Senate Republicans provide the votes to pass Woke ESG agenda.

By Rubashov
 
S-3605 passed the Senate yesterday, even though the bill has not been certified by OLS for a fiscal note. In other words, we don’t know what it will cost.
 
This bill “requires the Commissioner of Community Affairs to adopt regulations implementing certain reductions in required on- and off-street parking spaces in the Statewide site improvement standards by 20, 30, and 50 percent, depending on a residential development’s proximity to certain public transportation services.”
 
The prime sponsors of the bill are Senators Paul Sarlo and Troy Singleton. As legislation goes, S-3605 has led a charmed life. It was introduced on February 16, 2023; referred to the Senate Community and Urban Affairs Committee, from where it was reported on May 8th. It passed the Senate on Monday, by a vote of 21 yeas, 12 nays, and 7 not voting.
 
Democrats Beach, Cruz-Perez, Gopal, Greenstein, Johnson, Lagana, Madden, Pou, Sarlo, Scutari, Singleton, Smith, Thompson, Vitale, and Zwicker voted “Yes”.
 
Republicans  Bramnick, Connors, Holzapfel, Oroho, Polistina, and Stanfield put them over the top with their “Yes” votes.
 
Republicans Bucco, Corrado, Durr, Pennacchio, Schepisi, Singer, Steinhardt, and Testa voted “No”. Along with Democrats Cryan, Diegnan, Sacco, and Stack.
 
Democrats Burgess, Codey, Cunningham, Gill, Ruiz, and Turner were “Not Voting”; along with Republican O'Scanlon.
 
Legislation like S-3605 is a major goal of groups like the U.S. Green Building Council. They rate buildings that incorporate a “reduced parking footprint”, claiming that they “save money, improve efficiency, lower carbon emissions and create healthier places for people” and “are critical to addressing the climate crisis, meeting ESG goals, enhancing resilience, and supporting more equitable communities.”
 
ESG points are given “to minimize the environmental harms associated with parking facilities, including automobile dependence, land consumption, and rainwater runoff.”
 
No Parking or Reduce Parking (1 point)
Do not exceed the minimum local code requirements for parking capacity. Provide parking capacity that is a 30% reduction below the base ratios for parking spaces.
 
Carshare (1 point)
Provide dedicated parking for carshare vehicles. Provide carshare vehicle parking space(s) for at least 1% of total parking spaces, rounded up. If the project has fewer than 100 parking spaces, provide one carshare vehicle parking space. Establish an agreement between the project and carshare company guaranteeing that new and existing carshare vehicle space(s) will be dedicated for a minimum of two years from the certificate of building occupancy. Existing carshare vehicles located in nearby on- or off-street parking areas do not contribute to credit achievement.
 
Unbundling Parking (1 point)
Sell parking separately from all property sales or leases. For owner-occupied projects, do not provide free or subsidized parking for employees. Implement a daily parking fee at a cost equal to or greater than the daily roundtrip cost of municipal public transit.
 
Advocates of legislation like S-3605 point to the “Seattle Model” where transportation options are being determined by parking availability instead of personal choice.
 
Most U.S. cities require residential developers to provide one or more parking spaces with each housing unit they build. An oversupply of parking can lead directly to… more vehicle ownership and driving. As such, oversupplying parking harms the environment, reduces housing affordability, and thwarts efforts to improve social equity.

Realizing these downsides, a growing number of cities are reforming their parking policies to let developers provide fewer parking spaces… in Seattle, after the city reduced its off-street parking minimums… developers built less parking… this allowed Seattle to increase its housing production and discourage reliance on automobiles.
 
In addition to pushing the Green agenda, less parking means more profit for developers. Unfortunately for those who must inhabit such places, human activities -- like family gatherings at Thanksgiving or birthday parties -- will need to be curtailed. No parking, you see.
 
The Heritage Foundation has a new video on the threat of ESG:
 

“Voters can’t make informed decisions unless they’re informed.  If you asked any self-respecting constituent of George Santos, they’d tell you they wish they knew then what they know now.”
 
Micah Rasmussen
Director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University
 

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

George Orwell

Trenton Democrats need to read Andrew Sullivan

Trenton Democrats need to read Andrew Sullivan… and so do some Republicans.

Andrew Sullivan is a British-born American author, editor, and blogger. Sullivan is the former editor of The New Republic, a magazine founded in 1914 by leaders of the progressive movement.  Sullivan is the author or editor of six books and was a pioneer of the political blog, starting his in 2000. He eventually moved his blog to various publishing platforms, including Time, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and finally an independent subscription-based format. He announced his retirement from blogging in 2015.   Sullivan has been a writer-at-large at New York magazine since 2016.

Sullivan is sometimes labeled a “conservative” because of his Roman Catholicism and his embrace of the ideas of the late, great political philosopher Michael Oakeshott.  Sullivan was a leader of the movement to legalize same-sex marriage. Wikipedia notes: “Born and raised in Britain he has lived in the United States since 1984 and currently resides in Washington, D.C., and Provincetown, Massachusetts. He is openly gay and a practicing Roman Catholic.”

His latest New York magazine column is brilliant.  It is called: “The Nature of Sex”.  An excerpt appears below…

It might be a sign of the end-times, or simply a function of our currently scrambled politics, but earlier this week, four feminist activists — three from a self-described radical feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front — appeared on a panel at the Heritage Foundation. Together they argued that sex was fundamentally biological, and not socially constructed, and that there is a difference between women and trans women that needs to be respected. For this, they were given a rousing round of applause by the Trump supporters, religious-right members, natural law theorists, and conservative intellectuals who comprised much of the crowd. If you think I’ve just discovered an extremely potent strain of weed and am hallucinating, check out the video of the event.

I’ve no doubt that many will see these women as anti-trans bigots, or appeasers of homophobes and transphobes, or simply deranged publicity seekers. (The moderator, Ryan Anderson, said they were speaking at Heritage because no similar liberal or leftist institution would give them space or time to make their case.) And it’s true that trans-exclusionary radical feminists or TERFs, as they are known, are one minority that is actively not tolerated by the LGBTQ establishment, and often demonized by the gay community. It’s also true that they can be inflammatory, offensive, and obsessive. But what interests me is their underlying argument, which deserves to be thought through, regardless of our political allegiances, sexual identities, or tribal attachments. Because it’s an argument that seems to me to contain a seed of truth. Hence, I suspect, the intensity of the urge to suppress it.

The title of the Heritage panel conversation — “The Inequality of the Equality Act” — refers to the main legislative goal for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ lobbbying group in the US. The proposed Equality Act — a federal nondiscrimination bill that has been introduced multiple times over the years in various formulations — would add “gender identity” to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, rendering that class protected by anti-discrimination laws, just as sex is. The TERF argument is that viewing “gender identity” as interchangeable with sex, and abolishing clear biological distinctions between men and women, is actually a threat to lesbian identity and even existence — because it calls into question who is actually a woman, and includes in that category human beings who have been or are biologically male, and remain attracted to women. How can lesbianism be redefined as having sex with someone who has a penis, they argue, without undermining the concept of lesbianism as a whole? “Lesbians are female homosexuals, women who love women,” one of the speakers, Julia Beck, wrote last December, “but our spaces, resources and communities are on the verge of extinction.”

If this sounds like a massive overreach, consider the fact that the proposed Equality Act — with 201 co-sponsors in the last Congress — isn’t simply a ban on discriminating against trans people in employment, housing, and public accommodations (an idea with a lot of support in the American public). It includes and rests upon a critical redefinition of what is known as “sex.” We usually think of this as simply male or female, on biological grounds (as opposed to a more cultural notion of gender). But the Equality Act would define “sex” as including “gender identity,” and defines “gender identity” thus: “gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or characteristics, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.”

What the radical feminists are arguing is that the act doesn’t only blur the distinction between men and women (thereby minimizing what they see as the oppression of patriarchy and misogyny), but that its definition of gender identity must rely on stereotypical ideas of what gender expression means. What, after all, is a “gender-related characteristic”? It implies that a tomboy who loves sports is not a girl interested in stereotypically boyish things, but possibly a boy trapped in a female body. And a boy with a penchant for Barbies and Kens is possibly a trans girl — because, according to stereotypes, he’s behaving as a girl would. So instead of enlarging our understanding of gender expression — and allowing maximal freedom and variety within both sexes — the concept of “gender identity” actually narrows it, in more traditional and even regressive ways. What does “gender-related mannerisms” mean, if not stereotypes? It’s no accident that some of the most homophobic societies, like Iran, for example, are big proponents of sex-reassignment surgery for gender-nonconforming kids and adults (the government even pays for it) while being homosexual warrants the death penalty. Assuming that a non-stereotypical kid is trans rather than gay is, in fact, dangerously close to this worldview. (Some might even see a premature decision to change a child’s body from one sex to another as a form of conversion therapy to “fix” his or her gayness. This doesn’t mean that trans people shouldn’t have the right to reaffirm their gender by changing their bodies, which relieves a huge amount of pressure for many and saves lives. But that process should entail a great deal of caution and discernment.)

The Equality Act also proposes to expand the concept of public accommodations to include “exhibitions, recreation, exercise, amusement, gatherings, or displays”; it bars any religious exceptions invoked under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993; and it bans single-sex facilities like changing, dressing, or locker rooms, if sex is not redefined to include “gender identity.” This could put all single-sex institutions, events, or groups in legal jeopardy. It could deny lesbians their own unique safe space, free from any trace of men. The bill, in other words, “undermines the fundamental legal groundwork for recognizing and combating sex-based oppression and sex discrimination against women and girls.”

… This is the deeply confusing and incoherent aspect of the entire debate. If you abandon biology in the matter of sex and gender altogether, you may help trans people live fuller, less conflicted lives; but you also undermine the very meaning of homosexuality. If you follow the current ideology of gender as entirely fluid, you actually subvert and undermine core arguments in defense of gay rights. “A gay man loves and desires other men, and a lesbian desires and loves other women,” explains Sky Gilbert, a drag queen. “This defines the existential state of being gay. If there is no such thing as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ the entire self-definition of gay identity, which we have spent generations seeking to validate and protect from bigots, collapses.” Contemporary transgender ideology is not a complement to gay rights; in some ways it is in active opposition to them.

And the truth is that many lesbians and gay men are quite attached to the concept of sex as a natural, biological, material thing. Yes, we are very well aware that sex can be expressed in many different ways. A drag queen and a rugby player are both biologically men, with different expressions of gender. Indeed, a drag queen can also be a rugby player and express his gender identity in a variety of ways, depending on time and place. But he is still a man. And gay men are defined by our attraction to our own biological sex. We are men and attracted to other men. If the concept of a man is deconstructed, so that someone without a penis is a man, then homosexuality itself is deconstructed. Transgender people pose no threat to us, and the vast majority of gay men and lesbians wholeheartedly support protections for transgender people. But transgenderist ideology — including postmodern conceptions of sex and gender — is indeed a threat to homosexuality, because it is a threat to biological sex as a concept.

You can access the entire article here:  

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/andrew-sullivan-the-nature-of-sex.html