Eugene Polley

Eugene Polley, an inventor whose best-known creation has fostered blissful sloth, caused decades of domestic discord and forever altered the way consumers watch television, died on Sunday in Downers Grove, Ill. Mr. Polley, the inventor of the wireless television remote control, was 96.

His death was announced by the Zenith Electronics Corporation, where Mr. Polley began his career in the stockroom before rising through the engineering ranks to invent the device, called the Flash-Matic, in 1955.

An ad for Zenith’s Flash-Matic. Zenith sold 30,000 televisions with the remote control.

“Just think!,” an advertisement breathlessly proclaimed that year. “Without budging from your easy chair you can turn your new Zenith Flash-Matic set on, off, or change channels. You can even shut off annoying commercials while the picture remains on the screen.”

The Flash-Matic remote, which worked like a flashlight, was shaped like a snub-nosed revolver. The shape was a considered choice on Mr. Polley’s part, as he explained in 2000, letting viewers in the age of ubiquitous TV westerns “shoot out” commercials.

Flash-Matic made the TV audience less captive, though also less active. For the first time, viewers could comfortably exercise dominion over sound and image without simultaneously exercising the body on the march between couch and dial.

B&W TV w/ Dials

(The “dial” was a round thing with numbers on it — all the way up to 13 — by which viewers changed the channel through the direct application of fingers and wrist. One did not so much surf channels in those days as ride their gentle swells with all due deliberateness.)

As Mr. Polley, by then 86, proudly told an interviewer in 2002: “The flush toilet may have been the most civilized invention ever devised, but the remote control is the next most important. It’s almost as important as sex.”

For his invention, Mr. Polley received a thousand-dollar bonus. But his device was soon supplanted by a more efficient, more enduring and far better-selling one, developed by a Zenith colleague, Robert Adler.

News accounts over the years have often described Mr. Adler erroneously as the TV remote’s sole inventor. Mr. Polley, a plain-spoken man who seemed to avail himself of his own internal mute button only rarely, was largely relegated to the margins of history, a condition that rankled.

“Not only did I not get credit for doing anything,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2006, “I got a kick in the rear end.”

BIOGRAPHY

Eugene Theodore Polley was born in Chicago on Nov. 29, 1915. (He disliked the name Theodore and adopted his confirmation name, Joseph, as his middle name.) His father, a bootlegger, abandoned the family when Gene was about 10.

A Zenith Radio

The young Mr. Polley studied at the City Colleges of Chicago and the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), but lacked the money to complete a degree. At 20 he joined the Zenith Radio Company, as it was then known, as a stock boy earning 40 cents an hour.

Mechanically adept, he worked his way into the engineering department. During World War II Mr. Polley, on loan from Zenith, worked for the United States military on bomb fuses and ship-detecting radar.

After the war, as TV sets began to colonize American homes, Zenith’s president, Eugene F. McDonald, faced a quandary. Mr. McDonald, who held a utopian view of the new medium, was certain that viewers would revolt en masse against television commercials, by his lights a growing scourge.

But until that halcyon day arrived, Mr. McDonald knew, he needed to offer consumers a stopgap, and he enlisted the company’s engineers to make it.

Ad of Lazybones remote

The first TV remote, called Lazy Bones, was introduced by Zenith in 1950. It had one profound drawback, however: a cable snaking from the remote to the set, over which users were inclined to trip.

Mr. McDonald enlisted Mr. Polley to build a wireless remote, and the Flash-Matic was born. The hand-held device emitted a visible beam of light, which consumers could point at a compatible TV set.

The new, purpose-built sets had a photo cell embedded in each corner of the screen; the viewer activated the cell by “shooting” it with the remote. One cell changed the channel up, another changed the channel down, a third muted the sound, and the fourth turned the set on and off.

A 1955 Flash-matic remote

The device proved popular: during its first and only year of existence, 30,000 Flash-Matic sets were sold.

But there were difficulties. Because the system was light-activated, sunlight hitting the TV screen could cause the channels to change in spontaneous roulette. Viewers also had trouble remembering which corner of the screen controlled which function.

Mr. Adler improved Mr. Polley’s device by making it responsive to sound instead of light. His remote, called Space Command, used inaudible, high-frequency sound waves to control the set. It, too, had problems — it could be set off by the sound of jangling keys or rattling coins — but was deemed enough of an improvement on its predecessor to be brought to market in 1956.

A Space Command Remote

From that year to the early 1980s, when infrared remotes became standard, more than nine million sets controlled by Space Command technology were sold.

Mr. Polley, a longtime resident of Lombard, Ill., had lived most recently in Glen Ellyn, Ill. He is survived by a son, Eugene Jr., and a grandson. His wife, the former Blanche Wiley, died before him, as did a daughter, Joan Polley.

With other colleagues, Mr. Adler and Mr. Polley represented Zenith when it was given a special Emmy Award in 1997 for its development of wireless remotes.

Mr. Adler died in 2007. Zenith has said publicly that it considers him and Mr. Polley the joint inventors of the device. Mr. Polley begged to differ. “A father has to be present at conception,” he said in a 2002 interview. “And if you’re not, you’re not that father.”

From one lazybones who spend a lot of time in front of the tv, Thank you Mr. Polley. I’d be much more active if it were not for you.

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Age 19

It’s true. I model nude. I’m also not a sex symbol, or a twig, or unfed, or in magazines, or on a runway. I model nude for art classes in the area of my hometown. Why do I do this? Well, for many reasons. I started modeling for art classes at the age of 19 y/o to pay for my college books. My mother had done it when she was in college and introduced me to the teacher she had modeled for. At 19 I was going to model for the art classes she taught at Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT. This modeling gig led to fifteen years (so far) of a modeling career (and to my meeting my partner!).

I’m not the type of person one thinks of when they hear the term “model”. I’m not stick thin, or glamorous, or sexy. I’m an over-stuffed hourglass with wide hips, large breasts, and long curly hair. (Height: 5’7″, Weight 285 lbs. Breasts 44DD) Does that sound like a model to you? Well in the Art Community - I’m more beautiful and graceful than any Size Zero in a magazine. The reason for this is because I have curves.

Age 22

Artists like drawing curves because its easier than drawing lines. When you walk into an art class to model nude you must remember that the people drawing you are not looking at you like you are a sex symbol. To them….you are a bowl of fruit. Simple as that.- No sex appeal. No personality. You are an inanimate object for them to draw.

This evening I returned to nude modeling after a year hiatus to have a child and mend a broken ankle. I model at an art gallery here in Rutland, VT. It is a small group of artists that come to the Life Drawing classes, which aren’t really classes, but more of a free drawing period with a model provided. I get paid $20/hr to sit on a platform nude in different poses that I chose in front of a group of strangers. The only person that talks to me is the person that hired me and gives me my check at the end of the gig, usually a teacher/gallery manager. (This isn’t rude, its a sign of respect to the model. After years of modeling I now speak to some of the artists that have been drawing me for years and have learned that they can actually speak to me like a person and I won’t be offended.)

I arrived 10 minutes before the gig starts because 1.) I like to be early/on time for a gig. 2.) I like to look at the art displayed (because its free!) before I have to sit still for 2-4 hours, depending. I talked to the assistant that ran the gig as I came in. I walked around the gallery, which has 2 floors and 5 rooms dedicated to displaying art. This month’s show was a collection of art done by children around the area ages K-12. As I finished my walk around I went to the bathroom and got out of my clothes.

Painting of me by Anonymous

I usually bring a bag with me because it carries my large bath towel that I wrap around myself during breaks and to walk around, and it also holds the clothing I’m wearing when I arrive (along with my cell phone, wallet, glasses, etc.). I get into my towel, grab my bag and shoes and head to the second floor. The room we use for the class is at the front of the building with the windows covered from prying eyes. It is also one of the rooms they show art in, so every time I model I get to see the latest show. The problem with this is you never know what you will be stuck staring at while people draw you and you can’t move. This evening I got the pleasure of looking at a large amount of artworks by small children. The most imposing piece was a 7 foot tall orange cyclops wearing a blue bathing suit missing one toe on his right toe. I got to look at it for 3 hours. You couldn’t miss it.

So I start the gig and I’m told by The Time Keeper (the before-mentioned gallery assistant) that I will be doing 5 minute poses and she will tell me when I have one minute left in the pose. Its a simple system that works. This evening we began with 3 artists, but ended with 5 (sometimes artists show up late or leave early). I’ve noticed that when I model for a college class that there are many students, but very few if its in a gallery class. I’ve learned to be prepared for either size, but I prefer the smaller classes.

A painting of me found in an art gallery

Posing is harder than it looks. When you see a model in a photograph that person had to stay still for as long as it took for the photographer to set up the shot and push a button. For an art model they have to sit still for 1 minute to 1 hour at a time, depending on the pose. The class I model for does a series of poses for different times. I start with simple 5 minute poses and end my gig doing a 25 minute pose. The only problem you have to look out for is body parts falling asleep. It takes a model YEARS to figure out their body enough to know what poses they can and cannot do and for how long and what will hurt or fall asleep. So you model and you learn.

This evening while only my right hand fell asleep in one pose, I was thanked 3 times for the pose I had done and thanked profusely at the end of the gig for being a good model. This is the highlight of my modeling gigs; getting praise. I’ve been told by complete strangers that I’m beautiful, stunning, gorgeous, voluptuous, curvacious, and the best female model they’ve ever seen. This is my ego boost. This happens after the gig is finished and the artists are packing their supplies up. I walk around and see what they’ve drawn. It is the best feeling for me to see how others perceive me artistically. Being an artist myself I know that everyone sees the world differently, but its only in art when you can actually see how someone else sees the world. To be a part of that is wonderful for me. I like seeing how others see me because it makes me feel better about my own image. I’m reminded that I’m not as ugly and disgusting as I feel sometimes. I’m actually rather …beautiful.

Sketch by Richard Weiss 2012

Over the years I’ve suggested to friends that they also get into nude modeling. None have taken me up on the offer. I don’t know why. It is good money for little work, you are helping artists develop their skills, and you are contributing to the world of Art. Who knows, someday you might be the next Mona Lisa.  Tonight I found out that one of the artists drawing me tonight has been drawing me for 15 years now, just sold a painting of me, and has a gallery at home that has a few framed prints of me. *BLUSH* Stuff like this just makes you feel special knowing that you are so beautiful that you are art.

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I have watched and listened as the War on Women has assaulted the right of every woman in the United States to a safe, medical abortion. We’ve all heard the rhetoric. We’ve read the horror stories from before abortion was legal – and yes, it touched my family, too. I lost a great-aunt to an illegal abortion long before I was ever born. From what my mom said about her, I would have liked Aunt Barbie. I heard the horror stories first hand from Mom – she was a registered nurse, and worked emergency rooms before Roe V. Wade. She made me understand why, when abortion doctors had targets printed on their backs, the ones who hung in there were the old ones, the ones who had tried desperately to save women dying from botched abortions before it was legal. They knew that if safe medical abortions were outlawed again, the abortions wouldn’t stop; they would go back to killing women.

What I haven’t read about is the other side of choice. Not the absence of choice, with women dying or struggling to support and raise children they hadn’t planned on or wanted. No, the other side, where the answer was yes, I want this child.

My daughter, who is now 34 years old, knows that I contemplated an abortion. I was single, alone, her father wanted me to have one… we were both scared. She knows that instead, I chose to have her. She knows that while her conception was unplanned, her birth was a choice I made. Leaving when she was six months old was the choice her father made, even after being there for her birth. He was only 20, and still scared. I had a family that was willing to help me. My daughter and I were both lucky that way. She is the best and most precious thing I ever did with my life.

I have a daughter of my heart, Steph, who faced the same choice not once, but twice. The first time was with her high school sweetheart. They were engaged, so the choice was to have the baby. They stayed together for a time after Sebastian was born, but then he split. The second time was a few years later, with a man who had loved her from afar for years. They had just started dating when the birth control failed. His response to her “I’m pregnant” was unalloyed joy. They’re married now, with Logan and their youngest, a girl named Morrigan, and soon he’ll be adopting her first son. If they don’t know already, then someday both those boys will know that they were chosen, that their mom wanted them.

Then there’s my grandson. He wasn’t planned, by a long shot. His folks were another loved-from-afar, finally got together, forgot the condom, oops. There was the first knee-jerk thought of abortion on his dad’s part, but that didn’t last long. He was told in no uncertain terms by both the mom and me that while he was welcome to stick around, he could leave if he wanted, but we were going to have the baby. You see, she’d been told that her chances of ever getting pregnant were astronomical, so she was stunned when it happened… and then she was so grateful to a compassionate goddess for this incredible gift. No way was she going to choose to abort it.

Dad stayed. He is now thoroughly in love with his son, as well as my daughter. Felix is seven months old, and an amazingly happy and loved child.

That is what each of these children will know, or know now. They are loved, in a very special way. They weren’t planned, but they were chosen. Their mothers, and sometimes their fathers, chose to have them, chose to keep them, chose to love them.

What a beautiful thing to know about one’s self. Every child should know that they are here because their parents chose to have them, either as a planned child or a chosen unplanned.

What a horrible thing to learn, that the only reason you are here is because your mother had no choice… and that you were never wanted.

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• The X Case 20 Years Later, and Why I’m Pro-Choice(auroralapetite.wordpress.com)

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The Ba Bottle Holder

A few years ago, Travis Hendricks of Portland, Oregon, noticed his daughter, 3-month old Mathilda, wanted to hold her own bottle but couldn’t get her little hands around it.

“I thought, well, I should make some little handles for it,” Hendricks recalled. “I took one of her existing toys and fashioned it to make a bottle fit into it, and handed it to her and it became her bottle.”

Like a lot of kids just learning to talk, she called it her “ba” (pronounced “bah”). Everywhere Hendricks went with Mathilda other parents noticed it and asked where they could get it. It was a businessman in a Starbucks in Seattle who was really serious about where Hendricks got it, and after talking to him he realized if he didn’t make this for people, then the businessman would take his idea and profit from it. He had to act fast.

Travis formed a company, called ”The Original” with two partners and the “ba” was born. It was hitting shelves about a year ago both locally and online. And it’s become very popular.

Fellow dad and friend of Hendricks, Ray Gordon, is a fan. He said it was a milestone for his child when he started using it. “It’s like sitting up or anything, or walking, a big moment – you’re like, WOW!” he said. “He definitely started learning how to use his hands a little bit more, because of it.” Gordon also said the ba has given him a small measure of freedom. “It liberated one hand,” he said with a laugh.

The ba, which costs $15, is available at Canoe in Portland, Chuck’s Place in Lake Oswego and online at Amazon.

Related articles

• Preparing Your Baby’s Bottle (enfamil.com)
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This Sunday 22^nd April french voter will choose between 10 presidential candidates. The polls are currently giving the socialist Francois Hollande and the right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy winner of the first round. Out of the ten candidates three of them are women: the extreme left-wing candidate Nathalie Arthaud, the green party candidate Eva Joly and the extreme right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen. However, according to the polls none of them will be present for the second round.
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans topic has not, as often, been considered as an important societal issue. During this campaign candidates used the fear of the other The association Sos Homophobie in its annual report of 2011, shows that there the last few years, the number of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender has increased. Compared to year 2010 there is 18% more testimonies. Since last year, internet has been the first play where homophobic discrimination takes place. Assaults in public places has increased 43% between 2009 and 2010. However, these numbers are only the tip of the iceberg. They represents the number of cases identified and reported and not all other victims. The fact that there is still discrimination based on your sexual orientation should remind us on the importance of the next presidential elections. It is the opportunity to make mentalities change.

In the context of the presidential election this same association submitted to the candidates twelve questions on equal rights, the fight against discrimination related to sexual orientation and gender identity. Each party answered to the questions, which shows an effort to take in consideration the LGBT’s rights. Anyhow, the results of the questions shows us that all political parties are not willing to do much more effort. As usual, there is a strong contrast between the left and right parties. None of the right-wing parties are open to same-sex marriage and equality in access to parenthood. On the other hand, all left-wing parties are in favor of equal rights between heterosexual and homosexual people. There is just one question on which they all agree on, which is to help and support people victim of homophobia.

It seems hard, if not even impossible, to fight homophobia if the States doesn’t give the right message to the people. A start would be to give equal rights to everyone. By refusing to give homosexuals the same right of marriage and parenting it puts them in a different category. The heterosexuals are considered better, more worthy. This creates and encourages discrimination based on sexual orientation. Nonetheless, these issues are not considered as essential in the campaign. Even though all the parties have expressed more or less their opinion, only few plans on actually realizing it. Four candidates, the socialist Francois Hollande, the left-candidate of Front de Gauche Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the anti-capitalistic Philippe Poutou and the green candidate Eva Joly wants to give same marriage rights for all couples. The centrist candidate, Francois Bayrou, agrees with them concerning equal parent rights for everyone. The other candidates say they only agree to give same-sex couples the right to a civil union which would be comparable to the marriage. That is still discriminatory towards LGBT people.

With the eleven other questions the candidates continue to draw the difference between the left- and right-wing parties. One question concerned the blood donation. In France, if a man has had once a sexual intercourse with an other man it is enough for lifetime ban on blood donation. This to prevent the risk of HIV contamination. The green candidate Eva Joly and anti-capitalistic candidate Philippe Poutou are both saying that the selection should not be based on prejudice, but on real medical facts. Nicolas Sarkozy talks about only refusing it to people who have had sex in less that a year. Marine Le Pen expresses herself all against. Once again, refusing blood donation from gay people because of the “risk factor” reinforces a negative image of gay people assimilated to sickness.

The conclusion of these twelve question is that the difference between left and right is more than ever accurate when talking about minorities issues. Only the left-wing leader of Le Front de Gauche: Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the green leader of Europe Ecologie : Eva Joly answered positively on 11 out of the 12 questions. The Green party represented by Eva Joly is already, since 2001, the first political party to have claimed the recognition of LGBT parents/families and equal rights with different sex families. Already then they also suggested the right for adoption for same-sex couples. In contrast to them, Marine Le Pen answered negatively to all questions except one, which concerns assistance to young people victim of homophobic attacks.

For the french people, who takes the gay issues into account for the elections, have suddenly narrowed their choice. Even though some of the right-wing candidates promises changes, it is not one of their main issues. Nicolas Sarkozy, when elected in 2007, promised to give more financial rights to gay couples, nothing ever happened.

With only a couple of days left before the first round of the French presidential election, the polls estimates the socialist Francois Hollande and the right-wing leader Nicolas Sarkozy winners. The first one suggests, in addition to the equal rights, a ministry of women’s right conducted by a women. This in order to reduce the gaps between men and women in the society.

Which is not so much of a surprise. What is surprising, on the other hand, is the great popularity of Marine Le Pen, who is estimated to have around 15%. She is representing the extreme right-wing party: Le Front National. This party collects the people’s fear and then distributes a message of hate and discrimination. What is frightening is the normalization process that goes along the fact that this party is fighting for the third place at the elections. More and more people identifies to what the party represents and says. More and more people therefore convey this message of hatred.

This years campaign feels like it only started three weeks ago. And even since then, there haven’t occurred any debates (that because the top runners wanted to wait for the second round). When it concerns social issues it seems like it is always the same. The left-wing parties puts the focus on these issues, while the right-wing parties knows their existence but does not put a priority on solving them.

Our Future

As absurd as the allegations of Indiana House Rep. Bob Morris are (the Girl Scouts of America is a radical organization that promotes abortions and homosexuality, and is a “tactical arm” of Planned Parenthood), this little news burp stinks to high heaven. It is another sign of the battle being waged for the hearts and minds of the next generation… the next generation of parents, of school boards, of voters, of lawmakers.

At the core of this particular battle are two organizations serving girls and young women; the Girl Scouts of America and the American Heritage Girls (Question: why do Christian conservatives keep using the word “heritage” in their organizational titles? Answer: because it lends a false legitimacy to their propaganda.). Let’s take a look at these organizations. It might help you decide who you would rather entrust your daughters to.

(All information below comes from the organizations’ official websites. Text inserted by the author is italicized.)

Girl Scouts of America

Juliette “Daisy” Gordon Low assembled 18 girls from Savannah, Georgia, on March 12, 1912, for a local Girl Scout meeting. She believed that all girls should be given the opportunity to develop physically, mentally, and spiritually. With the goal of bringing girls out of isolated home environments and into community service and the open air, Girl Scouts hiked, played basketball, went on camping trips, learned how to tell time by the stars, and studied first aid.

At a time of segregation and before laws promoting civil rights were passed, Juliette Gordon Low ensured that African-American, American Indian and Hispanic girls were able to become Girl Scouts. She led efforts to make Girl Scouting available to girls who lived in rural and urban areas, to girls who were rich, middle class and poor, and to girls who were born in this country as well as immigrants. [This dedication to diversity continues to this day, and expands constantly as the needs of the nation’s community of girls dictates. It now extends to the LGBTQ community.]

Illustrious alumnae include Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States; Madeleine Albright, the first female Secretary of State; Eileen Collins, the first woman space shuttle commander; Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard University; and Katie Couric, the first woman to anchor a network evening newscast.

The Girl Scout Mission

To build girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.

The Girl Scout Promise

On my honor, I will try:
To serve God and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.

The Girl Scout Law

I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong, and
responsible for what I say and do,
and to
respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister to every Girl Scout.

The Girl Scouts of America and Religious Faiths

My Promise, My Faith Pin

Everything in Girl Scouting is based on the Girl Scout Promise and Law. The Girl Scout Law includes many of the principles and values common to most faiths. Thus, while a secular organization, Girl Scouts has, since the movement began, encouraged girls to take spiritual journeys via their faiths’ religious recognitions.

Girls of all grade levels can now earn the My Promise, My Faith pin developed by Girl Scouts of the USA. A girl earns the My Promise, My Faith pin by carefully examining the Girl Scout Law and directly tying it to tenets of her faith.

Religious Recognitions

Religious recognitions are created by national religious organizations/committees to encourage the spiritual growth of their youth members and reinforce many of the values integral to Girl Scouting. While My Promise, My Faith helps girls connect Girl Scouting with their faith, the religious recognitions programs help girls grow stronger in and learn more specifically about their faith.

Each religious organization/committee develops and administers its own program.

National Interfaith Committee for Girl Scouting (churches offering programs to Girl Scouts): African Methodist Episcopal, Baha’I, Baptist, Buddhist, Disciples of Christ, Christian Methodist Episcopal, Christian Science, Churches of Christ, Community of Christ, Eastern Orthodox, Episcopal, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, Lutheran, Mormon, Polish National Catholic Church, Presbyterian Church, Presbyterian Church in America, Protestant and Independent Christian Churches, Quakers, Roman Catholic Church, Unitarian Universalist, United Church of Christ, United Methodist, United Pentecostal Church International, Unity Church

(that’s 27 national church organizations supporting Scouting)

American Heritage Girls

American Heritage Girls was founded in 1995 in West Chester, Ohio by a group of parents wanting a wholesome program for their daughters. These parents were disillusioned with the increasing secular focus of existing organizations for girls. They wanted a Judeo-Christian focused organization for their daughters.

AHG Mission:
“Building women of integrity through service to God, family, community and country.”

AHG Vision:
“American Heritage Girls is the premier national character development organization for young women that embraces Christian values and encourages family involvement.”

AHG Oath:
“I promise to love God,
Cherish my family,
Honor my country,
and Serve in my community.”

American Heritage Girls is a Christ-centered leadership and character development ministry. The following Statement of Faith applies to all American Heritage Girls’ Charter Organizations, Adult Members and Adult Leaders.

“We believe that there is One Triune God – Father, Jesus Christ His one and only Son, and the Holy Spirit – Creator of the universe and eternally existent. We believe the Holy Scriptures (Old/New Testament) to be the inspired and authoritative Word of God. We believe each person is created in His image for the purpose of communing with and worshipping God. We believe in the ministry of the Holy Spirit who enables us to live a Godly life. We believe that each individual is called to love the Lord their God with all their heart, mind, soul and strength; and to love their neighbors as themselves. We believe that each individual is called to live a life of purity, service, stewardship and integrity.”

Clarity is further provided to the following terms:

Purity – An AHG member is called to live a life of holiness, being pure of heart, mind, word and deed, reserving sexual activity for the sanctity of marriage; marriage being a lifelong commitment before God between a man and a woman.

Service – An AHG member is called to become a responsible member of their community and the world through selfless acts, which contribute to the welfare of others.

Stewardship – An AHG member is called to use their God given time, talents and money wisely.

Integrity – An AHG member is called to live a moral life, demonstrating the inward motivation to do what is right, regardless of the cost

For further information, visit the websites and do some serious reading.

Related articles

• Indiana Legislator Refuses To Honor “Radical” Girl Scouts (buzzfeed.com)
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• The Anti-Gay Not-Scouts (joemygod.blogspot.com)

Rep. Bob Morris Looks Like a Shaved Unibrow to Me

There is hope for this country, as evidenced by the sarcasm and ridicule from his own party that greeted Indiana Rep. Bob Morris’ allegations that the Girl Scouts of America is a radical organization that promotes abortions and homosexuality, and is a “tactical arm” of Planned Parenthood. He made these allegations in a letter to fellow House Republicans Saturday, the start of the long President’s Day weekend. Yesterday the Indiana Republican House Speaker Brian Bosma called Morris’ comments absurd, spent much of the day passing out Thin Mints (that sinful Girl Scout cookie every chocoholic loves) and ended the day’s session by asking former and current members of the Girl Scouts in the chamber to stand up. He also told reporters that he had purchased over 200 cases of Girl Scout cookies since getting the letter.

Rep. Morris claims to have found the evidence of this dastardly plot on the Internet. Obviously no one has ever explained to this man that you can find evidence of anything on the Internet. He also stated that the inclusive action of a Colorado troop which admitted a transgender child last month was another reason for Christian conservative parents to pull their children out of the Girl Scouts. He has pulled his girls out, and is putting them into the American Heritage Girls.

I feel sorry for his girls.

Related articles

• Indiana Lawmaker Attacks ‘Radicalized’ Girl Scouts in Anti-Gay, Transphobic Letter to Colleagues (towleroad.com)
• Politician: Girl Scouts Sell Cookies, Sex, Abortion, Communism, Lesbian Agenda [Republicans] (gawker.com)
• Indiana lawmaker: Girl Scouts in league with Planned Parenthood (news.blogs.cnn.com)

That, in one paragraph, is what has been wrong with “No Child Left Behind” from the very beginning. Without a national curriculum, without even state-wide curriculums, any standardized test is a trap.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have a cure for this stupidity – grant waivers from the “No Child Left Behind” requirements so that states have more flexibility to educate children instead of teaching them how to pass the tests.

Ten states have now been granted the waivers – Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee. New Mexico had applied, but needs to iron out some small parts of their proposal to get the waiver. Twenty-eight other states are preparing to apply for the waiver.

“No Child Left Behind,” with its standardized tests and punishment of schools and school districts that failed to reach certain benchmarks with those tests was a bad idea. It went at the problems of education in America backwards. Without a national curriculum, without a nationalized standard of course material, national standardized tests were only going to serve to show the differences between state curricula and individual school board interpretations of those curricula.

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and a group of educational specialists developed the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. It was a structure system for public schools, grades kindergarten through 12^th. It set out instructional objectives and goals, by saying that at such and such a grade level, children should have learned multiplication or gerunds. It was never adopted nationwide, though you will find copies of it in every college and university library with a education department. The problem became more evident as more families moved from town to town, county to county or state to state. My niece never learned to write a research paper because she moved from Florida to Georgia to Vermont in the wrong sequence, too early in Georgia, too late in Vermont. My daughter moved from Florida to Georgia, was a year behind in math and couldn’t take physics on schedule as a consequence. That happens all the time all across the country.

So, when the United States Department of Education, under the direction of Congress, created these benchmark exams for schools, no one took into consideration the idea that not every eighth grader in America had taken the same classes.

The state waivers will address the individuality of each state, and create their own benchmarks for judging how their schools are preforming. What they won’t get is a unified education system.

When the state of Georgia decided to re-write their entire K-12 curriculum over a decade ago, they published the proposed curriculums for public input. Reading the public objections was a lesson in how diverse our education systems are and how deeply some parts of the nation are entrenched in regionalized individuation of history and science. It is something we see every few years when the Texas School Board nixes scientifically accurate or historically factual textbooks for ones that reinforce Creationism or white superiority.

The inescapable fact is that the United States is not keeping up with the rest of the industrialized world in education. We keep slipping further and further down the list every year. The waivers don’t address that. The can’t. The only thing that would is the one thing we cannot do in this country – establish a national curriculum with national standards and national recognition that we really do a bad job of educating our children. That flies in the face of the conservative determination to retain local control of schools. But the waivers will allow some states to improve their schools without the pressure of improving scores on a standardized test that doesn’t match the state curriculums.

Related articles

• Oklahoma freed from some No Child Left Behind education mandates (newsok.com)
• Georgia to receive waiver from No Child Left Behind (ajc.com)
• You: 10 States Given Waivers From No Child Left Behind Law (nytimes.com)
• Massachusetts among states granted No Child Left Behind waiver (boston.com)
• Colorado Gets No Child Left Behind Waiver (denver.cbslocal.com)

Would this family be allowed to exist in Virginia?

By a 71-28 vote, the Virginia House has passed a law which codifies the state’s Board of Social Services policy of allowing private adoption agencies to discriminate against potential adoptive parents on the basis of gender, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation and family status. The supporters of the bill cite religious freedom, while the opponents say any agency which has a state contract cannot discriminate.

Naturally, the loudest voices are being raised over the issue of same sex couples or gay individuals being barred from adoption in Virginia. That ignores the discrimination being allowed against others.

Under this law, a Virginia private adoption agency can decide that they will only provide services to a white, married couple, aged 25 through 35, who belong to an evangelical church, are found to be perfectly healthy by medical examination and who are “pillars of their community” with an inherited or achieved status that includes a yearly income over $100,000 a year. The suitability of the couple will not be an issue, just their ability to meet these arbitrary and superficial criteria. A couple could meet all those criteria and turn out to be child molesters or spousal abusers. Psychological abuse does not leave visible bruises, but leaves scars just as damaging and devastating.

Legally, the opponents are right. Private firms that accept government contracts and government money are subject to the same anti-discrimination laws are government agencies. This law will probably end up being challenged in court. Hopefully, it will not be presented as a single-issue lawsuit. An older couple should be able to adopt, particularly since there are so many older adoptable children in America. A person in a wheelchair can be an excellent parent. People of every faith and people of no faith can be good parents . And what the hell does “family status” mean?

This law is a case of “cover your ass” legislation. To keep gays from adopting, Virginia’s legislature has voted for broad-spectrum discrimination, just so they will not be accused of being homophobic. These are great laws, really they are. In covering their homophobic asses, these homophobes leave themselves open to having the laws overturned under all the laws this country has about not discriminating against people with disabilities, or on the basis of race, religion, age or gender. Thank you, Virginia, for being so utterly stupid.

Related articles

• VIRGINIA: State Board Allows Adoption Agencies To Discriminate Against Gays (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• Virginia’s Anti-Gay Adoption Restrictions May Create Costs For State (thinkprogress.org)
• New Virginia Adoption Rules Permit Anti-Gay, Gender, Disability And Other Forms Of Discrimination (thinkprogress.org)
• Obama Backs Gay Parents in Proclamation for National Adoption Month (towleroad.com)

Charles Dickens, 1812 - 1870

Charles Dickens was born two hundred years ago today. He only lived to be 58, not uncommon in his time. He was a brilliant observer of the human condition and wrote books that were an indictment of the top-down economics of his time. Dickens is as relevant to our culture today as he was in 1860.

That said, he is taught badly, and treating his every word as sacred text is stupid.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Dickens was responsible for my one and only disciplinary trip to the principal’s office. My class was reading Great Expectations. I got so bored with it I polished it off in one weekend. A couple of weeks later, on a pop quiz about some obscure point in the story I didn’t answer the question, but rather nastily explained why I didn’t remember that particular point. I firmly believe that teachers with average I.Q.s should never be assigned to classes of gifted students. The teachers end up being intimidated and petty. Only the gifted make good teachers of gifted students because we understand what wicked little buggers gifted kids can be.

Dickens in the raw is boring. So is Agatha Christie. A good argument can be made that Christie was boring because Dickens was. Like Dickens, Christie used way too much verbiage for things that could easily be passed over with a couple of sentences, like the tilt of some lady’s hat At Bertram’s Hotel. With Dickens considered the gold standard of fiction writing in English, Christie just followed his patterns.

I love both Dickens and Christie in filmed adaptations because the scriptwriters eliminate the unnecessary descriptive material, replacing it with visuals.

Dickens didn’t write novels. He wrote newspapers serials. He was paid by the word, so the more words he used, the more money he made. It was economics, folks, not art. He had a wife, ten children and a couple of siblings to support. Only artists who attach themselves to wealthy patrons can afford a household like that. To be successfully taught in schools, Dickens needs an editor or a truly inspired teacher who teaches it the way it was written – one chapter at a time, separated by days or weeks, reading it the way someone in San Francisco would have read it at the time, with the irregularity caused by trans-Atlantic and cross-continental transportation delays. Cliffhangers are a great literary and dramatic mechanism.

I also love the irony of Dickens in the classroom. He is one of the revered “dead white men” whose works are so beloved of conservative school boards and college deans. It is almost as though none of them have ever read him, they are so blind to how socialist, radical and anti-establishment Dickens was. Among his modern heirs is historian Caleb Carr, whose novels of New York in the late 1800s are gripping journeys into the underbelly of the city, where child prostitution and police corruption and soul-rending choices between sin and starvation. The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness belong in that same rarified space where Dickens dwells.

Where Dickens is needed today is as an exposé of where we are headed if we continue with the kind of economic policies and philosophy of his time. When Newt Gingrich talks about putting poor children to work as janitors in schools, there’s Dickens with tales of child labor and child criminals. When Mitt Romney talks about not caring about the very poor, there’s Dickens with the truth of what poverty really is without an adequate safety net. When Republicans condemn environmental and safety regulations for workers, there’s Dickens with his army of characters dying of diseases caused by environmental factors in the workplace.

Those powerful words from The Chimes stand today as a preamble to the declaration of the Occupy movement: “Give us, in mercy, better homes when we are a-lying in our cradles; give us better food when we’re a-working for our lives; give us kinder laws to bring us back when we’re going wrong; and don’t set Jail, Jail, Jail afore us, everywhere as we turn.”

Dickens combined two of the primary movements – literature and journalism – advocating for better working conditions, living wages, decent housing, child labor laws, all the things that the very rich say we don’t need. He was a newspaper writer, and he had colleagues in the world of journalism who were just as devoted to advocacy. His fiction was appearing side-by-side with news stories of squalor, disease and abuse in the lower classes.

Dickens needs to be made more accessible to people, more readable. It is not a defense of laziness that prompts this idea, but an acknowledgment that the mechanics of Dickens’ work should not stand in the way of the message of his words. He knew to the ha’penny how much each chapter was worth. We have no way to know how much he would have edited his work if he had truly been writing novels to be printed as volumes. His observations are needed today, his exposé of the abusive exploitation of the working poor is relevant.

But nothing he wrote is as relevant as these words from Martin Chuzzlewit: “A man ain’t got no right to be a public man, unless he meets the public views.”

Typical stack for college course (Creative Commons, Flickr)

The explanation for why college textbooks are so expensive is simple. The books are very big, requiring a lot of paper, and very few of them are sold at any given time. As a consequence, textbook costs for college student can quickly approach $400 a semester just for survey courses. Once a student gets into more specialized classes, textbook costs easily top $1,000.

But what if the textbooks didn’t have to be physically printed? What if they could be purchased for a Kindle or Nook or other reader? Wouldn’t they cost a lot less?

Take that idea down to public school level. I graduated from a very, very small high school in Vermont. We bought our own textbooks. To save money, we had a system for selling good used textbooks to the next grade for three of the four major subjects, math, history, science and English. One of those four was completely replaced every year. That meant that our textbooks were never more than four years old, and more up-to-date than most of the schools where the books were provided by the districts. And yes, there was a fund to assist those who could not afford the books.   One of the reasons textbooks chosen by the Texas School Board are so important is because they buy so many books, it lowers the cost for other states to buy the same books. 

Too many school systems are struggling with the cost of books. Too many students are stuck using books that are out-of-date and forced to supplement those books with outside materials. And on the other side of the world, students are being supplied with extremely cheap computers by One Laptop Per Child, founded in 2006 by Nicholas Negroponte.

The devastation in Joplin, Missouri, led that school system to replace hundreds of thousands of lost textbooks with laptops. Digital learning is being used in Florida, Idaho, Utah and California. The biggest deterrent is the lack of national broadband capacity. It is also a transition that is front-heavy for expense.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced on Wednesday that they are challenging America’s schools to transition to digital textbooks in the next five years. This comes two weeks after Apple announced it will sell electronic versions of a few standard high-school textbooks for the iPad.

The United States is lagging behind countries like South Korea in the transition to digital textbooks. Digital textbooks, on a device that can also access the internet, holds enormous potential for improving education. Chairman Genachowski explained, “When a student reads a textbook and gets to something they don’t know, they are stuck. Working with the same material on a digital textbook, when they get to something they don’t know, the device can let them explore, it can show them what a word means, how to solve a math problem that they couldn’t figure out how to solve.” A digital format also makes the material adaptable for the individual student. Some children learn best through pictures, others through words, still others through interaction. A computer makes it possible for a student to explore a subject in the method that works best for the student.

American schools spend $8 billion annually on textbooks, and that’s an amount that reflects the “cost cutting” system of keeping textbooks going in a school as long as the books hold together. Though textbook companies have been working to transform the industry, it isn’t enough. The schools aren’t ready in many cases. Few schools are wired for broadband in ways that allow every student to access the connections needed for digital learning. There is also the problem, not being addressed in this challenge, of how children will do homework in a digital mode in homes without internet access or in neighborhoods where the computer might be a target for a criminal.

Joplin, which received donations from the United Arab Emirates to supply the computers, is a perfect showcase for this type of learning. Some students have had problems making the transition, according to the district’s Assistant Superintendent, Angie Besendorfer, but they are hoping that as their eighth graders progress through the system, they will be textbook-free. What Joplin is learning from this is that not only is a mind a terrible thing to waste, but it is also a terrible thing to regiment. When a 14-year-old has trouble adapting to a new way of learning, that child has spent too many years locked in a box, limited in what he or she can learn because it must be learned in a particular manner. Hopefully, those who are advocating this transition will recognize that it is best done by changing the way children learn in kindergarten through third grade first, possible going as high as fifth grade if the students respond to it, then let the new method rise to top with the students. It would, unfortunately, take years. Educational reform is notorious for trying to change all the students at once, not acknowledging that we force children into patterns of learning that are hard to break.

Digital learning can do so much to improve America’s competitive position against countries which are pouring more money into their schools and more technology into their teaching. The only thing standing in the way, besides the money and broadband access, is a right wing resistence to any proposal that would destroy their ability to tightly control what their children learn.

Related articles

• Challenge to schools: Embracing digital textbooks (sfgate.com)
• Challenge to schools: Embracing digital textbooks (mysanantonio.com)
• Download Textbooks (college-textbooks.co)
• Digital Textbooks Go Straight From Scientists to Students (almacen13.wordpress.com)
• Apple’s e-textbooks do not look so world-changing to educators (teleread.com)
• Apple Digital Textbooks: iBooks 2 Revealed (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)
• Apple sees over 350K digital textbook downloads, report says (venturebeat.com)

Ever since Dee Brown published Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee in 1970, the battle of historical accuracy has raged. In the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant version of American history, Washington threw a silver dollar over the half-mile wide Potomac at the age of 62 and Americans put the native population in reservations for their own good. Newt Gingrich’s and Rush Limbaugh’s favorite phrase for describing any attempt to correct the historical record is “revisionist history,” meaning that historians were trying to revise history for a liberal perspective instead of correcting its errors.

Let’s get this straight right off: the Americans didn’t liberate the people of Texas or California. They conquered both those states. They wanted slavery in Texas, which was against Mexican law, and the wanted California’s access to the Pacific and resources. Zorro is an Anglo myth, not a Mexican legend. The people of California were no worse off under Spanish rule than any people in a top-down, rich-man’s control situation, and they sure as hell were better off under Mexican rule in Texas without slavery.

In Tucson, Arizona, the school board has decided that students should not have access to any facts about the WASP conquest of this continent. They sent in goons to seize books from classrooms and out of students’ hands. The majority of books seized were by Native American authors ranging from the twenty-year old text book Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years co-edited by that radical Hispanic Bill Bigelow to N. Scott Momaday’s The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee and a picture book of Mexican landscapes.

When Star Trek: Voyager premiered, there was some criticism from Native Americans of the casting of Mexican-American actor Robert Beltran as an Southwestern Native American. Beltran explained, rather emphatically and somewhat angrily, that most Mexicans are Native Americans, not Spaniards. Latin America was always racially divided. At the political and economic top were the Spaniards like my grandparents – a closed society of immigrants who were frequently the younger members of upper-class and aristocratic Spanish families and their descendants. In the middle were the mix-bloods, descendants of Spanish soldiers and lower-class immigrants who intermarried with the native population. At the bottom, the overwhelming majority of inhabitants of Mexico, the continent, the islands and the isthmus, were Native Americans. The Mexican Civil War of 1909-13 was fought along these racial lines.

At the core of the school board’s decision (which interestingly enough included banning Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but not Othello) is the personal agenda of Arizona state superintendent of public instruction John Huppenthal, who campaigned for his office on the promise to “stop la raza.” “La Raza” refers in an narrow sense to Partido Nacional de La Raza Unida, a Chicano political party that as founded in the 1970s to work for better conditions of Mexican-Americans. In Huppenthal’s usage, it means all Latin-American peoples who want equal opportunity, equal rights and preservation of their culture.

The Tucson school board has informed teachers of Mexican-American studies that they are to avoid any class units where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes.” So, they are forbidden to teach the Trail of Tears, the genocidal Indian Wars, the reservations on land that could not support agriculture, the truth in all its uncomfortable forms?

So-called “revisionist history” seeks to correct the American mythology by providing the other side of the story – the facts about the Indian Wars and the conquest of the Southwest. It is not a liberal agenda, but an agenda of truth and fact. It is an assertion of who really built this nation and what those men and women contributed to it and who suffered for it.

I can hear the complaints now – you live in New England, so what the hell do you know about the Mexican border? What I know is that the northern border and Canadians are the same situation as the southern border and Mexicans, just less obviously because of the racial factor. The entire northern tier from the Atlantic to the Dakotas was settled by the French Canadians. They settled as far south as Colorado and all along the Mississippi Valley. They founded Louisiana before the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia. Canadians and Canadian-Americans crossed back and forth over the border as though it didn’t exist until 2001. There were hundreds of little roads that were unmonitored border crossings. My husband’s grandparents crossed the border twice a year with their entire brood of children in the back of the truck, following the seasonal work. No one questioned that practice. It was the same on the southern border. The borders didn’t exist in the minds of those who lived along them. In point of fact, our immigration laws did not initially include any reference to Mexicans and Canadians. The hysteria over 9-11 – and in this regard it was pure hysteria – damaged the cultures of both borders. It denied us the right to do what had been done since before any of these three nations existed, maintain contact with friends and relatives no matter where they lived, take jobs that shifted with the seasons. There is nothing in the Canadian-American border vocabulary that parallels the word “tejano” – the culture of the border. One Canadian explained it to me thusly: these were for the most part illiterate laborers. They couldn’t write letters to the families they left behind, but they could get in their cars or trucks and visit. Those who didn’t do that were deemed to have been swallowed up by America, lost to their families and friends. In a Québeqois family reunion, the presence of descendants of the lost ones is a big deal. It re-establishes connections thought to be gone for all time.

Arizona has a population of 6.4 million. The non-Hispanic white population is 57.8% of that. Hispanics are 29.6%. Native Americans make up only 4.6% of the population. The remaining 8% of the population is “other” or mixed race. One third of the population is Hispanic and Native American, while the non-white population is over 40%. Huppenthal wants to deny 40% of the population of his state access to anything other than the Anglo white-washed version of history and Anglo literature. He wants Arizona children to be raised to think there has never been racial prejudice, racial injustice or even a multitude of races in this country. He wants a curriculum of lies. The Tucson high school students who compared the seizing of their books to Nazi Germany had it right. The Nazis wanted an ethnically and religiously pure nation, too.

The Republican charge that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama “apologize” for America is part of this battle over historical accuracy. The United States has done some stupid things over time, especially as part of the Cold War. We supported vicious, butchering dictators because they said they were “pro-America,” including men like Saddam Hussein and Augusto Pinochet, whose body count in Chile was higher than Hussein’s in Iraq. We did this. That is historical fact. It is not an apology to acknowledge it. The acknowledgment shows that as a nation we – or at least some of us – have grown beyond the fascist nationalism of the Cold War era.

There is a minor benefit to men like Huppenthal, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. They have gotten arrogant. They believe that there is enough support in this country for their bigotry that they can drop the facade of inclusiveness. They think they are free to pursue their agendas that denigrate, demean and deny the wide range of ethnic and racial identities in America. They think that the color of my skin will make me their ally. They do not understand that even whites have been victims of discrimination over time and that there is a strong sense among Americans that oppression and repression based on ethnicity or race or culture is fundamentally wrong.

The more secure they think they are in such overt expressions of bigotry, the more they turn good Americans against their agenda.

Related articles

• Tucson school board suspends Mexican-American studies program (cnn.com)
• Tucson schools ban books by Chicano and Native American authors (moorbey.wordpress.com)
• A critical reading of Tucson’s ‘Banned Books’ list (alanlechusza.wordpress.com)
• Arizona bigotry: How it can affect us all (dailykos.com)
• Testament’s Chuck Billy Opens Up About His Native American Upbringing (noisecreep.com)
• The Ten Commandments of the Native American Indians (the2012scenario.com)
• Neo-Racism in the Southwest (moorbey.wordpress.com)
• School Suspends Mexican-American History Program To Comply With Arizona’s Ban On Ethnic Studies (thinkprogress.org)
• Tucson Unified School District Ban Rethinking Columbus (ecochildsplay.com)

J. R. Martinez and Diana Gonzalez-Jones

On Thursday, December 15, 2011, President and Mrs. Obama welcomed our troops home from Iraq. On Friday, Secretary of Defense Panetta oversaw the hand-off of our facilities to the Iraqis, and veteran Jessica Lynch graduated from college. And on Saturday, we learned that Iraq veteran J. R. Martinez is going to be a father. Sometimes, a war can end with good news on top of good news.

Martinez, 28, who was severely burned in an IED explosion and underwent 33 operations, won the 13^th season of Dancing With The Stars just weeks ago. He has started an acting career, overcoming the conventional wisdom that says men with extensive facial scarring can only play psychotic villains. And now, he and girlfriend Diana Gonzalez-Jones are expecting their first child in the spring.

Martinez told People magazine, “We found out just last week it’s a girl and we are over the moon. Diana has a little baby bump now and it’s the cutest thing ever. With the holidays coming up, this is the biggest and best gift we could get.”

Martinez has been a gift to all of us who served and who have loved ones who served, and those still serving and their loved ones. We wish all the best for J. R., Diana and their daughter.

Related articles

• ‘Dancing with the Stars’ JR Martinez, girlfriend expecting child (digitalspy.co.uk)
• J.R. Martinez expecting first child with girlfriend (ontheredcarpet.com)
• J.R. Martinez Is Going to Be a Dad (people.com)
• Jessica Lynch’s New Life (lezgetreal.com)
• Baby Girl On the Way for J.R. Martinez (celebritybabies.people.com)

Dorothy Ebersbach

My Dad had a favorite maxim: “You can take over the world with a clipboard and an air of authority.” He had two stories from World War II to illustrate that. The short one involves female pilots in the U. S. Army Air Corps.

Male pilots had a way to empty their bladders in flight, an adaptation of the method used by railroad motormen. Female pilots did not. The Corps used female pilots to move planes from base to base, among other things, and when they landed, the usually had their knees pressed together and were desperate for the nearest john. While stationed in Texas where he was teaching new recruits how to use their rifles, Dad and his buddies would meet the pilots with their clipboards, ask a bunch of dumb questions and watch the women’s eyeballs float. He though it was very funny. I hope those of who have joined him on the other side have extracted payment for that, all 775 of them.

Last month, one of those WASPs passed away at the age of 96. Dorothy Ebersbach became a nurse after the war and she combined those two loves into an endowment for a school for flight nurses at Case Western Reserve University. Her $2 million will be used to establish the Dorothy Ebersbach Academic Center for Flight Nursing at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, where Ebersbach earned her degree in 1954.

The school has an Advanced Practice Flight Nurse Program, which will be expanded through this endowment. The program’s mission is to train graduate-level nursing students to provide on-site care during emergencies and man planes and helicopters used to transport patients. The program is the only one of this type at an American nursing school. Fourteen students have graduated, eight are in the program this semester and they have provided summer school training to an additional 250.

Ebersbach’s death was unexpected. She arranged for the gift to Case Western and the school was planning to fly her from her home in Florida for the announcement. Christopher Manacci, clinical director of the program, said of Ebersbach, “Separate elements of her life have merged to continue her legacy of flight and nursing. This will help perpetuate this program for decades.”

Dorothy Ebersbach during World War II

Ebersbach, who grew up in Pomeroy, Ohio, went to work for her father’s construction company in Tampa, Florida, after graduating from Ohio University in 1936. The job required her to fly planes, so she trained at the University of Tampa. After Pearl Harbor, she applied for admission into the WASP group. The U. S. Air Force National Museum says that 25,000 women applied for flight training, 1,830 were accepted, 1,074 graduated and 900 were still in the program when it ended in December, 1944, as men started returning from the European theater. Ebersbach served doing test flights and towing targets for gunnery practice in Arizona and Texas….yes, Texas. Give my Dad hell, Dorothy.

After the war, Ebersbach wanted to continue flying, but the job market was flooded with male veterans, so she pursued a nursing degree. Ebersbach worked as a public health nurse in Hillsborough County, Florida (that’s Tampa) until her retirement in 1975. In 1977, WASPs were given military veteran status, even though they were civilians contracted to the military. In March, 2010, the 300 remaining WASPs were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor awarded to a civilian by Congress. Ebersbach received hers in Tampa in April, 2010. She never married and she lived in the house her parents had bought in 1935.

It may seem that there should be no issues with being a nurse in flight, but my mother worked for a while escorting patients between cities. She worked entirely on commercial airplanes, but even there the issues included turbulence and banking of the plane, adjustments for altitude, movement of the patient, and potential side effects of air travel, like popped ears and motion sickness. Helicopters, which are used extensively in emergency transportation, present even more problems with motion in the air and keeping the patient stabilized. It really is a specialization within nursing. A certified flight nurse would also have to be a certified trauma nurse, trained in the unique needs of treating trauma patients. The degrees received at Case Western

The endowment helps fill a need in the medical community and the school will be a permanent reminder to young women of how special the women of World War II were – how they had survived the Great Depression, how they fought for college educations, how they contributed to the war in factories and in the military. My Aunt Lydia was in the Marines stationed at Pearl Harbor. My mother and her older sister Kathy were both in Army nursing corps training when the war ended. Women’s contributions to the war effort is something I grew up with, even if it wasn’t as talked about as much as the war stories of my male relatives and their friends. You can visit the WASP, Women Airforce Service Pilots of WWII webpage at www.wingsacrossamerica.us.

Thank you for your service, Dorothy Ebersbach, and for guaranteeing the future of flight nursing training.

Related articles

• Betty Haas Pfister Dies at 90; Wartime Pilot With Passion for Flight (nytimes.com)

So, why are so few women participating in college and university governments?

That’s the question being addressed by the American Association of University Women. In collaboration with Running Start, AAUW has announced the expansion of its Elect Her – Campus Women Win initiative. It will be holding sessions on 30 campuses this year to teach women how to run for office.

This move goes far beyond the simple need for greater representation of women in student government, to fight for women’s issues. Having been an officer in student government looks as good on a resume as a summer internship with a top company or your state’s senator. It shows the kind of leadership characteristics needed in management in any field.

There are a lot of reasons why women don’t participate in campus elections. At the top of the list is the simple fact that on state and community campuses, a large number of the women students are non-traditional – working mothers, working women, welfare recipients being given a leg up, young women who dropped out and earned their GEDs. Women are far more likely to have outside obligations while they earn their degrees than men. They are also more likely to take advantage of on-line college opportunities because of their life obligations. Somewhere near the bottom of the list is the social programming that says the student body president must be some frat boy with the right legacy. In between is the fear that achieving too much in academia makes a woman less desirable…you know, the “Thank God” response to Elizabeth Warren’s joke that she kept her clothes on to pay for college.

Please, check out the AAUW website. Even if you can’t squeeze in the time to run for office, it is an important organization that all college and university women should become involved with. The AAUW is 130 years old, with 100,000 members, 1,000 branches and 500 college and university partners. Its primary mission is to advance equity for women and girls through advocacy, education, philanthropy and research.

Women are still suffering from salary gaps and glass ceilings in the workplace, and are coming under increasing assault in the political arena. For every woman who has risen to prominence in politics there is a law that seeks to limit our access to health care, undermine our labor rights, destroy those programs that have been helping women get out of poverty and away from abusive relationships, and limit our voting rights.

There has also been a deterioration in the gains we made in the modern women’s movement. Our girls are being subjected to even greater body image issues than we were thirty years ago, being bullied into suicide, watching the circus of conservatives mocking Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayer for their looks instead of arguing their credentials. As someone pointed out to my daughter while she was attending college, once you belong to the community, it goes with you everywhere. AAUW is a community that transcends being a graduate of one school or coming from one state.

Women and girls are making great strides in academic fields once considered off-limits for females – math and the sciences especially. Now is the time to make great strides in the politics of campuses, a training ground for the politics of the town, state and nation.

You will find the AAUW at aauw.org.

Related articles

• About Us (aauwnorthfield.wordpress.com)
• Campus Funding and Leadership Opportunities (blog-aauw.org)
• AAUW Celebrates Women’s Hall of Fame Inductees (blog-aauw.org)
• Fellowships for Women to Study in the US (economistindia.wordpress.com)
• Coming Soon to Your Mailbox, Fall Outlook (blog-aauw.org)
• Meet AAUW’s New Student Leaders (blog-aauw.org)
• 10/11/11: Annual AAUW-NYS Day at the UN (kingstonaauw.blogspot.com)
• SisterMentors: Building the Dream for 15 Years (blog-aauw.org)

BBC journalist Katya Adler and Juan Luis Moreno

Between 1960 and 1989, as many as 300,000 newborn infants may have been trafficked by the Catholic Church, initially with the full knowledge and co-operation of the regime of dictator Francisco Franco. After Franco’s death in 1975, the Spanish government’s involvement is alleged to have been a case of government negligence and failure to regulate the adoption industry.

The baby trafficking appears to have been on two levels. The first was a politically motivated practice designed to punish Franco’s opposition and critics. If a family were deemed dangerous to Franco’s rule, which began in 1939, and had a pregnant family member, they would be told that the baby was stillborn or had died just after being born. In these cases, it was normally a couple’s first-born child and may have been the grandchild of a Franco opponent. 1960 was still within that time when no family member attended births and women were sedated during delivery, so the deception was easy to pull off. The second level was actually routine with the Catholic Church worldwide. Unwed pregnant girls and women were turned over to the nuns until they delivered their babies. The mothers were relentlessly pressured to give up the babies for adoption, and it was not unheard of for a girl to be told her baby had died at birth if there was the slightest possibility that she was going to a “problem.”

The hospitals and clinics in Spain were run by the Catholic Church, and arranged many of the adoptions before the baby was born. One woman, 89-year-old Ines Perez, has testified that a priest attached to the San Ramon clinic in Madrid told her to fake a pregnancy, wear padding which he supplied under her clothing, so that no one would question the arrival of her “baby” in 1969. Birth certificates were faked to show the adoptive parents as the birth parents.

In the period immediately following the death of Franco, several amnesty laws were passed concerning crimes committed by the regime, in the hopes that not prosecuting would help the nation heal faster. Additionally, the Church has traditionally been protected from government oversight and prosecution, so there is no national interest in pursuing these adoptions. The investigations have been undertaken by regional prosecutors, with 900 cases currently under review.

An informal effort has begun to set up a DNA database for the mothers whose babies were taken during this period, but there is no government attempt to create a central clearing house for these inquiries. Since so many of these adopted children were issued birth certificates with their adoptive parents listed as their biological parents, there is no reason for these adults to question their parentage. It was a deathbed confession that started the investigation.

When Juan Luis Moreno’s father was dying, he confessed that he and his wife had bought Juan from a priest in the northern city of Zaragoza. At the same time, the parents of Antonio Barroso had bought him from the same priest for 200,000 pesetas, a huge sum at the time (No date was given for this transaction, but from 1959 to 1967, that would have been equivalent to $3,333, after 1967 $2,857) Antonio Barroso said that his adoptive parents paid installments for ten years for him.

There were also international adoptions. Texan Randy Ryder, 40, was one of those adoptions. His birthdate led Spaniard Manoli Pagador to believe Randy is her stolen son. An upcoming BBC television special tracks her search for the facts. Until it airs, the press has not been made privy to the results.

Randy Ryder and his adoptive mother, 1971Randy Ryder and Manoli Pagador, 2011

Randy Ryder and Manoli Pagador, 2011

In come cases, particularly in the San Ramon clinic, when a mother was told her baby had died and demanded to see the baby, she was shown a corpse that many of these mothers have testified appeared to be freezing cold. Photos of a baby in a freezer, taken in the 1980′s were shown to the BBC reporter Katya Adler in their course of her investigations.

The adoptive parents were equally clueless about the circumstances. They were told the mothers had voluntarily given up their babies, instead of being pressured or deceived to do so.

In 1987, the Spanish government started taking responsibility for adoptions, and proper records began being kept.

Adler gave this overview of the scandal, “The situation is incredibly sad for thousands of people. There are men and women across Spain whose lives have been turned upside-down by discovering the people they thought were their parents actually bought them for cash. There are also many mothers who have maintained for years that their babies did not die – and were labelled ‘hysterical’ – but are now discovering that their child has probably been alive and brought up by somebody else all this time.”

Experts believe that as much as 15% of the adoptions that took place in Spain between 1960 and 1989 were part of this conspiracy.

It is grossly unfair of those who are working to expose this to characterize the money that changed hands as the babies being “bought for cash.” There is always money involved in an adoption, fees to be paid for legal work, “donations” made to hospitals or clinics to cover costs of the delivery, even layers of bribes to paid in foreign adoptions. The people who were adopting these babies probably didn’t think of it as a case of buying a baby, but of the normal costs involved in an adoption.

The scandal is in the collusion between the Franco regime and the church in stealing babies from the families of political enemies and in the ways in which unwed mothers were lied to about their babies by members of the Catholic Church. Some aspects of the Church’s relationships with unwed mothers have already been exposed in other countries. As the story unfolds in Spain, it will undoubtedly be repeated in other countries – stories of supposedly dead babies and off-the-book adoptions.

The Church can do two things at this point. Most probably, given their history, they will circle the wagons and obstruct investigations. Those involved will petition their governments and since most countries do not have the kinds of “amnesty for history” laws that Spain has, the Church will find itself under the same kind of scrutiny, criminal charges and civil suits that it has faced over pedophile priests. Or, the church can volunteer to set up DNA databases, open its records and help these mothers and children find each other. This goes beyond the simple desire to know the truth. There are strong medical reasons for adoption records to be opened. People deserve to know if they are carrying a genetic time bomb like a family history of breast cancer or paranoid schizophrenia.

The child abuse scandal has seriously damaged the Catholic Church, as much because of the attempts at denial than because of the abuses themselves. An international adoption scandal would just worsen the Church’s position in the world. Or, if saner heads can prevail at the Vatican, they can use this situation to start to rebuild the trust their members have lost in them.

Related articles

• Spain’s stolen babies (bbc.co.uk)

Bridget Wismer and the contested baby boy

The cross-jurisdiction Delaware-Pennsylvania case of a woman accused of selling her baby is a real problem for conservatives. If they applaud her decision not to abort an unwanted pregnancy, they must support her decision to give the baby to a gay couple. If they condemn giving the baby to a gay couple, are they tacitly approving an abortion?

These are the facts as presented by the parties involved: Bridget Wismer (who lives in Delaware) had two children and no husband. She discovered she was pregnant. She did not want to abort the pregnancy and did not want to give the baby up permanently for adoption, forfeiting all contact with the child. Enter John Gavaghan and his long-term partner Antonio, who live in Philadelphia. They offered to help her financially if she would allow them to foster the child (no legal adoption involved) and raise it as their own, allowing her free access to the child. Everyone agreed to the arrangement and were very happy with their decision. Shortly before the baby was born, John and Antonio had a baby shower for “their” baby.

Wismer’s grandmother didn’t like the whole idea – whether she objected to the fostering part or the gay parents part is not known. Grandma alerted the authorities, told them that Wismer had offered the child on Facebook for $15,000 and had “sold him” to Gavaghan. The police arrested Wismer and seized the baby from Gavaghan, placing him in foster care. Wismer is free on bail and presumably caring for her other children herself. In a statement to the courts requesting higher bail for Wismer, the prosecutor insisted that Wismer had posted the baby on Facebook and stated her intention to use the money to take her other children to Disney World. The Disney World part is based on a Christmas present Gavaghan and Antonio (last name not published) decided to give Wismer and her children. It was not payment for the baby. It was intended as a thank you gift for fulfilling their desire to have a child. The “tipster” cited in the prosecution’s filings is assumed to be the grandmother.

Wismer does not have a Facebook account. Wismer and Gavaghan have known each other for some time and were friends, though the police say they were introduces during the pregnancy by mutual friends. Either way, this did not involve advertising for some stranger to buy the baby.

If Wismer’s and Gavaghan’s account of the arrangement reached is accurate, Wismer did not sell her baby. She entered into the ancient practice of fostering. The worst thing they are guilty of is not involving a lawyer in the arrangement. From their statements, to the press and to law enforcement, these are three consenting adults who were trying to do something positive, albeit unconventional, for a baby. During the baby shower, Gavaghan wrote in a card, “Bridget, thanks with all our hearts for giving me and Antonio a baby. We love you, respect you and thank you with all our hearts. You made our life full.”

The ridiculous part of this arrest is the fact that Delaware’s Division of Family Services was allegedly involved before the baby’s birth. They had responded to the grandmother’s complaint with an investigation and gave their approval if the Philadelphia child protection services approved of Gavaghan as a foster parent.

Gavaghan’s name is on the baby’s birth certificate as the baby’s father, and the Delaware prosecutors say he paid $2,000 to Wismer for her to do that. Delaware police say they have a video of Gavaghan signing papers and handing over money to “a woman” less than a week after the baby’s birth and allege that this is proof of the “sale.” Records indicate that Gavaghan gave money to the unemployed Wismer, who lives with her mother, at random intervals during the pregnancy. Wismer is currently free on $1,500 bail and Gavaghan free on $7,000 bail. Gavaghan has refused to speak to the press until he has retained counsel.

Related articles

• Delaware mom denies trying to sell baby (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Mom denies trying to sell her newborn (philly.com)
• Mom Sells Son To Go To Disney World (buzz103.radio.com)
• Total Depravity: The ‘Mother’ Charged with Selling her Baby- so She Could Go to Disney World (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)

Marni Kotak

Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time I take the attitude that I may not like a piece of art, but the artist has a right to create it. I just found one of those zero point one percenters.

 All my maternal instincts want to scream ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR PUNY MIND??????

 Brooklyn, New York, performance artist Marni Kotak has decided to give birth at the Microscope Gallery in the Bushwick neighborhood in front of a live audience. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR EGOTISTICAL MIND?????

 Kotak explained to the New York Post, “I hope that people will see that human life itself is the most profound work of art, and that therefore giving birth, the greatest expression of life, is the highest form of art. I have decided to do this because I want to show people that, as in my previous performances, real life is the best performance art.”

 She is. She’s out of her self-centered, self-absorbed mind. And her “good support team” is even more so. The support team consists of her midwife, doula (a birthing professional who is not trained to deliver the baby) and husband. “Of course,” Kotak said, “I am a bit nervous about the whole process of giving birth and having a child, and like every mother, I am a bit nervous about the whole process of giving birth and having a child and like every mother, I am hoping that everything goes smoothly.”

 No, lady, not like every mother. Most mothers care more about the safety and atmosphere created for their baby than they do about getting a round of applause or making an “artistic” statement. When that baby is finally ready to be born (a date Kotak is apparently not terribly sure about), that fragile, precious, tiny infant will be forced out of a dark, warm, enfolding, snug, secure little space, painfully, crushingly pushed through a barely flexible hole and dumped into a cold, bright, noisy space that scares the crap out of him or her. He/she will be forced to suddenly give up floating and absorbing and have to suck air into virgin lungs. He/she will have someone’s finger shoved in his/her mouth to clear the airway – some strange, vinyl-tasting thing fishing around his/her tongue. Being born is traumatic. It hurts. It’s scary. It’s terrifying.

 And this “artist” wants to add the sights, sounds and smells of an audience to this, wants to do this in a wide-open space with god knows what for a heating system and ventilation, wants to subject this precious life to whatever germs that audience is carrying, or perfumes they are wearing. I don’t care if they hand out face masks to everyone and insist that everyone refrain from wearing scents. Americans are never without multiple perfumes – shampoo, conditioner, body wash, deodorant, laundry detergent, fabric softener all on top of the scents of the fabrics and materials that shoes are made of. We are the smelliest people on earth. It doesn’t matter if the audience doesn’t breathe on the baby, they are giving off germs just standing still. They are shedding skin cells and hair dander and dirt from the outside world.  And speaking of the outside world — how far is this gallery from any elevated trains?  Is there anything within shared-air distance that qualifies as a polluting industry?  What kind of art has been displayed in the gallery and did it involve any hazardous materials like paint remover? 

 ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FREAKING MIND?????

 Kotak could rig up some giant TV screens and use a closed circuit system if she really want to share her screaming and grunting and expulsion of bodily fluids and sweat and pain with an audience, but for the baby’s sake, she should give birth in a warm, small, quiet space. That child isn’t a prop for an art performance. That child is a living human being who during delivery and afterwards has needs that far exceed Kotak’s artistic vision.

 The midwife and doula should have their licenses revoked for agreeing to put an newborn in such a potentially hazardous situation and the parents….frankly, there are thousands of childless couples in this country who would do anything to have that baby and who certainly deserve him or her far more than a selfish fool and her equally foolish husband. This is as much a case of child abuse as beating a kid with a stick.

Related articles

• Performance artist Marni Kotak to give birth in gallery (100gf.wordpress.com)
• Performance Artist to Give Birth Live (newser.com)
• Performance Artist Invites You to Watch Her Give Birth [Art] (jezebel.com)

This is a bit of a personal post, so if you’re not into family stories and philosophical musings, you might want to skip it.

My Mother

From 1986 to 2007, I was in the middle of a tri-generational household. My widowed mother, my daughter and myself made up this household. I worked in the computer system management field, and until her retirement in 1992 my mother was a registered nurse. When I asked her what she wanted for a retirement gift, she told me a washer-dryer set, so she could do the laundry instead of me having to schlep it to the laundromat every weekend. I told people at work that I’d finally gotten a wife. The best part, though, was that my kid got a full-time mom out of the deal. I did the “dad” stuff, including doing my own car tune-ups until they started putting computer chips in them. Mom did the “mom” stuff, like baking Christmas cookies with my, no, our daughter.

PET scan of an Alzheimer's victim's brain (Wikipedia)

In 2001, Mom had a heart attack and triple-bypass surgery. About six months later, she started showing signs of very early Alzheimer’s disease. Because we were keeping such a close eye on her health anyway, we picked up on the change much earlier than most people. Her doctor concurred, but we had trouble convincing even the visiting nurses… they usually dealt with the later stages of the disease. So my daughter and I went through a shift in roles; there is a program in Vermont that will pay family members to care for the sick/elderly/disabled in their homes, so we applied for it and Joy was able to be paid for part of her time staying home with Mom. I was working full-time, and I took over when I was home.

When things got to the point where we needed help, about 2005 I think, my eldest sister came home from Georgia to help care for Mom. She left her husband, two daughters and a son-in-law behind to do this. Her husband was still two years away from retirement, and they planned to come home to Vermont then, but they decided to have her come home early. That’s the type of family I come from (don’t worry, we have our dysfunctional moments like everyone else).

Because Mom could still pull off a coherent conversation, there were members of the family who refused to believe the diagnosis. This did not make being her guardian any easier. On top of the Alzheimer’s, she was going blind. If any of you have dealt with either of those conditions, imagine them together. Alzheimer’s robs a person of their ability to learn new things, adjust to changes in environment, make rational decisions… long before it takes their speech and their memory. Encroaching blindness requires a person to learn new skills, adjust to interacting with an environment they can no longer see, remember so much. Put the two together, and you wind up with a woman who can no longer get around her house without a guide, who can’t learn how to knit without her eyesight, who feels useless, who desperately needs her family around her because she recognizes their voices, who is terrified of being abandoned in an institution.

To make a long story a bit shorter, we managed to keep Mom home until she died in November of 2007. She passed away in her own bed, with her family there and her two cats stretched out next to her on the bed. It was how she wanted to go.

Felix Skye

After 21 years, Joy and I were a two-generation household. A couple of years later she met a young man and moved in with him. Last year they broke up and she came home. Then came the current boyfriend, who had been a close friend until they had one of those “Oh, it’s you” moments.

And now we’re back to three generations. This is my grandson, who arrived five days ago. Life does go on.

Oh, and he’s the reason I kind of disappeared for the past week or so. Sorry for those who were waiting for continuing stories. I should be back on a regular basis in the next few days. Namaste.

Related articles

• Mom Has Alzheimer’s – How Long Will She Recognize Me? (everydayhealth.com)
• Alzheimer’s Care Could Well Devastate The US Economy (forbes.com)
• The mysterious, magical art of being a household (goqnotes.com)

States' educational rankings

And a yabba-dabba-do to that!

No Child Left Behind has been a failure from the beginning. It set national testing criteria without a national curriculum. It punished schools for failing to raise test results, forcing schools to “teach to the test” instead of teaching the students. It did not address the core problems in our school systems or do anything to deal with the differences between school systems that lead to our children having no central base of cultural literacy. And just like all educational reform since the 1950′s it isolated reading and math as the be-all-and-end-all of education. It didn’t even include science, which since Sputnik has been tied so tightly to math they practically exist as a single word “scienceandmath.”

President Obama cannot end the law. That would require the impossible – passage of a law voiding the NCLB law by both chambers of Congress. They can’t pass anything these days, so there isn’t much point in trying to follow the constitutional path on this one. Instead, President Obama is inviting states to request waivers from the provisions of the law and submit plans that would, hopefully, have built into them even higher standards for their students. At least 20 states have expressed interest in the waivers. Standardized testing would still be required as would reports to the community, but there will be far more leeway about the testing and no threat of shutting down a school if it doesn’t meet some randomly set standard of “progress” over time.

The last time a President offered a waiver program similar to this one was President Clinton, who offered waivers to states who wanted to rewrite their welfare programs. In some states, Clinton’s idea was brilliantly successful. Under Governor Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin rewrote its rules and sharply reduced welfare roles through job training and child care provisions, taking the tack that spending a little more for a short period of time resulted in spending less over time. By putting forward the money for job training, Wisconsin turned welfare recipients into taxpayers with good jobs. In other states, like Mississippi where there was a paucity of jobs, there was little that could be accomplished.

The law, signed by President George W. Bush early in 2002 in a ceremony honoring the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s vision was intended to hold schools responsible for their test scores and help reduce the achievement gaps between white students and minority students. Every child is supposed to pass the math and reading exams by 2014. Schools that don’t improve are labeld “failing” and after a few years, they can be shut down or taken over by the state. The fear of being shut down caused teachers in Atlanta (and possibly more schools) to cheat on their students’ exams.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that as many as 80% of schools risk being labeled failures in 2014. Last year alone, it was 37% of schools. The waivers would allow states to concentrate on their bottom 5% of schools. The waiver plan lets state set their own strategies for dealing with underperforming schools but still expects schools to use many of the reforms that the Obama administration believes in.

No Child Left Behind was set to be reauthorized this year, but the House of Representatives can’t come up with a single plan to tweak it and the Senate hasn’t even addressed the issue. Expectedly, Republicans are condemning the waiver plan. House Education Committee Chairman John Kline fo Minnesota called it a backdoor reauthorization of NCLB. “While I appreciate some of the policies outlined in the secretary’s [Duncan’s] waivers plan, I simply cannot support a process that grants the secretary of education sweeping authority to handpick winners and losers,” Kline told the New York Times. Bush’s Education Secretary, Margaret Spellings, told the Washington Post “I’m skeptical about states’ ability or will to do great reform or close the achievement gap. The reason this whole waiver issue is before us is they told us they were going to do something and didn’t do it. And now they want a waiver against their own promises.” And Michael Petrilli, vice president of the Fordham Institute told The Lookout that the plan amounts to rolling back NCLB. “I think it’s fair to say that this will effectively neuter No Child Left Behind.”

It’s so predictable at this point. President Obama speaks and Republican knees jerk. He could probably say the sky is blue and the Republicans would drag out fifteen “experts” to say that at such and such a time, it’s actually pink.

There are so many things wrong with our education system, starting with the fact that we don’t have an American education system but fifty separate systems each containing dozens if not hundreds of individual systems. No one law is going to fix our system and standardized testing doesn’t really prove that any child has actually learned anything other than how to take the test. We have had over fifty years of wringing our hands over our schools, studying our schools, tweaking our schools and none of it has produced an educational system for the 21^st century. Heck, it’s managed to wipe out most of the good aspects of our educational system that existed when this whole process began. A lot of what is going to happen with these waivers depends on which states are going to use them.

In educational ranking, the bottom twenty states are Texas, North Dakota, Missouri, California, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Hawaii, Iowa, Alaska, South Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia and Mississippi. There isn’t really a single common factor in those twenty states, anymore than there is a single common factor in the top twenty: Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut, Indiana, Maine, Florida, Illinois, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Vermont, Georgia and Washington. Having had my own children in three of those states, I’m dumbfounded that Florida would rank above and Georgia would rank just 0.05 points behind Vermont. A one-size-fits-all law isn’t a way to deal with fifty states that have different causes for their successor failure. Hopefully, the other 30 will also apply for the waivers so that they can have the power to deal with their own students and whatever inadequacies they may have.

Related articles

• President offers states an opt-out from NCLB – in exchange for more federal control of education (hotair.com)
• No Child Left Behind: With waivers Obama offers states flexibility (csmonitor.com)
• Will Obama’s NCLB Waiver Plan Really Diminish ‘Teaching To The Test’? (huffingtonpost.com)
• No Child Left Behind Waivers for States (nytimes.com)
• Obama Lets States Opt Out Of ‘No Child Left Behind’ (npr.org)

It was pretty pathetic when Gretchen Carlson of Fox and Friends, who graduated from Sanford and attended Oxford, said she had Googled the word “tsar.” One would have hoped that with a first-class education she would have known what a tsar was. At least she knows how to Google, which puts her one up on the Governor of New Mexico and all the governor’s critics.

Susana Martinez, Republican Governor of New Mexico, is having a little public relations problem. She has taken a Republican hard line against illegal immigration, but admits that she believes her own grandparents were illegal. Maybe. Possibly. But it is very doubtful, as anyone would know if they bothered to Google immigration law in this country.

The facts are a bit fuzzy. Gov. Martinez’s grandparents, specifically her father’s parents, appear on the 1930 census in El Paso, Texas, and are noted as not being citizens. But, there is no record of when they may have entered the country. Gov. Martinez never knew her grandfather because he abandoned his family when her father was only five, and he has only the vaguest memories of his parents. All of which is pretty irrelevant when one checks the facts about immigration law.

America passed its first immigration law, the Emergency Quota Act, in 1921, and the Immigration Act in 1924. The primary reason for both was the flood of immigrants coming to America from Europe and Asia. There had long been a deep prejudice against Chinese immigrants, who were referred to as “The Yellow Peril,” and there were laws in California that barred the Chinese from purchasing property. The European immigrants were mostly from Eastern Europe and in the view of good Christian Americans, way too many of them were Jewish. In the 1950′s, people escaping from communist Eastern Europe often found it easier to immigrate first to Canada and then to the United States. Coming directly from Poland or Hungary, they would be up against the quotas, but coming from Canada, they weren’t.

There was a program during the Great Depression to “encourage” Mexicans to repatriate, but it had little to do with them being Mexicans and a lot to do with the economy.

Maybe the best way to illustrate the difference in attitude about immigration is with the experience of a pair of World War II volunteers, my uncles. They were born in the Caribbean and were brought here as children. When they enlisted, no one asked for their immigration status or proof of citizenship. They were asked about their educations, and since both had dropped out of school to work during the Depression, they were given their GEDs with their enlistment. The period between the passage of the first immigration laws and the end of World War II was a time of transition in immigration. For some, especially for Jews fleeing before Hitler, the laws were inhumanely enforced. For others, they didn’t exist. It all depended on where one was coming from.

Being interviewed on the Spanish-language television stations KLUZ in Albuquerque, Gov. Martinez defended the contradiction of her grandparent’s status and her pushing for passage of a reversal of the law which allows illegal immigrants to get New Mexico driver’s licenses, by saying, “In those days, the law was very different.” Democratic State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino responded to her interview by telling Reuters that “The rules have not changed. What changed is this need to find some enemy as the cause of our problems.” No, Senator, it isn’t just the post-9-11 paranoia about illegal immigrants, the rules really have changed.

Governor Martinez didn’t grow up on stories of her grandparent’s immigration. That is one of the few facts in this teapot tempest. She is hardly alone in being part of a family that didn’t go in for familial oral history. People should be able to understand why she doesn’t have all the facts about her grandparents. While her position on illegal immigrants is as wrong-minded as the rest of the Republican governors on the border, that’s no excuse to make an issue out of something that is unimportant and being judged by today’s standards instead of those in place at the time.

Related articles

• Republican New Mexico Governor Says Her Grandfather Was Undocumented (alternet.org)
• Martinez Admits Her Grandparents Were Illegal Immigrants (politicalwire.com)
• NM governor says grandparents came to US illegally (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Anti-Illegal Alien Governor Confronted With Evidence That Grandparents Were Illegal Aliens (jonathanturley.org)
• Should Illegal Immigrants Be Given Driver’s Licenses? (usnews.com)

Cartoon depicting abstinence only sex education

The stereotype is simple: Liberal states have loads of divorce and lots of preggers teenagers. Conservative states have loads of stable families and teenagers keeping the abstinence pledge. Like most stereotypes, it’s WRO-ONG! Just as wrong as the myth that same sex parents produce problem children.

A new federal study, and a new book, blow the whole idea that conservative states and evangelical churches produce better families to hell and back. A brief review of the results:

The “blue family,” as in Democratic “blue state,” has a higher rate of women with college educations snd they are more likely to be married than those who dropped out of high school. Men and women who marry after age 25 have lower divorce rates than those who married younger. The more educated the couple, and the later they defer childbearing (though not too late), the more stable the family. Established careers based on higher education means a family is more affluent, better able to purchase a home, and better able to afford the things that enhance a child’s education. Divorce rates of these families are at levels not seen since the 1960′s, and non-marital births have decreased.

In the “red states,” conservative, more prone to belong to non-mainstream, evangelical churches, there is strong support for abstinence instead of sex education and bans on abortion. But in these states, teenagers are having sex (and more frequently unprotected sex) at a slightly lower age than in blue states (16.38 years to 16.52 years of age). Evangelical couples are more likely to divorce than non-evangelical couples and evangelical mothers are more likely to hold full-time jobs than non-evangelicals. Also, with lower education levels and the general economics of states with “right to work” laws, there is a greater chance that these mothers are doing shift work in retail with odd hours and weekends. Economics are making it harder for traditionalists to create traditional marriages with well-defined gender roles. Where those roles aren’t expected, there is greater satisfaction with the marriage. A woman who grows up expecting to be a full-time homemaker and ends up working a register at the supermarket is not a happy woman and her marriage will not be happy.

The recession has had a great impact on marriage. The typical blue state family, where the couple have had more time to mature, to develop their sexuality, to find their place in the career world and to negotiate marital roles fitting their personalities and careers are more able to survive economic difficulty, both economically and emotionally.

Traditionalists, however, react to hard times by choosing to become even more traditional and pushing traditional family values as policy. States that have pushed abstinence-only sex education, limit subsidies and access to contraception and restrict abortion, and oppose same-sex marriage, have higher teen birth and divorce rates. And when the imposition of those family values policies fails to improve society, they just dig in harder. In spite of all the laws that conservative state legislatures have passed, the recession and the sluggish recovery have produced more teen pregnancies, more unwed mothers and more abortions, not less. Worse, for these traditionalists, males are unemployed at higher rates than females, which creates even greater strains on couples who have married young.

Naomi Cahn and June Carbone have published Red Families v. Blue Families, which explores the study data and draws conclusions about the policy decisions this nation should be making. At Amazon, it is available for Kindle at just $9.99, half the price of the hard cover. For those wishing to engage in the battle against the laws being proposed to force religion-based family values into our civil laws, owning this book is worth the investment. Facts are always useful.

Related articles

• West Texas School Administrators See Literally No Connection Between Their Choice Of Sex Education And Teen Pregnancy Rates (hayladies.wordpress.com)
• Rick Perry Can’t Handle Evidence in Epic Fail of Abstinence Question: VIDEO (towleroad.com)
• Weak Argument for Abstinence (crossexaminedblog.com)
• Letter: Evangelicals and Marriage (nytimes.com)
• Atheist Divorce Rates Among Lowest in America (queerlandia.com)
• Sarah Palin’s Views on Abstinence Lead to Second Grandchild (thegreatone22.wordpress.com)
• Red Families, Blue Families, Gay Families (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)

Benedict Garrett a.k.a. Johnny Anglais

Thirteen years ago, a religious education teacher in Britain’s Oakmead College of Technology in Bournemouth, was discovered stripping to the Full Monty in pubs and private parties. Forty-six year old Robert Fraser explained at the time that he had tried various part-time jobs to supplement his teaching income, but stripping paid the most. “Striptease is an art form – it’s not sex,” he said, “There is nothing illegal or dishonest about what I was doing. If I had been a roofer or a bricklayer it would have been viewed differently.” As head of personal social education for 1,100 pupils, Fraser admitted that “I always accepted there was a moral contradiction in what I was doing.”

Rather than fight the system over his part-time job, Fraser resigned.

Now, another British teacher has been found to be earning money on the side by stripping and has appeared in porn films as well. Benedict Garrett, 31, was head of personal, social and health education at Beal High School in Ilford from January, 2008, to July of 2010. The General Teaching Council discipline board was told that some of Garrett’s pupils had seen him in a trailer for one of his porn films. Ignoring the question of how underage students had viewed a porn trailer, the board found Garrett guilty of “unacceptable professional conduct” but said he could continue teaching. Garrett, who strips and porns under the name Johnny Anglais, said “I don’t think I’ve done anything that goes against my values and I worked incredibly hard as a teacher. What a teacher chooses to do in their life outside that work is up to them.” He did admit that it “might be slightly embarrassing” if his students had seen any of the films, but no more embarrassing than if he had been seen “starring as a monkey in the school musical.” He challenged the idea that any of his students would see films they are not legally supposed to see, but said that what he does is “perfectly natural. Get over it.”

Garrett doesn’t see himself as anyone’s role model and thinks teachers shouldn’t be held up as role models for students. “If teachers are role models, why do we tolerate teachers who smoke, when smoking is linked to thousands of deaths? Do we look at teachers who are fat and say you shouldn’t be teaching? Obesity is linked to thousands of deaths. However, I’ve heard from students who have told me they believe I’m a role model because I’m standing up for what I believe in.”

But, the puritanical among us do not consider drinking, smoking or overeating as damaging to young minds as viewing a well-muscled, attractive young man in the buff. It might cause young people to think the human body is a beautiful thing instead of something to be hidden in shame. After all, isn’t that what it says in the Bible. After eating of the forbidden tree, Adam and Eve were ashamed of their nakedness. Honestly, I’ve never understood that one – God thought it was okay for them to be naked and they didn’t think there was anything wrong with that until after the apple.

Garrett has not announced if he plans to return to teaching or earn more with his side job. But, seriously, of all the bad things teachers can do that can damage their students, earning good money on the side, enough money to be able to continue teaching, as long as that job is legal, ranks way at the bottom. Neither of these men were having sex with their students, or verbally abusing them in the classroom, or playing stupid head games on their students, or messing around with grades because of bigotry, or teaching them misinformation to support a personal agenda. They were earning a living, and one that probably most of their students would not only have accepted, but gotten a real hoot out of. Adults really need to get realistic about teenagers.

Related articles

• Stripper teacher defends actions (bbc.co.uk)
• Porn star teacher in strip act (telegraph.co.uk)
• Schoolteacher who worked as stripper uncovered by students (guardian.co.uk)
• Porn star teacher shows skills (telegraph.co.uk)
• Porn actor/sex-ed teacher allowed to keep teaching (theglobeandmail.com)

Most network and cable news programs today have mentioned a study which shows that not only do marriage and long-term committed relationships improve partners’ health, they may have a detrimental effect. Okay, the obvious ones are a smoker whose partner spends twenty years inhaling second hand smoke and the guy whose “I hate veggies” fetish reduces a woman’s vegetable intake.

But there was a small aspect to the study which no one has mentioned – the statistics about the respondents. Those are far more interesting than that the impact of each other’s bad habits.

There were 122 people involved in the study, 31 straight couples, 15 gay couples and 15 lesbian couples. The couples had been together between 8 and 52 years.

The average age of the straight couples was 53 years, and they had been together an average of 25 years. The gay couples averaged 49 years of age and 21 years in the relationship, and the lesbian couples averaged 43 years old and 14 years together. Look at those numbers again – 53/25, 49/21 and 43/14. Take all of them up to 53 years of age and you get gay couples together 25 years and lesbian couples together 24 years. Wow, awesome.

Small, overlooked statistic, just part of the explanation of study method, but very important in the debate about same sex marriage…same sex partners, even without the benefits of legal marriage, stay together just as long as straight couples. It is something that really needs further investigation. Every time a state gains same sex marriage, we see couples who have been together for decades tying the knot. We now have the opportunity to explore this issue openly, even in states that don’t have same sex marriage. We can separate the experimental “living together” couples in both straights and gays/lesbians from the committed couples and get some hard numbers.

For far too long the anti-same sex marriage battalion has used irrelevant studies to support their positions. The most public, before Sen. Al Franken challenged a witness in a committee hearing, was former Sen. Rick Santorum using studies of straight parents comparing single-parent and two-parent households to “prove” that children need opposite sex parents and a study called “The Death of Marriage in Scandinavia” that used statistics from the 1970′s and countries that didn’t even have civil unions. At the time, the Netherlands was the only European country with same sex marriage and it is not in Scandinavia. We do have studies about same sex parents – the ones that show that same sex parents raise kids who are healthier, better adjusted and more affluent than straight parents raise, but we don’t have solid studies that show that a same sex couple can be as committed for as long as a straight couple.   It’s time we did. 

Related articles

• Marriage matters to same-sex parents (topix.net)
• Estimate: One Quarter Of All NYC Marriages Last Month Were Same-Sex (lezgetreal.com)
• Taiwan to host same-sex marriage celebrations (topix.net)
• Poll: Over half of all Americans favor national recognition for same-sex marriages (miamiherald.typepad.com)
• NOM Leader Jennifer Roback Morse: “Anal Sex Is Icky” (lezgetreal.com)
• American Psychological Association Endorses Same-Sex Marriage (lezgetreal.com)
• Maine To Gather Signatures To Allow Pro-Same-Sex Marriage Vote (lezgetreal.com)
• Mexico City reaches 1,000th gay marriage (miamiherald.typepad.com)
• Data Suggests 1400 Same-Sex Couples Have Married in NYC (towleroad.com)
• Lesbians Marry More Often Than Gay Men (towleroad.com)

State Capitol, Pierre, South Dakota

Facing budget problems, over 120 school districts in 20 states have chosen to shrink the academic schedule to a four-day week. Most of the states are in the West and Mid-West, though Florida and Georgia are discussing the idea. The school day in Irene, South Dakota, will be lengthened by a half-hour, lunch and phys ed classes shortened adding about three hours of instruction time to the four days. The states where this has been implemented include Texas, Idaho, Colorado, Minnisota, Montana and New Mexico. The cost savings come primarily in busing, fuel, support staff and operational costs of the buildings. South Dakota’s Education Secretary Melody Schopp, says that schools that have switched to four days have not suffered in achievement tests. That doesn’t really say much since we have learned that the No Child Left Behind testing systems have accomplished nothing but shifting school systems to teaching to the tests.

Heaven forbid we should eliminate a few tax breaks for the rich to keep our schools competitive with the emerging world. Our disjointed, fractured school systems are already doing a lousy job of educating our children, so why not make it harder for them to compete in a global economy. If one believed in conspiracy theories, one could begin to see a pattern here – first downgrade workers’ expectations for pay and benefits, then downgrade their children’s educations so that when the rising middle classes of former third-world countries become too expensive, companies can return to America for super cheap labor. First, they ship our jobs to Nicaragua, then they turn us into Nicaragua. That is, if one believed in a vast right wing conspiracy…..

Irene, South Dakota, is going to save about $50,000 a year, which will allow them to keep a vocational education program that would have had to be scraped. Most four-day systems have classes from 8 a.m. to around 3:30 or 3:45 p.m. daily. They will retain the traditional school year with a full summer vacation. The normal 180-day school year will be reduced to 144 days.

So, how does that rack up against, say, China? The Chinese summer vacation is only six weeks, not ten, but summer vacation is spent in summer classes or studying for entrance exams for university. The school day runs from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a two hour lunch/recess break. That means a seven and a half hour day, so around the same amount of time daily, but an additional day. Class size is 21 students and computer to student ratio is 1:2. Language and math skills are tested yearly and passage is required for advancement.

How about Australia? Two hundred days per year in four terms each lasting 9 to 11 weeks with two weeks vacation between terms. School day is 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., class size is 18 and computer to student ratio is 1:3.

In South Korea, the two school terms run March to July and September to February. Each day is 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with enrichments and activities into the evening. Special classes are held on Saturdays. Beginning in third grade, students are taught English.

Japan is having an interesting problem. They used to have six-day a week school schedules, then switched to the five-day. Parents have complained ever since that kids have too much time on their hands and are wasting it watching TV or playing video games. A whole industry has arisen for activities on the weekends, craft classes and sports being the most prominent. In spite of their “shortened” school year, Japan consistently ranks higher than the United State in academic achievement.

In fact, the United States ranks #12 at 4^th grade, #28 at 8^th grade and #19 at 12^th grade. The increase between 8^th and 12^th grades has more to do with our drop-out rate than with increases in academic achievement. Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong beat us in 4^th and 8^th grade. Most of Europe outranks us in all grades.

So, when we most desperately need to improve education so that our children can compete in the global economy, we are shortening the school week and limping along without a national curriculum and only minimal national standards.

But, lastly, let’s look at the economic consequences of this switch to four-day school weeks.  Parents will have to arrange an extra day of day care, increasing their costs.  That is, if they can find day care.  Most day care facilities operate at license maximum as it is.  While someone will be making money off the babysitting, it is just as likely that the babysitting will fall to older siblings, increasing potential for accidents in the home and all the dangers to latchkey children.  Those school bus drivers and support staff are losing income, reducing consumer purchasing in those communities.   So, to save $50,000 the town of Irene will suffer an economic shrinkage and place possibly hundreds of children in jeopardy every Friday.  They alternative to not being able to find day care or leave children at home alone would be for a parent to cut their work hours.  Great trade off. 

Related articles

• South Dakota School Districts Eliminate Friday Classes To Save Money (huffingtonpost.com)
• The high cost of “austerity.” (thenewquakeragitator.wordpress.com)
• South Dakota schools cut costs with 4-day week (msnbc.msn.com)
• South Dakota schools cut costs with 4-day week (sfgate.com)

Mitt Romney, by Donkey Hotey on Flikr

Poor Mitt Romney. He filed his financial disclosure this week and the news is so bad. After pouring millions of his own money into the 2008 presidential primary race, and with the effects of the lingering bad economy, Romney lost 8% of his wealth between 2007 and 2010. He’s now only worth $264 million. That’s not even spitting distance of the Forbes 400 whose entry level is now $1 billion in personal wealth/assets.

Poor Mitt Romney. Like he keeps saying, he’s just an unemployed slob like the rest of us.

The New Yorker magazine’s George Packer, in the July 25 issue, was kind enough to provide us with a profile of a real unemployed slob just for comparison…..

Danny Hartzell was laid off from a packaging plant in 2008, losing not just his job and wages, but his health insurance as well. The only job he could get was as a part-time shelf stocker at a Target store for $8.50 an hour with no benefits. His daughter was diagnosed with bone cancer. His hours at the Target store were slowly reduced to just 5 hours a week. In April, he was fired. He cannot file for new benefits for losing his Target job because of a new law supported and signed by Republican Governor Rick Scott. The Hartzells lost their home and were living in a roach-infested apartment. Florida roaches are not a sign of filth, even the cleanest homes have them, and they are not your tiny Northern roaches. They don’t even call them roaches in Florida. They are Palmetto bugs and average over an inch in length. Most are the size of peach pits.

The Hartzell’s only income right now is the emergency Supplemental Security Income and food stamps, two of those “entitlement” programs Republicans like Romney want to terminate. Paul Ryan’s “budget” would force a 50% cut in those two programs.  Mr. Hartzell’s daughter was treated in a charity hospital because even Medicaid doesn’t cover all the costs of cancer treatment for a child. A small saving grace was the fact that his teenaged son was healthy.

 On July 1, the Hartzell family packed what few possessions they have left into a rental truck and, with a whopping $29 to their names, drove from Tampa to Northern Georgia, where an old acquaintance had offered them shelter – in an area with no jobs and fewer prospects. I would try to connect him with a friend of ours there, but Sam’s house painting business is on the verge of bankruptcy. Seems people aren’t getting their houses painted these days.

The official unemployment rate is 9.2%. The actual rate is closer to 20%. Men like Danny Hartzell aren’t in the official number, in part because they can’t collect unemployment and the official unemployment rate is determined by phone surveys, not physical counts.

The day Mitt Romney understands the difference between him and Danny Hartzell, he will understand why his jokes about being unemployed fall so very flat. He and his beautiful family have never had to brush dozens of Palmetto bugs off their possessions before loading them into a truck to move from one jobless place to another. Romney and other Republicans could probably sit through ten showings of The Grapes of Wrath and not understand that what happened then is happening now – despairing, desperate families taking to the road in search of anything that resembles employment. No, the Republican ideology says that 20% of us are choosing to not have jobs, and millions more are just welfare-collecting leeches. They don’t support jobs programs because they believe we don’t want the dignity and self-esteem of earning paychecks.

Mitt Romney made his millions by buying up companies and gutting them – personally being responsible for the lay-offs of thousands of men and women. Like the rest of the Republican field, he is completely clueless about the realities of this nation at this time.

Related articles

• Mitt Romney Says ‘Corporations are People’, Gets Heckled at Iowa State Fair: VIDEO (towleroad.com)
• New Balance Distances Itself from $500K Donation by Chairman James Davis to Anti-Gay PAC Backing Mitt Romney (towleroad.com)
• Mitt Romney Worth $190 Million, Maybe $250 Million, He’s Not Really Sure (inquisitr.com)
• George Packer: The debt-ceiling fight continues. (newyorker.com)
• Politicians Not Connected With Reality…”Empty Wallets” (educationclearinghouse.wordpress.com)

Image via Wikipedia

08/09/11 by LGR World News Staff

Australia’s first openly gay federal cabinet member, Finance Minister Penny Wong, has announced that she and her partner are expecting a baby.

According to the Australian Associated Press, Wong released a statement on Tuesday revealing her long-term partner Sophie Allouache is expecting.

“Like any expecting parents, the prospect of welcoming this child into our lives fills us both with joy,” she said.

“We are extremely grateful to our IVF service and staff, and to our donor, for giving us the opportunity to raise a child together.

Wong added she had gone public with the pregnancy because  “as we understand there may be public interest due to my position.”

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who has in the past said she believes that marriage should be limited to unions between men and women only and who has bucked her own Labour party to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage in Australia, nevertheless, congratulated the Wong and her partner.

“I’m very pleased for Penny and her partner Sophie as they look forward to a new baby and the next phase of their lives,” Gillard told reporters in Canberra.

However, when was pressed on whether it bothered her that the child would have parents who could not marry under Australian law Gillard said, “Clearly there are strong views about same-sex marriage in the community, and we’ll have a debate at national conference about those strongly held views. I’ve made my views clear”.

Pressure has been building on Gillard, who is unmarried, but lives with her male partner in the prime minister’s official residence in Canberra, to get in step with many in her party who want the law changed.

A policy change will be voted on at the Labour Party’s annual national conference in December.

Related articles

• IVF baby joy for Penny Wong (heraldsun.com.au)
• Wong pregnancy sparks gay marriage debate (news.theage.com.au)
• Senator’s joy and nerves on baby role (theage.com.au)

Florida's capital, Tallahassee

We have a crisis in the Federal judiciary because we have a shortage of judges. President Obama stopped nominating judges because every one he nominated was filibustered by the Republicans ain the Senate. When it became clear they were not going to all any new judges, there wasn’t any point in continuing the vetting and nominating process. We went through this before, when Bill Clinton was President. The backlog of nominations was so bad that when the Democrats regained control of the Senate, they had to fast track nominations like a runaway freight train.

It’s pointless to expect that the Republicans will suddenly acquire a sense of responsibility about the judgeships, not with the number of Federal lawsuits being filed over the laws, bills, referendums and amendments being put out by the Republican-controlled states. The latest one is in Florida.

The Florida Education Association and other plaintiffs, including groups representing mainstream churches, have filed suit to prevent a state constitutional amendment that would repeal the state ban on using public money to aid churches and religious organizations.

The basis of the lawsuit is the claim that repealing the existing law would expand the voucher system so that tax payers were paying for children to attend religious academies and taxpayer money would be used for things like the de-gaying “therapy” of the Bachmann’s clinic, which they deny they provided and other programs that are entirely religion-based. The present law says that money can go to faith-based facilities as long as they don’t use their facilities to promote their religious beliefs.

The repeal would serve just one purpose – to turn taxpayer-funded facilities into places preaching evangelical Christianity. The funny part is that the state legislature failed to recognize is that the repeal would also allow for funding of non-Christian religious schools, such as those Muslim madrassas they are so hysterical about. It’s called the “law of unintended consequences.”

Don’t you just love it when fanatics fail to think things through?

Related articles

• Florida Teachers Union Sues State Over ‘Religious Freedom’ Amendment (huffingtonpost.com)
• TN Groups File Lawsuit Against Anti-Gay Law (topix.net)

7/7/2011

Most people know how controversial the world of child beauty contests can be.  The Learning Channel‘s Toddlers and Tiaras reveals to the world what parents will do to help their child succeed in the ruthless world of beauty and competition.  Sometimes the show is extremely hard to watch, because some of the things the parents put their children through are harsh and cruel.  However, most episodes show how dedicated the children really are when it comes to competitions like this.  Some of them actually love the spot light, and the work, including a 7 year old boy who loves to compete up on stage with the girls.

Last night, on the premier of the latest episode, the show introduced self-described “diva” Brock Ritter.  According to his mother, Tori Ritter, he became interested in pageants at the age of 2, and when expressing his dream at the age of 5 was bullied by fellow students.

“We dealt with it in kindergarten,” Tori explains during an interview on E!. “A couple of boys in his class said dancing was a girls thing. It took the teacher telling them that football players take ballet for them to understand.”

During the E! interview Tori talked about her son very proudly.

“He loves school, he loves to read,” She said.  She also explained that he is currently in a “hardcore” advanced reading program that has him reading way beyond his age group.

He is also a “tap dancing machine,” she explained, “I asked him ‘What kind of dance do you want to do?’ and he said tap. He’s been dancing for six years now.”

As anyone would ask, where is the father in all of this, and how does he feel about it?  Well according to Tori, Dad is the one mixing and cutting all the music Brock dances to, and his routines are a family affair.  “We don’t work with a coach, we play around at home.”  She said.

Brock has already become a pro at dance and gymnastics, and has earned a half dozen first-place trophies.  He also dreams of performing on stage on Broadway one day.  He even makes up his own routines and songs at home according to Tori.

“He’s not your typical kid.”  She explained.

7/4/2011

Almost everyone remembers watching the animated show Smurfs on NBC when they were little.  Those little blue people fascinated the child’s mind with life lessons and quirky humor for many years before being taken off air in December of 1989.  The show aired an amazing 256 episodes with a total of 421 stories.  Released on the big screen on July 29th 2011 Papa Smurf, Smurfette, and the whole gang returned for a 3D extravaganza staring vocal talents such as Kenan Thompson (Saturday Night Live, Kenan & Kel), Katy Perry, Paul Reubens (Peewee’s Playhouse), Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother), and many more.

The Smurfs producers went way out of the way to promote the film giving a new definition to the phrase “Smurf Fever.”  Juzcar, a remote village in southern Spain, which sits in the Genal Valley and is less than 2 miles wide, allowed Sony Pictures to paint it blue agreeing to host the film’s world premier on June 16th.

According to The Daily Telegraph, the project took 12 local painters who used up 4,000 liters of blue paint causing Juzcar to look like a giant blue dot in the midst of beautiful mountains and forests.  The town has already had an incredible increase in tourism.

Sony has agreed to restore the buildings to their original colors, however, it has been said that the town is considering leaving them all blue.  Whoever said there’s no such thing as a Smurf Village needs to recheck their information.

7/2/2011

Almost a week ago a historic vote allowed New York to legalize same-sex marriages, making New York the sixth, and by far the most populous, state to do so.  Massachusetts led the way, by court order, in 2004, and many other states are now considering the decision.  There has been a fight for world wide equality for so many years it’s hard to count, but it’s finally on the horizon and the GLBT community can finally start jumping for joy.

Neil Patrick Harris has decided to finally tie the knot, with long time partner David Burtka, after the New York vote was official.  The “How I Met Your Mother” star was one of the uncountable amount of people celebrating on June 24th when the news of the same-sex marriage bill passing was announced.  Also the child star of “Dougie Howser”, Harris couldn’t be any happier.

“It passed!!” He tweeted on June 24th. “Marriage equality in NY!! Yes!! Progress!!”

The couple, unknown to the public ear, has actually been engaged for quite some time now, even a little before he announced to the public that he was gay in late 2006.

“David and I did propose to each other, but over five years ago!” He tweeted last weekend in response to many questions. “We’ve been wearing engagement rings for ages, waiting for an available date.”

Harris and Burtka have been together as a couple for many years.  They are proud parents of 8 month old twins, via surrogate, and are currently planning their wedding.  However, no official date has been set yet.

6/30/2011

I remember when I was young, going to piano classes that my mom would pay for, and enjoying it so much.  The feel of the keys beneath my fingers and the harmonious sound of the notes that filled the room as I practiced.  My instructor always told me I was a really fast learner, and playing the piano quickly became a favorite pastime of mine.  Throughout the years I have drifted away from playing, however the memories still rest deep in my mind of those wonderful days sitting in front of the worlds most beautiful instrument.

From Beethoven to Fiona Apple, many people, gay and straight, have embraced the beauty of the piano’s sound.  Thanks to British artist Luke Jerram thousands of people in NYC can join the musicians around the world by sitting at a piano and performing for the public for free.

Jerram, sponsored in New York by the non-profit arts group “Sing for Hope,” has placed 88 decorated pianos around NYC for public display and use.  Debuting in 2008, the artist’s musical project has been touring the world ever since.  The decorated street pianos have been seen, so far, in eight cities around the world, with more to come.

What is awesome about this display is that all 88 pianos have been decorated differently by well known, and not so well known, visual artists.  There are pink pianos, rainbow pianos, spatter painted pianos, abstract pianos, flower power pianos, and many more.

“A blank slate for everyone’s creativity” is what Jarram is calling his piano installments.  Which is a very true statement.  Each host city the project hits is given brand new pianos that are painted, and designed, by local students and artists, and then placed randomly around the city.  After the instillation is shut down, the pianos are donated to schools and community centers so the music never stops.

People throughout NYC were skeptical about playing the pianos at first, but not for long.  Soon enough sounds of Beethoven, Billy Joel, Bach, Elton John, Mozart, Alicia Keys, and many more pianists started to flow through the summer air through strange fingers.  These sounds will probably never leave.

The piano instillation will soon be seen in other cities such as Cincinnati, San Jose, and Grand Rapids later this year.  The NYC instillation can  be seen, and played, through July 5th.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Sandra Lee at premiere of "Julie & Julia" (photo by New York Post)

It’s one of those idiot arguments against same-sex marriage – it will somehow destroy straight marriages. To prove this point, the anti-gay lobby uses a study called Marriage in Scandinavia to show how straight marriage has declined – since the 1970′s in countries that didn’t have same-sex unions of any kind. It’s like their favorite studies on same-sex parenting that don’t involve the study of any same-sex parents. But the passage of the same-sex marriage law in New York brings up the issue of the state of straight marriage in the time of same-sex marriage again.

Since January, New York State has had an unusual situation with its governor. Andrew Cuomo was married for thirteen years to Kerry Kennedy, daughter of the late Robert F. and Ethel Kennedy. They had three children and were divorced in 2005. In and of itself, that’s not completely unheard of. Mitch Daniels and his wife were divorced and remarried during his political career. But all through the public appearances Cuomo has made as the new governor, there has been a woman at his side – the Food Network star Sandra Lee. New Yorkers, accepting people that they are, haven’t said much about having a mistress as their shadow First Lady.

Still, Cuomo’s enthusiastic support of same-sex marriage and his speeches praising the new law in the past three days raises an interesting question. If marriage is good enough for same sex couples, when will it be good enough for the Governor?

Related articles

• In NY, gay marriage law brings wedding plans (miamiherald.typepad.com)
• Gay marriage fans talk of Cuomo presidential bid (miamiherald.typepad.com)
• Quote Of The Day – David Frum (joemygod.blogspot.com)

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June 11, 2011

By: Jamie Clark

People usually surround themselves with others that have identical morals, values and goals whether it be as friends or colleagues. That is why I feel obligated to share a few grim reminders here, just in case anyone has missed the connections between Uganda and Minnesota.
Yesterday, the Minnesota Independent posted an article which included a picture of Bradlee “kill the gays” Dean with Minnesota Family Council President, Tom Prichard. This sounds innocent enough (if that’s even possible) until, of course, you look at the rest of their circle of friends. Dean is also pals with Bryan Fischer from the American Family Association, who has also been a guest on Dean’s radio talk shows. In one such interview, he promotes a book called “The Pink Swastika,” which is really nothing more than hate propaganda attempting to once again demonize homosexuals. He promotes it because he is friends with the author, Scott Lively.
In 2009, Lively and two associates traveled to Uganda to talk about what he calls “the gay agenda” to basically destroy everything we touch. This country already condemned homosexuality, but now they were being told that their families and even their health, would be threatened as long as gays existed in their society. Easily influenced by a man who they saw as a honest American minister, the people demanded action. Homosexuals in Uganda insist it was the message brought by Lively and his pals that caused panic to turn into what we refer to as  the Uganda “kill the gays” Bill. Written by Ugandan Parliament member David Bahati, this bill called for the execution of homosexuals not willing to endure so called  “ex-gay therapy.”
I know that this may seem like nothing more than a series of coincidental acquaintances, that is until you throw the Minnesota Family Council and Tom Prichard into the mix.
Last month, the MFC had an article on it’s site that accused homosexuals of “aberrant behavior such as those who commit incest, adultery, bestiality or pedophilia ” and added that we “ingest urine and feces.” Most American’s know these accusations are ridiculous and such acts are not due to homosexuality. The  MFC quickly deleted the article, but Prichard still defended the sentiments afterward. Some of these words have been used before in recent history, by none other than Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, who is also a top “kill the gays” activist in that country. No wonder  the MFC was so quick to hit the delete button.
I know this is the United States, and there are laws that protect homosexuals from being rounded up for execution. We need to keep in mind however, that not only do all these guys have a hateful bond, a few of them also have direct ties to political figures such as Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. The link between them and Bradlee Dean is more than obvious after his “prayer” on the MN Legislative floor, and both of them have even been on  Bryan Fischer’s radio talk show. I find it very unsettling that these members of our political parties are spending time with people such as Dean and Fischer, both of whom think homosexuals are monsters that need to eliminated for society to be pure. What exactly is the big picture in all of this?
I feel that these hate groups and individuals think Minnesotan’s are simple minded and closed off from the world. Why else would they not even bother to pretend that they don’t run in the same circles? Why did the MFC use language on their website reminiscent of things used to mobilize hate in Uganda?  Did they want to see if Minnesotan’s would react in the same way Ugandans did, or do they just think that Ssempa is a great role model to base their “Christian“ ministries on? I can’t help but worry about what could happen if anyone in this circle of hate were to hold a major office such as President, especially now that we are seeing a major push across the country for religious domination of our rights. Writing discrimination into a document meant to protect citizens can open doors to laws and dangers we never thought would be possible here.

Lively insists the Ugandan’s took his message much further than he ever intended. Some people think however, that Uganda was a test, a sort of warped experiment on human nature.  Maybe, maybe not-  I‘m beginning to think anything could be possible. Either way the fact remains that these people definitely know each other in one way or another, and like I said, we do seek friends that share our morals, values and goals.

Related articles

• The Bachmann and Friends Death Squad (lezgetreal.com)
• Alert: Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill is Getting its Hearing Today (lezgetreal.com)
• Uganda – Watch Martin Ssempa Explain Homosexuality as TWO Calls for Investigation (lezgetreal.com)

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June 9, 2011

By: Jamie Clark

St. Paul/Minneapolis Archbishop, John Nienstedt defends the Minnesota Catholic Conference decision to become involved in the Minnesota (un)Constitutional Marriage Amendment.  According to the Minnesota Independent, he used the old discredited claim that kids need a mom and a dad, adding that this measure is “not anti-gay, mean spirited or prejudicial,” even though it will ban Minnesota’s LGBT community from a fundamental right allowed to heterosexual citizens. This is not the first time that the St. Paul/Minneapolis Archdiocese has been in the Minnesota news this week.
On Tuesday, a federal lawsuit was filed in MN by a man alleging that former St. John’s Abbey Abbot Timothy Kelly (deceased) abused him when he was an altar boy in New York at St. Anselm’s Church between 1966-67. The man decided to come forward when he learned of his abusers death.  Kelly even  co-founded the “Interfaith Sexual Trauma Institute” (no longer operating) at St. John’s Abbey in 1993, which was created to deal with sex offenders in the Catholic Church. I can understand why St. John’s would decide it needed to step up on this issue, after all, it is known as  dumping grounds for “holy” sex offender’s .
BehindthePineCurtain.com, is a site dedicated to “more than 300 victims of sexual abuse and misconduct by monastic and other personnel” in Minnesota. St. John’s itself has faced over fifty allegations, and ten of the accused were allowed to stay under “restrictions.” I would like someone to explain exactly what a “restricted sex offender” is, because I thought children were the ones we were suppose to protect, not their abusers.

The Abbey “Policy on Sexual Abuse and Sexual Exploitation” states, “Monks of Saint John’s Abbey are vowed to a celibate way of life.” A vow is nothing more than a promise and I do not feel like a promise to not molest children should even be considered, no matter who you are. Under “Intervention with the Accused Monk” this policy states that “if a psychological evaluation recommends professional treatment” and the monk receives said treatment, he will be allowed to “live at the monastery” where they will “establish appropriate limitations.” When they say “professional treatment” do they mean the Minnesota Sex Offender Program, because I can not imagine that the church is capable of dealing with the rehabilitation of sex offenders. Honestly, the state provided rehabilitation doesn’t seem to work either, according to a November 2009 Minnesota Independent article titled “MN Sex Offender Program costs $70 million a year but rehabilitates no one.” Either way it seems, these “holy” sex offenders shouldn’t have been allowed to return to any position in the Catholic Church.
Where is the justification in this? I thought sex offenders in Minnesota were not allowed near any environment where children may be present? Why are these pedophiles so different? I know that the Catholic Church has used all of this to further stigmatize homosexuals, most specifically gay men, because most allegations involved men and young boys. I need to point out that the abuse reported is said to have happened years ago, in a day when girls were nearly nonexistent in the lives of the accused. It has nothing to do with homosexuality, and a lot to do with opportunity. Once you look at child molesters in other denominations, the number of female victims greatly increases.
The days of using the LGBT community for a scapegoat for their crimes are over, so now they have decided to attack our families by supporting what I think has been most appropriately referred to by MN DFL members as the “Bradlee Dean Amendment.” How does Archbishop Nienstedt know what is best for anyone else’s family? And why is he involving Catholic Churches across Minnesota in his agenda to help write discrimination into our state Constitution? If he wants to participate, maybe he should volunteer his personal time outside of the Church instead of labeling every Minnesota Catholic as someone who does not believe in equal rights. Though, I think an even better idea would be for him to concentrate less time on ruining the lives of kids with same sex parents, and more on protecting  children in the church that allows sex offenders to stick around on “sex offender restrictions.”

Related articles

• Nine victims of clergy abuse settle with St. John’s Abbey (reuters.com)
• NY man sues Minn. monastery, alleging clergy abuse (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

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June 8, 2011

By:Jamie Clark

Target Corp. held its annual shareholders meeting today and there was some explaining to do on their part. Last year, after they  contributed $150,000 to MN Forward, a group that was backing the anti-gay Tom Emmer for Governor of Minnesota, the backlash was heard acorss the country. There was the  boycott, decrease in stock, thousands of emails, a lot of disappointed LGBT Target employees, and angry stockholders want to be sure it doesn’t happen again. Lady Gaga lit a fire under them also by revoking the exclusive privileges they had for the special edition of her new album, Born This Way, which by the way has  sold 2 million copies since it’s May 23 release.  The message that Target was given did not go unnoticed by other businesses and corporations across the country. For example, take the spankings the NBA has been giving players for using anti-gay slurs.

Here in Minnesota, newspapers  have either directly spoken out against the Amendment or they have stated there are much better things to worry about besides discriminating against minorities.  I’m not saying some newspapers either, I’m saying as of last month, not a single editorial board in any newspaper in this state had backed the MN Marriage Amendment (“Bradlee Dean Amendment”). Speaking of Dean, he has not dodged the bullet on the backlash lately either. Salem Communications stepped up  and told Bradlee Dean to take a hike, along with his “Sons of Liberty” radio talk show. Minnesota WalMarts also took a stand against Dean,  a move that I am still shocked over, and told him he can no longer hold fundraisers in their parking lots. Salem Communications, which is a Christian Broadcaster here, was  disgusted by his  extremist rants and wanted nothing to do with it. WalMart spokeswoman Ashlie Hardie stated that Dean” falsified documents” by registering his kill the gays ministry under a fake name, to gain permission to solicit outside their stores. The smack down against hate in Minnesota is well underway.

Target has stated that it will not be getting involved in the fight for human rights in Minnesota, and they now have new policies in place to prevent such a donation “mishap”  from happening again. I guess only time will tell.

Related articles

• Bradlee Dean’s “Moral” Obligation To Execute Gays In the Name of Jesus (lezgetreal.com)
• Target CEO: Company Will Be Neutral on Marriage Vote (advocate.com)
• MINNESOTA: Anti-Gay Preacher Told To Stop Raising Money At Walmart (joemygod.blogspot.com)

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June 7, 2011

By: Jamie Clark
Right now, I can’t help but wonder why the Minnesota Republican Party members who are connected to Bradlee Dean didn’t remember to pay him to keep his mouth shut. I am thankful however, that they didn’t, because he has managed to open the eyes of many people who thought he was nothing more than a harmless, arrogant threat. Turns out, Minnesota has a political mafia on our hands.

Today, the Minnesota Independent posted an article titled, “Bradlee Dean takes credit for passing anti-gay marriage amendment.” The harbinger of death (aka Dean), wrote on his June 4th blog that he believes he has “done his duty.”  He continued by saying, “The people of the great state of Minnesota now have the power to vote.” I find this quite telling since he has direct ties to  Minnesota Republican Party members who helped push the overthrow of our state Constitution, including Michele Bachmann, who has been fighting for years to let people vote on the human rights of others. Also, lets not forget Tom Emmer and the Target boycott that brought demonstrations outside their stores due to their major contribution to his campaigns, which include anti-gay proposals.  Emmer and Dean run in the same circle, which apparently has meetings (“prayers”) right in front of everyone, and so far, the joke has been on us for not seeing all of this. This inside joke was not funny and, due to Bradlee Dean and his big mouth, we are in on it now too.

Dean thinks that homosexuals “engage in illegal activities” that he calls “immoral,”  and due to his “christian” beliefs, he finds that it is “moral” to imprison or execute them. He also uses the youth involved in his “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide” ministries to go out and collect money for what he calls “suicide prevention,” when really he is stealing from uninformed citizens looking to help a good cause. Of course, Dean defends this because he apparently feels that homosexuality  will lead to suicide, never mind the fact that gay kids (and adults) are killing themselves due to people like him, not homosexuality.  Dean will be bringing his “suicide prevention” team to the Minnesota State Fair this summer to collect more money for his kill the gays ministry. I would like to urge you to contact them and inform them that he is taking money from people under false pretenses, which actually is an illegal activity.

I need to know that I am painting a clear enough picture for everyone to see just how involved the man that wants to kill homosexuals is with the Minnesota Marriage (un)Constitutional Amendment. Not only is he backed by several Republican Party members, many in the MN DFL have even referred to this Amendment as the “Bradlee Dean Amendment.“ Senate District 44 DFLers took to Twitter to share their sentiments about the situation. They tweeted “MNGOP knows they are on the wrong side of history by passing the Bradlee Dean Amendment. It WILL be defeated in 2012.” Right here on the Iron Range of Minnesota, DFL-Hibbing Representative Carly Melin had tweeted “Bradlee Dean Amendment placed on the calendar this evening.” How’s that for a crystal clear picture?

I really do not enjoy giving a false prophet like Bradlee Dean attention, he has already had too much. The problem is that the focus has been merely on the horrible things he says and not the people that he has supporting him, and what is really going on with the hijacking of our state Constitution. Even if you disagree with same sex marriage and homosexuality, do you really want us dead? Do you really want to give these people the chance to write discrimination into the document that protects us all? I think decent people and good Christians will need to think about  their votes very carefully. This is not a decision to take lightly because, in the end, the lives of people could be at stake, and it‘s hard to think otherwise anymore. This Amendment is just the beginning of something that may be very hazardous to the well being of your neighbors. Changing a Constitution to discriminate against a minority due to your personal feelings is not only wrong, but it is dangerous. He is the stunning example of the term “sociopath.”
“Sociopath- (noun)-a person, as a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.” – This word is also used to describe Charles Manson, who was another  false prophet. He convinced his  followers that he was Jesus reincarnated and was able to get them to murder innocent people based on his word. People are easily brainwashed, which makes the situation in Minnesota even more urgent. Yes, Bachmann, Dean and the other hijackers of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, have been very busy here. Michele is “talking to God” and Dean wants to kill homosexuals in the name of Jesus, but to keep the blood off their hands, the GOP is putting it on the hands of Minnesota voters.

Bradlee Dean makes a mockery out of Christianity, which is based on the morals and teachings of Jesus Christ.  He even states in the introduction to “My War,” that the “ultimate message of My War is Jesus Christ” adding that the so called homosexual “illegal agenda” is “aimed at demoralizing children.“ Don’t forget that this is the same guy using kids to steal money from people, while he points the finger elsewhere when child corruption is sitting on his shoulders.  It sounds like he feels that he is obligated, in the name of Jesus, to kill gay people to make sure they get into Heaven. Good, true Christians should be angry that this man is spitting on the sacrifice Jesus made that day on the cross. Right now, I am asking myself ‘who would Jesus kill?’

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”-Luke 23:34

Related articles

• The GOP’s “How To Manipulate A Nation Like the Third Reich” Handbook (lezgetreal.com)
• The Bachmann and Friends Death Squad (lezgetreal.com)
• MN Marriage Ban In Jeopardy After Anti-Gay Prayer By Bradlee Dean (joemygod.blogspot.com)

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June 7, 2011

By: Jamie Clark

Bradlee Dean is often called an attention seeker with a love of controversy. I can agree but, when you look between the lines he is more like a harbinger of death and destruction, set loose on Minnesota with the full support of Michele Bachmann and friends. The war on America runs deeper than some people take the time to realize.

Dean is the founder of “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide” (YCRBYCH) ministries. Honestly the name is perfect in a way, especially since he thinks homosexuals should be imprisoned or even executed. There is no escaping the fact that he could  be the doppelganger of Fred Phelps, at least that’s how crazy he sounds. The biggest difference is the fact that quite possibly all of America despises Phelps, but a lot of  people actually buy into Dean’s garbage. The fact that the original Fred rants about God “hating” America so much that he is even thankful for dead soldiers, is enough to anger pretty much anyone because only a monster would do that. Dean’s trick is that he claims to be a person of God trying to save the United States from the evil that he calls homosexuality. He doesn’t push the line that Phelps does so people seem to think he is more credible, even though he thinks gays and lesbians need to be wiped out.

Last month Minnesota was in the spotlight after the Republican majority had Dean deliver an opening prayer at a state legislative session. Apparently they thought it was okay to have the kill the gays guy do this, otherwise they wouldn’t have asked him to come. There was no turning back once he gave his discriminatory prayer, no matter how much they tried to act like they felt guilty. Michele Bachmann however, must love this guy because she prays for him, helps fund his programs and even  recommends his ministry,  according to the YCRBYCH website.

Dean is also friends with fellow gay hater Bryan Fischer, who supports  claims that Hitler was a homosexual, therefore the the slaughter of millions of innocent people was the fault of gay people. Fischer gets this disgusting, ungrounded sentiment from another leader in the full out assault on homosexuals from a man named Scott Lively. I get a very unsettled feeling in my soul when I know that a man who has ties to the “Uganda Kill the Gays” bill, which calls for the imprisonment or execution of homosexuals in that country, has connections like this with people like Dean.

I can almost see Minnesota in the year 2014 if Bachmann’s evil scheme to sabotage the state Constitution works. Homosexuals would be running with no where to hide, while Bradllee Dean and his brothers in arms gather us up for our eradication. I would hope the federal government would step in, but one can not be sure of even that, especially if a GOP candidate takes the presidency. I wonder  if it would be cheaper to get rid of us here, or to ship us to Uganda and let them deal with us?

I hope I don’t regret putting that question here.  You never know when Michele or Dean might be taking notes to share at their next tea party with the boys.

Related articles

• The GOP’s “How To Manipulate A Nation Like the Third Reich” Handbook (lezgetreal.com)
• Radio talker Bradlee Dean accuses Keith Ellison (D-MN) of trying to overthrow the US Constitution and replace it with Shari’a law. (barenakedislam.wordpress.com)
• Watch: Anti-Gay Minister Sneaks In Jesus References During Non-denominational Prayer AT Minn. House, Slams Obama (towleroad.com)

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June 5, 2011
By: Jamie Clark
Minnesota-What can two LGBT teens do when they are bullied by an entire school district that has a “don’t say gay” policy?Personally,  I suggest following the example of Desiree Shelton and Sarah Lindstrom who fought back by saying “gay” in Minnesota’s most intolerant school district.

Desiree and Sarah knew LGBT students needed their help if they were going to survive in the Anoka-Hennepin school district long enough to make it to graduation. Kids were being bullied to death  not only by other students, but also by an intolerant school district that believes ‘don’t say gay’ policies are a safe alternative to gay/straight alliances. Students were committing suicide after being endlessly bullied by peers who had spent their school years being taught that being gay is so wrong that it’s an unmentionable word. It was a tragic case of bullies creating bullies to be sent out into the world to spread intolerance and discrimination, and the outcome was heartbreaking.

Nine students killed themselves, seven within a year, in this district after being horribly bullied, four were openly gay. Families were destroyed and it was still not enough to get these school officials to see the dangers in silenced children. They simply refused to address anti-gay sentiments in their schools. Things were not improving either as the school district not only denied any responsibility in anything that transpired but they also insisted no bullying had occurred to begin with. A brave young man named Jacob Tighe  stood up at the December 2010 school board meeting to share his own experience of being bullied for his perceived sexual orientation.  He told them he had also watched a personal  friend be tormented for who she was until she took her own life only to have her bullies say she “deserved to die.” Jacob finished by stating,” You tell us to report things, but when people come forward, like some have done in this very boardroom, you say that what we say isn’t true.” He  asked the school board “Why should kids come forward if you aren’t going to believe them?” This young ally’s words couldn’t get through to them, and neither could the words Tammy Aaberg, whose son hanged himself in his closet after being endlessly harassed for being gay. The school board felt a full assault on the rights of students was better than any idea that outraged parents or distraught teens could come up with to solve the problem.

The Anoka Hennepin school district decided the best way to combat LGBT student suicide was by letting Barb Anderson, who represents The Minnesota Family Council and the Parents Action League, push her anti LGBT fears even deeper into their already stained reputation. Barb Anderson bragged that her work with these organizations  had kept the “real” threat out of the schools, and according to her the real danger is LGBT advocacy groups that promote tolerance and distribute school saftey materials that help combat gay youth bullying. Anderson said that these groups are the ones that caused the bullying in the first place because they were basically helping kids feel secure enough to come out of the closet. She specifically spoke against GLSEN (Gay Straight Lesbian Education Network) by calling them the “driving force, really the clearing house for all of the homosexual propaganda” and stated that they are a “real dangerous organization” comparable to a “child corruption organization.”

By January of this year, all of this intolerance being thrown around  was exactly why Desiree and Sarah realized something needed to be done to reach out to kids whose lives were suddenly thrown into the spot light. They felt they needed to know that their peers would give them support and a voice. The teens ran, and were elected by the student body to walk together as an “out” couple for the Champlin Park High School Snow Days coronation ceremony, which is an annual event that allows the students to elect who enters the Ball together. The school district retaliated and attempted to silence these young ladies too, by changing the student election policy after the fact and claiming it was against the rules. They thought they were pretty smart.  Desiree and Sarah proved that they were smarter by getting ahold of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the  National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR). These advocate groups informed the school district that not only were they violating the First and Fourteenth Amendment Rights of the newly elected couple, they were also violating the Minnesota Human Rights Act. They warned school officials that the girls either got their rightful place next to their peers as a couple, or they would ask a judge his opinion. Before the end of the month the school district agreed to let the LGBT couple enter together in procession with their classmates in front of an audience of peers and family, making them the first LGBT couple to ever  beat the Anoka Hennepin school district “don’t say gay” policy.

The “silencers of hate” were invited to  be special guests at the NCLS 34th Anniversary Celebration this May where they were referred to as “champions in the movement for equality and justice.” Desiree has said that they knew they had to stand up “for the kids that are closeted, the ones that are scared or feel worthless because of harassment or torment.”

The Minnesota Family Council and the Anoka Hennepin school district obviously had no idea who they were up against when they denied these girls their rights. They obviously thought Desiree and Sarah could be bullied into silence through intolerance but didn’t take into account that they were up against  two out and proud MN LGBT teens helping the silenced speak.

Remember, Silence is Acceptance when the able say nothing.

Related articles

• Minnesota Mom vs School District of Death (lezgetreal.com)
• Minnesota Family Council and NOM Promote Anti-Gay Bullying (lezgetreal.com)
• NCLR Speaks on Video about their Work Against Bullying in Minnesota (lezgetreal.com)

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June 4, 2011

By: Jamie Clark

Michele Bachmann was in Washington D.C. yesterday speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. She applauded Minnesota lawmakers for “carrying the torch” of discrimination, and said “This is the time to outlaw gay marriage” and called on other states to begin the overthrow of their Constitutions. This, of course, from the woman that claims “God” is speaking to her. In March of 2004, when speaking about the possible chance to hijack the Constitution to permanently ban gay marriage, she even said that it would be an “awesome day” to have the opportunity to “beseech the Lord.”

Maybe, I should not be so hard on Michelle, after all, it’s not like she is the only person in politics who has had one on one talks with the Big Guy. One man in particular comes to mind. Here are a couple of his quotes.

“Who say I am not under the special protection of God?” and “Hence today, I believe that I am acting in accordance with the Will of the Almighty Creator.”
No, those are not the words of a saint or holy prophet, quite the opposite actually. These are both quotes from the mass murderer, Adolf Hitler (A.H.).  Now, I’m not saying that Bachmann is a reincarnation of pure evil, but honestly,  she does sounds a little like him, leaving me to wonder where her true inspiration comes from. As I have researched this thought more, I can’t help but feel perhaps she has a “this is how to brainwash in the Third Reich way” handbook and she has made copies that she sent out to her buddies. After all, you can’t overthrow freedom all by your lonesome. That kind of tactical take over needs reinforcements.

One of Bachmann’s go to guys is Bradlee “Fred Phelps is my hero” Dean, the man responsible for the “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide” anti-gay ministry. Right now Dean is using young members of his organization to go in the community and ask unknowing citizens for donations to assist in suicide prevention.  People think this is a great cause and don’t mind giving a few bucks, not realizing they are helping fund an anti-gay hate group. This guy is bad enough that even Wal-Mart no longer wants him gracing their parking lots with his hate agenda.  Bachmann however,  fully supports Dean’s dangerous ministry. After he did the now notorious opening prayer on the Minnesota Legislature floor, there were complaints from all over the state. Pathetically, Michelle  feels that Dean is an upstanding citizen, so much so, in fact, that not only does she contribute funds to his campaign of hate, she also offered some kind words to those that oppose him and his beliefs. She said, “This ministry ‘You Can Run But You Can’t Hide,’ they are not sidetracked, they are on course. They’re way on course, because they get it. They get what this is all about.” ……Wait a minute, hold that thought.

Bradlee Dean is the “Christian” that believes homosexuality should be punishable by death  in this country. A year ago Dean said the following  “Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America,” Dean said on YCR’s May 15 radio show on AM 1280 the Patriot. “This just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination.”  This is when I began to think about other things that  Bachmann and her “Christian” extremists have done and said , after all, I am a lesbian in Minnesota. The big picture does not look pretty, in fact it  looks down right disturbing .

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”  A.H.

Well, obviously this works because, a lot of people think homosexuals recruit and molest children, something that is said time and time (and time and time) again by people like Bachmann, Dean, and many religious leaders, particuarily in the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). The involvement of the RCC in this smear campaign reminds me however, of the old saying that  ‘the one pointing fingers is usually the guilty party.’ Here is a nice site that shows just who is really destroying the lives of innocent children. We are living in a sad time when there is a need to have a website that tracks pedophiles in the church. Sure there have been a large reports of men in church positions who have molested boys, however, these child molesters are nothing but opportunists. They take what they can get. Honestly, how many alter girls have you seen running around churches these days anyway?….

“Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the ‘remaking’ of the Reich as they call it.” A.H. (from Mein Kampf)— I think this one simply speaks for itself.
“Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.” A.H.

Well, here we are in that future. The parts about demoralization, surprise, terror and sabotage definitely hit the mark. These people and organizations have been doing all of these to the gay community for years, rather successfully I might add. What about the “assassination” part though?

Have you heard of the “Minnesota Shoot First Bill?” Republican legislators were also working on this unnecassary and dangerous bill at the same time they were arguing about the the hijacking of the MN state Constitution (aka the Minnesota Marriage Amendment). The bill, which didn’t make it past the Senate but will most likely rear its ugly head again in January, would allow a person to “shoot whenever there is a perceived threat, even if the shooter could safely walk away.” Now let me take you to the story  Michele told about being held “captive” by lesbians that she thought were a threat to her life. Imagine a state that you could shoot someone just for a perceived threat then, think about this bathroom hostage story one more time. Hmmm… See where I’m going here?

Now, I’m not saying that these mercenaries are necessarily planning a modern day “Third Reich” vs the homosexuals in Minnesota and the rest of the country, but when you break things down it’s pretty noteworthy, especially when the GOP (and friends) have sentiments like “locked and loaded“- “if ballots don’t work bullets will“- “execution” of homosexuals being “moral”- and of course my pal Michelle Bachmann, who keeps saying that “God” is telling her to do things, including pushing the overthrow of the Minnesota Constitution. I just hope her voice is not the same one that the face of evil heard, for her sake and ours.

Michelle, please do us a favor. First, burn all of the “brainwash through propaganda” how-to books that you have been handing out, and then listen closer to your “voice of God” and make sure you can’t hear the crackle of hell fire in the static. If you do these things, you might sound a little more trustworthy, though not a whole lot. At least then, you and your pals won’t sound so much like war criminals…

After reading so many horrible truths, I think it is necessary to close this with words that can inspire the gay community to stand against these truth bending hijackers of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” -  E.E. Cummings

Related articles

• MINNESOTA: Anti-Gay Preacher Told To Stop Raising Money At Walmart (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• Bachmann’s Christianist BFF (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• Bachmann Agenda May Bring Hate Group Invasion To MN Churches (lezgetreal.com)
• Minnesota Family Council and NOM Promote Anti-Gay Bullying (lezgetreal.com)

California Rep. Pete Stark

Last month, California’s 80-year-old Democratic Representative Pete Stark introduced the “Every Child Deserves A Family Act.” It would prohibit “descrimination in adoption or foster care placements based on the sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status of any prospective adoptive or foster parent, or the sexual orientation or gender identity of the child involved.” It is a very important piece of legislation, not just for gay and lesbian parents or prospective foster parents, but for the thousands of children who need parents and foster placements. Its chances of passage in the Republican-controlled House are slim to none.

Naturally, Liberty Counsel, the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family have attacked the bill, with FRC’s Peter Sprigg saying that “children will suffer” if it passes and “This represents one more case in which we are seeing the rights of adults placed ahead of the best interests of the children” while Kelly Rosati of Focus claims “We need to do all we can to encourage successful and innovative partnerships, rather than try to shut agencies of the process. It’s the children who will suffer.” Her issue is the number of private adoption agencies that will not place children with gay parents.

Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel alleges that the bill is unconstitutional and shows that the “homosexual activist political tsunami destroys everything in its path that is righteous, good and beneificial to society. This bill has nothing to do with providing adoptive homes for children in need and has everything to do with shutting down all biblically-sound Christian adoption agencies areound the country. This bill puts the [political] demands of selfish, adult homosexual activists…ahead of the welfare of children and religious liberty, and it must be stopped.” As always, Barber cites the “preponderance” of studies that “conclusively” show children are best served in a home with a mother and father.

Those would be the same studies that former Sen. Rick Santorum used during his tear-filled presentation in support of DOMA. As was pointed out then, these studies were done to demonstrate the impact of divorce or single-parenthood on children, and did not include same-sex parents. When same-sex parents are studied, the conclusion is the same, two parents are better than one. The most famous study of same-sex parents, fifteen of them, have shown that the children of same-sex couples are better educated, better adjusted, usually live at a higher financial level, well, in short, they rate higher on every measure of child development and family environment. The fact is, same sex parents want children and intentionally have children, the two factors that make the most difference in how children grow up.

Stark’s bill needs to be amended to cover only state and federal agencies. That removes the objection that it will infringe on anyone’s religious rights. Private religious adoption services should be allowed to set their own standards. But the religious right should not, and constitutionally is not entitled to, set standards for the secular, civil agencies operated by the government. All foster placements are supposed to be done by the government, since it is the government that removes children from unsafe environments.

Funny thing about Rick Santorum. When he ran for re-election to his senate seat in 2006, I was a very nasty person and wrote letters to the editors of every major newspaper in Pennsylvania explaining how Santorum had lied on the floor of the Senate during the DOMA debate, how every “study” he had cited was either not relevant to same-sex couples or was intentionally warped to support an anti-gay agenda. Other than the paper in Wilkes-Barre, I’m not sure how many papers published that letter. What I do know is Santorum lost his seat. When voters understand the truth, when they are shown how the “studies” are manipulated or have not looked at the people they are being used to attack, they do the right thing.

If there is a “homosexual activist political tsunami” it hasn’t been doing a very good job for the past five years of discrediting the studies they use to fight same-sex marriage and gay-lesbian parenting. The “same sex marriage destroyed marriage in Scandinavia” study used marriage statistics from years long before there was same-sex marriage in Scandinavia to skew the results. The parenting studies they use didn’t even include same-sex parents. In five years, the organizations that are supposed to be acting on behalf of the gay community have done little or nothing to discredit the use of these studies in legislative hearings and the public forum. If they are unwilling to fight lies with hard facts, what are we doing supporting them?

Related articles

• Michigan Adoption Agency Earns Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s “All Children – All Families” Seal of Recognition (hrcbackstory.org)
• Maggie Gallagher shucks and jives her way through the DOMA hearing (pamshouseblend.com)
• Minnesota Family Council and NOM Promote Anti-Gay Bullying (lezgetreal.com)
• Santorums Choose Which Of God’s Laws To Obey (lezgetreal.com)
• Rick Santorum: adoption children is a privilege – and gays aren’t entitled to it (pamshouseblend.com)
• Every Child Deserves A Family, And Pete Stark Wants To Make That Happen (lezgetreal.com)
• Legal Idiocy in Virginia (lezgetreal.com)
• Speaking Up for Same-Sex Parents in Texas (mombian.com)

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June 4, 2011

By: Jamie Clark

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and the Minnesota Family Council are merely disguising themselves as groups that think families need to be protected from homosexuals. Really, they are the ones that families need to be protected from.  Perhaps they need to add “suffer the little children”  to their motto.

National Organization for Marriage (NOM) President Brian Brown has a new “Dear Marriage Supporter”  blog letter (June 2)on their website that does nothing more than use school children by saying homosexuals are using children.  The only part of the letter that talks about these “at risk from the gay community” pupils takes about ten seconds to read. There  is however, plenty written about the typical “sanctity of marriage” delusion mixed in with other ways homosexuals are supposedly harming kids across America. The letter includes a clip from FOX News about an Oakland school  “anti-bullying and anti-discrimination focused on gender diversity” program.  Brown describes this as “weird” and “disturbing” and states that same sex marriage advocates are teaching grade school children about “multiple genders” “under the banner of preventing bullying.” Perhaps they are worried that if children learn about gender diversity to early they will have a tough time explaining the how to guide of gay discrimination.

— “Coming to a public school near you?”

My favorite part is the way he manipulates the story about the closure of the Rockford Catholic Charities adoption and foster care program making the suffering of children the fault of gay people who just want to give them a chance for life in a loving home. When it comes down to it, they would rather shut their doors and let those kids become property of the state than let them go to loving same sex parent homes. And to make it worse, property of the state gets paid for by the state, leaving me to wonder how much it will cost the tax payers to care for those “rejected by the church” pawns that decent Americans call children.

NOM’s fellow “use the kids to terrorize emotions” organization, the Minnesota Family Council, manage to really get to the gooey center of this one though. The top researcher for this gang of Constitutional mercenaries, Barb Anderson, sent ABC Newspapers a letter to the editor this week that is only a small taste of the way they are targeting children to protect their agenda. She stated,  “Under a banner of combating homophobia, GSAs become breeding grounds for hostile attitudes toward anyone who objects to homosexual behavior, including parents. This hostility extends toward traditional religions and morals, as well as school authority.” In other words she wants you to think a place where gay students find acceptance and safety (gay/straight alliances) in schools infected by their lies, are nothing more than “dangerous nonsense”

As I said, that was just a small taste of the MFC war on children.

I recently wrote about the Anoka-Hennepin school district “don’t say gay” policy that leaves LGBT students vulnerable to bullying.

“Minnesota Mom vs School District of Death”

Gay teens, such as Justin Aaberg,  are literally being bullied to death across our country. A poll conducted last year by the Public Religion Research Institute found that a majority of American’s feel that negative messages about homosexuality in “places of worship” lead to “higher rates of suicide in gay and lesbian youth.”  —– related article

I find it very enlightening to know that the Minnesota Family Council is involved in the attempt to make sure LGBT youth remain in the line of fire in this school district. Not only are they fighting to make sure the Anoka-Hennepin school district doesn’t adopt a policy that may protect youth from bullying, they think implementing “ex-gay therapy” is the more appropriate path for these schools to take. This article from the Minnesota Independent should make you feel as enlightened as I am about the truth of these “protect families and marriage” organizations. Notice it’s from last year. They have been at this for awhile.

What kind of legitimate  “family” organization would  pride itself in blocking anti-bullying policies of any kind? Whether you have an issue with same-sex marriage or homosexuals in general, there is no justification in this. Policies can’t  hurt people and really anti-gay bullying policies will not magically make little Johnny gay. These policies are meant to keep kids safe and these organizations are using them in their attempt to convince people that homosexuals will recruit children. What decent human being would use youth  tormented by other students until they feel the only escape is suicide, as a tool to push their own agenda? The answer is that decent people would not do that, and neither would organizations truly concerned about families.

The National Organization for Marriage and the Minnesota Family Council obviously see children as disposable resources in their agenda. No matter how many are bullied, or bullied to death, they will not step up and protect them in anyway. Turns out the “protect your family” organizations are the biggest bullies of all.

Related articles

• NOM pledges to give ‘resources’ in Minnesota anti-gay marriage vote (pamshouseblend.com)
• NOM showing large scale hypocrisy in Minnesota (pamshouseblend.com)
• Minnesota Mom vs School District of Death (lezgetreal.com)
• ‘Big Bullies’ report on conservatives and LGBT youth issued by People For the American Way (miamiherald.typepad.com)
• NOM’s methods of ‘defending marriage’ are unchristian (pamshouseblend.com)
• NOM playing the astroturf game against marriage equality in NC (pamshouseblend.com)
• ‘Homosexuals want your children’ – the lie that keeps on giving (pamshouseblend.com)

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06/03/2011- by Natasia Langfelder

Pink popped! Pop singer and vocal LGBT ally Pink (P!nk?) and her husband Carey Hart welcomes their baby girl into the world yesterday. The baby was breach so Pink had a c-section yesterday and everything went according to plan. The couple named their baby Willow Sage Hart. Which is a beautiful, unique and surprisingly normal name for a celebrity baby. But Pink is too awesome to give her baby a douchey name, amirite?

Pink is reported to be doing fine but will stay in the hospital until Monday.

As usual, you can thank RadarOnline for being the first with the scoop. [Source]

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June 2,2011

By: Jamie Clark

St. Cloud–  In a strange twist, Michele Bachmann’s Minnesota Marriage Amendment has brought same sex marriage to the MN United Methodist Church.

Today, Rose French of the Star Tribune reported that forty Minnesota United Methodist clergy members have stepped up to protect the Minnesota Constitution and human rights at their annual conference held in St. Cloud. The Reverend Bruce Robbins of the Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church in Minneapolis called upon his colleagues to join him in marrying all couples that ask for their service- including same sex couples. Robbins stated that “With the possibility of a Constitutional amendment in the state of Minnesota, this seems important.” The United Methodist Church doesn’t allow same sex marriage, so this brave stand could cost any clergy involved their conference membership, or even perhaps their clergy credentials. Reverend Robbins knows all of this but, according to the Star Tribune he said that will not stop him from “offering the grace of the Church’s blessing to any prepared couple desiring Christian marriage.” Bishop Sally Dyck confirmed that they would be putting their credentials at risk but added that “it is important for us to be mindful of each other and recognize differences and hold each other in grace.”

I have a strange feeling that Michele “I hear God in my head” Bachmann will see this as an opportunity to mention that the so called “gay agenda” is making its way into Minnesota churches. I would like to take a moment however,  to repeat the above quote by Reverend Robbins.– “With the possibility of a Constitutional amendment in the state of Minnesota, this seems important.”

I think it is quite obvious who is bringing gay marriage to the United Methodist Church. It is not homosexuals or even the good Reverend Robbins. It turns out that our pal Michele made this great occasion possible for LGBT couples in Minnesota. The gay community is not asking for our state Constitution to be to be changed, she is. Obviously, the clergy who signed this feel that our state Constitution is important enough to protect from Bachmann and her loyal band of mercenaries at the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and the Minnesota Family Council.

Sadly, this will divide many in the Minnesota Methodist Church because so many feel that same sex marriage does not belong there, even though it is apparent that those who actually do talk to God are seeing that this needs to change.  There are 365 United Methodist Churches in MN that serve about 75,000 people across the state. In one way or another, this will effect all of them. As Christian turns against Christian in the wake of this, let it be known that no one is to blame for the turmoil except those who are making a joke out of the freedom of ALL Minnesotans. Homosexuals are not hijacking the Constitution or dividing churches. Michele Bachmann is. The Minnesota Marriage (Constitutional) Amendment was her doing. She pushed it time and time again even though Minnesotans kept telling her no.

Right now my  hope is that a trained to hate national group doesn’t start a war against the United Methodist Church the way the Presbyterian Layman Committee turned on the Presbyterian Church (USA). Their campaign to close down the PC (USA) has caused a lot hate in churches across the country. Places of worship are being turned into battle grounds by people like Michele Bachmann. Apparently it is not enough for them to get good people to discriminate against minority groups, they also want good people to discriminate against those that support minorities. They call themselves good “Christians” but really they are using Christians to push their agenda just like they are using our Constitution. They will risk anyone and anything to make sure that tax paying citizens are denied the equality promised to them under law just because of who they are and love. Churches and Christians are no exception.  This really has to stop. Terrorism doesn’t belong in church. Christianity itself is at stake here.

Be vigilant Christians of Minnesota. There really is an agenda coming to your local place of worship. It’s called “divide and conquer” and the General hears voices who disguise themselves as God,  that are telling her to do it.

Related articles

• United Methodist Clergy Vow To Marry Gay Couples (advocate.com)
• Methodist Clergy Pledge to Marry Same-Sex Couples in Minnesota (towleroad.com)

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June 1, 2011

By: Jamie Clark

Minnesota- The Minnesota “gay’s eat feces” Family Council has officially registered with the state campaign finance board to begin their war of lies and deceit in MN. They are joined by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and the Associated Press noted that the Minnesota Catholic Conference, which handles policies here for the Roman Catholic Church, are also locked and loaded for the assault.

This article however, is not about who is playing. This article is about who is sleeping while the Minnesota state CONSTITUTION IS BEING HIJACKED right under our noses. The very same Constitution that guarantees my freedom AND yours is being used as a piece of scratch paper that they think is theirs to do a rewrite on as needed.  If these anti-LGBT, anti-family organizations are allowed to do this to the gay population in this state, who is to say that the rest of you will not be next. WAKE UP Minnesota. They are not coming, they are already here. They are ready for battle so it’s time for us to be to.

They will lie to you. They will say that voting yes won’t change anything since gay Minnesotan’s are already denied the “sanctity” of marriage, so this is just a technicality. True, we are not allowed to get married, but voting yes will make our Constitution a joke, because it will seem like it means nothing to us. Do you really want billion dollar organizations who are paid to hate others and wage wars on minorities to use you to push their agenda through the very thing that protects you from people like them?

They have already shown us that their “we will play the Minnesota nice way” strategy was just a tactical maneuver to convince Minnesotans that they won’t act like the Westboro Baptist Church. They told all of us that the “focus of this campaign is the nature and purpose of marriage” meaning, what will define it. They said it would be a clean fight. Despite this the Minnesota Family Council posted an article which referred to homosexuals as pedophiles that practice bestiality. They were even kind enough to say that we eat human excrement and drink urine. So much for the “Minnesota nice” way.

These anti freedom “Christian” groups even turn on Christian organizations, so why wouldn‘t they turn on you?  Just look at what the Presbyterian Layman Committee is doing to the Presbyterian Church (USA). This “Christian” group didn’t like PC (USA) policies so they have  started a hateful smear campaign against them in an attempt to get good Christians to leave their welcoming churches. Will they come after single mothers in Minnesota next? Perhaps it will be our unions. Maybe next time, it will be your loved one and then finally you.

This war is dirty, mean and full of lies. It is the exact opposite of everything we stand for. They are taking advantage of people that are known as good, hardworking American’s, and honestly, right now they are laughing. They know that no Minnesota organization has registered the way that they did today. They hear how quiet our National anti hate organizations are being on this matter. They are laughing as we take our time getting things together and I don’t like the idea that our state and my neighbors are a  joke to people like them. I am angry and you should be too!

We need to protect our state and our freedom and right now there are too many of us that think someone else will do it for us. The MN Marriage Amendment is not like what happened in California and all the other states that these groups have trampled on. This time it is not about heterosexuals and homosexuals. This time it is about protecting the very document that keeps them from waging war on every Minnesotan. Now take a minute to ask yourself ‘who will they come for next if we let them win?’

The answer however, just might scare you.

Related articles

• Minnesota- to Bigotry And Beyond! (lezgetreal.com)
• Raising Funds To Hate (therainbowpost.com)
• Presbyterian Layman Committee Calls MN Paper “Intolerant” For Refusing Discriminatory Religious Ad (lezgetreal.com)

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by:Jamie Clark

Minneapolis- Something is happening in Minnesota and certain religious entities are refusing to take the hint. So, Minnesota’s largest newspaper thought they would clear things up with a little stand that says a lot by doing what other papers around the country didn’t do. Now the Star Tribune is in the religious hot seat for their committed support of same sex marriage.

The Presbyterian Layman Committee recently launched an ad asking congregations to end their support of the Presbyterian Church (USA) for adopting an Amendment that allows gay clergy in their parishes. The Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal printed it so Layman Committee President Carmen Fowler LaBerge thought the Star Tribune would follow the leader. After all, they have let her run her God fearing Christian ranting words before. No such luck Carmen. Not this time. The MN paper sent the Lay Committee a letter stating that upon review by their advocacy specialist they would not run their ad as it was written. They told LaBerge to remove two lines and they would see what they could do for her.

The two lines are the second and third ones in the ad, which can be found on the Layman Online. (line 2) “Why does the PC(USA) no longer require its ordained leaders to limit their sexual activity to Christian marriage?” (line 3) “Why has the PC(USA) abandoned Scripture and 2,000 years of Christian faith and moral teachings?”

So, instead of simply removing these lines so their ad could run, LaBerge instead launched a ‘smear the Star Tribune campaign’ on the Layman Online, Friday May 27. The article is titled “Psst… your bias is showing” and complains that the Star Tribune “vaunts the First Amendment as its guiding light and tolerance as its north star” yet seems to be “unashamedly intolerant” of others views.  After all they won’t print the Layman Committee’s ad but ran a recent article stating that a marriage amendment here would “wrongly enshrine bigotry and discrimination in the state Constitution.” LaBerge needs to wake up and look at it this way.

Those pesky devils at the Star Tribune just know what Minnesotans want and anti gay rights propaganda rooted in religion is not it. I’m not saying that MN is not a religious state, trust me it is. My town on the Iron Range (with a population of about 20,000) has 28 churches of different faiths in it. I will also admit that we too have our fair share of religious fanatics that would love to see our rights be demolished. In my experience however, we have more Christians that know Christianity was founded on the morals of Jesus Christ and America was founded on freedom. We also have many that actually follow the concept of “hate the sin, love the sinner” and that means that the “sinner” is no more and no less than anyone else. To make it more clear. We have a lot of good and loving Christians in this state that do not want to use their savior to harm others.

The fact is that the “Christian right” and the GOP quit paying attention to the people of MN a long time ago. They don’t know what the people here want any more than the Star Tribune wants to run ads that spread religious based discrimination. They haven’t been listening  America, and that’s why Minnesota is a new start in the movement for our rights.  The people here are a quiet, mostly uncontroversial  bunch that don’t want our state to be a stomping ground for hate from either side of the movement. Tell yourselves, ‘handle Minnesota with care’ and keep that thought in your mind no matter what. We can win here, just remember that Minnesotan’s are watching.

Related articles

• Majority of Minnesotans Oppose Marriage Ban (advocate.com)
• Minnesotans Opposed To Anti-Marriage Amendment, Bigots Continue To March Forward (lezgetreal.com)
• Minnesota Paper Comes Out For Marriage (joemygod.blogspot.com)

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May 30, 2011
By: Jamie Clark
Minnesota-This is the story of a school district, nine dead teenagers and a grieving mother who is fighting for every child in America. Recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) were hard at work in Minnesota. The result was the letter that the U.S. Dept of Education sent to every school district in the country demanding students be protected from bullying and the victory for all of us was sweet. Since news in my great state rarely goes further than our borders though, I assume many of you do not know exactly why something like this would come from Minnesota. I feel, due to recent events here, that this needs to change.

On July 9, 2010 Tammy Aaberg found her fifteen year old son Justin hanging in his closet. During an interview with Minnesota Public Radio, she said “I touched him- because I just couldn’t believe it. I thought I was in a nightmare and he was so cold.” She didn’t understand. Why did her handsome, musically talented son kill himself just a year after coming out of the closet? He seemed so happy. The dots connected when Justin’s friends told her that he had been endlessly bullied in school ever since, a fact she was oblivious to. Justin however, was not the only one.

Altogether, nine students in the Anoka-Hennepin school district had committed suicide after being bullied…. Seven of them had done so in one year. Four of them were openly gay. The phone lines exploded with complaints and demands  that the school district remove a  “don’t say gay” policy from its “Equal Education Opportunity Declaration.” The school district thought that this measure was not necessary because, after all, they had never tolerated bullying of any kind and their long running “neutrality policy“ was left intact. Instead, to silence concerns they added vague language to their already existing bullying policy.

Parents, teachers and concerned citizens still wanted to know, how could school officials protect LGBT students when they couldn’t address LGBT issues? The school district responded by telling two lesbians that they couldn’t join their classmates in a traditional dance entrance together in January of this year. The girls hired a lawyer and the school district eventually allowed them to attend together, but the damage was done and the message was clear. It would take a lot to change their intolerant message.

Tammy Aaberg’s plan for change was already well under way, in fact it started soon after her son’s death. She was the ring leader in the confrontation over this issue with the school district. She spoke to Congress in support of the “Safe Schools Act” and teamed up with SPLC and the NCLR resulting in the letter demanding schools keep America’s children safe. On May 24th this team sent the Anoka-Hennepin school district a letter demanding that they remove the “don’t say gay” policy or face a lawsuit for allowing LGBT students to remain in jeopardy.

The Minnesota super mom is changing things. She is angry that the school district denies any responsibility for the deaths of nine students that were victims of relentless and cruel bullying while under their supervision and there is no policy to silence her. She has told the Minnesota Independent she thinks,“ Gay kids believe that they deserved to be treated this way  because they were gay. I honestly believe this is what Justin thought, which is why he tried not to make a huge deal of what happened to him. I don’t know why they (school district) are doing this. This is outrageous. They are bullying students into silence.“

I think we can all agree on that.

I know we lay claim to Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and the school district of death but maybe Minnesota really will be the state that changes everything. After all, we also have people like Tammy Aaberg.

Related articles

• NCLR and SPLC demand Anoka-Hennepin School District Immediately repeal Gag in discussing LGBT people (pinkbananaworld.com)
• NCLR & SPLC demand Anoka-Hennepin School District Immediately repeal Gag in discussing LGBT people (lezgetreal.com)

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May 28, 2011

by: Jamie Clark
St.Paul, Minn.-  When former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty officially announced his 2012 presidential campaign, a dark cloud fell over the hearts and memories of many Minnesotans. Perhaps it was this doom and gloom feeling that caused the St. Paul Pioneer Press to place the announcement in the most appropriate place….. the obituary page.

The headline reads “Pawlenty offers ‘tell the truth’ theme for race- will seek GOP presidential nomination” and there is no chance that you can miss the words “Today’s Obituaries” right next to it. Readers spoke in numbers about this “mistake”(?) with comments such as “that is so hilarious” and “right where it belongs” as Minnesota’s oldest running daily newspaper received more attention than it has probably seen in years.

Tim Pawlenty is offering a promise to you America. In his official campaign video he states, “I could promise that I can eliminate a 14 trillion dollar debt, create  jobs for ten million people, restructure Social Security and healthcare… or I could try something different. I could just tell you the truth.”

I live on the Iron Range of Minnesota, so my relationship with our former Governor is close to my heart. I feel I should help him in his campaign of “truth.” So, here is what you can look forward to hearing from GOP Presidential hopeful, Tim Pawlenty,  on  healthcare.

As a healthcare worker on the Iron Range of Minnesota, who has lobbied for healthcare at the State Capital and in Washington D.C. for the United Steelworkers, I can tell you that he fought for nursing homes… to close their doors. He believes that we need to take care of our own and keep our 70 year old parents in that empty room at the back of our homes, be their nurse and meet their needs ourselves. Or…. Help his friends out in Minnesota’s booming assisted living business by putting mom and dad in one of their beautiful, yet mostly unregulated by the state, facilities. After all it is a homey atmosphere. On the down side though, since roughly 500 nursing homes closed across the state during Tim’s term here, the tranquility could be broken by the screams of dementia and Alzheimer patients who are being cared for by over worked “resident aides” not qualified to meet their needs.

I can’t forget to mention also that as Minnesota nursing home funding dropped, Tim was kind enough to let them sell beds to the state on his lay-a-way plan. How this works is pretty remarkable. A nursing home in trouble can take an empty bed, promise the state to not fill it, and then in turn, the state will pay the home per bed set aside. Tim approves and so do the owners of the assisted living homes, which by the way are filling so fast they are building new ones every month. Corporate owners of the nursing homes nod their approval too, because they still get their end of the year “good job on the budget” bonuses. Everyone wins! Except for the following… healthcare workers, who receive chump change for raises because they really only get one when the state contributes to funding; families looking for qualified homes for their elderly love ones, who can’t find one close to home, forcing them to even  look out of state therefore severing most contact in the end of their loved ones life; then of course there is our greatest generation. Living in what use to be Iron Range nursing homes, spending life savings for care that is hard to come by and worrying if they can afford to take that big nursing home trip to the local Walmart.

Finally, just a smaller note on  my pal Tim and Social Security. I think he should try the following for his campaign. ‘If your old or disabled, get on with dying please. You’re ruining my balanced budget.’ I just hope he remembers to give the St. Paul Pioneer Press “kudos” for the inspiration.

Related articles

• Tim Pawlenty Campaign Dead? Presidential Announcement Runs On Obituary Page (PHOTO) (huffingtonpost.com)
• Minnesota paper puts Pawlenty presidential bid on obits page (thehill.com)

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May 27, 2012

Jamie Clark

The Minnesota Republican Party has launched a new website that lays the blame of a possible state government shutdown entirely on the shoulders of (D)Governor Mark Dayton.
The site, www.daytonshutdown.com, boasts that “When the Going Gets Tough, Mark Dayton Gets Gone” and compares him to a child throwing a tantrum over dessert. Meanwhile, Gov. Dayton spent Thursday touring Minnesota to personally propose his budget to the people.
Minn. Republicans spent valuable time pushing House Representative Michele Bachman’s “one man/one woman” constitutional amendment onto the 2012 ballot, as the legislative session quickly passed them by, causing quite a stir amongst state voters worried about jobs and education. Now, with no budget solution in sight, they seem too willing to throw stones at Dayton for vetoing their  proposed budget. Governor Dayton has already stated that he felt that Republicans were “singling out” cities with a democratic majority such as St. Paul and Duluth, for larger cuts in Government Aid. He also noted that three school districts in these areas would  also suffer from “drastic cuts” if the Republican proposed budget was signed, and offered three budget compromises that were swiftly rejected by the GOP.
Governor Dayton turned heads this week when he stood in support of the LGBT community in Minnesota with  his “symbolic veto” of the MN marriage amendment. During his speech he urged Minnesotans to remember that all people have the right under law to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and stated that he knows “Minnesota and Minnesotans are better than this.”
The Republican funded site also proposes that “Republicans understand compassion better than Gov. Dayton understands economics.” This statement alone gives their effort a sarcastic tone that is rather inappropriate considering their effort to destroy Minnesota’s LGBT families and communities instead of working on the things that really matter.

Northern Ireland's Gerry Adams

I’ve always said I don’t do LGBT stories, but there are times when the history in my field relates to the present in the LGBT community. So, another observation from the straight lady on the Lesbian blog……

One of the most important figures in the Northern Ireland peace negotiations was internationally recognized activist Gerry Adams. He was a hero of the cause of Irish Catholic equality. We all knew and ignored the fact that he had been an IRA terrorist with blood on his hands. We tunneled our vision to see the politician. But for years, the negotiations went nowhere. No one would give a single effing bloody inch.

Then, one morning, Gerry woke up and had an epiphany – he could have a life after the conflict. He did not have to live his whole life defined as a warrior. He could have a fulfilling life without the battle. That day, the nature of the negotiations changed. That epiphany made peace possible. Gerry brought his wife home from her 18 year protective exile. They quickly had a little girl in addition to the son they had before they separated for so many years. He has built a good life since the peace accord, a fulfilling life.

There can be life after the conflict. The battle does not have be a person’s whole identity. Only when the warriors realize that, can they do two things – fight to win and fight to make peace.

There has been virtually no reaction from the major LGBT groups about the amendment passed in Minnesota. Aside from MSNBC, where is the outrage? When the legal challenge to Georgia’s same-sex-marriage-banning amendment failed in the state supreme court, why wasn’t it taken to the Federal courts? The Georgia constitution clearly states an amendment can have only one clause. The same sex marriage ban had two. That’s about as legally simple as it ever gets. It’s freaking rare that a legal issue is that simple. Over and over, the battles never go far enough, or they appear, to anyone who actually knows the Constitution, to be conducted on the wrong battlefield.

In Oklahoma, the anti-Sharia amendment is being challenged in Federal court on the grounds that it is a backdoor establishment of a state religion. Any law that forbids religious worship has in effect stated that only one form of religion is acceptable. That is the proper grounds for fighting anti-gay and anti-abortion laws. They are based in religious belief, not in science or civil secular law principles. According to the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment, we should not be allowing clergy to have the right to certify the civil contract of marriage. It grants civil legal power to clergy. So why aren’t the legal challenges to those laws being fought on those grounds? Why are we bothering with the vague parameters of civil rights when we have the clear, indisputable First Amendment? Why are setbacks accepted so calmly?

There is a growing feeling in some parts of the LGBT grassroots that those big, moneyed groups that are supposed to be fighting for LGBT rights don’t really have their hearts in it. It is beginning to be believed that they are stalling and procrastinating because they can’t see how they could ever earn as good a living doing anything else. It’s a nasty, catty thing to rumor, but it has an unfortunate basis in evidence. What have they done for you lately? Not bloody much.

Do you remember in May of 1990, when Doonesbury comic strip character Andy Lippincott died of AIDS in his earthquake-damaged apartment as the Beach Boys “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” played in the background? The song is so relevant to the battle for same sex marriage rights. The moment was so poignant, so pure in its expression of the hope for equality. “Wouldn’t it be nice if WE….” That was 21 years ago this month. Twenty-one years have been spent giving money to lobbyists, giving money to legal experts, and falling farther and farther away from the goals. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’s elimination is still being held up by fanatical anti-gays in Congress. Those same fanatics want to use taxpayers’ money to hire an outside law firm to defend the indefensible in DOMA. We are losing ground to the religious rightwingnuts every day, both on gay rights issues and women’s rights issues.

If you can imagine how nice it would be if you were equal, if you can see a future without the conflict, with the battles won, with all men and women free and equal and able to determine their own futures, then you should be the one leading the charge, not a bunch of overpaid “activists” who can’t imagine that they could have fulfilling lives without that identity of “activist.”

Related articles

• Faith Leaders Speak Out Against Anti-LGBT Marriage Amendment in North Carolina (hrcbackstory.org)
• Minnesota House Passes Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment (lezgetreal.com)
• New HRC Poll Shows Majority of Christians Support LGBT Equality (hrcbackstory.org)
• Equality NC’s faith leaders press conference challenges anti-gay lawmakers, counters fundie rally (pamshouseblend.com)
• As Anti-Marriage Group Wants ‘Adult’ Debate, Senator Frankin Expresses Dismay Over Minnesota Vote (lezgetreal.com)
• Minnesota Marriage Battle Begins (advocate.com)
• Poll: Christians Support LGBT Equality (advocate.com)