FDA Official Resigns in Protest of 'Morning-After Pill' Decision
By Marc KaufmanWashington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 31, 2005; 12:30 PM
The top Food and Drug Administration official in charge of women's health issues resigned today in protest against the agency's decision last week to further delay a final ruling on the whether the emergency contraceptive "morning-after pill" should be made more easily accessible.
Susan F. Wood, assistant FDA commissioner for women's health and director of the Office of Women's Health, said she was leaving her position after five years because Commissioner Lester Crawford's decision on Friday amounted to unwarranted interference in agency decision-making.
"I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overuled," she wrote in an e-mail to her staff and FDA colleagues.
She said that Crawford's position -- that unresolved regulatory issues made it impossible to approve expanded use of the drug -- is "contrary to my core commitment to improving and advancing women's health."
When the FDA rejected the first application last year to make the emergency contraceptive Plan B available without a prescription, officials acknowledged that the science staff had overwhelmingly favored the application. When Crawford announced additional delays on Friday with a second application, he again acknowledged that the staff and managers of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research had concluded that the drug was safe for over-the-counter use for women over 17.
Crawford said, however, that the agency was wrestling with unresolved regulatory issues regarding whether it could properly allow a drug to be sold as an over-the-counter medication for most women, and by prescription-only for girls under 17. He said the issue had to be addressed through a formal rule-making process, which can be time-consuming.
Many supporters of the Plan B application -- including Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) -- accused Crawford of making a political decision that ignored science and public health.
The Plan B issue has become an emotional one for advocates -- who believe it will reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions -- and opponents who believe that it will encourage teenage promiscuity and that in some cases its mode of action constitutes abortion. Social and religious conservatives flooded the White House with phone calls in the days before Crawford's decision.
The FDA and mainstream medical associations consider that Plan B, which is generally effective in preventing pregnancy if taken with 72 hours of a contraceptive failure or unprotected sex, prevents a pregnancy rather than ending one. Religious conservatives and some members of Congress disagree and say that pregnancy begins with the fertilizing of the egg. They argue that anything that harms the egg amounts to abortion. While Plan B generally works by preventing fertilization, in some cases it can keep a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus.
Wood has been the senior official for women's affairs since 2000, and the mission of her office is to "be a champion for women's health, both inside and outside the agency."
Before coming to the FDA, Wood was the director for policy and program development at the Department of Health and Human Services' Office on Women's Health, where she led the development of policy for the office and recommended initiatives for the assistant secretary for health and the secretary. Before that, Wood worked on Capitol Hill for the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues, which is dedicated to advancing legislation that promotes legal, economic, and health equity for women.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Buddy can you spare a dime . . .
Poverty Rate Rises to 12.7 Percent
By JENNIFER C. KERR
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.
The percentage of people without health insurance did not change.
Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003.
Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty -- from 11.8 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year. The poverty rate among the elderly declined as well, from 10.2 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year.
The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold -- 11.3 percent of the population. Since then, the poverty rate has increased steadily from 11.7 percent in 2001, when the economy slipped into recession, to 12.5 percent in 2003.
The number of people without health insurance grew from 45 million to 45.8 million. At the same time, the number of people with health insurance coverage grew by 2 million last year.
Charles Nelson, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau, said the percentage of uninsured remained steady because of an "increase in government coverage, notably Medicaid and the state children's health insurance program, that offset a decline in employment-based coverage."
The median household income, meanwhile, stood at $44,389, unchanged from 2003. Among racial and ethnic groups blacks had the lowest median income and Asians the highest. Median income refers to the point at which half of households earn more and half earn less.
Regionally, income declined only in the Midwest, down 2.8 percent to $44,657. The South was the poorest region and the Northeast and the West had the highest median incomes.
The increase in poverty came despite strong economic growth, which helped create 2.2 million jobs last year.
"I guess what happened last year was kind of similar to what happened in the early 1990s where you had a recession that was officially over and then you had several years after that of rising poverty," Nelson said. "... These numbers do reflect changes between 2003 and 2004. They don't reflect any improvements in the economy in 2005."
Tim Smeeding, an economics professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, says the nation has experienced a shift from earnings income to capital income and capital gains, which aren't reflected in the Census Bureau's latest numbers.
"Most of that growth in the economy over the last couple of years has gone to higher income people and has taken the form of capital income -- interest, rents, dividends," Smeeding said.
The poverty threshold differs by the size and makeup of a household. For instance, a family of four with two children was considered living in poverty if income was $19,157 or less. For a family of two with no children, it was $12,649. For a person 65 and over living alone, it was 9,060.
The estimates on poverty, uninsured and income are based on supplements to the bureau's Current Population Survey, and are conducted over three months, beginning in February, at about 100,000 households nationwide.
The only city with a million or more residents that exhibited a significant change in poverty level last year was New York City, which saw the rate increase from 19 percent to 20.3 percent.
By JENNIFER C. KERR
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.
The percentage of people without health insurance did not change.
Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003.
Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty -- from 11.8 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year. The poverty rate among the elderly declined as well, from 10.2 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year.
The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold -- 11.3 percent of the population. Since then, the poverty rate has increased steadily from 11.7 percent in 2001, when the economy slipped into recession, to 12.5 percent in 2003.
The number of people without health insurance grew from 45 million to 45.8 million. At the same time, the number of people with health insurance coverage grew by 2 million last year.
Charles Nelson, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau, said the percentage of uninsured remained steady because of an "increase in government coverage, notably Medicaid and the state children's health insurance program, that offset a decline in employment-based coverage."
The median household income, meanwhile, stood at $44,389, unchanged from 2003. Among racial and ethnic groups blacks had the lowest median income and Asians the highest. Median income refers to the point at which half of households earn more and half earn less.
Regionally, income declined only in the Midwest, down 2.8 percent to $44,657. The South was the poorest region and the Northeast and the West had the highest median incomes.
The increase in poverty came despite strong economic growth, which helped create 2.2 million jobs last year.
"I guess what happened last year was kind of similar to what happened in the early 1990s where you had a recession that was officially over and then you had several years after that of rising poverty," Nelson said. "... These numbers do reflect changes between 2003 and 2004. They don't reflect any improvements in the economy in 2005."
Tim Smeeding, an economics professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, says the nation has experienced a shift from earnings income to capital income and capital gains, which aren't reflected in the Census Bureau's latest numbers.
"Most of that growth in the economy over the last couple of years has gone to higher income people and has taken the form of capital income -- interest, rents, dividends," Smeeding said.
The poverty threshold differs by the size and makeup of a household. For instance, a family of four with two children was considered living in poverty if income was $19,157 or less. For a family of two with no children, it was $12,649. For a person 65 and over living alone, it was 9,060.
The estimates on poverty, uninsured and income are based on supplements to the bureau's Current Population Survey, and are conducted over three months, beginning in February, at about 100,000 households nationwide.
The only city with a million or more residents that exhibited a significant change in poverty level last year was New York City, which saw the rate increase from 19 percent to 20.3 percent.
To Do List for Tuesday . . . Stop the War
What Noble Cause Did Casey Sheehan Die For?
"Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation. No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam." - Iraqi Constitution supported by Iran-backed Shiites and the Bush Administration (but opposed by Sunni leaders)
_______________
Resolution of Inquiry into Bush Lies Gains Momentum
There are now 53 co-sponsors on Barbara Lee's Resolution of Inquiry into the Downing Street Memos, including one Republican member of the International Relations Committee, Jim Leach. If your Representative isn't on this list yet, please call their D.C. office (202-224-3121) and ask to speak to the Legislative Director. Ask why they haven't cosponsored HRes375, and then report back to us. A vote in committee will come between Sept. 6 and Sept. 16. http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/902
_______________
"Bring the Troops Home Now" Bus Tour Begins August 31
On August 31st, the last day of the encampment, the Bring Them Home Now Tour will launch three buses from Crawford, Texas, each carrying military and Gold Star families, veterans of the Iraq War and veterans of previous wars. These buses will travel different routes across the country, converging in Washington, DC on September 21, for the United for Peace and Justice Mobilization September 24th-26th. From George Bush's doorstep to communities along the way, we demand that:
_______________
Why Aren't Congress's Kids Fighting in Iraq?
Dear Senator/Representative,
If you support the War in Iraq, why aren't you or your children or your grandchildren fighting there? The Army is short of soldiers because of the Iraq War disaster. This shortage has put our national security in danger throughout the world. Your family can help fix the problem that you created by supporting the Iraq War disaster. As your constituent, I will continue to ask this question until you call for the withdrawal of America's children from Iraq. http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/57
_______________
Pass Local Resolutions
The Backbone Campaign is helping grassroots activists organize their Town Councils and Democratic Committees to pass resolutions on:
_______________
Out of Iraq Rally in D.C. on September 15
The peace movement will rally against the war in front of the White House following Democrat-led hearings on an exit strategy hosted by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA).
Learn more: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/2369
_______________
September 24-26 - Mark Your Calendar!
September 24-26: End the War on Iraq!Three Days of Peace & Justice Actions in Washington, D.C.
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/septmobe
_______________
PDA Events Sept. 24-26 to Include Focus on Downing Street
Workshops and trainings in DC on Sept 25th organized by Progressive Democrats of America will include a focus on Downing Street, including remarks by AfterDowningStreet.org Co-Founder John Bonifaz.
http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/events/sept2005/index.php
_______________
Demand More Polls on Impeaching Bush
On June 30, a Zogby poll found 42% of Americans said "if it is found that President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should hold him accountable through impeachment." At the time, Bush's approval rating was just 43%. Since then, Bush's approval has dropped even lower - down to 36%. It's time for other pollsters to follow up on the Zogby Poll and to ask about impeaching George Bush. We've collected all the e-mail addresses you need to contact them.
http://www.democrats.com/bush-impeachment-polls
_______________
C-SPAN to Broadcast McKinney Congressional Briefing on 9/11
On July 22, Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) organized a day-long briefing on the 9/11 Commission's Final Report one year later. The event included leading victims' family members, former government and intelligence workers, academics and authors speaking on the flaws and weaknesses of the 9/11 Commission's investigation, assumptions, omissions, conclusions and recommendations. It was filmed in entirety by C-SPAN and will be broadcast:
_______________
BS Protector - Don't Leave Home Without It!
Veteran Bill Moyer didn't take any risks when he watched Bush speak. You shouldn't either!Make your own BS Protector - it's easy and fun for the whole family!
http://tinyurl.com/8bh8u
"Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation. No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam." - Iraqi Constitution supported by Iran-backed Shiites and the Bush Administration (but opposed by Sunni leaders)
_______________
Resolution of Inquiry into Bush Lies Gains Momentum
There are now 53 co-sponsors on Barbara Lee's Resolution of Inquiry into the Downing Street Memos, including one Republican member of the International Relations Committee, Jim Leach. If your Representative isn't on this list yet, please call their D.C. office (202-224-3121) and ask to speak to the Legislative Director. Ask why they haven't cosponsored HRes375, and then report back to us. A vote in committee will come between Sept. 6 and Sept. 16. http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/902
_______________
"Bring the Troops Home Now" Bus Tour Begins August 31
On August 31st, the last day of the encampment, the Bring Them Home Now Tour will launch three buses from Crawford, Texas, each carrying military and Gold Star families, veterans of the Iraq War and veterans of previous wars. These buses will travel different routes across the country, converging in Washington, DC on September 21, for the United for Peace and Justice Mobilization September 24th-26th. From George Bush's doorstep to communities along the way, we demand that:
- Elected Representatives Decide Now to Bring the Troops Home
- We Take Care of Them When They Get Here
- We Never Again Send Our Loved Ones to War Based on Lies!
_______________
Why Aren't Congress's Kids Fighting in Iraq?
Dear Senator/Representative,
If you support the War in Iraq, why aren't you or your children or your grandchildren fighting there? The Army is short of soldiers because of the Iraq War disaster. This shortage has put our national security in danger throughout the world. Your family can help fix the problem that you created by supporting the Iraq War disaster. As your constituent, I will continue to ask this question until you call for the withdrawal of America's children from Iraq. http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/57
_______________
Pass Local Resolutions
The Backbone Campaign is helping grassroots activists organize their Town Councils and Democratic Committees to pass resolutions on:
- Barbara Lee's Resolution of Inquiry (H. Res. 375)
- Rep. Rush Holt's Resolution of Inquiry (H.Res 363) into the Valerie Plame outing
- Letter to Senate Intelligence Committee chair Pat Roberts (R-KS) for Phase II of the Investigation Into Pre-War Intelligence
_______________
Out of Iraq Rally in D.C. on September 15
The peace movement will rally against the war in front of the White House following Democrat-led hearings on an exit strategy hosted by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA).
Learn more: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/2369
_______________
September 24-26 - Mark Your Calendar!
September 24-26: End the War on Iraq!Three Days of Peace & Justice Actions in Washington, D.C.
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/septmobe
_______________
PDA Events Sept. 24-26 to Include Focus on Downing Street
Workshops and trainings in DC on Sept 25th organized by Progressive Democrats of America will include a focus on Downing Street, including remarks by AfterDowningStreet.org Co-Founder John Bonifaz.
http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/events/sept2005/index.php
_______________
Demand More Polls on Impeaching Bush
On June 30, a Zogby poll found 42% of Americans said "if it is found that President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should hold him accountable through impeachment." At the time, Bush's approval rating was just 43%. Since then, Bush's approval has dropped even lower - down to 36%. It's time for other pollsters to follow up on the Zogby Poll and to ask about impeaching George Bush. We've collected all the e-mail addresses you need to contact them.
http://www.democrats.com/bush-impeachment-polls
_______________
C-SPAN to Broadcast McKinney Congressional Briefing on 9/11
On July 22, Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) organized a day-long briefing on the 9/11 Commission's Final Report one year later. The event included leading victims' family members, former government and intelligence workers, academics and authors speaking on the flaws and weaknesses of the 9/11 Commission's investigation, assumptions, omissions, conclusions and recommendations. It was filmed in entirety by C-SPAN and will be broadcast:
- Wednesday August 31 from 8:00 pm to 11:30 pm
- Friday, September 2 from 8:00 pm to 1:00 am
_______________
BS Protector - Don't Leave Home Without It!
Veteran Bill Moyer didn't take any risks when he watched Bush speak. You shouldn't either!Make your own BS Protector - it's easy and fun for the whole family!
http://tinyurl.com/8bh8u
Christian Coup d'Etat
Strategizing a Christian Coup d'Etat
A group of believers wants to establish Scriptures-based government one city and county at a time
By Jenny Jarvie
Times Staff Writer
August 28, 2005
GREENVILLE, S.C. — It began, as many road trips do, with a stop at Wal-Mart to buy a portable DVD player.
But Mario DiMartino was planning more than a weekend getaway. He, his wife and three children were embarking on a pilgrimage to South Carolina.
'I want to migrate and claim the gold of the Lord,' said the 38-year-old oil company executive from Pennsylvania. 'I want to replicate the statutes and the mores and the scriptures that the God of the Old Testament espoused to the world.'
DiMartino, who drove here recently to look for a new home, is a member of Christian Exodus, a movement of politically active believers who hope to establish a government based upon Christian principles.
At a time when evangelicals are exerting influence on the national political stage — having helped secure President Bush's reelection — Christian Exodus believes that people of faith have failed to assert their moral agenda: Abortion is legal. School prayer is banned. There are limits on public displays of the Ten Commandments. Gays and lesbians can marry in Massachusetts.
Christian Exodus activists plan to take control of sheriff's offices, city councils and school boards. Eventually, they say, they will control South Carolina. They will pass godly legislation, defying Supreme Court rulings on the separation of church and state.
'We're going to force a constitutional crisis,' said Cory Burnell, 29, an investment advisor who founded the group in November 2003.
'If necessary,' he said, 'we will secede from the union.'
Burnell has not moved to South Carolina himself — he promised his wife that they would stay in Valley Springs, Calif., until the end of next year — but believes that his 950 supporters will rally to the cause. Five families have moved so far.
Burnell said his inspiration came from the Free State Project, which in October 2003 appealed to libertarians to move to New Hampshire for limited government intervention, lower taxes and greater individual rights. By 2006, organizers had hoped to have 20,000 people committed to relocating to New Hampshire; so far, 6,600 have said they intended to make the move, and only 100 have done so.
Christian Exodus, Burnell predicted, will be more successful.
'There are more Christians than libertarians,' he said.
After scrutinizing electoral records, demographic trends and property prices, Christian Exodus members identified two upstate South Carolina counties — they will not officially say which ones — as prime for a conservative takeover. By September 2006, Burnell hopes to have 2,000 activists in one county and 500 in the other.
Frank and Tammy Janoski have settled into a five-bedroom house with white vinyl siding in a new subdivision in rural Spartanburg County.
'This is where God wants us to be,' he said.
Janoski, 38, a self-employed computer engineer, had been contemplating moving from his deadline-oriented lifestyle in Bethlehem, Pa., to a more conservative region with cheaper housing and lower taxes when a church friend handed him a Christian Exodus flier.
'What attracted me to the movement was the idea of calling back the country to a righteous standard,' he said.
His first six months in South Carolina have been idyllic, Janoski said. Not only do his neighbors wave as they pass by, but they also share most of his conservative Christian beliefs.
'If you're going to secede, this is the place to do it,' he said. 'A lot of the locals have that spirit.'
Although Christian Exodus members are confident that they can capitalize on evangelical disillusionment with the Republican Party, local observers are skeptical.
James Guth, a professor at Furman University in Greenville who studies the influence of religion on politics, does not think that Christian Exodus will be successful beyond a county level.
'South Carolina is a state that is dominated by Republicans,' he said. 'Although there are people on the far right edge of the Republican Party … in general, the population is a big fan of Bush.'
Nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, upstate South Carolina is the most conservative region of a conservative state: Bush won 58% of the South Carolina vote in 2004, and Greenville is home to Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian college that until recently had banned interracial dating.
Cleatus Blackmon, treasurer and director of missions at the Greer Baptist Assn., which oversees 39 Baptist churches in Janoski's town, doubts that Christian Exodus' focus on taking over government bodies will appeal to the majority of the region's Christians.
'You don't find the word 'control' in the scriptures,' he said. 'The basic mission of the church is to proclaim God's redeeming love through the example of Jesus Christ.'
But Christian Exodus activists insist that they will forge ahead, even if they end up polarizing the Christian community.
'We want to separate the wheat from the chaff,' DiMartino said. 'There's a lot of deception in the church. If the Republican Party says something, a lot of churches say it's gospel.'
Despite its cynicism about the Republican Party, Christian Exodus plans to use the party's popularity to its advantage. Rather than running for office themselves, Christian Exodus activists hope to influence which Republican candidates win local primaries.
'All we have to do is put our guy on the ballot with an 'R' sign,' Burnell said. 'It could be a corpse and they'll vote for him.
'Local Republicans, however, point out that they would never sit idly by while Christian Exodus took over.
'He talks about 2,000 activists, but I can easily get 4,000 activists,' said Bob Taylor, a Republican Greenville County councilman and a dean at Bob Jones University. 'There's incredible dedication to the [Republican] cause.
'While many South Carolinians may oppose abortion and gay marriage, Taylor said, few would support secession.
But DiMartino is not worried about the naysayers.
When he explained Christian Exodus to the man who sold him his home in Pickens County, he said, the salesman gave him a high-five. DiMartino looks forward to living alongside Christians who want to put local government back in the hands of what, he believes, America was really founded for.
'Whether it flies or not,' he said, 'is really in the Lord's hands.'
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
A group of believers wants to establish Scriptures-based government one city and county at a time
By Jenny Jarvie
Times Staff Writer
August 28, 2005
GREENVILLE, S.C. — It began, as many road trips do, with a stop at Wal-Mart to buy a portable DVD player.
But Mario DiMartino was planning more than a weekend getaway. He, his wife and three children were embarking on a pilgrimage to South Carolina.
'I want to migrate and claim the gold of the Lord,' said the 38-year-old oil company executive from Pennsylvania. 'I want to replicate the statutes and the mores and the scriptures that the God of the Old Testament espoused to the world.'
DiMartino, who drove here recently to look for a new home, is a member of Christian Exodus, a movement of politically active believers who hope to establish a government based upon Christian principles.
At a time when evangelicals are exerting influence on the national political stage — having helped secure President Bush's reelection — Christian Exodus believes that people of faith have failed to assert their moral agenda: Abortion is legal. School prayer is banned. There are limits on public displays of the Ten Commandments. Gays and lesbians can marry in Massachusetts.
Christian Exodus activists plan to take control of sheriff's offices, city councils and school boards. Eventually, they say, they will control South Carolina. They will pass godly legislation, defying Supreme Court rulings on the separation of church and state.
'We're going to force a constitutional crisis,' said Cory Burnell, 29, an investment advisor who founded the group in November 2003.
'If necessary,' he said, 'we will secede from the union.'
Burnell has not moved to South Carolina himself — he promised his wife that they would stay in Valley Springs, Calif., until the end of next year — but believes that his 950 supporters will rally to the cause. Five families have moved so far.
Burnell said his inspiration came from the Free State Project, which in October 2003 appealed to libertarians to move to New Hampshire for limited government intervention, lower taxes and greater individual rights. By 2006, organizers had hoped to have 20,000 people committed to relocating to New Hampshire; so far, 6,600 have said they intended to make the move, and only 100 have done so.
Christian Exodus, Burnell predicted, will be more successful.
'There are more Christians than libertarians,' he said.
After scrutinizing electoral records, demographic trends and property prices, Christian Exodus members identified two upstate South Carolina counties — they will not officially say which ones — as prime for a conservative takeover. By September 2006, Burnell hopes to have 2,000 activists in one county and 500 in the other.
Frank and Tammy Janoski have settled into a five-bedroom house with white vinyl siding in a new subdivision in rural Spartanburg County.
'This is where God wants us to be,' he said.
Janoski, 38, a self-employed computer engineer, had been contemplating moving from his deadline-oriented lifestyle in Bethlehem, Pa., to a more conservative region with cheaper housing and lower taxes when a church friend handed him a Christian Exodus flier.
'What attracted me to the movement was the idea of calling back the country to a righteous standard,' he said.
His first six months in South Carolina have been idyllic, Janoski said. Not only do his neighbors wave as they pass by, but they also share most of his conservative Christian beliefs.
'If you're going to secede, this is the place to do it,' he said. 'A lot of the locals have that spirit.'
Although Christian Exodus members are confident that they can capitalize on evangelical disillusionment with the Republican Party, local observers are skeptical.
James Guth, a professor at Furman University in Greenville who studies the influence of religion on politics, does not think that Christian Exodus will be successful beyond a county level.
'South Carolina is a state that is dominated by Republicans,' he said. 'Although there are people on the far right edge of the Republican Party … in general, the population is a big fan of Bush.'
Nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, upstate South Carolina is the most conservative region of a conservative state: Bush won 58% of the South Carolina vote in 2004, and Greenville is home to Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian college that until recently had banned interracial dating.
Cleatus Blackmon, treasurer and director of missions at the Greer Baptist Assn., which oversees 39 Baptist churches in Janoski's town, doubts that Christian Exodus' focus on taking over government bodies will appeal to the majority of the region's Christians.
'You don't find the word 'control' in the scriptures,' he said. 'The basic mission of the church is to proclaim God's redeeming love through the example of Jesus Christ.'
But Christian Exodus activists insist that they will forge ahead, even if they end up polarizing the Christian community.
'We want to separate the wheat from the chaff,' DiMartino said. 'There's a lot of deception in the church. If the Republican Party says something, a lot of churches say it's gospel.'
Despite its cynicism about the Republican Party, Christian Exodus plans to use the party's popularity to its advantage. Rather than running for office themselves, Christian Exodus activists hope to influence which Republican candidates win local primaries.
'All we have to do is put our guy on the ballot with an 'R' sign,' Burnell said. 'It could be a corpse and they'll vote for him.
'Local Republicans, however, point out that they would never sit idly by while Christian Exodus took over.
'He talks about 2,000 activists, but I can easily get 4,000 activists,' said Bob Taylor, a Republican Greenville County councilman and a dean at Bob Jones University. 'There's incredible dedication to the [Republican] cause.
'While many South Carolinians may oppose abortion and gay marriage, Taylor said, few would support secession.
But DiMartino is not worried about the naysayers.
When he explained Christian Exodus to the man who sold him his home in Pickens County, he said, the salesman gave him a high-five. DiMartino looks forward to living alongside Christians who want to put local government back in the hands of what, he believes, America was really founded for.
'Whether it flies or not,' he said, 'is really in the Lord's hands.'
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Monday, August 29, 2005
Cold-Blooded Murderer Gets Slap on the Wrist
GenderPAC Calls on Courts, Public to Take Gender-Based Hate Crimes More Seriously
Man Receives Four Year Sentence For Murder of Transgender Woman
WASHINGTON (August 29, 2005) Joel Robles, a 29 year-old transgender woman who was stabbed to death last year, will never report to her job as a dental assistant again, but her murderer, Estanislao Martinez, will be a free man in just four years. The California court that sentenced Martinez on August 24th could have sentenced him up to 12 years for Robles’ brutal murder. The Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC) called the sentence an unacceptable punishment for the violent hate crime.
Robles was in a Fresno apartment in August 2004 when Martinez stabbed her more than 20 times after learning that she was biologically male. Martinez was later picked up by Fresno police who found him wandering naked along the freeway.
“No one deserves to die for being who they are. The courts, police, and the public at large must begin to take hate crimes more seriously,” said Riki Wilchins, Executive Director of GenderPAC. “For a crime so brutal, the court gave a cold-blooded murderer little more than a slap on the wrist. That’s a slap in the face to everyone who cares about justice.”
While the overall number of violent crimes in the US decreased in 2004, transgender-related bias crime rates remained consistent -- accounting for 11 percent of all anti-LGBT violence, according to a report issued by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs.
Throughout the trial, Martinez’s attorneys argued that when their client discovered Robles was biologically male he was so overcome with anger that he resorted to murder. 'Crime of passion’ and ‘gay panic’ arguments have traditionally been at the core of defense cases in murder trials with gay and transgender victims.
Last week, defense lawyers in a re-trial of the Gwen Araujo case began summations and reiterated the ‘gay panic’ argument. Araujo, a California transgender teen, was attacked and killed in 2002 by a group of four men after they learned she was born a male. If convicted, they could face sentences of up to 29 years to life in prison.
The original trial resulted in a hung jury when jurors were unable to agree on convicting the men of first degree murder, which indicates a premeditated and deliberate act, or second degree murder. GenderPAC will continue monitoring this case as both sides wrap up closing arguments and await a verdict.
_______________________________________________
The Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC) works to end discrimination and violence caused by gender stereotypes. To join today, visit us at www.gpac.org/join.
Man Receives Four Year Sentence For Murder of Transgender Woman
WASHINGTON (August 29, 2005) Joel Robles, a 29 year-old transgender woman who was stabbed to death last year, will never report to her job as a dental assistant again, but her murderer, Estanislao Martinez, will be a free man in just four years. The California court that sentenced Martinez on August 24th could have sentenced him up to 12 years for Robles’ brutal murder. The Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC) called the sentence an unacceptable punishment for the violent hate crime.
Robles was in a Fresno apartment in August 2004 when Martinez stabbed her more than 20 times after learning that she was biologically male. Martinez was later picked up by Fresno police who found him wandering naked along the freeway.
“No one deserves to die for being who they are. The courts, police, and the public at large must begin to take hate crimes more seriously,” said Riki Wilchins, Executive Director of GenderPAC. “For a crime so brutal, the court gave a cold-blooded murderer little more than a slap on the wrist. That’s a slap in the face to everyone who cares about justice.”
While the overall number of violent crimes in the US decreased in 2004, transgender-related bias crime rates remained consistent -- accounting for 11 percent of all anti-LGBT violence, according to a report issued by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs.
Throughout the trial, Martinez’s attorneys argued that when their client discovered Robles was biologically male he was so overcome with anger that he resorted to murder. 'Crime of passion’ and ‘gay panic’ arguments have traditionally been at the core of defense cases in murder trials with gay and transgender victims.
Last week, defense lawyers in a re-trial of the Gwen Araujo case began summations and reiterated the ‘gay panic’ argument. Araujo, a California transgender teen, was attacked and killed in 2002 by a group of four men after they learned she was born a male. If convicted, they could face sentences of up to 29 years to life in prison.
The original trial resulted in a hung jury when jurors were unable to agree on convicting the men of first degree murder, which indicates a premeditated and deliberate act, or second degree murder. GenderPAC will continue monitoring this case as both sides wrap up closing arguments and await a verdict.
_______________________________________________
The Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC) works to end discrimination and violence caused by gender stereotypes. To join today, visit us at www.gpac.org/join.
Halliburton Whistle Blower Sacked
Halliburton Contract Critic Loses Her Job
Performance review cited in removal
By Griff Witte
The Washington Post
Monday 29 August 2005
A high-level contracting official who has been a vocal critic of the Pentagon's decision to give Halliburton Co. a multibillion-dollar, no-bid contract for work in Iraq, was removed from her job by the Army Corps of Engineers, effective Saturday.
Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the Army Corps, told Bunnatine H. Greenhouse last month that she was being removed from the senior executive service, the top rank of civilian government employees, because of poor performance reviews. Greenhouse's attorney, Michael D. Kohn, appealed the decision Friday in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, saying it broke an earlier commitment to suspend the demotion until a "sufficient record" was available to address her allegations.
The Army said last October that it would refer her complaints to the Defense Department's inspector general. The failure to abide by the agreement and the circumstances of the removal "are the hallmark of illegal retaliation," Kohn wrote to Rumsfeld. He said the review Strock cited to justify his action "was conducted by the very subjects" of Greenhouse's allegations, including the general.
Carol Sanders, a spokeswoman for the Army Corps, said she could not comment on personnel matters, but noted that the Department of the Army approves all actions involving members of the senior executive service.
Greenhouse came to prominence last year when she went public with her concerns over the volume of Iraq-related work given to Halliburton by the Corps without competition. The Houston-based oil services giant already had a competitively awarded contract to provide logistics support for the military in the Middle East and was awarded a no-bid contract to repair Iraq oil fields on the eve of the war there in 2003.
Greenhouse complained internally about that contract. Last fall she started giving interviews to national publications. And in June she testified before a Democrat-sponsored Capitol Hill event on contracting in Iraq.
"I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper abuse I have witnessed" in 20 years working on government contracts, Greenhouse said at the Democratic forum.
She said the independence of the Corps' contracting process was compromised in the handling of the contact. "I observed, first hand, that essentially every aspect of the [Restore Iraqi Oil] contract remained under the control of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. This troubled me and was wrong."
Greenhouse has been the Army Corps' top procurement official since 1997. Then-commander Gen. Joe N. Ballard has said he wanted Greenhouse -- a black woman -- to provide a jolt to the clubby, old-boys' network that had long dominated the contracting process at the Corps.
Since then, Greenhouse has developed a reputation among those in both government and industry as being a stickler for the rules. To her critics, she's a foot-dragging, inflexible bureaucrat. To her supporters, she's been a staunch defender of the taxpayers' dime.
In the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003, Greenhouse objected to a decision to give a five-year, no-bid contract to KBR for putting out the oil fires that Pentagon officials believed retreating Iraqi troops would set as the United States invaded. KBR had earlier been hired to write the plans for how that work would be conducted.
When the time came to award the Restore Iraqi Oil contract, the terms stipulated that the contractor had to have knowledge of KBR's plan. KBR was the only contractor deemed eligible. Normally, contractors that prepare cost estimates and plans are excluded from bidding on the work that arises from those plans.
When superiors overruled her objections to awarding the contract to KBR without competition, she recorded her concerns by writing next to her signature on the contract a warning that the length of the deal could convey the perception that limited competition was intended.
As Greenhouse became more vocal internally, she said she was increasingly excluded from decisions and shunned by her bosses.
Last October, Greenhouse has said, Maj. Gen. Robert Griffin, the Corps' deputy commander, told her that he was demoting her, citing negative performance reviews. He also gave her the option to retire. Instead, she hired a lawyer and took her story to the public.
Performance review cited in removal
By Griff Witte
The Washington Post
Monday 29 August 2005
A high-level contracting official who has been a vocal critic of the Pentagon's decision to give Halliburton Co. a multibillion-dollar, no-bid contract for work in Iraq, was removed from her job by the Army Corps of Engineers, effective Saturday.
Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the Army Corps, told Bunnatine H. Greenhouse last month that she was being removed from the senior executive service, the top rank of civilian government employees, because of poor performance reviews. Greenhouse's attorney, Michael D. Kohn, appealed the decision Friday in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, saying it broke an earlier commitment to suspend the demotion until a "sufficient record" was available to address her allegations.
The Army said last October that it would refer her complaints to the Defense Department's inspector general. The failure to abide by the agreement and the circumstances of the removal "are the hallmark of illegal retaliation," Kohn wrote to Rumsfeld. He said the review Strock cited to justify his action "was conducted by the very subjects" of Greenhouse's allegations, including the general.
Carol Sanders, a spokeswoman for the Army Corps, said she could not comment on personnel matters, but noted that the Department of the Army approves all actions involving members of the senior executive service.
Greenhouse came to prominence last year when she went public with her concerns over the volume of Iraq-related work given to Halliburton by the Corps without competition. The Houston-based oil services giant already had a competitively awarded contract to provide logistics support for the military in the Middle East and was awarded a no-bid contract to repair Iraq oil fields on the eve of the war there in 2003.
Greenhouse complained internally about that contract. Last fall she started giving interviews to national publications. And in June she testified before a Democrat-sponsored Capitol Hill event on contracting in Iraq.
"I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper abuse I have witnessed" in 20 years working on government contracts, Greenhouse said at the Democratic forum.
She said the independence of the Corps' contracting process was compromised in the handling of the contact. "I observed, first hand, that essentially every aspect of the [Restore Iraqi Oil] contract remained under the control of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. This troubled me and was wrong."
Greenhouse has been the Army Corps' top procurement official since 1997. Then-commander Gen. Joe N. Ballard has said he wanted Greenhouse -- a black woman -- to provide a jolt to the clubby, old-boys' network that had long dominated the contracting process at the Corps.
Since then, Greenhouse has developed a reputation among those in both government and industry as being a stickler for the rules. To her critics, she's a foot-dragging, inflexible bureaucrat. To her supporters, she's been a staunch defender of the taxpayers' dime.
In the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003, Greenhouse objected to a decision to give a five-year, no-bid contract to KBR for putting out the oil fires that Pentagon officials believed retreating Iraqi troops would set as the United States invaded. KBR had earlier been hired to write the plans for how that work would be conducted.
When the time came to award the Restore Iraqi Oil contract, the terms stipulated that the contractor had to have knowledge of KBR's plan. KBR was the only contractor deemed eligible. Normally, contractors that prepare cost estimates and plans are excluded from bidding on the work that arises from those plans.
When superiors overruled her objections to awarding the contract to KBR without competition, she recorded her concerns by writing next to her signature on the contract a warning that the length of the deal could convey the perception that limited competition was intended.
As Greenhouse became more vocal internally, she said she was increasingly excluded from decisions and shunned by her bosses.
Last October, Greenhouse has said, Maj. Gen. Robert Griffin, the Corps' deputy commander, told her that he was demoting her, citing negative performance reviews. He also gave her the option to retire. Instead, she hired a lawyer and took her story to the public.
Robertson -- a public menace
Venezuela to Seek Legal Action Against Robertson
Reuters
Sunday 28 August 2005
Caracas, Venezuela - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday his government would take legal action against Pat Robertson and potentially seek his extradition after the U.S. evangelist called for Washington to assassinate the South American leader.
Robertson, who later apologized for the remark, said he was expressing his frustration with Chavez's constant accusations against the administration of President George W. Bush.
"I announce that my government is going to take legal action in the United States ... to call for the assassination of a head of state is an act of terrorism." Chavez said in a televised speech.
The fiery left-wing critic of Bush's foreign policy who frequently charges the U.S. government is plotting to kill him, called Robertson "crazy" and a "public menace."
He said Venezuela could seek Robertson's extradition under international treaties and take its claim to the United Nations if the Bush administration did not act.
Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition and a leader of the Christian right that has backed Bush, said on Monday that if Chavez "thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said political assassination was against the law and was not U.S. policy.
Relations between Chavez and the United States, the top buyer of the OPEC nation's oil, have deteriorated since Chavez survived a brief 2002 coup he says was backed by U.S. authorities. Washington says it is not plotting to kill Chavez and denies involvement in the coup.
Chavez said on Friday Bush would be to blame if anything happened to him. In the past, he has said Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, would cut sales to the United States if he was assassinated.
A close ally of communist Cuba, Chavez presents his self-proclaimed revolution as an alternative to U.S. policies in the region.
Washington says Chavez is a negative influence who uses oil profits to fund anti-democratic groups in South America while becoming more authoritarian at home.
U.S. civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, visiting Venezuela on Sunday, called Robertson's remarks "immoral" and rejected U.S. government claims against Chavez.
Reuters
Sunday 28 August 2005
Caracas, Venezuela - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday his government would take legal action against Pat Robertson and potentially seek his extradition after the U.S. evangelist called for Washington to assassinate the South American leader.
Robertson, who later apologized for the remark, said he was expressing his frustration with Chavez's constant accusations against the administration of President George W. Bush.
"I announce that my government is going to take legal action in the United States ... to call for the assassination of a head of state is an act of terrorism." Chavez said in a televised speech.
The fiery left-wing critic of Bush's foreign policy who frequently charges the U.S. government is plotting to kill him, called Robertson "crazy" and a "public menace."
He said Venezuela could seek Robertson's extradition under international treaties and take its claim to the United Nations if the Bush administration did not act.
Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition and a leader of the Christian right that has backed Bush, said on Monday that if Chavez "thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said political assassination was against the law and was not U.S. policy.
Relations between Chavez and the United States, the top buyer of the OPEC nation's oil, have deteriorated since Chavez survived a brief 2002 coup he says was backed by U.S. authorities. Washington says it is not plotting to kill Chavez and denies involvement in the coup.
Chavez said on Friday Bush would be to blame if anything happened to him. In the past, he has said Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, would cut sales to the United States if he was assassinated.
A close ally of communist Cuba, Chavez presents his self-proclaimed revolution as an alternative to U.S. policies in the region.
Washington says Chavez is a negative influence who uses oil profits to fund anti-democratic groups in South America while becoming more authoritarian at home.
U.S. civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, visiting Venezuela on Sunday, called Robertson's remarks "immoral" and rejected U.S. government claims against Chavez.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
It's about time . . . Martha Coming Out
Martha Stewart Confinement Set to End
By JIM FITZGERALD, Associated Press Writer
KATONAH, N.Y. - Unless she gets into trouble with her probation officer again, Martha Stewart will gain her freedom this week from her "hideous" home confinement sentence and that bothersome, unstylish electronic anklet.
After five months in prison for lying about a stock sale and five months of court-ordered restrictions at her Westchester County estate -- plus three weeks tacked on for misbehaving -- the queen of domestic marketing should be able to move around like any other convicted felon who's done her time.
If she's still under constant surveillance after Wednesday's release, it'll be the paparazzi, not the feds.
Stewart will still be on probation, but will no longer be limited to 48 hours out of the house per week.
Her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, is looking forward to having her back, "working without restriction," said a company spokeswoman, Elizabeth Estroff.
Stewart had expected to shed the anklet on Aug. 10, but on Aug. 3, her 64th birthday, her lawyer announced that she had agreed to an extension.
The violation that got her the extra time was never made public, although there were reports that she popped into a yoga class and was spotted driving around her 153-acre estate, which could be violations if they were not related to her work.
Chris Stanton, chief federal probation officer in New York, would not say if other violations had surfaced.
Stewart said Thursday that she was "very much looking forward" to being freed from home confinement. "But I still have a year and a half of probation, so I won't be making any comment."
The continuing probation means that until March 2007 Stewart is not allowed to get drunk, own a gun or leave the federal court district (for her other homes in Connecticut, Maine and the Hamptons, for example) without permission. She must meet with her probation officer whenever requested and submit monthly reports on her activities. She can't associate with other convicted felons, unless she wants to become an informer.
If she does violate the rules and gets caught, the terms of her probation would likely be tightened, including a return to home confinement, electronic anklet and all, Stanton said.
Stewart has described home confinement as "hideous" and says the electronic anklet irritates her skin and complicates her exercise routine. In an Internet chat with fans, she said: "I hope none of you ever has to wear one."
Despite the electronic shackle, Stewart has been active, especially in her flagship magazine, Martha Stewart Living, where she's been writing about cooking mussels, choosing paint colors, sifting flour and determining whether yeast is fresh.
Freed from home confinement, she'll be much more visible -- with two new television shows.
"Martha," her syndicated weekday lifestyles show premieres Sept. 12. "It's a how-to show with entertainment and a live audience," Stewart told reporters Thursday on the sprawling set of the show. "It's not a talk show -- I don't see a couch anywhere."
Promotional videos for the show include what looks like Stewart being upended by a runaway cow.
"The Apprentice: Martha Stewart," a weekly NBC prime-time series, premieres Sept. 21.
She is probably less enthusiastic about her appearance -- as played by Cybil Shepherd -- in a CBS TV movie called "Martha Behind Bars," scheduled for Sept. 25.
She also wasn't happy when the town of Bedford, which includes Katonah, rejected her application to build a barn for tractors, snowplows and a forklift. It would have been too close to the road, the Planning Board said last month.
Stewart is expected to go back to the drawing board.
By JIM FITZGERALD, Associated Press Writer
KATONAH, N.Y. - Unless she gets into trouble with her probation officer again, Martha Stewart will gain her freedom this week from her "hideous" home confinement sentence and that bothersome, unstylish electronic anklet.
After five months in prison for lying about a stock sale and five months of court-ordered restrictions at her Westchester County estate -- plus three weeks tacked on for misbehaving -- the queen of domestic marketing should be able to move around like any other convicted felon who's done her time.
If she's still under constant surveillance after Wednesday's release, it'll be the paparazzi, not the feds.
Stewart will still be on probation, but will no longer be limited to 48 hours out of the house per week.
Her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, is looking forward to having her back, "working without restriction," said a company spokeswoman, Elizabeth Estroff.
Stewart had expected to shed the anklet on Aug. 10, but on Aug. 3, her 64th birthday, her lawyer announced that she had agreed to an extension.
The violation that got her the extra time was never made public, although there were reports that she popped into a yoga class and was spotted driving around her 153-acre estate, which could be violations if they were not related to her work.
Chris Stanton, chief federal probation officer in New York, would not say if other violations had surfaced.
Stewart said Thursday that she was "very much looking forward" to being freed from home confinement. "But I still have a year and a half of probation, so I won't be making any comment."
The continuing probation means that until March 2007 Stewart is not allowed to get drunk, own a gun or leave the federal court district (for her other homes in Connecticut, Maine and the Hamptons, for example) without permission. She must meet with her probation officer whenever requested and submit monthly reports on her activities. She can't associate with other convicted felons, unless she wants to become an informer.
If she does violate the rules and gets caught, the terms of her probation would likely be tightened, including a return to home confinement, electronic anklet and all, Stanton said.
Stewart has described home confinement as "hideous" and says the electronic anklet irritates her skin and complicates her exercise routine. In an Internet chat with fans, she said: "I hope none of you ever has to wear one."
Despite the electronic shackle, Stewart has been active, especially in her flagship magazine, Martha Stewart Living, where she's been writing about cooking mussels, choosing paint colors, sifting flour and determining whether yeast is fresh.
Freed from home confinement, she'll be much more visible -- with two new television shows.
"Martha," her syndicated weekday lifestyles show premieres Sept. 12. "It's a how-to show with entertainment and a live audience," Stewart told reporters Thursday on the sprawling set of the show. "It's not a talk show -- I don't see a couch anywhere."
Promotional videos for the show include what looks like Stewart being upended by a runaway cow.
"The Apprentice: Martha Stewart," a weekly NBC prime-time series, premieres Sept. 21.
She is probably less enthusiastic about her appearance -- as played by Cybil Shepherd -- in a CBS TV movie called "Martha Behind Bars," scheduled for Sept. 25.
She also wasn't happy when the town of Bedford, which includes Katonah, rejected her application to build a barn for tractors, snowplows and a forklift. It would have been too close to the road, the Planning Board said last month.
Stewart is expected to go back to the drawing board.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Value = Respect
Abuse found in military schools
By Steven Komarow, USA TODAY
Thu Aug 25, 7:24 PM
A culture that devalues the role of women in uniform makes it easier for rape and sexual harassment to occur at the Army and Navy academies, according to a Pentagon task force report released Thursday.
"When women are devalued, the likelihood of harassing and even abusive behavior increases," said the panel of 12 military officers and civilian experts. It proposed wide-ranging action, from better admissions screening to revamping antiquated military rape laws.
Congress ordered the review of the Army and Navy academies after a 2003 investigation at the Air Force academy found sexual assault "a part of life" for cadets. That investigation arose after almost 150 women came forward to say they had been assaulted by fellow cadets between 1993 and 2003.
Thursday's report praised Army and Navy leaders for taking the issue seriously but said the services need to do more.
Representatives at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., and the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., said their services would use the report to help improve conditions.
"Our goal is to eliminate this illegal behavior," said Lt. Col. Kent Cassella, a West Point spokesman.
The report cited 2004 Pentagon data showing 50% of women at all three academies were harassed, mostly verbally but dozens suffering physical abuse. Tolerance of "hostile attitudes and inappropriate actions toward women" continues "to hinder the establishment of a safe and professional environment," it said.
"I'm not surprised at all, I regret to say," said retired Air Force brigadier general Wilma Vaught, president of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation. "I don't know what we have to do to end" the harassment of women by some male colleagues.
Among more than four dozen recommendations:
That exclusion should end, said Vaught, adding that "we all take the same oath. We get the same pay. We should leave commanders free to use their troops the way they have to in times of combat."
By Steven Komarow, USA TODAY
Thu Aug 25, 7:24 PM
A culture that devalues the role of women in uniform makes it easier for rape and sexual harassment to occur at the Army and Navy academies, according to a Pentagon task force report released Thursday.
"When women are devalued, the likelihood of harassing and even abusive behavior increases," said the panel of 12 military officers and civilian experts. It proposed wide-ranging action, from better admissions screening to revamping antiquated military rape laws.
Congress ordered the review of the Army and Navy academies after a 2003 investigation at the Air Force academy found sexual assault "a part of life" for cadets. That investigation arose after almost 150 women came forward to say they had been assaulted by fellow cadets between 1993 and 2003.
Thursday's report praised Army and Navy leaders for taking the issue seriously but said the services need to do more.
Representatives at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., and the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., said their services would use the report to help improve conditions.
"Our goal is to eliminate this illegal behavior," said Lt. Col. Kent Cassella, a West Point spokesman.
The report cited 2004 Pentagon data showing 50% of women at all three academies were harassed, mostly verbally but dozens suffering physical abuse. Tolerance of "hostile attitudes and inappropriate actions toward women" continues "to hinder the establishment of a safe and professional environment," it said.
"I'm not surprised at all, I regret to say," said retired Air Force brigadier general Wilma Vaught, president of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation. "I don't know what we have to do to end" the harassment of women by some male colleagues.
Among more than four dozen recommendations:
- Toughen consequences for men who harass or tolerate harassment, or who abuse alcohol, a major factor. The system of peer loyalty, which discourages reporting, must be changed, it said.
- Increase the number of women on faculties and in student bodies. About 15% of cadets and midshipmen are female.
- Require incoming freshmen to release high school records that would show behavior problems.
- Urge Congress to pass criminal rape laws for the military similar to those of many states. Current military laws "do not reflect the full range of contemporary sexual misconduct," including cases that don't involve physical force.
- Give commanders more authority to close the doors of criminal hearings, to protect the accuser from public exposure and thus encourage reporting.
- Add history of women in uniform to the curricula, including why women are excluded from combat.
That exclusion should end, said Vaught, adding that "we all take the same oath. We get the same pay. We should leave commanders free to use their troops the way they have to in times of combat."
There's Got To Be a Morning-After
FDA Delays Morning-After Pill Decision
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON - Most women hoping to buy emergency contraception without a prescription will have to wait awhile longer. The Food and Drug Administration on Friday again postponed its long-awaited decision on whether to let the morning-after pill sell over the counter. It said it still hadn't determined how to ensure that only adults, and not young teenagers, used it without a doctor's guidance.
The FDA did say scientific evidence backed the safe nonprescription use of the pill, sold under the brand Plan B, by women 17 or older. But it called for 60 days of public comment on whether and how drug stores could enforce an age limit.
FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford said the agency "cannot have an inspector in every pharmacy."
The drug's maker, Barr Pharmaceuticals, criticized the decision, questioning how the agency could acknowledge that scientific evidence supported nonprescription sales and yet not allow those sales to begin.
"It's like being in purgatory," said Barr chief executive Bruce Downey.
The morning-after pill is a high dose of regular birth control that, taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex, can lower the risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent. The sooner it's taken, the more effective it is. But it can be hard to get a prescription on weekends or holidays, and some pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions.
Laws in seven states _ Alaska, California, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Washington _ already allow women to buy Plan B without a prescription, with no age restrictions. Massachusetts is set to become the eighth this fall, as lawmakers are expected to override their governor's veto of nonprescription sales.
FDA's delay doesn't affect Plan B sales in those states. But it marked Barr's latest disappointment in the two-year battle to sell Plan B without a prescription nationwide.
Contraceptive advocates and doctors groups say easier access could halve the nation's 3 million annual unintended pregnancies. FDA's scientists say the pills are safe, used by more than 2.4 million Americans and millions more women abroad with few side effects.
The agency's independent scientific advisers overwhelmingly backed over-the-counter sales for everybody, not just adults, in December 2003.
FDA rejected that recommendation, citing concern about young teens' use of the pills without a doctor's guidance. Barr reapplied, asking that women 16 and older be allowed to buy Plan B without a prescription while younger teens continue to get a doctor's note. Downey noted that cigarettes are sold in drug stores with age restrictions.
Friday, FDA essentially boiled the issue down to regulatory precedent: Selling the same dose of a drug by prescription and without at the same time and for the same medical use has never been done.
Among possible questions for the public to answer: Could Plan B be treated like cigarettes, or become the first so-called "behind-the-counter" drug, where women don't need a doctor's note but must ask the pharmacist to hand it over?
Crawford wouldn't say how soon after the 60 days of public comment that FDA would decide.
Why an age restriction, when there isn't one for prescription Plan B today? Crawford said the issue was at what age teens can understand how to use the pills properly.
Contraceptive advocates had expected a decision by a Sept. 1 deadline that Crawford had pledged to members of Congress as a condition of assuming leadership of FDA.
"It is a breach of faith," Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said in a statement in which they called for congressional hearings into the delay.
"It seems improbable to me that ... politics hasn't trumped science here, which is a tragedy," said Dr. Alastair Wood of Vanderbilt University, a member of the FDA advisory committee that evaluated Plan B.
Kirsten Moore of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project noted that FDA already has logged 17,400 letters from the public and advocacy groups. "How many more comments do they need?"
Conservative groups, which have claimed that over-the-counter emergency contraception would encourage teen sex, welcomed the agency's decision.
"Making the morning-after pill over-the-counter would only benefit those that profit from its increased sale, but the real price will be paid by women and girls who would suffer the health consequences," said Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America.
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON - Most women hoping to buy emergency contraception without a prescription will have to wait awhile longer. The Food and Drug Administration on Friday again postponed its long-awaited decision on whether to let the morning-after pill sell over the counter. It said it still hadn't determined how to ensure that only adults, and not young teenagers, used it without a doctor's guidance.
The FDA did say scientific evidence backed the safe nonprescription use of the pill, sold under the brand Plan B, by women 17 or older. But it called for 60 days of public comment on whether and how drug stores could enforce an age limit.
FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford said the agency "cannot have an inspector in every pharmacy."
The drug's maker, Barr Pharmaceuticals, criticized the decision, questioning how the agency could acknowledge that scientific evidence supported nonprescription sales and yet not allow those sales to begin.
"It's like being in purgatory," said Barr chief executive Bruce Downey.
The morning-after pill is a high dose of regular birth control that, taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex, can lower the risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent. The sooner it's taken, the more effective it is. But it can be hard to get a prescription on weekends or holidays, and some pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions.
Laws in seven states _ Alaska, California, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Washington _ already allow women to buy Plan B without a prescription, with no age restrictions. Massachusetts is set to become the eighth this fall, as lawmakers are expected to override their governor's veto of nonprescription sales.
FDA's delay doesn't affect Plan B sales in those states. But it marked Barr's latest disappointment in the two-year battle to sell Plan B without a prescription nationwide.
Contraceptive advocates and doctors groups say easier access could halve the nation's 3 million annual unintended pregnancies. FDA's scientists say the pills are safe, used by more than 2.4 million Americans and millions more women abroad with few side effects.
The agency's independent scientific advisers overwhelmingly backed over-the-counter sales for everybody, not just adults, in December 2003.
FDA rejected that recommendation, citing concern about young teens' use of the pills without a doctor's guidance. Barr reapplied, asking that women 16 and older be allowed to buy Plan B without a prescription while younger teens continue to get a doctor's note. Downey noted that cigarettes are sold in drug stores with age restrictions.
Friday, FDA essentially boiled the issue down to regulatory precedent: Selling the same dose of a drug by prescription and without at the same time and for the same medical use has never been done.
Among possible questions for the public to answer: Could Plan B be treated like cigarettes, or become the first so-called "behind-the-counter" drug, where women don't need a doctor's note but must ask the pharmacist to hand it over?
Crawford wouldn't say how soon after the 60 days of public comment that FDA would decide.
Why an age restriction, when there isn't one for prescription Plan B today? Crawford said the issue was at what age teens can understand how to use the pills properly.
Contraceptive advocates had expected a decision by a Sept. 1 deadline that Crawford had pledged to members of Congress as a condition of assuming leadership of FDA.
"It is a breach of faith," Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said in a statement in which they called for congressional hearings into the delay.
"It seems improbable to me that ... politics hasn't trumped science here, which is a tragedy," said Dr. Alastair Wood of Vanderbilt University, a member of the FDA advisory committee that evaluated Plan B.
Kirsten Moore of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project noted that FDA already has logged 17,400 letters from the public and advocacy groups. "How many more comments do they need?"
Conservative groups, which have claimed that over-the-counter emergency contraception would encourage teen sex, welcomed the agency's decision.
"Making the morning-after pill over-the-counter would only benefit those that profit from its increased sale, but the real price will be paid by women and girls who would suffer the health consequences," said Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America.
NARAL Reenters Media Battle Over Roberts
Abortion-rights TV ad faults Roberts on privacy views
By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY
Fri Aug 26, 9:51 AM
The nation's leading abortion-rights group reentered the media battle over Judge John Roberts' nomination to the Supreme Court on Friday, releasing a TV ad that warns he might weaken Americans' "right to privacy."
The ad from NARAL Pro-Choice America follows an earlier spot that the group withdrew from the airwaves after strong protests from Roberts' supporters over its charge that he had given legal aid to "fringe" groups that advocate violence at abortion clinics. (Related Web site: View the ad)
Nancy Keenan, NARAL's president, said Friday that the controversy created by the earlier ad had become a "distraction" that interfered with getting out her group's message about Roberts -- that it opposes his confirmation because it believes he will support efforts to overturn previous court decisions legalizing abortion.
"We still feel that ad was accurate and important but it was too easily misinterpreted," Keenan said. That ad aired on CNN and some local TV stations in Maine and Rhode Island for just a few days earlier this month.
The new ad cites a memo Roberts wrote in 1981, when he was a lawyer in the Reagan administration Justice Department, referring to the "so-called" right to privacy. It also makes reference to a briefing paper Roberts wrote in 1991, while a deputy solicitor general, in which he stated he felt the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade "was wrongly decided." That decision made abortion legal nationwide.
NARAL's new ad also cites a USA TODAY editorial that asked whether Roberts' legal record "raises questions on whether he accepts the right to privacy."
When it released the earlier ad, NARAL said it planned to spend about $500,000 on television advertising related to the Roberts nomination. Keenan did not say how much NARAL plans to spend on the new ad, but said the spending is part of that $500,000 budget. The ad was to start airing on CNN nationwide today, and will also air on some local stations in Washington, D.C.
Abortion is a hot issue in the Roberts nomination because the justice he would replace, Sandra Day O'Connor, has often been a swing vote in favor of abortion rights.
By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY
Fri Aug 26, 9:51 AM
The nation's leading abortion-rights group reentered the media battle over Judge John Roberts' nomination to the Supreme Court on Friday, releasing a TV ad that warns he might weaken Americans' "right to privacy."
The ad from NARAL Pro-Choice America follows an earlier spot that the group withdrew from the airwaves after strong protests from Roberts' supporters over its charge that he had given legal aid to "fringe" groups that advocate violence at abortion clinics. (Related Web site: View the ad)
Nancy Keenan, NARAL's president, said Friday that the controversy created by the earlier ad had become a "distraction" that interfered with getting out her group's message about Roberts -- that it opposes his confirmation because it believes he will support efforts to overturn previous court decisions legalizing abortion.
"We still feel that ad was accurate and important but it was too easily misinterpreted," Keenan said. That ad aired on CNN and some local TV stations in Maine and Rhode Island for just a few days earlier this month.
The new ad cites a memo Roberts wrote in 1981, when he was a lawyer in the Reagan administration Justice Department, referring to the "so-called" right to privacy. It also makes reference to a briefing paper Roberts wrote in 1991, while a deputy solicitor general, in which he stated he felt the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade "was wrongly decided." That decision made abortion legal nationwide.
NARAL's new ad also cites a USA TODAY editorial that asked whether Roberts' legal record "raises questions on whether he accepts the right to privacy."
When it released the earlier ad, NARAL said it planned to spend about $500,000 on television advertising related to the Roberts nomination. Keenan did not say how much NARAL plans to spend on the new ad, but said the spending is part of that $500,000 budget. The ad was to start airing on CNN nationwide today, and will also air on some local stations in Washington, D.C.
Abortion is a hot issue in the Roberts nomination because the justice he would replace, Sandra Day O'Connor, has often been a swing vote in favor of abortion rights.
Friday, August 26, 2005
More on Pat . . .
Whom would Jesus whack?
Palm Beach Post Editorial Thursday, August 25, 2005
The Rev. Pat Robertson's suggestion Monday that the United States kill a foreign head of state would have come as a surprise only to those who haven't kept up with the loony televangelist.
Think back to some of his greatest hits. The Rev. Robertson predicted that hurricanes would devastate Disney World because the theme park was holding "gay days." After the 9/11 attacks, the Rev. Robertson expressed approval of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's theory that "the gays and the lesbians" were partially to blame for what the terrorists did in New York and Washington. In May, the Rev. Robertson called "activist judges" more of a threat to the country than "a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings."
So it was hardly a reach for the founder of the Christian Coalition to say on his 700 Club that the U.S. ought to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. His country has the largest known oil reserves outside the Middle East, he's a friend of Fidel Castro, he sticks his thumb in our eye all the time. What Would Jesus Do? Take him out, the Rev. Robertson advises. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments would stop."
Surprise? No. Nor is it surprising that the forces of the right-wing morality police were silent or unavailable. The Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition saved their anger for those opposing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. Even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, while disagreeing, said, "Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time."
But this private citizen meets with the president. Is it because this private citizen can deliver some votes? No surprise there.
Palm Beach Post Editorial Thursday, August 25, 2005
The Rev. Pat Robertson's suggestion Monday that the United States kill a foreign head of state would have come as a surprise only to those who haven't kept up with the loony televangelist.
Think back to some of his greatest hits. The Rev. Robertson predicted that hurricanes would devastate Disney World because the theme park was holding "gay days." After the 9/11 attacks, the Rev. Robertson expressed approval of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's theory that "the gays and the lesbians" were partially to blame for what the terrorists did in New York and Washington. In May, the Rev. Robertson called "activist judges" more of a threat to the country than "a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings."
So it was hardly a reach for the founder of the Christian Coalition to say on his 700 Club that the U.S. ought to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. His country has the largest known oil reserves outside the Middle East, he's a friend of Fidel Castro, he sticks his thumb in our eye all the time. What Would Jesus Do? Take him out, the Rev. Robertson advises. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments would stop."
Surprise? No. Nor is it surprising that the forces of the right-wing morality police were silent or unavailable. The Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition saved their anger for those opposing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. Even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, while disagreeing, said, "Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time."
But this private citizen meets with the president. Is it because this private citizen can deliver some votes? No surprise there.
Happy Women's Equality Day!
What is Women’s Equality Day?
At the behest of Rep. Bella Abzug (D-NY), in 1971 the U.S. Congress designated August 26 as “Women’s Equality Day.”
The date was selected to commemorate the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. This was the culmination of a massive, peaceful civil rights movement by women that had its formal beginnings in 1848 at the world’s first women’s rights convention, in Seneca Falls, New York.
The observance of Women’s Equality Day not only commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, but also calls attention to women’s continuing efforts toward full equality. Check with your local NOW chapter to find a Women's Equality Day celebration in your community.
At the behest of Rep. Bella Abzug (D-NY), in 1971 the U.S. Congress designated August 26 as “Women’s Equality Day.”
The date was selected to commemorate the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. This was the culmination of a massive, peaceful civil rights movement by women that had its formal beginnings in 1848 at the world’s first women’s rights convention, in Seneca Falls, New York.
The observance of Women’s Equality Day not only commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, but also calls attention to women’s continuing efforts toward full equality. Check with your local NOW chapter to find a Women's Equality Day celebration in your community.
Joint Resolution of Congress, 1971
Designating August 26 of each year as Women’s Equality Day
WHEREAS, the women of the United States have been treated as second-class citizens and have not been entitled the full rights and privileges, public or private, legal or institutional, which are available to male citizens of the United States; and
WHEREAS, the women of the United States have united to assure that these rights and privileges are available to all citizens equally regardless of sex; and
WHEREAS, the women of the United States have designated August 26, the anniversary date of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, as symbol of the continued fight for equal rights; and
WHEREAS, the women of United States are to be commended and supported in their organizations and activities,
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that August 26th of each year is designated as Women’s Equality Day, and the President is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation annually in commemoration of that day in 1920, on which the women of America were first given the right to vote, and that day in 1970, on which a nationwide demonstration for women’s rights took place.
WHEREAS, the women of the United States have designated August 26, the anniversary date of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, as symbol of the continued fight for equal rights; and
WHEREAS, the women of United States are to be commended and supported in their organizations and activities,
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that August 26th of each year is designated as Women’s Equality Day, and the President is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation annually in commemoration of that day in 1920, on which the women of America were first given the right to vote, and that day in 1970, on which a nationwide demonstration for women’s rights took place.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Humor
How many members of the Bush administration does it take to change a light bulb?
Ten.
1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed
2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed
3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb
4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for changing the light bulb or for eternal darkness
5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb
6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a step ladder under the banner 'Bulb Accomplished'
7. One administration insider to resign and in detail reveal how Bush was literally 'in the dark' the whole time
8. One to viciously smear No. 7
9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along
10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country
Ten.
1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed
2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed
3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb
4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for changing the light bulb or for eternal darkness
5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb
6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a step ladder under the banner 'Bulb Accomplished'
7. One administration insider to resign and in detail reveal how Bush was literally 'in the dark' the whole time
8. One to viciously smear No. 7
9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along
10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country
LGBT Community Opposes Roberts
HRC, THE TASK FORCE, NCLR AND PFLAG ANNOUNCE OPPOSITION TO ROBERTS NOMINATION
WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 — The Human Rights Campaign, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays put out a united statement today to announce opposition to the nomination of John G. Roberts to the Supreme Court.
"Judge Roberts has such a narrow view of what the courts can and should do, it's a wonder he wants the job at all," said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign. "Ultimately, this is about an individual’s right to privacy. From women's rights to religious freedom to civil rights, there is powerful evidence that Judge Roberts would rule against equality."
"For his entire adult life, John Roberts has been a disciple of and promoted a political and legal ideology that is antithetical to an America that embraces all, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "He has denigrated the nature and scope of the constitutional rights to privacy, equal protection and due process as well as federal government's role in confronting injustice. I have no doubt he's an accomplished lawyer and an affable dinner companion, but that doesn't make him any less a mortal danger to equal rights for gay people, reproductive freedom and affirmation action."
"There is nothing in Roberts' history as a lawyer, policymaker or judge to indicate that he would be anything other than hostile to the claims of those seeking to preserve affirmative action, reproductive freedom and fundamental rights, or for those seeking to ensure that the emerging protections expressed in Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas become truly meaningful in the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans," said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
"The stakes for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans are too high," said Jody Huckaby, executive director of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. "We cannot sit back and allow a man with a demonstrated record of hostility towards privacy and minority rights to make decisions on our nation's highest court that will affect this nation for generations to come. After a thorough review of the selective documents released by the White House, PFLAG is convinced that nominee John Roberts should not be trusted to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of all Americans."
______________________________
Joint Statement of Human Rights Campaign, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in Opposition to Nomination of John G. Roberts, Jr. to the United States Supreme Court
As organizations working to advance civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender ("LGBT") people, we work in varied spheres — in Congress, in the courts, before our state legislatures, and within our families. In the realm of civil rights, we know of no more significant event than the appointment of a Supreme Court justice. Together, because of our shared commitment to LGBT rights, we announce our opposition to the nomination of John G. Roberts, Jr. to the Supreme Court of the United States.
History has shown us that the Supreme Court is a bulwark of protection for minorities from the tyranny of sometimes misguided majorities. That was true in 2003 when the court ruled that mere disapproval was not a rational reason to brand us as criminals, just as it was true in 1968 when the court struck down bans on interracial marriage — although 72% of Americans disagreed. Since President Bush nominated John Roberts on July 19, disturbing evidence has emerged about the kind of justice that he would be. His writings as a lawyer, his rulings as a judge, and his statements as a policymaker all lead us to the unfortunate conclusion that Judge Roberts would not vote to protect our civil rights from those who are, at this moment, fighting so hard to take them away. Instead, his record indicates that Judge Roberts would vote to roll back the constitutional protections upon which our community — and all Americans — rely.
The impediments to the Senate's thorough review of Roberts' record. We are particularly troubled that the Senate has had no access to relevant documents relating to Judge Roberts' service as principal deputy solicitor general from 1989 to 1993. These documents include Roberts' writings about cases involving voting rights, choice, the separation of church and state, and many other subjects of critical importance. The Senate's constitutional duty of "advice and consent" depends upon full disclosure of the nominee's record — something that the American people deserve, especially in light of the troubling record revealed thus far. The administration's claim that these documents are shielded by attorney-client privilege is without basis. The American people, not the White House, were Roberts' true client when he was in the Solicitor General's office.
Although our groups, the Senate, and the American people have been denied full access to Roberts' record, the evidence before us is sufficient to lead to the following conclusions:
Roberts and fundamental rights. Just two years ago, the court finally recognized that the constitutional guarantee of liberty protects our community and our relationships. The basis for the landmark case of Lawrence v. Texas was the idea that the Constitution draws a line beyond which the government cannot go. Roberts' writings clearly indicate that he does not agree with the cases and constitutional foundations of Lawrence. He has criticized the court for what he claims is an intrusion into areas belonging to legislatures and dismissed what he calls the "so-called right to privacy." His record indicates that Roberts would not vote to safeguard our liberties, but instead join Justices Scalia and Thomas in upholding limitations on our freedoms.
Roberts and equal protection. Roberts has taken a similarly narrow view of the Equal Protection Clause, which provided the basis for its decision in Romer v. Evans. As a Reagan administration lawyer, Roberts wrote that by reading the Equal Protection Clause to cover classifications other than race, the court had imposed "values which do not have their source in that document." We are concerned that his narrow view would likely have led Roberts, had he been on the court when Romer v. Evans was decided, to conclude that Colorado's discriminatory law was constitutional.
A note on Roberts and Romer v. Evans. We are mindful that Judge Roberts provided a few hours of pro bono help to the attorneys in Romer v. Evans — a landmark case for our community. Some have said that this work — which consisted mostly of playing the role of a conservative justice — demonstrates that Roberts is not personally anti-gay. This theory is not relevant to the important issue for our community: how Roberts would vote as a Supreme Court justice. Roberts has repeatedly written that the court should not stand up for civil rights, but rather allow legislatures to enact such laws as they wish — even those that deny the rights that Americans understand to be fundamental.
Roberts and "court stripping." Our concern that Judge Roberts would not enforce constitutional protections is reinforced by his writings on "court stripping" statutes. Last year, the House of Representatives passed the so-called Marriage Protection Act, which would have prevented the courts from even hearing challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act ("DOMA"). Roberts' writings indicate that he believes such statutes are constitutional, a view that undermines the court's constitutional function as it has been understood for over 200 years. Should such a measure pass the Congress, Roberts would likely vote to uphold it and effectively block our community at the courthouse door.
Roberts and sound science. In spite of the clear consensus among social science, psychiatric, psychological and medical associations in favor of LGBT equality, courts are frequently presented with unfounded assertions that there is conflicting evidence. The way that a judge regards research findings before the Court can affect a case's outcome. In short, it can mean the difference between Goodridge, in which the Massachusetts court ruled that there was no rational basis for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, and Lofton, in which the Eleventh Circuit upheld Florida's anti-gay adoption law even though every credible social science and child advocacy group opposed it.
We were troubled to learn that Roberts, as a Reagan administration attorney, seemed to disregard mainstream scientific evidence about how HIV is transmitted. In September 1985, Roberts cautioned President Reagan against stating that the AIDS virus could not be spread through casual contact among schoolchildren, claiming that this conclusion was in dispute. In fact, August 1985 Centers for Disease Control guidelines clearly stated that "Casual person-to-person contact, as among schoolchildren, appears to pose no risk."
Our community needs to know whether, as a justice, Roberts would look to the sound and tested science about our community. This is an issue that we believe the Senate should examine thoroughly.
Roberts and Congress's power to protect our community. Because the LGBT community is particularly vulnerable to hate violence and discrimination, Congress's authority to prevent these problems is of vital importance to us. Roberts' record shows that he holds a very limited view of Congress's authority, and would likely vote with the court's most conservative justices in cases challenging civil rights statutes, workplace protections and hate crimes legislation.
Roberts as a replacement for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Justice O'Connor, who announced her retirement on July 1, 2005, has often been a critical swing vote in favor of equality. In Romer v. Evans, she joined a 6-3 majority to strike down an anti-gay law. In Lawrence v. Texas, she wrote a concurring opinion that Texas' sodomy law violated the Equal Protection Clause. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, she voted to uphold Roe v. Wade — four justices dissented in that case. In two closely divided cases about public displays of the 10 commandments handed down June 27, she voted to protect the separation of church and state. On all of these areas critical to our civil rights, Judge Roberts has stated that he holds the opposite position. His elevation to the court would be a shift away from equality.
We, and all Americans, deserve better. Our process for arriving at this opposition has been rigorous. Throughout our careful review of Roberts' record, we have been focused on one goal: learning whether his lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court would be in the interest of this community. The evidence indicates that it would not.
As LGBT Americans, we deserve no less than a justice who will uphold our freedoms and protect our rights. By announcing our opposition today, we do not conclude our work but rather commence a new stage in our efforts, engaging the community we represent in this important issue. The confirmation hearings are still ahead, and it is crucial that the Senate Judiciary Committee make clear that our lives, our liberty, and our equality are on the line.
We acknowledge that our task is not an easy one. But we know that it is the right thing to do.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Blair . . . Bush . . . and War
IS BLAIR OFF TO JOIN $30BN WORLD ELITE?
Aug 21 2005
Exclusive By Rupert Hamer
TONY Blair is expected to join one of the most exclusive groups of businessmen in the world after he leaves Downing Street.
The PM is being lined up for a highly lucrative position with the Carlyle Group - an American-based investment giant with strong links to the White House and the defence industry.
The firm has been nicknamed "The Ex-Presidents Club" because it has had a host of former world leaders on its books including George Bush Senior, his former secretary of state James Baker and former British PM John Major. There a also a large number of former US Army top brass.
Mr Blair has been keeping quiet about his plans after his departure from Number 10 - which could be as early as 2007 according to some Labour insiders.
But sources in the City have revealed that he is "seriously considering" a high-profile role with Carlyle - which manages $30billion (£20million) of investments worldwide.
The job could net Mr Blair up to £500,000 a year for only a few days work a month giving speeches and making "networking" trips on behalf of the company.
The move comes after it emerged that the premier's financial affairs are in an increasingly perilous state His dream home has crashed in value by £700,000 in just seven months and he and Cherie have to find £13,000 a month for the mortgage.
The £3million loan the couple took out to buy the house in London's Connaught Square is 17 times Mr Blair's current salary.
Last night one leading City source said: "Private equity firms don't come any more powerful than Carlyle. It would be a huge coup for them if they could bring Tony Blair on board.
"But the job is likely to infuriate MPs and campaigners opposed to Britain's role in the Iraq War because of Carlyle's strong links to the defence industry."
A senior Government source admitted: "We know that Tony is looking at a number of options for life after Downing Street including writing his memoirs.
"But taking certain jobs could present the Labour Party with a large headache, particularly with firms investing in the US arms industry.
"We are trying to move links with the US and the Iraq War down the agenda - and linking up with a firm like Carlyle could reopen all those wounds."
At one time, Carlyle's multi-million pound investors included Saudi members of the estranged family of al-Qaeda warlord Osama bin Laden, who have disowned him. But the family have not been involved with the group for several years.
It has been criticised for using George Bush Senior to help land business deals in the Middle East while advising the American President on sensitive issues in the region at the same time.
City experts believe Mr Blair would be ideally suited to the investment world because he has "the charm to schmooze almost anyone", according to one financier in the Square Mile.
The PM would have the added advantage of having met many of the world leaders with whom Carlyle is keen to do business.
But friends of Mr Blair insist he is considering other money-making options after leaving frontline politics.
They include a lecture tour in the United States which could net him more than £1million and the possibility of a visiting professorship at an American university.
Job.. Bush Snr White House
HOW THE FIRM HAS LINKS AT THE TO
THE Carlyle Group is an American private investment firm which has branches across the world.
It was named after the Carlyle Hotel in New York - although it made its headquarters in Washington DC.
A range of former US leaders either work for the company or invest in it including Frank Carlucci, President Ronald Reagan's former Defence Secretary.
Former US President George Bush Senior was also involved with the huge corporation, but he left two years ago.
Aug 21 2005
Exclusive By Rupert Hamer
TONY Blair is expected to join one of the most exclusive groups of businessmen in the world after he leaves Downing Street.
The PM is being lined up for a highly lucrative position with the Carlyle Group - an American-based investment giant with strong links to the White House and the defence industry.
The firm has been nicknamed "The Ex-Presidents Club" because it has had a host of former world leaders on its books including George Bush Senior, his former secretary of state James Baker and former British PM John Major. There a also a large number of former US Army top brass.
Mr Blair has been keeping quiet about his plans after his departure from Number 10 - which could be as early as 2007 according to some Labour insiders.
But sources in the City have revealed that he is "seriously considering" a high-profile role with Carlyle - which manages $30billion (£20million) of investments worldwide.
The job could net Mr Blair up to £500,000 a year for only a few days work a month giving speeches and making "networking" trips on behalf of the company.
The move comes after it emerged that the premier's financial affairs are in an increasingly perilous state His dream home has crashed in value by £700,000 in just seven months and he and Cherie have to find £13,000 a month for the mortgage.
The £3million loan the couple took out to buy the house in London's Connaught Square is 17 times Mr Blair's current salary.
Last night one leading City source said: "Private equity firms don't come any more powerful than Carlyle. It would be a huge coup for them if they could bring Tony Blair on board.
"But the job is likely to infuriate MPs and campaigners opposed to Britain's role in the Iraq War because of Carlyle's strong links to the defence industry."
A senior Government source admitted: "We know that Tony is looking at a number of options for life after Downing Street including writing his memoirs.
"But taking certain jobs could present the Labour Party with a large headache, particularly with firms investing in the US arms industry.
"We are trying to move links with the US and the Iraq War down the agenda - and linking up with a firm like Carlyle could reopen all those wounds."
At one time, Carlyle's multi-million pound investors included Saudi members of the estranged family of al-Qaeda warlord Osama bin Laden, who have disowned him. But the family have not been involved with the group for several years.
It has been criticised for using George Bush Senior to help land business deals in the Middle East while advising the American President on sensitive issues in the region at the same time.
City experts believe Mr Blair would be ideally suited to the investment world because he has "the charm to schmooze almost anyone", according to one financier in the Square Mile.
The PM would have the added advantage of having met many of the world leaders with whom Carlyle is keen to do business.
But friends of Mr Blair insist he is considering other money-making options after leaving frontline politics.
They include a lecture tour in the United States which could net him more than £1million and the possibility of a visiting professorship at an American university.
Job.. Bush Snr White House
HOW THE FIRM HAS LINKS AT THE TO
THE Carlyle Group is an American private investment firm which has branches across the world.
It was named after the Carlyle Hotel in New York - although it made its headquarters in Washington DC.
A range of former US leaders either work for the company or invest in it including Frank Carlucci, President Ronald Reagan's former Defence Secretary.
Former US President George Bush Senior was also involved with the huge corporation, but he left two years ago.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Fetal Pain Myth
Fetuses May Not Feel Pain in Early Months
Researchers Say Fetuses Likely Don't Feel Pain Until Late in Pregnancy
By LINDSEY TANNER
The Associated Press
Aug. 23, 2005 - A review of medical evidence has found that fetuses likely don't feel pain until the final months of pregnancy, a powerful challenge to abortion opponents who hope that discussions about fetal pain will make women think twice about ending pregnancies.
Critics angrily disputed the findings and claimed the report is biased.
"They have literally stuck their hands into a hornet's nest," said Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand, a fetal pain researcher at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, who believes fetuses as young as 20 weeks old feel pain. "This is going to inflame a lot of scientists who are very, very concerned and are far more knowledgeable in this area than the authors appear to be. This is not the last word definitely not."
The review by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco comes as advocates are pushing for fetal pain laws aimed at curtailing abortion. Proposed federal legislation would require doctors to provide fetal pain information to women seeking abortions when fetuses are at least 20 weeks old, and to offer women fetal anesthesia at that stage of the pregnancy. A handful of states have enacted similar measures.
But the report, appearing in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, says that offering fetal pain relief during abortions in the fifth or sixth months of pregnancy is misguided and might result in unacceptable health risks to women.
Dr. Nancy Chescheir, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Vanderbilt University and a board director at the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, said the article "will help to develop some consensus" on when fetuses feel pain. "To date, there hasn't been any."
The researchers reviewed dozens of studies and medical reports and said the data indicate that fetuses likely are incapable of feeling pain until around the seventh month of pregnancy, when they are about 28 weeks old.
While brain structures involved in feeling pain begin forming much earlier, research indicates they likely do not function until the pregnancy's final stages, said the report's senior author, UCSF obstetric anesthesiologist Dr. Mark Rosen.
Based on the evidence, discussions of fetal pain for abortions performed before the end of the second trimester should not be mandatory, the researchers said.
The authors include the administrator of a UCSF abortion clinic, but the researchers dispute the claim that the report is biased.
Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, JAMA's editor-in-chief, said the decision to publish the review was not politically motivated.
"Oh, please," DeAngelis said. "If I had a political agenda, I wouldn't pick fetal pain."
JAMA does not publish "politically motivated science. We publish data-based, evidence-based science," DeAngelis said.
The measure pending in Congress would affect about 18,000 U.S. abortions a year performed in the fifth month of pregnancy or later, said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee. He said the review is slanted.
But Rosen said the researchers "tried to review the literature in an unbiased fashion. This was a multidisciplinary effort by experts on anesthesia, neuroanatomy, obstetrics and neonatal development."
Rosen also said that administering anesthesia or painkillers to the fetus could pose health risks to the mother.
When doctors operate on fetuses to correct defects before birth, general anesthesia is given to the mother primarily to immobilize the fetus and to make the uterus relax, Rosen said. Anesthesia during fetal surgery increases the mother's risks for breathing problems and bleeding from a relaxed uterus, the researchers said.
Rosen said those risks are medically acceptable when the goal is to save the fetus but there's not enough evidence to show any benefit from fetus-directed anesthesia during an abortion.
Administering anesthesia directly to the fetus is also sometimes done but generally to reduce the release of potentially harmful fetal stress hormones, Rosen said. There is little research on its effects, the authors said.
Anand, the researcher from Arkansas, said the authors excluded or minimized evidence suggesting fetal pain sensation begins in the second trimester and wrongly assume that fetuses' brains sense pain in the same way as adult brains.
While Anand has testified as an expert witness for the government in court cases opposing some late-term abortions, he said he is not anti-abortion and that his views are based on years of fetal pain research.
-------------------------------
On the Net:
JAMA: http:jama.ama-assn.org
Researchers Say Fetuses Likely Don't Feel Pain Until Late in Pregnancy
By LINDSEY TANNER
The Associated Press
Aug. 23, 2005 - A review of medical evidence has found that fetuses likely don't feel pain until the final months of pregnancy, a powerful challenge to abortion opponents who hope that discussions about fetal pain will make women think twice about ending pregnancies.
Critics angrily disputed the findings and claimed the report is biased.
"They have literally stuck their hands into a hornet's nest," said Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand, a fetal pain researcher at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, who believes fetuses as young as 20 weeks old feel pain. "This is going to inflame a lot of scientists who are very, very concerned and are far more knowledgeable in this area than the authors appear to be. This is not the last word definitely not."
The review by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco comes as advocates are pushing for fetal pain laws aimed at curtailing abortion. Proposed federal legislation would require doctors to provide fetal pain information to women seeking abortions when fetuses are at least 20 weeks old, and to offer women fetal anesthesia at that stage of the pregnancy. A handful of states have enacted similar measures.
But the report, appearing in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, says that offering fetal pain relief during abortions in the fifth or sixth months of pregnancy is misguided and might result in unacceptable health risks to women.
Dr. Nancy Chescheir, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Vanderbilt University and a board director at the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, said the article "will help to develop some consensus" on when fetuses feel pain. "To date, there hasn't been any."
The researchers reviewed dozens of studies and medical reports and said the data indicate that fetuses likely are incapable of feeling pain until around the seventh month of pregnancy, when they are about 28 weeks old.
While brain structures involved in feeling pain begin forming much earlier, research indicates they likely do not function until the pregnancy's final stages, said the report's senior author, UCSF obstetric anesthesiologist Dr. Mark Rosen.
Based on the evidence, discussions of fetal pain for abortions performed before the end of the second trimester should not be mandatory, the researchers said.
The authors include the administrator of a UCSF abortion clinic, but the researchers dispute the claim that the report is biased.
Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, JAMA's editor-in-chief, said the decision to publish the review was not politically motivated.
"Oh, please," DeAngelis said. "If I had a political agenda, I wouldn't pick fetal pain."
JAMA does not publish "politically motivated science. We publish data-based, evidence-based science," DeAngelis said.
The measure pending in Congress would affect about 18,000 U.S. abortions a year performed in the fifth month of pregnancy or later, said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee. He said the review is slanted.
But Rosen said the researchers "tried to review the literature in an unbiased fashion. This was a multidisciplinary effort by experts on anesthesia, neuroanatomy, obstetrics and neonatal development."
Rosen also said that administering anesthesia or painkillers to the fetus could pose health risks to the mother.
When doctors operate on fetuses to correct defects before birth, general anesthesia is given to the mother primarily to immobilize the fetus and to make the uterus relax, Rosen said. Anesthesia during fetal surgery increases the mother's risks for breathing problems and bleeding from a relaxed uterus, the researchers said.
Rosen said those risks are medically acceptable when the goal is to save the fetus but there's not enough evidence to show any benefit from fetus-directed anesthesia during an abortion.
Administering anesthesia directly to the fetus is also sometimes done but generally to reduce the release of potentially harmful fetal stress hormones, Rosen said. There is little research on its effects, the authors said.
Anand, the researcher from Arkansas, said the authors excluded or minimized evidence suggesting fetal pain sensation begins in the second trimester and wrongly assume that fetuses' brains sense pain in the same way as adult brains.
While Anand has testified as an expert witness for the government in court cases opposing some late-term abortions, he said he is not anti-abortion and that his views are based on years of fetal pain research.
-------------------------------
On the Net:
JAMA: http:jama.ama-assn.org
Pat Robertson Calls for Assassination of Hugo Chavez
Updated: 09:51 AM EDT
Pat Robertson Calls for Assassination of Hugo Chavez
Televangelist Calls Venezuelan President a 'Terrific Danger' to the United States
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (Aug. 22) - Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson called on Monday for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, calling him a "terrific danger" to the United States.
Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former presidential candidate, said on "The 700 Club" it was the United States' duty to stop Chavez from making Venezuela a "launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism."
Chavez has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of President Bush, accusing the United States of conspiring to topple his government and possibly backing plots to assassinate him. U.S. officials have called the accusations ridiculous.
"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," Robertson said. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."
Electronic pages and a message to a Robertson spokeswoman were not immediately returned Monday evening.
Venezuela is the fifth largest oil exporter and a major supplier of oil to the United States. The CIA estimates that U.S. markets absorb almost 59 percent of Venezuela's total exports.
Venezuela's government has demanded in the past that the United States crack down on Cuban and Venezuelan "terrorists" in Florida who they say are conspiring against Chavez.
Robertson accused the United States of failing to act when Chavez was briefly overthrown in 2002.
"We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," Robertson said.
"We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator," he continued. "It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."
8/22/2005 23:07:21
Pat Robertson Calls for Assassination of Hugo Chavez
Televangelist Calls Venezuelan President a 'Terrific Danger' to the United States
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (Aug. 22) - Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson called on Monday for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, calling him a "terrific danger" to the United States.
Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former presidential candidate, said on "The 700 Club" it was the United States' duty to stop Chavez from making Venezuela a "launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism."
Chavez has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of President Bush, accusing the United States of conspiring to topple his government and possibly backing plots to assassinate him. U.S. officials have called the accusations ridiculous.
"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," Robertson said. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."
Electronic pages and a message to a Robertson spokeswoman were not immediately returned Monday evening.
Venezuela is the fifth largest oil exporter and a major supplier of oil to the United States. The CIA estimates that U.S. markets absorb almost 59 percent of Venezuela's total exports.
Venezuela's government has demanded in the past that the United States crack down on Cuban and Venezuelan "terrorists" in Florida who they say are conspiring against Chavez.
Robertson accused the United States of failing to act when Chavez was briefly overthrown in 2002.
"We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," Robertson said.
"We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator," he continued. "It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."
8/22/2005 23:07:21
Monday, August 22, 2005
John Roberts' Woman Problem
The humorless feminists strike again.
By Dahlia LithwickPosted Friday, Aug. 19, 2005, at 3:33 PM PT
http://slate.msn.com/id/2124789/fr/rss/
Score one for Bruce Reed. He picked up on what I completely missed this week: that the most telling aspect of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' adolescence was not his staunch refusal to get high in the woods, but his contempt for all things female. Closely reading an essay Roberts penned in 1972 for his high-school newspaper, Reed notes that the 17-year-old went beyond arguing for keeping girls out of his Catholic all-boys school. He evinced a horror of "giggling and blushing blondes" that seems to have been airlifted right out of the 1950s: poor beleaguered Roberts and a gaggle of giggling Gidgets.
Yesterday's info dump from the National Archives, raining down more than 38,000 pages of memos from Roberts' service as a legal adviser in the Reagan White House from 1982-86, suggests that Reed has the better of it. What's most startling about Roberts' writings isn't always the substance. Some of the policy ideas he rejected—like that of paying "comparable worth" for traditionally female jobs—may have deserved the scorn he evinced. What's truly is shocking is his dismissive tone, which seemed to surprise even ultraconservative Phyllis Schlafly, who described it yesterday as "smart alecky." Gender disparities are invariably "perceived" or "purported," in Roberts' eyes. Every effort to solve them is laughable. At a moment when serious inequities in women's wages, employment, and opportunities existed in this country, Roberts seemed to dismiss every attempt to remedy them as a knock-knock joke.
In a 1985 memo about whether a government lawyer could be nominated for an award program honoring women who changed professions after age 30, Roberts wrote and approved the nomination but added: "Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good, but I suppose that is for the judges to decide."
In 1983, while reviewing the "Fifty States Project" that Elizabeth Dole had compiled, surveying various state proposals for solving what he deemed "perceived problems of gender discrimination," Roberts took pains to distance the White House from several initiatives he considered "highly objectionable." He wrote, "I think it is imperative that the report make clear (as it presently does not) that the inventory is just that, an inventory, and that proposals appearing in it are not necessarily supported by the administration." He dismissed, from that survey, a Florida proposal that would have charged women less than men to attend state schools to compensate for their lower earning power as "presumably unconstitutional." He condemned a California law requiring the order of layoffs to reflect affirmative action and not merely seniority as at odds with the administration's policies.
Another memo has Roberts blasting the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, dismissing it as an attempt to "bridge the purported 'gender gap.' " In a later memo, Roberts referenced a proposal from a Reagan supporter for elevating Sandra Day O'Connor to chief justice and appointing a second woman to replace her if Warren Burger retired—and "Presto! The gender gap vanishes." Roberts' response: "Any appointments the president makes will not be based on such crass considerations," Roberts added. "The president's strong record on women's issues—as it becomes more widely known—should suffice to close the 'gender gap.' "
Oddly enough, even Sandra Day O'Connor isn't above such crassness. But then she lived through the "purported" gender gap in a way Roberts did not.
Pile these memos onto what we already know of Roberts and gender issues: that later and as a lawyer in private practice, Roberts would argue for narrowing the scope of Title IX—the statute that bars gender discrimination at any school receiving federal funding. He advocated for court-stripping legislation that would have kept the Supreme Court from reviewing certain classes of cases, including abortion, arguing that such legislation would not "directly burden the exercise of any fundamental rights." He urged the Justice Department not to get involved in a case in which female prisoners seeking job training claimed discrimination, even though his superior, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, disagreed.
Does all this add up to John Roberts, woman-hater?
Elliot Mincberg, senior vice president of People for the American Way, told the Chicago Tribune today, "You do see a real clear lack of regard for—and even it could be argued, hostility toward—laws and theories and arguments that would promote equality for women in important ways." And Kim Gandy, president of NOW, fumed in the same paper: "I don't see Roberts' positions as conservative. ... I know a lot of conservatives who expect women to be paid fairly, who think women should become lawyers if they want to be lawyers. That is not a conservative position, that is a Neanderthal position. It's unfair to conservatives to call the positions he takes conservative."
And does anyone besides me dread the depressing prospect of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and 17 men on the Senate Judiciary Committee tenderly probing at Roberts' sensitivity to women's issues, in a sad retread of the Clarence Thomas hearings?
Roberts has several legitimate defenses. The first is that a few classless cracks in 38,000 pages of documents isn't all that bad. Reporters who needed a story connected some dots and turned a handful of dumb comments into front-page headlines. These news stories tend to conflate flippant cracks with serious policy critiques, which isn't entirely fair.
A patently bad defense, however, offered by one of Roberts' staunchest supporters, Prof. Douglas Kmiec, is that most of the proposed policies Roberts disparaged eventually "were largely rejected as unwise by policymakers." So what? The issue isn't the policies themselves but the tone. Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women's Forum similarly believes that proving these policies were dumb is enough to turn Roberts a sensitive new-age guy. I'm not buying.
Then there's the Phyllis Schlafly "he was just a kid" argument. As she told the Washington Post yesterday, Roberts was "a young bachelor and hadn't seen a whole lot of life at that point." She even offered up the corollary "some-of-his-best-friends-are-women" defense, observing, "I don't think that disqualifies him. I think he got married to a feminist; he's learned a lot." Of course the obvious answer to the assertion that his views have evolved over 20 years is to allow us to see documents that are less than 20 years old, i.e., the files from the period in which he served as the deputy solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush. But the White House won't let us see recent files. So I herein suggest that Roberts supporters are estopped from advancing the "just a kid" defense.
Finally, there's the humorless-feminist tack. I vaguely remember this argument from the '80s: It's that women can't take a joke. So that is the new defense: This wasn't just a joke, it was a lawyer joke! That's evidently the White House position, too: "It's pretty clear from the more than 60,000 pages of documents that have been released that John Roberts has a great sense of humor," Steve Schmidt, a Bush spokesman told the Washington Post. "In this [housewives] memo, he offers a lawyer joke."
Heh-heh.
I don't quite know what to make of that argument. It brings me back to Bruce Reed's giggling blondes. The problem isn't with his desperate housewives (or hideous lawyers) crack, but with his relentless "Gidget sucks" tone. Roberts honestly seemed to think that humor or disdain were the only appropriate ways to think about gender. It's not that feminists can't take a joke. It's that Roberts can't seem to take feminists seriously.
The record seems to make it quite clear that Roberts—with his "perceived/purported/alleged" discrimination trope—simply didn't believe that gender problems were worthy of his serious consideration or scrutiny.
The emerging picture of Roberts is of a man deeply skeptical about federal efforts to equalize opportunity for women or minorities, be it through busing, housing, voting rights, or affirmative-action programs. He was even more skeptical of judicial efforts to engage in the same project. And that's a legitimate, if debatable, political theory. But if, as the memos suggest, Roberts' ideological views are the result of being too smart-alecky or dismissive to accept that these disparities were of serious national concern in the first place, he doesn't just have a gender problem. He has a reality problem.
By Dahlia LithwickPosted Friday, Aug. 19, 2005, at 3:33 PM PT
http://slate.msn.com/id/2124789/fr/rss/
Score one for Bruce Reed. He picked up on what I completely missed this week: that the most telling aspect of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' adolescence was not his staunch refusal to get high in the woods, but his contempt for all things female. Closely reading an essay Roberts penned in 1972 for his high-school newspaper, Reed notes that the 17-year-old went beyond arguing for keeping girls out of his Catholic all-boys school. He evinced a horror of "giggling and blushing blondes" that seems to have been airlifted right out of the 1950s: poor beleaguered Roberts and a gaggle of giggling Gidgets.
Yesterday's info dump from the National Archives, raining down more than 38,000 pages of memos from Roberts' service as a legal adviser in the Reagan White House from 1982-86, suggests that Reed has the better of it. What's most startling about Roberts' writings isn't always the substance. Some of the policy ideas he rejected—like that of paying "comparable worth" for traditionally female jobs—may have deserved the scorn he evinced. What's truly is shocking is his dismissive tone, which seemed to surprise even ultraconservative Phyllis Schlafly, who described it yesterday as "smart alecky." Gender disparities are invariably "perceived" or "purported," in Roberts' eyes. Every effort to solve them is laughable. At a moment when serious inequities in women's wages, employment, and opportunities existed in this country, Roberts seemed to dismiss every attempt to remedy them as a knock-knock joke.
In a 1985 memo about whether a government lawyer could be nominated for an award program honoring women who changed professions after age 30, Roberts wrote and approved the nomination but added: "Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good, but I suppose that is for the judges to decide."
In 1983, while reviewing the "Fifty States Project" that Elizabeth Dole had compiled, surveying various state proposals for solving what he deemed "perceived problems of gender discrimination," Roberts took pains to distance the White House from several initiatives he considered "highly objectionable." He wrote, "I think it is imperative that the report make clear (as it presently does not) that the inventory is just that, an inventory, and that proposals appearing in it are not necessarily supported by the administration." He dismissed, from that survey, a Florida proposal that would have charged women less than men to attend state schools to compensate for their lower earning power as "presumably unconstitutional." He condemned a California law requiring the order of layoffs to reflect affirmative action and not merely seniority as at odds with the administration's policies.
Another memo has Roberts blasting the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, dismissing it as an attempt to "bridge the purported 'gender gap.' " In a later memo, Roberts referenced a proposal from a Reagan supporter for elevating Sandra Day O'Connor to chief justice and appointing a second woman to replace her if Warren Burger retired—and "Presto! The gender gap vanishes." Roberts' response: "Any appointments the president makes will not be based on such crass considerations," Roberts added. "The president's strong record on women's issues—as it becomes more widely known—should suffice to close the 'gender gap.' "
Oddly enough, even Sandra Day O'Connor isn't above such crassness. But then she lived through the "purported" gender gap in a way Roberts did not.
Pile these memos onto what we already know of Roberts and gender issues: that later and as a lawyer in private practice, Roberts would argue for narrowing the scope of Title IX—the statute that bars gender discrimination at any school receiving federal funding. He advocated for court-stripping legislation that would have kept the Supreme Court from reviewing certain classes of cases, including abortion, arguing that such legislation would not "directly burden the exercise of any fundamental rights." He urged the Justice Department not to get involved in a case in which female prisoners seeking job training claimed discrimination, even though his superior, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, disagreed.
Does all this add up to John Roberts, woman-hater?
Elliot Mincberg, senior vice president of People for the American Way, told the Chicago Tribune today, "You do see a real clear lack of regard for—and even it could be argued, hostility toward—laws and theories and arguments that would promote equality for women in important ways." And Kim Gandy, president of NOW, fumed in the same paper: "I don't see Roberts' positions as conservative. ... I know a lot of conservatives who expect women to be paid fairly, who think women should become lawyers if they want to be lawyers. That is not a conservative position, that is a Neanderthal position. It's unfair to conservatives to call the positions he takes conservative."
And does anyone besides me dread the depressing prospect of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and 17 men on the Senate Judiciary Committee tenderly probing at Roberts' sensitivity to women's issues, in a sad retread of the Clarence Thomas hearings?
Roberts has several legitimate defenses. The first is that a few classless cracks in 38,000 pages of documents isn't all that bad. Reporters who needed a story connected some dots and turned a handful of dumb comments into front-page headlines. These news stories tend to conflate flippant cracks with serious policy critiques, which isn't entirely fair.
A patently bad defense, however, offered by one of Roberts' staunchest supporters, Prof. Douglas Kmiec, is that most of the proposed policies Roberts disparaged eventually "were largely rejected as unwise by policymakers." So what? The issue isn't the policies themselves but the tone. Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women's Forum similarly believes that proving these policies were dumb is enough to turn Roberts a sensitive new-age guy. I'm not buying.
Then there's the Phyllis Schlafly "he was just a kid" argument. As she told the Washington Post yesterday, Roberts was "a young bachelor and hadn't seen a whole lot of life at that point." She even offered up the corollary "some-of-his-best-friends-are-women" defense, observing, "I don't think that disqualifies him. I think he got married to a feminist; he's learned a lot." Of course the obvious answer to the assertion that his views have evolved over 20 years is to allow us to see documents that are less than 20 years old, i.e., the files from the period in which he served as the deputy solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush. But the White House won't let us see recent files. So I herein suggest that Roberts supporters are estopped from advancing the "just a kid" defense.
Finally, there's the humorless-feminist tack. I vaguely remember this argument from the '80s: It's that women can't take a joke. So that is the new defense: This wasn't just a joke, it was a lawyer joke! That's evidently the White House position, too: "It's pretty clear from the more than 60,000 pages of documents that have been released that John Roberts has a great sense of humor," Steve Schmidt, a Bush spokesman told the Washington Post. "In this [housewives] memo, he offers a lawyer joke."
Heh-heh.
I don't quite know what to make of that argument. It brings me back to Bruce Reed's giggling blondes. The problem isn't with his desperate housewives (or hideous lawyers) crack, but with his relentless "Gidget sucks" tone. Roberts honestly seemed to think that humor or disdain were the only appropriate ways to think about gender. It's not that feminists can't take a joke. It's that Roberts can't seem to take feminists seriously.
The record seems to make it quite clear that Roberts—with his "perceived/purported/alleged" discrimination trope—simply didn't believe that gender problems were worthy of his serious consideration or scrutiny.
The emerging picture of Roberts is of a man deeply skeptical about federal efforts to equalize opportunity for women or minorities, be it through busing, housing, voting rights, or affirmative-action programs. He was even more skeptical of judicial efforts to engage in the same project. And that's a legitimate, if debatable, political theory. But if, as the memos suggest, Roberts' ideological views are the result of being too smart-alecky or dismissive to accept that these disparities were of serious national concern in the first place, he doesn't just have a gender problem. He has a reality problem.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)