scientific scrutiny.

While the latest research does confirm that males can be idiots, it fails to shed light on a larger mystery that has preoccupied this correspondent since girlhood, growing up in a household with six brothers: How did these idiots ever convince the non-idiot gender that they were somehow superior (and worthy of earning close to 30% more, on average, in the United States)?'

More from the guilty-even-when-proven-innocent files. Petition here. Excerpt:

'In 2008 we adopted 5 adorable siblings and were finally able to add four girls and a boy to our family of two biological boys. We did our best to blend our children into a unit, but in late 2010, our world fell apart. Our oldest daughter ran away and the second oldest, upset at being left behind, made allegations of abuse against my husband. He was convicted of two counts of child molestation in December of 2011.

Six months later, our daughter told her caseworker that she had lied about the abuse. Finally, in Spring of 2013 she sent letters and testified at a hearing that she had perjured herself. Her caseworker also testified under oath that her office had been aware of the false accusation for over a year and that they were confident that there had been no abuse. Still, they did nothing. Scott's request for a new trial was denied on the basis that our daughter had not been charged with perjury therefore the judge could not award a new trial.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The uncritical rush to embrace of Rolling Stone story attests to the toxic climate created by this crusade. Erdely’s article should have quickly set off alarm bells (mine went off on the second reading). The preplanned initiation-ritual gang rape in which “Clockwork Orange”-level ultraviolence meets “Silence of the Lambs” (“Grab its motherf-----g leg,” yells one of the men); the reaction of the victim’s friends who see her disheveled and bloodied yet talk her out of going to the police or to the hospital because being “the girl who cried rape” would carry a social stigma; the nonchalance of the frat boy who casually chats her up shortly after engineering the attack—it all seems highly implausible, reading more like a rape-culture morality tale than a factual account. And that’s not even to mention the fact that Jackie supposedly endured three hours of rape while lying on sharp shards of glass from a smashed coffee table; or that later, when she had become an anti-rape activist on campus, a man supposedly threw a beer bottle at her as she walked past a bar and it broke on the side of her face but left only a bruise.
...

From 2011, but highly bookmark-able. Send this to anyone who throws the thoroughly-debunked (but not acknowledged as such by POTUS, et al.) 1-in-4 statistic at you. Excerpt:

'You can not have an article on sexual assault in college, of course, without a solemn invocation of that infamous, oft-repeated, almost-as-oft-debunked One-in-Fourstatistic. The Trib does not disappoint:

The National Sexual Violence Research Center in Enola, northwest of Harrisburg, estimates 20 percent to 25 percent of women are victims of forced sex during their time in college.

But where the Trib, like everyone else who uncritically accepts this uncritical notion, does disappoint is in its failure to acknowledge that the numbers do not add up. And, in fact, that they do not even come close.

As a supplement to that same article, the Trib published a Campus Safety sidebar that provided a list of reported sexual assault offenses for eight local colleges over the past three years. All told, there were 65. 

65. At 8 colleges. Among tens of thousands of female students. Over 3 years.

That’s a long way from 1-in-4. And thus a complete repudiation of the now-boilerplate statistic claimed in the article.

Those numbers, however, only represent reported assaults that occurred in student housing. Surely the numbers would be much higher, and much more alarming, once you counted sexual assaults that occurred elsewhere on campus and in the community at large. Surely that would get us much closer to the canonical 1-in-4 wisdom. 

I decided to test that theory by examining the sexual assault statistics at Pittsburgh’s three largest residential universities: the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Duquesne University.
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'A study of sexual assault released by the federal government on Thursday challenges conventional wisdom about the heightened danger on college campuses, finding that women there are less likely than nonstudents to be victims. College women are also less likely, the study found, to report the incidents to the police.

The rate of rape and other sexual assault over the past two decades was 1.2 times higher for nonstudents of college age than for students, according to the study, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It showed an average of 7.6 cases per 1,000 nonstudents, compared with 6.1 per 1,000 college women. For the most recent year, 2013, those rates were almost identical, according to the study, which focuses on women ages 18 to 24.

Article here. Excerpt:

'In a piece posted just two days before the story came undone, New York’s Kat Stoeffel not only deplored the resistance to “taking a traumatized young woman at her word” but argued that even if Jackie’s harrowing tale was made up or exaggerated, it was problematic to debunk it. In Stoeffel’s view, the benefits of believing the story—“forcing reform at UVA, encouraging other women to come forward”—outweighed any possible negatives, since no specific individuals had been accused and no innocents’ lives could be ruined.

Article here. Excerpt:

'THE uproar about sexual assaults on American college campuses is growing louder. Barack Obama has called them “an affront to our basic humanity”. Several universities—including Johns Hopkins, San Diego State, Emory, MIT, Clemson and the University of Virginia—have shut down or suspended parties at their fraternities in recent months. This week Wesleyan University in Connecticut banned a fraternity from holding social events for a year following two allegations of assaults at booze-fuelled revels. Meanwhile, 90 schools in 35 states are under investigation by the federal Department of Education for mishandling cases of sexual violence.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Feminists are distraught now that Rolling Stone has retracted the sensational University of Virginia rape story published last month. Many are continuing to defend “Jackie,” the UVA student whose tale of a horrific gang rape was found to contain numerous holes.

Jessica Valenti, columnist for London’s Guardian newspaper, wrote: “I choose to believe Jackie. I lose nothing by doing so, even if I’m later proven wrong.”

Liberal blogger Melissa McEwan tweeted: “I can’t state this more emphatically: If Jackie’s story is partially or wholly untrue, it doesn’t validate the reasons for disbelieving her.”

Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly believes feminists are so vehemently defending Jackie and her partially discredited allegations because they don’t want to lose out on an anti-male narrative.

“The reason they bought into the story and didn’t have any suspicions about the flakiness of it is antagonism toward men in general,” Schlafly said. “Their cry is they want to abolish the patriarchy, and anything that hurts men is something that pleases the feminists.”
...
There isn’t any rape culture,” she said. “There’s nothing ‘culture’ about rape. Rape is a crime and ought to be punished. But people who make false accusations about a dangerous crime like that also ought to be punished, and I hope everybody connected with this false story will suffer the consequences.”

Schlafly, whose recently published book “Who Killed the American Family?” came out just days before she turned 90, sees a national media landscape dominated by feminists and those who are afraid to anger the feminists.

Article here. Excerpt:

Article here. Excerpt:

'Despite the furor that’s swept campus in the last week, it appears Washington Post columnist George Will won’t be disinvited from speaking at Michigan State University graduation ceremonies on Saturday.
george-will-2.jpgGeorge WillCourtesy of MSU

That was the message sent by university President Lou Anna K. Simon in an interview following Friday’s meeting of the Michigan State University Board of Trustees.

Simon repeated the university’s talking point that Will’s view on sexual assault — made infamous in June 6 column where he wrote reports of sexual assault on campus make “victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges” — is not condoned by the university. However, she believes Will should be allowed to speak.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its proposed guidelines on male circumcision for public comment. The new federal guidelines would recommend male circumcision as a healthy choice that doctors should offer for parents to make for their sons and for teenagers and adults to consider. The CDC background report claims that circumcision has been shown to prevent HIV, HPV and other infections. The new CDC report mimics the 2012 American Academy of Pediatrics Circumcision Policy Statement which drew widespread criticism for its claim that circumcision benefits outweigh the risks.

IntactNews asked the CDC for comment about the risks for an average American male in acquiring HIV. “It’s hard to establish one, single figure for risk of HIV acquisition by a heterosexual male,” the CDC responded in an email to IntactNews today, saying the risks are not well documented.

One study estimates the chance of an American male acquiring HIV through a single unprotected sex act with a known HIV+ female partner is less than 0.04%. That adds up to a 6% risk per year, with an estimated total of 620 new HIV infections per year for white, heterosexual males with known HIV+ or high-risk female partners.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A recent article in Rolling Stonehas related a horrifying account of an on-campus gang rape allegedly committed by University of Virginia students in 2012. Third-year student “Jackie” told her story of how, as a freshman, she was brutally raped for three hours by seven men in a darkened, upstairs room at a fraternity party after being lured there by “Drew,” an upperclassman. Jackie’s account of her subsequent run-ins with Drew only add to the chilling nature of the crime: Weeks and months after the incident, Drew acted as though nothing unusual had happened, even thanking her for the “great time” he’d had.

This is criminal, predatory, and sociopathic behavior. If Jackie’s account is accurate, the perpetrators deserve lengthy prison sentences. Yet they reportedly graduated from UVA and remain at large. Why? Did police and prosecutors drop the ball?