Put San Francisco values on the ballot

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

Musing on Rafael Mandelman's response to reporter Heather Knight's question on public injection drug use:

And asked whether the city should continue to allow blatant injection drug use on our sidewalks, Mandelman laughed. “No! No!” he replied. “We should have safe injection sites, but it is not tolerable to have the norm of open-air injection drug use.” He supports more drug treatment services, as well as more police foot patrols to order drug users to, in his words, “knock it off” and issue citations if need be.

That feeble response is typical of what city progressives are willing to tolerate on city streets, but I suspect that's a lot different than what city voters are willing to put up with.

Recall that Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash measure in 2002 was called a "war" on the poor by ultra-prog Chris Daly, and Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond called it "an attack on homeless people." 

In reality the measure was about stopping the city policy of giving the homeless monthly cash grants that in effect helped them remain homeless. Not surprisingly after Care Not Cash went into effect, 1,000 people dropped off the list of beneficiaries. They just wanted cash, not care.

And when the sit-lie measure was put on the ballot by Mayor Newsom in 2010, city progs opposed it, even putting a poison pill measure on the same ballot. City voters weren't fooled and passed it anyway.

It's now time to put a measure on the ballot to allow city cops to arrest those who shoot up in public to put a stop to that outrage to public decency. 

Injection sites is just another half-assed progressive idea that fails to come to grips with the problem.

While we're at it, let's include public nudity in the measure, another quality of life violation supported by city progressives.

And there's graffiti/tagging vandalism, which many progs think is simply a public art genre that shouldn't be discouraged: see this and this.

See also "The Sidewalks of San Francisco."

Family values

From City Journal (Honor Killing and Islam):

...Phyllis Chesler carefully distinguishes honor killings from “plain and psychopathic homicides, serial killings, crimes of passion, revenge killings, and domestic violence.” 

An honor killing is the murder of girls and women by their families because of supposedly disgraceful acts perceived to have brought public shame. Honor killings are a family collaboration and even considered by their perpetrators to be legally justifiable acts of self-defense, because the murdered girls’ dishonor is regarded as an aggressive act against their families. It demands a response.

In her second of four in-depth studies first published in the Middle East Quarterly, Chesler looked at 172 incidents and 230 honor-killing victims. She gathered most of her information from English-language media around the world. “There were 100 victims murdered for honor in the West, including 33 in North America and 67 in Europe,” Chesler found. “There were 130 additional victims in the Muslim world. Most of the perpetrators were Muslims, as were their victims, and most of the victims were women.” 

Indeed, while Sikhs and Hindus do commit such murders, the honor killings in her study, both those in the West and in the rest of the world, are mainly Muslim-on-Muslim crimes...

But can Islam itself really have nothing to do with honor killings, even though Muslims have perpetuated the majority of such murders in the West? Yes, honor killings have also been found in various societies in the Balkans, the southern Mediterranean (Sicily, for example), and in India, but could these cultures not have learned from Islam, since they were all under Islamic domination for centuries?...

Surely, for example, Pakistani culture, saturated with Islam—a religion that undoubtedly treats women as inferior—could only develop a deeply misogynistic society that makes honor killing possible. 

Religious authorities do not condemn honor killings in Pakistan, a fact that makes hope of abolition remote. The attitudes that make honor-killing possible are derived directly from Islamic teachings and are further reinforced by them. Muslim nations make similar arguments about cliterectomy and other anti-modern practices...