Obsidian Wings

Not My Moral Values

by hilzoy

From the Denver Post, via Bitch, Ph.D.:

"The protocol of six Catholic hospitals run by Centura calls for rape victims to undergo an ovulation test.

If they have not ovulated, said Centura corporate spokeswoman Dana Berry, doctors tell the victims about emergency contraception and write prescriptions for it if the patient asks.

If, however, the urine test suggests that a rape victim has ovulated, Berry continued, doctors at Centura's Catholic hospitals are not to mention emergency contraception. That means the victim can end up pregnant by her rapist."

Or, in short: if a rape victim doesn't need emergency contraception, the hospitals' doctors will tell her about it; but if there's a significant chance that she might actually get pregnant as a result of her rape, and therefore does need it, they won't say a word.

Why We Separate Church And State In One Easy Lesson

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch, via Pandagon, comes an article with the delightful title 'ACLU files petition on behalf of witch':

"The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia has filed a petition on behalf of Cynthia Simpson, a witch of the Wiccan faith, seeking to reverse a ruling that upheld Chesterfield County's decision to bar her from giving the invocation at Board of Supervisors meetings. (...)

In 2002, Simpson, who calls herself a witch, asked to be placed on the list of religious leaders invited to deliver the invocation at county board meetings. She later received a letter from Chesterfield's county attorney that said leaders on the list are restricted to those within the Judeo-Christian faith.

Simpson filed suit, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. One year later, the Richmond U.S. District Court ruled that the county violated the constitutional mandate for separation of church and state and discriminated against minority religions.

Chesterfield appealed the court's decision.

This month, a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit ruled Chesterfield's policy fits within the Supreme Court's requirements for legislative prayer." (emphases added.)

Not being a lawyer, I am not particularly clear on the relation between the first amendment of the United States Constitution and the activities of Chesterfield County, Virginia. So I will not make any specifically legal arguments here. What I will say is this: one very obvious reason to separate church and state is that unless we do so, we will either end up allowing every religion to entangle itself with the state, or we will end up picking some subset of religions to allow in, while excluding others. The first case is probably not what most religious people want: many Christians would not be at all happy about a Wiccan giving the opening prayer at government meetings, and even I, who have no problem with the versions of Wicca that I've encountered (other than disbelief), would not be thrilled to have Satanists or members of Aum Shinrikio leading my elected representatives in prayer. And I feel this way despite not being an adherent of any religion: back when I was, and when I therefore cared deeply about prayer, I would have minded a lot more.

I would also have minded the implicit assumption that anyone who claims to represent any religion, however bizarre, could deliver a prayer in which adherents of any other religion would wish to join. That's true of a lot of religions, and when I was a Christian I happily joined in prayers led by Muslims, Jews, and all sorts of people; but it is not true of all of them.

The alternative, as I said, is to have the government restrict the religions it will allow itself to become entangled with. This is what Chesterfield County seems to have done. The actual letter sent to Cynthia Simmons includes the following passage:

"Chesterfield's non-sectarian invocations are traditionally made to a divinity that is consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Based upon our review of Wicca, it is neo-pagan and invokes polytheistic, pre-Christian deities. Accordingly, we cannot honor your request to be included on the list of religious leaders that are invited to provide invocations at the meetings of the Board of Supervisors."

This is not an appropriate thing for a government that purports to represent all its citizens to be doing. It is not the role of government to decide the status of "polytheistic, pre-Christian deities." Nor, I would have thought, is this something Christians should want governments to do: Christians spent centuries being tortured and killed because they did not hold the beliefs their governments favored, and our country was founded by Christians who were not permitted by their government to worship as they believed they should. If Christians are really worried about being 'persecuted', they should hold to the principle of the separation of church and state, since if history teaches anything, it's that no one should count on remaining in the majority forever.

Moreover, it's not as though Christianity cannot be practiced without things like Christian opening prayers at County Board of Supervisors meetings. As I said in a previous comment thread, when school prayer first became an issue, I was mystified by the claim that liberals were trying to ban prayer in the schools, since I had for years had a downright voluble relationship with God while in school, despite the absence of organized prayers. No one had noticed my frequent conversations with God, nor would anyone have been able to ban them had they wanted to, since they were silent and unobservable, at least to humans. And according to the Bible, it's not frequent public appeals to God that count; it's whether you keep Him in your heart, where only you and He can see.

If we're going to allow the state to endorse 'religion', we must either be prepared to endorse all religions, or to have the state pick certain specific religions to endorse. In the first case, we will have to accept prayers by Wiccans. In the second, we will have to give up any pretense that the state is neutral between religions, or that it's not endorsing some specific religion, but 'faith' in general. And we will give up our best protection against the day when our religion, whatever it may be, becomes the religion of an unpopular minority. That protection is the separation of church and state: the view that while individual politicians can and should consider their consciences, and thus necessarily their religious views, in deciding what to do, they should never seek to establish one religion as the official religion of government. Individuals, not governments, should decide which religion they should accept, and to think otherwise contradicts both the founding principles of this country and the spirit of the specific religion that Chesterfield County is trying to make official. Christianity asks individual believers to come to Christ. It distinguishes what we owe to Caesar and what we owe to God, and asks us to do the same. If the Christians of Chesterfield County are not moved by the principles our country was founded on, they should at least do Christ the courtesy of taking Him at His word.

Illegal, Unconstitutional, and Cruel

A 13-year-old ward of the state of Florida has had her planned abortion blocked by a state court injunction asked for by Florida's department of children and families:

A pregnant 13-year-old girl in Florida has been told she cannot have an abortion because she lacks the maturity to make such a decision.

A state court granted an injunction which prevents the girl from terminating her pregnancy.

She is three months pregnant and had planned to have an abortion on Tuesday of this week.

The American Civil Liberties Union says it will launch an urgent appeal against the ruling. [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union 's executive director in Florida, Howard Simon, said forcing a 13-year-old to carry on an unwanted pregnancy to term, against her wishes, is not only illegal and unconstitutional, it is cruel.

As much as I wish the 13-year-old would chose to have her baby, what's happening here is nightmarish to me. Florida's logic here is that a person too immature to make a decision about their own body is apparently mature enough to bring another peron into the world. As a ward of the state, her child would become a ward of the state as well, no? Does that mean Florida would be free to place the child where it wants? Would the 13-year-old have any say?  Is she just a reluctant, state-owned baby-making  machine at this point? What if she doesn't take care of her own health (and by extension her fetus's health) the way a pregnant mother should? Will the state prosecute her? On whose account?

It seems to me that, legally, the state is forcing this 13-year-old to have a child that the state is the legal guardian of. Florida is forcing this child to bear its child. It's so beyond grotesque.

Pilgrim Open Thread

It's a rainy April morning here in NYC, but tomorrow is May and we know what April Showers bring! (Yes, eventually, Pilgrims).

What's on your mind?

Pack your Bags Pumpkins, The Honeymoon is OVER

The day it became apparent that GWB would be our president for another four years, I made a pledge to give him the benefit of doubt for 100 days into his new term. Like it or not, he was the president. I'm quite sure there are folks who think I broke that pledge, that I've been overly critical of the President since that day, that I've not given him the benefit of doubt in his actions. To those folks all I can say is "Wait for it." By comparison, you'll see how much I held back. The honeymoon was a chance for him to prove my misgivings unfounded. He has failed.

Day 100 of the second term of George W. Bush we find an administration resistant to learning from its mistakes, an administration with three central and tragic flaws. I'll cover two today (the third is larger and requires more cites...I'm working on it):

1. An allergy to accountability
2. A priority of perception over reality

Banning Books in Alabama

I'll tolerate just about any kind of crap the right-wing extremists in this country can drudge up with regards to limiting the rights of gay Americans to live openly in this nation, so long as they stay in states I would never entertain living in even if you paid me (most of them Red, yes), but I draw the line at the sort of willful ignorance Ala. State Rep. Gerald Allen is up to:

Republican Alabama lawmaker Gerald Allen says homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, under his bill, public school libraries could no longer buy new copies of plays or books by gay authors, or about gay characters.

"I don't look at it as censorship," says State Representative Gerald Allen. "I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children."

This report notes some of the literature public school libraries would no longer be able to buy, including works by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal. Others include Auden, Albee, Alger, Baldwin, Behan, Boswell, Burroughs, Butler, Cocteau, Crane, Crisp, Cunningham, Forster, Foucault, Fry, Genet, Gide, Ginsberg, Housman, Hughes, Isherwood, Keynes, Kushner, Leavitt,  Mann, Marlowe, Maugham, Maupin, McNally, Monette, Orton, Proust, Rauch, Rimbaud, Savage, Sedaris, Andrew Sullivan, Whitman, Wilde, Wilder, Wittgenstein, etc. etc. etc.

I want to laugh at this. I want to note that the only people he's really hurting are the ones he thinks he protecting, the ones who will be that much stupider, that much poorer, and that much less blessed by the genius of such writers. I want to believe that an idiot like Allen will be drummed out of the Alabama legislature for being too freakin' moronic to serve as dog catcher, let alone Representative. Five years ago, in this country, I would have been certain that would be the response to such a transparent grandstanding. Now, I think this SOB might actually be successful. Look at what happened in Texas, just yesterday:

The school board in [Odessa, Texas] has voted unanimously to add a Bible class to its high school curriculum.

Hundreds of people, most of them supporters of the proposal, packed the board meeting last night. More than 6,000 Odessa residents had signed a petition supporting the class.

Some residents, however, said the school board acted too quickly. Others said they feared a constitutional fight.

Barring any hurdles, the class should be added to the curriculum in fall 2006 and taught as a history or literature course. The school board still must develop a curriculum, which board member Floy Hinson said should be open for public review.

The board had heard a presentation in March from Mike Johnson, a representative of the Greensboro, N.C.-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, who said that coursework designed by that organization is not about proselytizing or preaching.

Not about proselytizing or preaching? Yeah, Mike...it's about selling Bibles, isn't it?

Let's face it folks, when elected officials feel empowered to openly call for censorship of classics that have been staples of public school libraries, we've turned a dangerous corner. I can't believe the President himself hasn't sent a team of advisers down to Alabama to stomp on this freak's head. WTF is happening in this country?

UPDATE: Although I agree that the Bible is a miraculous book with important cultural significance, and that as such it has a rightful place in the public schools (alongside the Koran and Torah and other religious texts), constant reader Bernard Tomtov noted the following about the organization claiming its advocacy is not "about proselytizing or preaching":

After googling on the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, the group behind the Odessa effort, I find that they are backed by Center for Reclaiming America and American Family Association .

Anyone who thinks these organizations are just interested in teaching the Bible as a literary work might want to check their web sites.

You might also want to check out this article about Elizabeth Ridenour, head of NCBCPS.

Nice work Bernard.

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Found!

I know this is not an ornithology blog, but trust me: this is extraordinary news. Science is reporting that an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker has been found in Arkansas, and has been photographed and videotaped. The photos and video are admittedly blurry and hard to make out (you can see some of them if you download the pdf from the link I gave, and more in the 'Supporting Materials'.) But together with the sightings, they seem to be conclusive evidence that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is not, as we have thought for decades, extinct.

Look at it: isn't it gorgeous?

Karnak Penalty!...no, er, wait, maybe not...

--Edward

Since I began blogging (eons ago, it seems) I've been accused of "mindreading" on countless sites. What seemed apparent enough to me to mention was often slammed by opponents as out-of-bounds. And although I've learned to appreciate that in this forum, it's considered best to criticize only what someone has said or done and not why I suspect they said or did it, I've always felt that was an artificial constraint designed for the "sport" of blogging, not a legitimate realworld guideline for deciding important issues. In other words, just because a politician (oh, like, say Bush) doesn't say he's personally pro-rich and anti-poor, doesn't mean I can't conclude that on my own when pulling a lever in the voting booth.

Now, however, comes a report that suggests the ability to "read minds" is not only real, everyone is capable of it:

In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for planning movements. The cluster of cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but likewise when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else. The cells responded the same way whether the monkey reached out to grasp a peanut, or merely watched in envy as another monkey or a human did.

Because the cells reflected the actions that the monkey observed in others, the neuroscientists named them "mirror neurons."

Later experiments confirmed the existence of mirror neurons in humans and revealed another surprise. In addition to mirroring actions, the cells reflected sensations and emotions.

"Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person's mental shoes," says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. "In fact, with mirror neurons we do not have to pretend, we practically are in another person's mind."

In other words, when I see Bush smirk in a press conference (sidebar...any takers for a poll on how many times he'll smirk tonight?), I actually can, generally speaking, understand what emotions motivated him to do so. So, I'm actually right in believing he's focused  on robbing the poor and giving to the rich and doesn't really care about freedom or democracy or compassion or... ;-p

More seriously, PBS has a nice piece on this discovery and suggests it explains all kinds of behaviors, from alarmingly passionate arm-chair quarterback hollering (you reading Dad?) to the (widely disliked by ObWi readers) inability to watch people on TV making fools of themselves.

In the medical arena, this discovery may even give scientists some leads in combating autism:

The idea is that the mirror neuron systems of autistic individuals are somehow impaired or deficient, and that the resulting "mind-blindness" prevents them from simulating the experiences of others. For autistic individuals, experience is more observed than lived, and the emotional undercurrents that govern so much of our human behavior are inaccessible. They guess the mental states of others through explicit theorizing, but the end result is a list -- mechanical and impersonal -- of actions, gestures and expressions void of motive, intent, or emotion.

I'll just be happy to have a link to point to when I'm accused of being Karnak. Bloggers beware!

Who Left The Kids In Charge?

Today, the House passed The Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIANA), a bill making it illegal to transport a minor across state lines to circumvent laws in the state in which the minor lives that require parental notification before an abortion. The Democrats offered several amendments to this bill; one, for instance, exempts cab drivers and bus drivers from prosecution. But the Republicans, in issuing the committee report, took it upon themselves to rewrite the amendments' descriptions in the official committee report to make it read as though they concerned sexual predators, even though neither the bill nor the amendment has anything to do with sexual predators. The revisions are as follows:

"DEMS: a Nadler amendment allows an adult who could be prosecuted under the bill to go to a Federal district court and seek a waiver to the state’s parental notice laws if this remedy is not available in the state court. (no 11-16)
GOP REWRITE:. Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have created an additional layer of Federal court review that could be used by sexual predators to escape conviction under the bill. By a roll call vote of 11 yeas to 16 nays, the amendment was defeated.

DEMS: a Nadler amendment to exempt a grandparent or adult sibling from the criminal and civil provisions in the bill (no 12-19)
GOP REWRITE: . Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution under the bill if they were grandparents or adult siblings of a minor. By a roll call vote of 12 yeas to 19 nays, the amendment was defeated.

DEMS: a Scott amendment to exempt cab drivers, bus drivers and others in the business transportation profession from the criminal provisions in the bill (no 13-17):
GOP REWRITE. Mr. Scott offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution if they are taxicab drivers, bus drivers, or others in the business of professional transport. By a roll call vote of 13 yeas to 17 nays, the amendment was defeated.

DEMS: a Scott amendment that would have limited criminal liability to the person committing the offense in the first degree (no 12-18)
GOP REWRITE:. Mr. Scott offered an amendment that would have exempted from prosecution under the bill those who aid and abet criminals who could be prosecuted under the bill. By a roll call vote of 12 yeas to 18 nays, the amendment was defeated.

DEMS: a Jackson-Lee amendment to exempt clergy, godparents, aunts, uncles or first cousins from the penalties in the bill (no 13-20)
GOP REWRITE. Ms. Jackson-Lee offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution under the bill if they were clergy, godparents, aunts, uncles, or first cousins of a minor, and would require a study by the Government Accounting Office. By a roll call vote of 13 yeas to 20 nays, the amendment was defeated."

Here is the text of the bill. I can't provide a link to the amendments, because, oddly enough, their descriptions have not been posted (and at this stage in the proceedings, they usually are.) But if you read the bill, it's just about transporting minors across state lines to get an abortion. It has nothing to do with sexual predators at all.

No doubt, you are thinking to yourselves, this was the work of some rogue staffer, the same sort of person who would think it was funny to change the description to say something like: "Rep. Nadler proposed an amendment to declare that he is a poopyhead." Wrong:

"Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who authored the panel's report, defended its language, saying the Democratic amendments would not have specifically excluded child molesters from protections.

"Perhaps these amendments were not properly drafted by the authors when they were submitted in the committee," Sensenbrenner told the House. "That's not the fault of the majority, that's the fault of the people who drafted the amendment." "

To which Rep. Nadler replied:

"Under CIANA, a father who rapes and impregnates his own daughter can go and sue the doctor or the grandparent or the clergyman who transported his child across state lines for the purpose of getting an abortion. Maybe that wasn’t exactly the intent of this legislation. But according to the descriptive guidelines now laid out by the majority, it would therefore be fair to call this entire bill the Rapists and Sexual Predators Right to Sue Act."

And he's right. If any law that provides people some right or benefit without specifically exempting sexual predators can now be redescribed as the Republicans suggest, the possibilities are endless. The Highway bill, for instance, can now be called the "Helping Sexual Predators Reach Their Victims More Quickly Act". A bill appropriating money for cabins at a National Park could be called the "Providing A Secluded Location In Which Sexual Predators Can Molest Their Victims Act". A new telecom regulations bill might be the "Enabling Sexual Predators To Communicate More Easily With Their Victims Act." The next time a supplemental appropriations bill for Iraq comes up, we can call it the "Enabling Sexual Predators To Target Our Men And Women In Uniform Act". (I mean, what are the odds that our armed forces, noble though they are, do not include at least one sexual predator?) The possibilities are endless.

Or at least they're endless if you happen to be interested in entering infantile distortions of House members' bills and amendments into the Congressional Record for political purposes. To a responsible adult, there's only one option: entering an accurate description of each bill and amendment into the record, and debating them on the merits. Apparently, though, Sensenbrenner is not interested in behaving like an adult, or in exercising his responsibilities as Chair of the Judiciary Committee in a minimally responsible way. His conduct is indefensible.

(h/t Opus)

Krens the Great

--Edward

You may recall that lately I've been obsessed with the life of Alexander the Great, reading every biography of him I can lay my hands on. And I'm looking forward to seeing this exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center. As cold-blooded conquerors go, Alexander was a hottie (see this image of Ghengis Khan for comparison). But his monomaniacal quest for glory saw Alexander lose his way, dragging his increasingly opportunistic and foreign forces around the known world, simply because it was there and he wanted it. None of the Greek idealists who set out with him on his conquest would recognize their leader (let alone his vision) by the end of his life.

I couldn't help but think of the Macedonian emperor when I read the story in today's NYTimes about Guggenheim Director Thomas Krens' imperialist designs. Despite the growing criticism and high-profile resignations, Krens keeps pushing further into exotic territory (with plans for possible Guggenheim satellites in Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, and Guadalajara) and bringing on board members who share his hunger for expansion:

Today's board is driven by leading members of New York's real estate world who share Mr. Krens's dreams of empire building. Besides [new chairman, William L. Mack, a real estate developer], one of five trustees who joined the board two years ago, they include Stephen M. Ross, founder and chief executive of the Related Companies, and Robert C. Baker, the chairman and chief executive of Purchase, a New York-based national realty and development corporation. [President, Jennifer Stockman] is president of Stockman & Associates, consultants specializing in technology.

Just like Alexander though, whose empire collapsed with a stunning expediency after his passing because he had too few true believers in key positions and had spread them too far apart, Krens is possibly building a global network of museums no one will be interested in defending after they're constructed (no true believers in Peggy's original vision, anyway).