Eideard

A man who was held in solitary confinement for two years and was forced to pull his own tooth because he was denied dental health, has been awarded $22 million for violation of his constitutional rights.

Stephen Slevin, 58, from New Mexico, was awarded the sum of money – one of the largest federal civil rights settlements in history involving an inmate – after accusing Dona Ana County jail of essentially forgetting about him while he was in custody, not giving him the healthcare he needed and treating him inhumanely.

Outside the federal courthouse in Santa Fe today, Mr Slevin said it was never about the money for him but more about sending a message that prisoners should be treated more humanely…

“Prison officials were walking by me every day, watching me deteriorate. Day after day after day, they did nothing, nothing at all, to get me any help.”

The 58-year-old was arrested in August 2005 and charged with driving while intoxicated and receiving a stolen vehicle near Las Cruces. His lawyer said that, due to his history of mental illness, he was placed into solitary confinement. Civil rights attorney Matthew Coyte revealed it was here that his client started to deteriorate.

He said: ‘They threw him in solitary and then ignored him. He disappeared into delirium, and his mental illness was made worse by being isolated from human contact and a lack of medical care…’

While Slevin was in solitary confinement, his toenails grew so long they began to curl around his feet, he developed bedsores, fungus and dental problems and lost a lot of weight, according to the lawsuit…

Mr Slevin was eventually released after 22 months as a pre-trial detainee and the charges against him were dismissed…

The county had recently offered to settle the case for $2 million…despite previously denying there was a lack of medical care and that, as government employees, county officials deserved immunity from liability.

You should know two things about this incident: [1] Don’t judge every part of New Mexico law enforcement by this case; [2] If he had been a serious criminal, DWI-repeater or violent felon – he would have been out of jail in no time at all.

In a step few politicians would take, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle…declared the nation’s decades-old war on drugs a failure…

“Rather than invest in detaining people in the Cook County Jail at almost $150 a day . . . we need to invest in treatment, education and job-skills training. That’s the only way . . . we are going to reduce crime and stabilize our communities,” she said…

“We all know that the war on drugs has failed to end drug use. Instead, it’s resulted in the incarceration of millions of people around the country, and 100,000 here in Cook County on an annual basis,” she said. “Drugs and the failed war on the drugs have devastated lives, families and communities. For too long we’ve treated drug use as a criminal justice issue, rather than a public issue, which is what it is.”

Academics, religious leaders and social-service providers spoke out, but Preckwinkle was the sole politician to address the crowd, which cheered her on.

Kathleen Kane-Willis, director of Roosevelt University’s Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy, kicked off the rally by citing recent statistics indicating Illinois leads the nation when it comes to putting far greater percentages of African Americans behind bars for drug crimes than whites.

“The sad thing about the war on the drugs is that most people know it has failed,” added Rev. Alexander Sharp of Protestants for the Common Good. “They just don’t have the courage to say so…”

Preckwinkle’s call for more treatment and less punishment was in keeping with her statements on the campaign trail, when she often talked about diverting drug users into treatment programs. She said she now is working with the courts, prosecutors, defense attorneys and the sheriff’s office to find ways to do that.

“If 70 percent of the people in the jail are there for non-violent offenses, and 83 percent of the people who walk through the door have illicit drugs in their system, clearly the issue we’ve got is around addiction as much as it is around criminal justice,” she said after making her speech. “It is a public health issue.”

American politicians lead the Western World in hypocrisy. Moralizing based upon myth, laws carrying sanctions better suited to the Dark Ages, characterize the unproductive foolishness that our jurisprudence and book of laws has become.

Most drug use should be decriminalized. Take crime and drug cartels out of the equation altogether – and treat simple addictions for what they are. A product of many causes from genetic sensitivity to social and economic despair.

A family around the supper table

Growing numbers of gay couples across the country are adopting, according to census data, despite an uneven legal landscape that can leave their children without the rights and protections extended to children of heterosexual parents.

Same-sex couples are explicitly prohibited from adopting in only two states — Utah and Mississippi — but they face significant legal hurdles in about half of all other states, particularly because they cannot legally marry in those states.

Despite this legal patchwork, the percentage of same-sex parents with adopted children has risen sharply. About 19 percent of same-sex couples raising children reported having an adopted child in the house in 2009, up from just 8 percent in 2000…

That reality has been shaped by what advocates for gay families say are two distinct trends: the need for homes for children currently waiting for adoption — now about 115,000 in the United States — and the increased acceptance of gays and lesbians in American society.

The American family does not look the same as it did 30 years ago, they argue, and the law has just been slow to catch up.

Most of the legal obstacles facing gay couples intending to adopt stem from prohibitions on marriage, according to the Family Equality Council, an advocacy group for gay families. In most states, gay singles are permitted to adopt…

“The reality is we really need foster and adoptive parents, and it doesn’t matter what the relationship is,” said Moira Weir, director of the job and family services department in Hamilton County, Ohio. “If they can provide a safe and loving home for a child, isn’t that what we want?”

RTFA. Lots of details.

“Peace on Earth, good will to all” – is how most organized religion speaks [way too highly] of itself in America. Practice does not follow propaganda. What’s characterized as dissent within these religion/businesses is often a willingness and hope to return to those original values. If they think they stand a chance.

The head of the Catholic church in Phoenix has stripped Arizona’s largest hospital of its Catholic affiliation after he ruled that a decision to save the life of a mother by terminating her 11-week pregnancy was morally wrong.

Bishop Thomas Olmsted announced yesterday that St Joseph’s hospital can no longer be considered to be Catholic. The ruling breaks a relationship that stretches back to the hospital’s founding by Catholic nuns 115 years ago.

He has also excommunicated the member of the hospital’s ethics committee that permitted the abortion to go ahead.

The schism brings to a head a dispute that has been building for several months over the termination, performed in November 2009, at St Joseph’s hospital and medical centre.

The case concerned an unidentified woman in her 20s, who had a history of abnormally high blood pressure that was under control before she became pregnant. But doctors were concerned on learning of the pregnancy about the extra burden that would be placed on her heart, and they monitored her closely.

Tests showed that in the early stages of pregnancy her condition deteriorated rapidly and that before long her pulmonary hypertension – which can impair the working of the heart and lungs – had begun to seriously threaten her life. Doctors informed her that the risk of death was close to 100% if she continued with the pregnancy.

Consultations were then held with the patient, her family, her doctors and the hospital’s ethics team, and the decision to go ahead with an abortion was taken in order to save the mother’s life. And no need to invite the Bishop and his church in on the decision!

The hospital’s president, Linda Hunt, said following the bishop’s severing of relations that the operation had been “consistent with our values of dignity and justice. If we are presented with a situation in which a pregnancy threatens a woman’s life, our first priority is to save both patients. If that is not possible we will always save the life we can save, and that is what we did in this case.”

But Olmsted did not see it that way. you can RTFA if you really care about crap doctrine, religious ideology, philosophical systems that place superstition as taking precedence over human life.

I’m not wasting any more time on it than I’ve felt necessary for the last 59 years of my life.

Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Dozens of Italian women who have had relationships with Roman Catholic priests or lay monks have endorsed an open letter to the pope that calls for the abolition of the celibacy rule. The letter, thought by one signatory to be unprecedented, argues that a priest “needs to live with his fellow human beings, experience feelings, love and be loved”.

It also pleads for understanding of those who “live out in secrecy those few moments the priest manages to grant [us] and experience on a daily basis the doubts, fears and insecurities of our men”.

The issue was put back on the Vatican’s agenda in March when one of Pope Benedict’s senior advisers, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna, said the abolition of the celibacy rule might curb sex abuse by priests, a suggestion he hastily withdrew after Benedict spoke up for “the principle of holy celibacy”.

The authors of the letter said they decided to come into the open after hearing his retort, which they said was an affirmation of “the holiness of something that is not holy” but a man-made rule. There are many instances of married priests in the early centuries of Christianity. Today, priests who follow the eastern Catholic rites can be married, as can those who married before converting to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism.

One signatory, Stefania Salomone, 42, an office manager, said the message to the pope had been endorsed by nearly 40 women registered with an online forum linked to Il Dialogo website. But such was the sensitivity of the issue that only three had published their names…

My family walked away from the Roman Catholic church almost 70 years ago – over the question of freedom to access means of birth control. I think it unlikely that the church is ready to engage intelligent dialogue on an even more demanding subject.

Living in the 21st Century, peering backwards at an ideology, superstition, rooted to the Dark Ages like a tumor clinging to an organ it has already sucked dry of life – I hardly see any reason for this attempt at dialogue except to illustrate the unwillingness of Papal princes to learn and grow into the real world.

They were 51 young men who met a grisly death far from home, their heads chopped off and their bodies thrown into a mass grave.

Their resting place was unknown until last year, when workmen excavating for a road near the London 2012 Olympic sailing venue in Weymouth, England, unearthed the grave. But questions remained about who the men were, how long they had been there and why they had been decapitated.

On Friday, officials revealed that analysis of the men’s teeth shows they were Vikings, executed with sharp blows to the head around a thousand years ago. They were killed during the Dark Ages, when Vikings frequently invaded the region.

“To find out that the young men executed were Vikings is a thrilling development,” said David Score, project manager for Oxford Archaeology, which excavated the remains. “Any mass grave is a relatively rare find, but to find one on this scale, from this period of history, is extremely unusual and presents an incredible opportunity to learn more about what is happening in Dorset at this time…”

The burial site was found during work for the Weymouth Relief Road, meant to ease traffic congestion on the highway to Weymouth, on England’s southern coast. Weymouth Bay and nearby Portland Harbor will host the Olympic and Paralympic sailing events during the 2012 London Olympics.

The leader of the Dorset County Council, Angus Campbell, said the construction of the road had already revealed prehistoric and Iron Age finds.

“But we never would have dreamed of finding a Viking war grave,” Campbell said in a statement. “The burial pit took us all by surprise and its story gets more fascinating as the analysis goes on.”

I realize this is intimidating to those who fear history, fear knowledge. This stuff is fascinating, filling in the details of broad strokes of history for large segments of geopolitics, economics and culture.

The Pope and his international Shari’a Court
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Pope Benedict XVI has condemned British equality legislation for running contrary to “natural law” as he confirmed his first visit to the UK later this year…His comments relate to laws that came in last year preventing adoption agencies from discriminating against gay couples and also Harriet Harman’s equality bill, currently going through parliament.

The pope, whose visit is expected in September, made the comments after hearing representations from English and Welsh bishops on their concerns about the place of religion in an increasingly secular society.

They told him sexual orientation legislation that came into effect on 1 January 2009 had forced the closure of half the Roman Catholic adoption agencies because the law making it illegal to discriminate against gay applicants went against their beliefs…

It is also thought the pope was referring to the equality bill, which narrows the special exemption enjoyed by churches allowing them to exclude people whose lifestyles do not fit in with the religious ethos of an organisation when hiring staff. The bishops cited it as another restriction of their freedom of religious belief.

His remarks drew swift criticism from the National Secular Society, which said it would stage protests during the visit.

Terry Sanderson, the society’s president, said: “The taxpayer is going to be faced with a bill for £20m for the visit – in which he has indicated he will attack equal rights and promote discrimination.”

You must realize that priest-commanders feel only their own sanctimonious flock are worthy of freedom of choice and opportunity. Centuries of discrimination and bigotry translated to simpler modes – like whether or not someone can have a job or a life partner or a family means nothing to religious cabals with a history of corruption that stretches over centuries.

It had long been rumoured that the Polish-born pontiff, who died five years ago, engaged in acts of penance and self-flagellation. The practice has now been confirmed by Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the Vatican “postulator” who has the task of reviewing John Paul’s life and preparing a case for him being made a saint.

In the new book, “Why he’s a saint“, Msgr Oder writes: “As members of the Pope’s close entourage heard with their own ears, Karol Wojtyla used to flagellate himself.

“In his wardrobe, in between all his robes, a special trouser belt hung on a coat hanger, which he used as a whip. He always took it with him when he went to Castel Gandolfo (the traditional summer residence of the popes outside Rome).”

In November a Polish nun claimed that when she stayed at Castel Gandolfo she often heard John Paul whipping himself.

“Several times he would put himself through bodily penance,” said Tobiana Sobodka, a nun from the Sacred Heart of Jesus order.

“We would hear it – we were in the next room at Castel Gandolfo. You could hear the sound of the blows when he flagellated himself…”

The book also described how, as a bishop in Poland, the future pontiff would often sleep on a bare floor as an act of self-denial and asceticism.

Got to hand it to nutballs who commit themselves to being true to the Dark Ages. Har!

Is adultery a crime?

Legislators in New Hampshire are revisiting that question as they consider repealing a 200-year-old state law that defines adultery as a criminal offense…

Roughly two dozen other states also have laws that criminalize adultery, said Jonathan Turley, a Georgetown University law professor, who views the laws as “clearly … unconstitutional.”

Most such laws were written long ago when legislators cited morality to pass laws against homosexuality, fornication and other offenses, Turley said…

“I just don’t think the state should tell two consenting adults who they can sleep with,” State Rep Timothy Horrigan said.

A committee of the New Hampshire House of Representatives plans, beginning Tuesday, to weigh a proposal seeking to repeal the adultery law.

“I think the more laws in the books, the more difficult it is to pay attention to the important ones,” said Rep. Carol McGuire, a Republican co-sponsor of the bill who has been married for 28 years. “I’ve asked a colleague, and we can’t find out who the last person charged was.”

Over the two centuries that the law has been on New Hampshire’s books, penalties have ranged from a year in jail or up to 39 lashes. In 1992, the penalty was reduced to a fine of up to $1,200 — with no jail time.

The nutball side of the Republican Party holds some of the seats in the state legislature including a smattering of religious fanatics. No doubt there will be righteous indignation and a calling down of heavenly anger – until the legislature finishes terminating another leftover piece of crap law.

Better suited to overseeing an inquisition
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

In an apparent split with Roman Catholic bishops over the abortion-financing provisions of the proposed health care overhaul, the nation’s Catholic hospitals have signaled that they back the Senate’s compromise on the issue, raising hopes of breaking an impasse in Congress and stirring controversy within the church.

The Senate bill, approved Thursday morning, allows any state to bar the use of federal subsidies for insurance plans that cover abortion and requires insurers in other states to divide subsidy money into separate accounts so that only dollars from private premiums would be used to pay for abortions.

Just days before the bill passed, the Catholic Health Association, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals across the country, said in a statement that it was “encouraged” and “increasingly confident” that such a compromise “can achieve the objective of no federal funding for abortion.” An umbrella group for nuns followed its lead.

The same day, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops called the proposed compromise “morally unacceptable…”

In practical political terms, some Democrats — including some opponents of abortion rights — say that the Catholic hospitals’ relative openness to a compromise could play a pivotal role by providing political cover for Democrats who oppose abortion to support the health bill. Democrats and liberal groups quickly disseminated the association’s endorsement along with others from the nuns’ group, other Catholics and evangelicals…

“We have known for quite some time that the Catholic hospitals and also the nuns are really breaking from these hard-line bishops and saying, ‘This really is our goal: to get more people into health care coverage,’ ” said Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado.

It would be funny if it weren’t so bloody criminal, callous and egregious – to witness these ethical bottom-feeders calling any solution “unacceptable” on the basis of their superstition.

A great deal of courage is required for hospitals and nuns to oppose these princes of piety.