For a city that prides itself on its liberal credentials, we are sorely lacking in a few major areas: Diversity, Trans and Men’s Issues are all absent from the long list of Commissions that the city has. I think we need to address this systemic wrong and I am personally calling on the City Council to stand up and do more for our city residents who are ignored and underserved.
Otherwise we are continuing to promote a heteronormative, transphobic, homophobic, misandrist and racist agenda that is taking people’s lives.
We have a Commission the Status of Women, and one on Disabilities, but that is it as far as I can tell and those commissions that are designed to serve particular populations. I find it interesting that we have this facade of political correctness that overlays our city, but we ignore the needs of so many minorities who live amongst us.
I say all of this having just completed listening to “The Diversity Delusion” by Heather MacDonald. She is an American lawyer, essayist and commentator on the state of our nation. As a Thomas W. Smith Fellow of the Manhattan Institute she is a voice for the conservative organization and its mission.
The Diversity Delusion is a well researched, and well thought out indictment of the current state of our society from police forces to the devastation that is occurring on college campuses to critical thinking. I highly recommend this book as vital reading for any parent who has a son that is going to be attending a college in the next 20 years. It’s a frightening description of the horrors that boys are facing on campus in the war on sexual assault that is being waged by the social justice warriors who have no plan.
MacDonald takes on the hottest topics of the day, and summarily dismantles the talking points that are used by protesters to get media sound bites. She attacks the underpinnings of what the far left is using to push an agenda that has become a self-sustaining industry of diversity, indictments and “cancel culture.” Her searing commentary holds nothing back, and her contempt for those who are heading the drive is not hidden in the slightest.
Over the course of ten hours I was subjected to her sharp wit, pointed analysis and stinging rebukes of administrators who claim to be working for the greater good, but only seem to be creating the double speak world of Orwell’s 1984 and even more so, the imploding world of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Having read Atlas Shrugged more than a few times, let me condense its message to this: Entrepreneurs and Free Thinking Creatives are shut down by a call of the masses to create equality at all costs and without standards. That is the current posture of many a college campus these days. It foretells a world of ever decreasing mediocrity is created, to the point where the Entrepreneurs and Free Thinkers, run away to start over.
When I first read Rand’s magnum opus, I was as a freshman in college. It was 1986, I was a Reagan Republican, wanted to be a captain of industry and styled myself as such. Fast forward 35 years and I still believe in much of the value that an entrepreneur and a free thinker like MacDonald brings to society, but I also have tempered my thoughts with a greater sensitivity to the experiences of others.
Do I still believe that personal empowerment, hard work, and dedication will build a life? Yes. Do I also understand that I have grown up in a heteronormative world that has impacted me as a gay man? Absolutely. Can I extrapolate from that to the proposition that other minorities have been impacted both negatively and positively by the way or society is ordered? No doubt.
This level of insight is why I can style myself as a Father’s Rights or Men’s Rights lawyer, and still represent a woman in a domestic violence case, because I can see more than just one perspective. That’s why I don’t call for the abolition of the Commission on the Status of Women, (which has NO men on it by the way, which seems like it might be creating an echo chamber effect, but I digress). The need for a Commission on the Status of Men is obvious to anyone who can step outside the feminist orthodoxy that men are the source of all that is wrong in the world, and all history is men’s history so we need to take a break from the men. It strikes me that to ignore the specialized needs of men is just as wrong as it was to ignore the needs of women for so long. Same goes for the LGBT community which deserves its own Commission.
We have no Diversity commission that I could discern and that seems to be a gross oversight of the Black, Latinx, Asian and indigenous population amongst us. The obligatory naming of a park and roadway seems like a glib offer of acknowledgment while not actually doing anything of value.
So, all you new City Councilmembers, what say you? Need a volunteer for those new commissions? I’m in for the Men’s and LGBT Commissions.
David Pisarra is a Los Angeles Divorce and Child Custody Lawyer specializing in Father’s and Men’s Rights with the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He can be reached at dpisarra@pisarra.com or 310/664-9969. You can follow him on Twitter @davidpisarra
