A few links to stories I found interesting this week:
~Indiana Legislator Refuses To Honor “Radical” Girl Scouts.
~Rick Santorum Could Take Republicans Down With Him
~AIDS Research Being Done By 17 Year-olds
~Rehberg Should Try Some ‘Made In Montana’ Funding
~Female Elephants Need Not Apply
~Marriage: David Cameron Faces Church Backlash Over ‘Cultural Vandalism’
Happy Clicking!
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Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu, a rising Republican star, publicly admitted he was gay on Saturday, in order to combat accusations from a former boyfriend. He joins a long line of conservatives who came out of the closet only after scandal forced them to do so.Vodpod videos no longer available.
Some of the memes of rural Republicans include: “the government is taxing us to death,” “we’re paying for other people’s programs” “where’s the benefit to the working man person?”. Tea Party protests against government are being held on sidewalks, streets and in parks designed, paid for, cleaned and lit by- you guessed it- the very taxes they’re protesting. Irony is begging for attention here.
Especially- according to the following article- in the red states:
It’s no secret: The federal budget is expanding faster than tax revenues, a trend that’s been fueled by the rapid growth of entitlement programs and exacerbated by the recession. As a recent New York Times article documents, even as fiscally conservative lawmakers complain about deficit spending, their constituents don’t want to give up the Social Security checks, Medicare
benefits, and earned income tax credits that provide a safety net for the struggling middle class…
States receiving the most federal funding per tax dollar paid:
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1. New Mexico: $2.63
2. West Virginia: $2.57
3. Mississippi: $2.47
4. District of Colombia: $2.41
5. Hawaii: $2.38
6. Alabama: $2.03
7. Alaska: $1.93
8. Montana: $1.92
9. South Carolina: $1.92
10. Maine: $1.78
Read the full article (with interactive maps) here.
“We are incredibly proud of the hard work Jon Tester and Max Baucus have put in on this issue. Montanans shouldn’t have to lose out on a $1,000 tax break because of petty partisan games in Congress. Thankfully, Jon and Max worked together to get the job done for Montana families.”
“Senator Baucus did something you rarely see in Washington these days: He brought folks from both side of the aisle to the table to give tax relief to working families when they need it most. His work represents the spirit of working together that Montanans expect and deserve in their elected leaders.”
By Francis De Bernardo, New Ways Ministry
Yesterday, the Maryland House of Delegates approved a marriage equality bill, virtually guaranteeing it would become law, since the bill is likely to pass the Senate, and Governor Martin O’Malley, a Catholic, has promised to sign it.
Yesterday in New Jersey, however, Governor Chris Christie, a Catholic, vetoed that state’s marriage equality bill which had passed both Assembly and Senate. The legislature has until January 2014 to override the veto.
MARYLAND
The Baltimore Sun report rightly noted O’Malley’s role in the bill’s success in Maryland, and quoted him saying:
“We are a good people. We all want the same things for our kids.”
The Washington Blade’s story carried a quote from O’Malley that reflected the Catholic social teaching principle behind the issue of marriage equality:
“Today, the House of Delegates voted for human dignity.”
Earlier this week, The Baltimore Sun carried a news report on a talk O’Malley gave in which he described the evolution of his thinking on marriage equality. New Ways Ministry’s Sister Jeannine Gramick is quoted in that article about her thoughts to O’Malley’s support of the issue. Sister Gramick said:
“I’m proud of him for being a Catholic and for witnessing real Catholic values. … I’m so glad he’s supporting the marriage equality bill.”
Last night, Bondings 2.0 posted New Ways Ministry’s response to the vote, along with a link to The Washington Post article about the news.
Even after the bill would become a law, the struggle would still not be over, as opponents have promised to mount a referendum campaign
NEW JERSEY
In The New York Times account of Christie’s veto, they explain that
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“The governor’s veto was conditional, asking the State Legislature to amend the bill, so that rather than legalizing same-sex marriages, it would establish an overseer to handle complaints that the state’s five-year-old civil union law did not provide gay and lesbian couples the same protections that marriage would.
“Mr. Christie also affirmed his call for the Legislature to put a referendum on same-sex marriage on the ballot in November. . . .
“At the same time, Mr. Christie repeated what the State Supreme Court said in 2006 — that same-sex couples deserve the same benefits enjoyed by married couples. Answering testimony that same-sex couples in civil unions had more trouble than married couples in matters like obtaining mortgages and making health care decisions, the governor said he wanted to set up a new ombudsman to make sure gay and lesbian couples did not suffer discrimination.”
Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, responded in the Timesstory to the ombudsman idea by calling it
““the equivalent of gold-plating a separate water fountain for a specific class of people.”
In a posting two days ago, Bondings 2.0 noted that Washington State’s Catholic governor Christine Gregoire, who this week signed a marriage equality bill into law, sent a letter to fellow Catholic Christie, offering to discuss her evolution on the issue. Christie had not responded.
In their editorial column, the Times opined about “Governor Christie’s Misguided and Intolerant Veto,”
“Sadly, there was no surprise to Gov. Chris Christie’s veto on Friday of the same-sex marriage bill that cleared New Jersey’s Assembly and Senate this week. Mr. Christie had said all along that he would block the measure as soon as it reached his desk. That does not change the message of intolerance or lessen the pain for gay residents and their families. Mr. Christie compounded the insult when he dismissed the Legislature’s support for the rights of gay people as merely ‘an exercise in theater.’ The only one who deserves that accusation is Governor Christie, who is clearly pandering to his own conservative base. . . .
“This isn’t about theater and shouldn’t be about politics. Marriage equality is a basic right.”
Click graphic for link to the fascinating story- and a bigger graphic
I’ve been talking about this for a while now, but it’s now being seriously discussed in the mainstream media.
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On the growing roster of antibiotic-resistant diseases, gonorrhea is the one that has most recently captured the attention of public health officials. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned last week that 1.7% of certain types of gonorrhea infections show little response to treatment, even with cephalosporins, the last line of antibiotic defense.
At this point, no matter what happens with cephalosporins, resistant gonorrhea is on its way to winning out over available antibiotics, making it one of many worrisome bacterial strains, such as total-drug-resistant tuberculosis and MRSA,or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Resistant infections are emerging faster than new antibiotics. According to the nonprofit Pew Health Group, from 1935 to 1968, 13 classes of antibiotics were created; since 1968, there have been only two. Antibiotics are hard to develop and the profit margin on them is low because, unlike antidepressants or medications for high blood pressure, they’re not usually taken on a long-term basis.
The demand for such classes of antibiotics is clearly growing- but outside of one of the board members of Merck or Abbott or Pfizer gets untreatable gonorrhea or MRSA- you can bet it won’t happen without a struggle.
Friends Jeannine Gramick and Frank DeBernardo from New Ways Ministry had an excellent Valentine’s Day Op-Ed in The Washington Post. In one of the most well prepared (both theologically and sociologically) essays I’ve read, they make the case for marriage equality:
In forming our consciences, Catholics also consult scripture and our theological tradition. Here, again, there is little firm reason to oppose marriage equality. The Bible presents us with a marital landscape that includes polygamy, concubinage, temple prostitution and Levirate marriages (in which a man is bound to marry his brother’s widow.) Jesus disputed the Mosaic law on divorce, saying that what God has joined man must not separate, but this dictum was modified in the letters of St. Paul.
When we see the manifold changes that marriage has undergone throughout history, many Catholics wonder why our bishops believe that heterosexual marriage in its current 21stcentury state is a matter of divine revelation.
Those who delve into the theology of marriage will encounter the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, who articulated what Christians have come to call “the goods of marriage.” These are enumerated in contemporary terms as partnership, permanence, fidelity and fruitfulness. Same-sex couples demonstrate all of these attributes just as opposite-sex couples do, unless one defines “fruitfulness” narrowly as the ability to procreate. But many heterosexual couples cannot or choose not to procreate, and the church marries them anyway.
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The deeper one looks into the church’s core teachings, the more one realizes that the bishops are not representing the breadth of the Catholic tradition in their campaign against marriage equality. Nowhere is that more true than in the area of Catholic social justice teaching.Catholic social teaching requires that all people be treated with dignity, regardless of their state in life or their beliefs. It upholds the importance of access to health-care benefits, the protection of children, dignity in end of life choices, and, most importantly, the promotion of stable family units. Marriage equality legislation would be an obvious boon to same-sex couples and their children in each of these areas, yet the bishops are spending millions of dollars opposing it.
Brilliant. If you’re a pray-er, these two deserve all you can give them.
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Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, Utah’s Legislature is moving forward on HB363, a piece of legislation that would effectively end any comprehensive sexual education in Utah schools. The Salt Lake City Weekly:
House Bill 363 sponsor Rep. Bill Wright, R-Holden, argued that teaching contraception only encouraged immoral behavior, so his bill would allow for schools to teach abstinence-only or to opt out of teaching sexual education entirely. Wright said teaching sexuality wasn’t a priority in education. “This is not like all our students are going to die if they don’t learn promiscuous behavior,” Wright said. (emphasis mine)
Yes. That’s what he said.
In an editorial for the same paper, Rebecca Walsh opines
Anti-sex-education crusader Bill Wright would have loved me.
In seventh grade, I was just like the tiny blond granddaughter the Republican legislator from Holden hauled up to Capitol Hill last week as a prop for his legislative campaign, House Bill 363. I was the pristine product of a sex-free Utah public education and Mormon parents—innocent, naïve, clueless.
Then one day, I overheard a boy in the hall at school crudely describing the mechanics of copulation. In an instant, Troy rendered irrelevant my parents’ denial that we needed to have the talk and showed me the limits of my teachers’ silence. It was the end of innocence, delivered by a pimply teenage boy.
And that’s the problem with Wright’s (and my parents’) plan: It’s not rooted in real life.
American teens are shockingly misinformed about their bodies, birth control and pregnancy—Utah kids even more so.
A 2008 study by Self magazine and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found many young adults had “magical thinking” when it comes to sex—unsure of how often to take birth-control pills, unfamiliar with 28-day fertility cycles.
And that was among young adults with some level of sex education. In the information vacuum created by Utah lawmakers, sex ed ranges from abstinence-only programs in four school districts—Alpine, Canyons, Jordan and Nebo—to oblique references from frightened biology and health teachers in others.
When are we going to wake up to science and truth? High school students are having sex. Right now. Probably without condoms, birth control, and in Utah, without rudimentary knowledge of biological processes.
While this “teaching kids about sex causes them to have more sex” nonsense avoids the reality of the situation: as a society, we are ridiculously stupid about sex.
Ridiculously.
And if this bill gets through, that ridiculousness will be enshrined in Utah law.
From Eternity To Here 