Archive for category Human Rights

Plan B: It’s About Health Care Not Teenagers and Sex

Posted by Glenden Brown in Health Care, Human Rights, This Blog on June 13, 2013

Terry O’Neill, of NOW, at HuffPo:

 You’re making a mistake that is all too common in this debate about reproductive justice and women’s health by conflating two separate conversations.

One is about sex. The other is about health care.  Both are important, but they are not the same.

Is it inappropriate for 14-year-old girls to be having sex? Of course it is.

Should parents bite the bullet and have the difficult conversation with their young daughters (and sons) about having sex too young?  Of course they should.

But would a responsible parent wish to deny their child urgently needed — potentially life-saving — health care?

Of course they shouldn’t.  And not many parents would say they do.

But that’s exactly what they are saying when they conflate the medical conversation about emergency contraception with the personal conversation about teenage sexuality.

Making contraception more difficult to access doesn’t discourage sex, it just makes it riskier.  It also punishes the people who least need punishment – teens from poor or dysfunctional families.

 

 

No Comments

Idaho Still Making Utah Look Good by Comparison

Posted by Glenden Brown in GLBT issues, Homophobia, Human Rights, Religion, Religious Fundamentalism, Society on May 29, 2013

I’d like to thank Sheriff Ben Wolfinger for his role in making Utah look much smarter and much less nutty than Idaho.  Sheriff Wolfinger is unhappy with the decision by BSA to permit openly gay scouts.

The Kootenai County Sheriff said Friday that he is compelled to drop the department’s Boy Scouts of America charter because the organization is promoting a lifestyle that is against state law.

“It would be inappropriate for the sheriff’s office to sponsor an organization that is promoting a lifestyle that is in violation of state law,” Sheriff Ben Wolfinger said.

Sodomy is against the law in Idaho, he added.

Except it’s not:

Idaho’s sodomy law was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 26, 2003, as a result of the Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, No. 02-102 (U.S. June 26, 2003). Idaho sodomy law applied to both heterosexual and same-sex partners as a “crime against nature,” punishable by imprisonment in state prison for not less than five years.Idaho Code §§ 18-6605 (2001); 18-6606 (2001). The sodomy law did not apply to married heterosexual couples. The Idaho Court of Appeals in Idaho v. Holden, 890 P.2d 341 (Idaho Ct. App. 1995), held that “Idaho’s statute prohibiting the infamous crime against nature may not be constitutionally enforced to prohibit private consensual marital conduct.”

So the Sheriff doesn’t know the law he’s supposed to enforce.  And we also need to have a discussion with him about his bigotry.  (Thanks to John at Americablog for catching this one.)

No Comments

The Boy Scouts Delicate Balancing Act

Posted by Glenden Brown in Activist groups, Bigotry, Conservative, Homophobia, Human Rights, Liberal, Queer, Religion, Religious Fundamentalism, This Blog on May 25, 2013

I was an enthusiastic Cub Scout but at best a indifferent Boy Scout.  I lost interest in scouting after a campout that was a well-intentioned mismanaged fiasco from beginning to end.

BSA have been living in a difficult place for years.  They clearly sees themselves as a mainstream organization, modernizing and responding to contemporary society while transmitting time honored values and experiences.  They strive to achieve racial and ethnic diversity.  The organization updates and adds to its list of possible merit badges to represent changing societal awareness and standards, as for example badges in environmental science, disabilities awareness and game design.  At the same time, many of the most fervent supporters of scouting are religious conservatives who perceive the organization as a bulwark of traditional values defending against a rising tide of valueless modernity.  The organization’s struggle exemplifies the struggle in American culture. Read the rest of this entry »

,

5 Comments

Did President Obama Just Apologize for the Drone Campaign?

Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Military, National Politics, Terrorism, This Blog, War, War Crimes on May 23, 2013

Predator drone

Via Spencer Ackerman and HuffPo.

Here’s the take-away from President Obama’s speech today at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, in Washington DC.

The drone surge may finally be over. By some estimates, 98% of drone strike casualties were civilian noncombatants (50 for every one “suspected terrorist”). The Bureau of Investigative Journalism issued a report detailing how the CIA deliberately targeted rescuers who show up after an attack, and mourners at funerals as a part of a “double-tap” strategy eerily reminiscent of methods used by terrorist groups like Hamas.

In the months and years ahead, drone strikes once conducted by the CIA will become more of a U.S. military responsibility. The rules for launching the strikes will become stricter — there must be a “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed, for instance — and they’ll become less frequent. “To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective,” Obama said… “is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance.”

Yet neither Obama nor senior administration officials ruled out the most controversial aspect of Obama’s counterterrorism measures: so-called signature strikes, in which the CIA does not know the identities of the people it targets, but infers terrorist affiliation based on their observed patterns of behavior.

President Obama says he’s sorry.

Of the civilians who have died in the strikes, Obama said: “For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Of course, the other guys kill civilians too.

“Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes,” he added.

Read the rest of this entry »

41 Comments

The Nostalgia Trap

Posted by Glenden Brown in American History, American People, GLBT issues, Human Rights, Racism, Society, This Blog on May 19, 2013

I’ve written about the ways in which many conservatives seem to yearn for yesteryear. This morning, historian Stephanie Coontz offered a fascinating and compelling article in the NY Times on the dangers of nostalgia:

In society at large, however, nostalgia can distort our understanding of the world in dangerous ways, making us needlessly negative about our current situation.[snip]

Happy memories also need to be put in context. I have interviewed many white people who have fond memories of their lives in the 1950s and early 1960s. The ones who never cross-examined those memories to get at the complexities were the ones most hostile to the civil rights and the women’s movements, which they saw as destroying the harmonious world they remembered.

Read the whole thing, it’s worth it.

,

3 Comments

College Life, Rape and Public Discourse

Posted by Glenden Brown in Contraception, Human Rights, Mental health, Sex, Society, This Blog on May 2, 2013

There’s a major discussion happening right now about sexual assault on college campuses (i.e. it’s made the NY Times; some other posts and articles here, here, here and here).  The basic shape of the conversation can be described fairly simply:

Rape and sexual assault are already underreported crimes.  Students on college campuses are victims of rape and sexual assault on a regular basis; college campuses nationwide engage in efforts to minimize reporting of sexual assault on campus and take minimal actions against perpetrators.  New regulations are shining a light on the situation.

The consensus seems to be that colleges aren’t doing enough to protect students from sexual assault and aren’t doing enough with regard to punishing perpetrators; it seems to me the worst a college can do is expel a perpetrator and even then they run risks they may prefer to avoid.  As I think about this issue, it seems that colleges are trying to thread the needle with regard to legal liability – in the absence of specific knowledge about specific threats to a student from/by another student, they can’t take any action; they can’t expel a student because he might rape someone.  Without evidence, they can’t punish a student.  In many cases, victims can’t identify the perpetrators. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , ,

6 Comments

Ten Years Later: Yup, It Was Torture

Posted by Richard Warnick in American History, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Human Rights, National Politics, Torture, War Crimes on April 23, 2013

It certainly took long enough. The new 577-page torture report from The Constitution Project’s bipartisan commission concluded (emphasis added):

The question as to whether U.S. forces and agents engaged in torture has been complicated by the existence of two vocal camps in the public debate. This has been particularly vexing for traditional journalists who are trained and accustomed to recording the arguments of both sides in a dispute without declaring one right and the other wrong. The public may simply perceive that there is no right side, as there are two equally fervent views held views on a subject, with substantially credentialed people on both sides. In this case, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that among those who insist that the United States did not engage in torture are figures who served at the highest levels of government, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

But this Task Force is not bound by this convention.

The members, coming from a wide political spectrum, believe that arguments that the nation did not engage in torture and that much of what occurred should be defined as something less than torture are not credible.

Robert Parry:

Now that a bipartisan blue-ribbon panel has reached the conclusion that President George W. Bush and his top advisers bear “ultimate responsibility” for authorizing torture in violation of domestic and international law, the question becomes what should the American people and their government do.

The logical answer would seem to be: prosecute Bush and his cronies (or turn them over to an international tribunal if the U.S. legal system can’t do the job). After all, everyone, including President Barack Obama and possibly even Bush himself, would agree with the principle that “no man is above the law.”

Interestingly enough, Section 3286 of the USA PATRIOT Act effectively abolished the statute of limitations for torture.

The U.N. Convention Against Torture, signed by President Reagan in 1988, compels all signatories who discover credible allegations that government officials have participated or been complicit in torture to “submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution” (Art. 7(1)).

Glenn Greenwald:

The disgrace of the American torture regime falls on Bush officials and secondarily the media and political institutions that acquiesced to it, but the full-scale protection of those war crimes (and the denial of justice to their victims) falls squarely on the Obama administration.

UPDATE: George W. Bush Library Opens, Amnesia Ensues

111 Comments

Running Towards the Smoke and Fire

Posted by Shane Smith in American People, Climate Change, Conservatives, Disaster, Gun Control, Health Care, Human Rights, Hypocrisy, Philosophy, Society on April 18, 2013

I am about out of energy for this week. But I do have the smoking remains of an irony meter sitting in the corner crying to be heard. And a tiny little mangled… something. Something Confucius might have called Ren. Something I almost forgot about. Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment

With a big gay rainbow over your district…

Posted by Shane Smith in Equality, Human Rights on April 17, 2013

I have a new hero. Fantastic speech out of kiwi-land that shows that you can be a good person, in government, and even have a sense of humor.

Wish we could move him to Utah!

6 Comments

The Republicans Passion for Pelvic Politics Takes a Turn for the Toxic

Posted by Glenden Brown in Activist groups, Bullying, Conservative, Human Rights, Religion, Religious Fundamentalism, Republicans, Sex, This Blog on April 3, 2013

Via of Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly, this report about Kansas Republican legislators’ latest attempt to micromanage women’s magical lady parts:

The Kansas legislature is advancing an omnibus abortion bill that would, among other things, define life as beginning at conception in the state constitution and place unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers in the state. HB 2253 has already passed the House, and looks poised to gain enough support to sail through the Senate — but only after Republicans rejected several key amendments to soften the measure, including a provision to add exceptions for rape and incest to the state’s existing abortion restrictions. Top Republicans decried those provisions as “little gotcha amendments.”

There’s an interesting dynamic at work here.  Conservative Republicans jump up on their sanctimonious high horse over abortion.  Then they get tangled up in the conversations about rape and incest because of course abortion isn’t as black and white as anti-choice forced birther folks like to pretend it is.  Rape and incest are the obvious first stumbling blocks to the anti-choicers simplistic moralizing.  Having invested significant time and energy into sentimentalizing fetuses, the forced birthers cannot now pretend that the sentiment only applies to some fetuses.  So they’re forced to make incredibly cruel arguments – women who get pregnant as a result of rape or incest shouldn’t punish the fetus by having it aborted; they should instead see it as a blessing.  It’s an awful argument but it flows directly from the logic embraced by the anti-choice movement.

Enmeshed in their own arguments, the anti-choice people wind up unable to make coherent arguments about abortion, contraception or reproduction.  They end up buying into various myths (for instance the debunked claim that abortion causes breast cancer or that women’s magical lady parts prevent conception when they’re being raped).  In this instance in Kansas, they’re forced to pretend any objection to their forced birth agenda is nothing more than politics. 

And despite wanting desperately to avoid the topic of rape, Republicans can’t seem to steer clear of it.  And so the unpleasant dynamic sucks them into a discussion they want to avoid.  And they end up saying things that make them sound like sociopaths.  In response, they propose even more toxic and authoritarian rules concerning the ladyparts.

No Comments

The Best Humor Comes From Near Tragedy

Posted by Larry Bergan in Election Fraud, Human Rights, Laugh, Society, Voting Rights on March 9, 2013

But in this case, past tragedy. Tragedy not usually experienced as widely as as it could be, or was in the past.

That’s not saying it couldn’t happen again to anybody, but you know what they say:

Humor is the best medicine:

1 Comment

A History of Defeat Followed By Defeat

Posted by Glenden Brown in Activist groups, American History, American People, Conservative, Democracy, Human Rights, Liberal, Party Politics, This Blog on February 18, 2013

I’ve highlighted the idea that US politics are driven as much by historical cultural forces as by contemporary ones.  Colin Woodward’s eleven nations thesis argues that the US is divided into 11 distinct cultural areas which align themselves in a series of shifting alliances and thus shift and move national political power.  Certain longstanding alliances (Yankeedom, the Left Coast and the Midlands on the one hand and the Deep South, Tidewater and Greater Appalachia endured for decades).  Woodward summed up his thesis:

The Tea Party agenda may hold sway over large parts of the South and interior West, and with the economy and the president in such a weakened state a Tea Party favorite like Rick Perry could conceivably win the White House. But the movement has no hope of truly dominating the country. Our underlying and deeply fractured political geography guarantees that it will never marshal congressional majorities; indeed, it almost guarantees that the movement will be marginalized, its power and influence on the wane and, over large swaths of the nation, all but extinguished.

Woodard’s argument is that South is not a unified region – it consists of multiple cultural areas that have a long standing tradition of allegiance – Michael Lind’s Chesapeake Bay area is part of the Tidewater region

Tidewater has always been fundamentally conservative, with a high value placed on respect for authority and tradition, and very little on equality or public participation in politics.

Tidewater is a nation in decline as the Midlands have taken over sizable portions of Tidewater (think of Northern Virginia for a good example). Read the rest of this entry »

9 Comments