In article , "Bob Ahnmeischaft"
wrote:

"paghat" wrote

Homeowners Association as I documented thoroughly have a racist origin.

So...all are tainted by the ugly actions of some?

The movement is certainly tainted throughout by its origins. The fact that
HOA advocates in this thread have had NO sense of conscience in this
regard suggests even the "best" individuals (the least troublingly
malignant) support a racist status quo by their refusal to face reality. A
few HOAs are consciously, overtly seeking integration, & I still have
issues with a system that provides the OPTION of circumventing so many
basic Civil Rights, even if they never act on that option. The option
shouldn't even be there.

The reason it is still there is because in some contexts, such as
retirement communities, it seems to make sense that the retirees buying a
home in an age-restricted enclave have signed away their right to ever
have their grandchild live with them, even if the kid's mom & dad get
killed by a drunk driver. To others it "makes sense" that Christians
should be able to ban together & incoporate their whole neighborhood to be
uniformly Christian. To the government, some of these options are legal
only if government funding is not used, & if inside-HOA private schools
get no government funding. But the result is too often incorporated
communities of 2,000 houses or more, the majority of buyers (all white) of
such low conscience & UNITENTIONAL racism that they simply really never
gave thought to why their street's lilywhite when the community at large
is 20% minorities. When a pattern emerges of that sort, the HOA activists
should be subject to imprisonment, fines, & foreclosures. So I don't think
even the "best excuse" reasons for discrimination are any good, & even
those HOAs which actively strive against the norm shouldn't even have the
option of circumventing other peoples' civil rights.

Is that really where
you're headed here? IIRC, Planned Parenthood was founded at least in part
on eugenicistic principles. Would you judge the current organization by

If you mean the stuff against Margaret Sanger, that was entirely
fabricated by anti-birth control activists. As for organizatiosn that
really were founded on eugenic principles & removed Sanger's
personal-choice/personal-rights philosophy to IMPOSE birth control on
blacks & the retarded -- some of those organizations do still exist, &
they are all still racist. So no, a bad origin does not evolve into a good
outcome. It certainly has not done so with HOAs. For as long as the OPTION
exists for incoporated neighborhoods to discriminate legally, they nature
of that system will remain racist.

Anyway, this is off-topic enough without going deeply into the mythic
capacity for anti-birth control, anti-choice, far-right loons popularizing
the idea that Sanger was a Eugenicist & therefore Planned Parenthood is
tainted. You can do a google search of "Planned Parrenthood" + "Nazi" or
+ "Nuremburg" or + "Eugenics" & get thousands of hits from people &
organizations who care nothing whatsoever about truth & use the tactic of
lying (which we've also seen in this thread as the primary means of
supporting HOAs!) because they have nothing good on their side if they
adhere to the truth. Yet by sheer volume of the lying they are too often
assumed to have SOME truth underlying what really is pure nonsense. But
here's the truth:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...utput=gpla in

From which I will quote only Sanger's ACTUAL assessment of eugenics (of
which she disapproved most heartily):

"Eugenists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we
contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state. We
maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive
functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her
child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is
her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether
she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if
she chooses to become a mother." [Birth Control Review, Feb 1919]

If Sanger's organization had had a Eugenic origin, damned right, I would
not support it today. Fortunately there's not a lick of truth to that. But
HOAs do have a racist history, still are to the great majority actively
racist, & even when not racist do have under law the option of being so.

-paghat the ratgirl


Now there you go just with your head in a hole. Homeowner Associations are
semi-independently governed entities which, if they do not accept
government funding of the HUD sort, do not have to follow
antidiscrimination laws.

Um. Hm. Care to reveal your source on this one? My understanding of the
Fair Housing Act (enforced or not) is that it applies to nearly everyone,
including HOAs, condo nazi boards, and cooperative apartment boards.
Religious outfits can discriminate, but even tehy aren't allowed to
discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.

Because incorporation gets private clubs & HOAs around such things as Fair
Housing, a whole slug of secondary laws & ammendments have been passed
state-by-state in an attempt to undermine the HOA option or privilege of
being racist if they want to. The specific law I alluded to I can cite,
yes: Legislation sponsored by Senator Burton (San Francisco Democrat)
Senate Bill 1148 in 1999, & Assembly Bill 1493 by Assemblyman George
Nakano (D, Torrence) in 2000, were signed into law by the Governor of
California in 2000. These laws provide that discriminatory language in
covenants & any racist restrictions even within Homeowners Associations in
California can be voided by the purchaster (but it's entirely OPTIONAL to
do so!). It unfortunately in no way makes the racist policies illegal
even now, but when someone attempts to sell their HOA-controlled home to
an "inappropriate" family, & the HOA interfers, the seller can since 2000
sue to recover damages.

If Fair Housing Act had already covered this, the new legislation
wouldn't've been required, but this law alone did not change the overall
right of HOAs to circumvent civil rights, it merely made it possible for
sellers when harmed by to sue the HOAs. Some of the behavior of the HOAs
was already illegal, yes, but there were zero means of enforcement,
requiring new legislation to be even moderately enforceable. Other
post-2000 legislation has been enacted. This is all for California only, a
state in the vaguard of undermining incorporated neighborhoods' right to
discriminate. In the majority of states there is still not even a token
attempt to enforce Fair Housing in incorporated HOA neigbhorhoods, so even
IF some of the Fair Housing Act were found to apply, most HOAs have never
had to ammend even their official documents, let alone go even further &
actually permit integration. In many cases, when the charters & deeds &
regulations are "corrected" to remove overt racism, the HOA continues by
all other means to behave racistly keeping their neighborhood from ever
becoming integrated, & the government even if motivated cannot take on
thousands of cases each of which would take years to prosecute & be
difficult to prove. But at least a rebel within the HOA has options,
whether or not would-be buyers always do.

The strange thing is that these laws regard official language in charters
& deeds & do not alter behavior that keeps HOAs lilywhite. I guess it's
because behavior is hard to prove in court even if outcomes of lilywhite
HOAs make it pretty obvious. Garth Warth, a reporter for the North County
Times covering the legacy of racism in the Placido del Mar HOA, citing
post-2000 legislation that has permitted legal actions against HOA racism
in the last thee years, said: "With homeowners associations now required
to remove the restrictions, and with homeowners having a streamlined
process to erase them from their deeds, it may be a matter of time before
the days of racial restrictions become a distant memory." The key word
there is "may come a time" because that time is not yet upon us! And even
such patches as California have laid over the Fair Housing Act have been
restricted advancements, & are not federal, but must be undertaken state
by state. Test cases have made it to within inches of the supreme court
only to be returned for states to decide.

A 1988 California fair housing ammendment (in California) explicitely
PRESERVES the rights of retirement communities to ban grandparents from
raising their own grandchildren, or any other age-restriction. So while a
few gains made for minorities (slight though they are) have weakened HOA
racist agendas, agism is explicitly factored in as always unimpeded. The
legal arguments were for elder care communities; but the application has
been to any incorporated retirement community.

It would appear that your assertions are more correct WRT HOAs and suchlike
on the west coast and specifically California. But they don't apply
everywhere, perhaps not even most places.

Unfortunately because California, Texas, & Florida have been the first
states to "patch" a few of the holes in the Fair Housing Act, they're
actually BETTER than most of the states. My state (Washington) is behind
the curve. The western part of the state is fairly liberal & many HOA
housing neighborhoods are inteigrated but still have alarming options if
they didn't wish to be. Worse, incorporated individual condo HOAs &
limited equity coops are not integrated even marginally. There has been no
new legislation here (as there has been in California) to help enforce
Fair Housing standards. In Eastern Washington it seems no one even
questions it, but there are activists on the coast striving to change
things. Unfortunately HOA lobbyists are very powerful here, & not a one of
them has even one liberal ideas.

I can't even freakin' believe I'm essentially defending something I hate,
but here I am.

Because you see the faults too, you were at least able to launch of
defense that was thoughtful & sensitively done, so I'm impressed.

-paggers

Bob

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/