Kansas vs Missouri reaction to Supreme Court ruling on (marriage) equality

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that states must accept other states recognition of marriages, including those of same-sex couples.

You'd that would settle it, right?

Well, naturally not, given some "red" or Republican states legislators and governors.

What's interesting, however, is the difference between the way Kansas and Missouri will apparently be approaching this issue. Check it out:

Kansas is ignoring the Supreme Court too — the governor is GOP former congressional neanderthal Sam Brownback:

“You can’t do that in the state of Kansas,” said Nancy Escalante, supervisor for marriage licenses at the court. “Our application says ‘man and woman.’ The Legislature has not changed it.”

In contrast, here’s how a Democratic governor handled today’s move by the Supreme Court, even though none of the decisions in question even applied to Missouri:

Attorney General Chris Koster today released the following statement:

“The circuit court’s judgment in Barrier v. Vasterling held that Missouri must recognize marriages lawfully entered into in other states. We will not appeal that judgment. Our national government is founded upon principles of federalism – a system that empowers Missouri to set policy for itself, but also obligates us to honor contracts entered into in other states.

A consequence of this morning’s ruling by the United States Supreme Court is that gay marriage will soon be legal in as many as 30 states. At a time when Missouri is competing to attract the nation’s premier businesses and most talented employees, we should not demand that certain individuals surrender their marriage licenses in order to live and work among us.

Missouri’s future will be one of inclusion, not exclusion.”

Kudos to Chris Koster and the entire state of Missouri.

Imagine that. People wanting equality. In America.

Here's your "Catholic Education" for you

So many of us don't know our history:

Catholic Church enslaved 30,000 Irish women in Magdalene Laundries until 1996

From the article:

The Irish Prime Minister gave a partial apology today for the government’s role in a 74-year scandal in which, a new official government report says, over 10,000 women were forced to work without pay at commercial laundries called Magdalene Laundries, operated by the Catholic Church for “crimes” as small as not paying a train ticket.

Wikipedia notes that the estimate of the number of women who were used as forced slave labor by the Catholic Church in Ireland alone goes as high as 30,000 over the entire time the Magdalene laundries were in operation.

The last Magdalene laundry closed in 1996.

Women were locked in, couldn’t leave Magdalene Laundries for months, sometimes years

The women were locked in and not permitted to leave.  And if they tried to get away, the cops would catch them and bring them back. They were quite literally Catholic slave labor working for the government and even Guinness, which would pay the laundries for the women’s slave labor.

Half of the girls enslaved in these Catholic Church prisons were under the age of 23.  The youngest entrant was 9 years old.

Singer Sinead O’Connor was perhaps the most famous Magdalene Laundry slave

Singer Sinead O’Connor was forced to work in a Magdalene Laundry in Dublin:

When I was a young girl, my mother — an abusive, less-than-perfect parent — encouraged me to shoplift. After being caught once too often, I spent 18 months in An Grianán Training Centre, an institution in Dublin for girls with behavioral problems, at the recommendation of a social worker. An Grianán was one of the now-infamous church-sponsored “Magdalene laundries,” which housed pregnant teenagers and uncooperative young women. We worked in the basement, washing priests’ clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.

This, however, is, for me, the most difficult to believe and hardest to forgive them for:

No apology from the Catholic Church

Absent from any of the media reports on the scandal that I could find was an apology from the Catholic Church which operated the Magdalene laundries and made handsome profits from contracts with government and hotels.  Oh, found one. It seems the Catholic Church blew the women off.  I know, you’re as surprised as I am:

Victims of the child sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Irish Catholic Church have received an apology and compensation, but no one has taken responsibility for what happened in the laundries. Cardinal Sean Brady, the most senior Catholic cleric in Ireland, met with Justice for Magdalenes in 2010. He said “by today’s standards much of what happened at that time is difficult to comprehend” but that it was a matter for the religious orders who ran the laundries to deal with. The religious orders have declined to meet the women.

The Irish Cardinal wasn’t interested in hearing from people who were hurt and abused — if not sexually, certainly physically and mentally, by the Catholic Church.  And it’s not the Catholic Church’s fault. 

 Where have we heard that story before?

The laundries were run by nuns, many of whom treated the women sent to work there as slaves:

Senator McAleese’s inquiry found that half of the girls and women put to work in the laundries were under the age of 23 and 40%, more than 4,000, spent more than a year incarcerated.

Fifteen percent spent more than five years in the laundries while the average stay was calculated at seven months.

The youngest death on record was 15, and the oldest 95, the report found.

The Irish state is also implicated in the scandal because the police would take women to the asylums after arresting them for trivial offenses and would return runaways.

The story of the Magdalene laundries shows what happens when an institution — in this case the church and the government — is considered beyond criticism. It probably isn’t a coincidence that the last of the laundries closed in 1996, shortly after the first wave of the Catholic pedophile priest scandals hit Ireland.

Let me reiterate that for a moment.  The Catholic Church had slaves as late as 1996.

There is more to the article, too. There are women's brief accounts of what was done to them. It would be worth our time to go the the original article so we all know more of what happened. 

The world needs to know what happened, we need to never forget and we need to make sure things remotely like this are ended and that they're not repeated, of course, ever.

Kansas and Missouri, down the rabbit hole

So, yesterday, with the elections in their respective states, Missouri and Kansas went farther, still farther, off the Right Wing end.

In Missouri, Amendment 2 was voted in which "lets parents and children opt out of any curriculum they feel contradicts their religious teachings."

Isn't that just terrific?

Forget the goal of teaching the children, the students--the person's individual religious interpretations takes priority, instead.

Then, as if that weren't bad enough, Kansas voted in the deeply Right Wingers to support Governor Brownback's agenda and goals.

And trust me, believe me when I say, it isn't just because they're Right Wing that I say this, either. It's because it's all so extreme. Honestly, if it were Left Wing extremism, I'd be saying the same thing. There would be less concern about it, I'll grant you that, since it would be from the left, but I'd still be concerned. Extremes just aren't good for people and states and nations.

Where does all this end, anyway?

Links: http://www.americablog.com/2012/08/ready-light-years-beween-mo-mars.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Americablog+%28AMERICAblog%29

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/08/3749775/conservatives-seize-control-of.html

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/07/3749376/right-to-pray-passing-easily-in.html

On Porkulus

Here's the thing about Rush Limbaugh right now--he's lost 13 advertisers, I understand, and 2 radio stations and Peter Gabriel, the singer/songwriter/performer has demanded that he never use his song "Sledgehammer" again. It was the song he played as he--Limburger--derided the young lady last week. The thing is, here he was, doing his shtick and bam! He went too far. WAY too far. Now, he's had to apologize to the young lady--and he did it twice to date--so he's backing down big time, for the first time ever, to my knowledge. Now, say--God forbid--you're "Porkulus", just for this argument's sake. You've lambasted an otherwise innocent young lady, nearly the entire nation is against you and you're losing both stations and advertisers. What do you do? Really, what do you do on and for your next show? How can you angrily "go after" anyone when you were just heavily reprimanded by nearly the entire nation? It makes doing his shows right now extremely difficult. So good did come of this, after all. Unfortunately, the state of Missouri is, right now, arranging to have a statue of him put up in the State Capitol. Brilliant. Let's idolize and canonize an ugly hater. Way to spend the state money. Links: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/limbaugh-not-think-sandra-fluke-slut-prostitute-181711551.html; http://www.americablog.com/2012/03/rush-just-lost-station.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Americablog+%28AMERICAblog%29; http://www.americablog.com/2012/03/list-of-advertisers-still-on-limbaughs.html; http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/rush-limbaugh-to-be-honored-in-state-capitol-s-hall/article_36b99152-66fb-11e1-af45-0019bb30f31a.html

Great spending question for the Senate

Americablog has a great question for our Congress today and that is, why does the Senate Chaplain make $150,000 per year and have staff making $129,000, $86,000 and $52,000 each per year? If you add just those figures up, that comes to nearly one half million dollars a year for four people--one office. The entire article is both brief AND good, I think. I'd like answers. More than that, I'd like to be the Senate Chaplain. Link: http://www.americablog.com/2011/07/why-does-senate-chaplain-make-150k-and.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Americablog+%28AMERICAblog%29

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Man, I hope this is true:

Study: Liberal brains bigger in areas dealing with complexity, conservative brains bigger in area of fear

Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology.

"We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala," the study said.

As both proof and an example, I think we could start, for instance, with Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney.

Have a great weekend, y'all.

Links:  http://www.americablog.com/2011/04/study-liberal-brains-bigger-in-areas.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Americablog+%28AMERICAblog%29;

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iISI7ifh-AjUE3ejyC1wQmwFrMFw?docId=CNG.61c886c438708471a9f4ea23070fa70c.3a1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2011/04/06/AFNEgnqC_story.html

And so it begins...

From CNN today:

Radiation found in food as workers scramble to curb nuclear crisis

Tokyo (CNN) -- The Japanese government halted the sale of all food from farms near a tsunami-affected nuclear plant Saturday after abnormally high levels of radiation were found in milk and spinach.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said levels of radiation exceeding safety limits stipulated by Japanese law were found in some samples of spinach and milk from the Fukushima and Ibaraki prefectures but authorities said the radioactive iodine-contaminated food posed little risk.

(Yeah, right.)

Tainted milk was found 30 kilometers from the plant and spinach was collected as far as 100 kilometers (65 miles) to the south, almost half way to Tokyo.


Link to original post:  http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/19/japan.nuclear.reactors/index.html?hpt=T2

A roundup of articles on the Republicans this afternoon

Each day, I look at the links I've attached here, to this blog, to see what stories I should possibly be aware of. This afternoon, it seems there is a pretty good thread, telling of what the Rethugs, I mean Republicans, are up to of late.

To wit:

From Americablog:

--Inhofe and GOP again rally to protect BP from liability

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Environmental and Public Works committee, blocked a request offered by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) to pass the bill, which would raise corporations' liability caps from $75 million to $10 billion.

Republicans, protecting British Petroleum. Nice.

From Daily Kos:

Great patriotic Republicans reject taking care of 9/11 responders
by Joan McCarter

I guess they're already over 9/11.

Ailing Sept. 11 responders don’t deserve a permanent, guaranteed program to ensure they get health care, and giving it to them could wreck the country, Republicans in Congress argued today.

Calling the Sept. 11 Health and Compensation Act a new “entitlement program” like Medicare, members of the GOP on the House Energy and Commerce Committee argued the nation already has too much that it must pay for, and making the care of tens of thousands of 9/11 responders mandatory was too much of a burden.

Republicans, not protecting the American people who were working for us, right after 9/11 and putting their lives and health on the line for us.

From Alternet:

Peak Hypocrisy: Republican Party Vies for Tax-Payer Bailout

Posted by Joshua Holland at 1:40 pm

Four years ago, I asked Dean Baker why he didn’t like the term “free-market fundamentalism” to describe conservative economic thinking.

Joshua Holland: You say that conservatives are not, in fact, self-reliant fans of free-markets. Lay out your thesis in a nutshell.

Dean Baker: Well that’s the stereotype — that conservatives are willing to take the hard knocks when they come — but in my book I argue that what the conservatives have done is they’ve rigged the deck. They’ve made sure that certain people come out ahead, that income flows upward, and that other people are put at a disadvantage — and these things are built into the rules of the system. And then what they want to do — in talking about “free markets” — is they want to kick back and say, “No, no, no; those are the rules, and we can’t talk about them.” They don’t want to talk about how the deck is rigged; they want us to fight over the small scraps.

Republicans, taking care of themselves and their rich friends, first, last and foremost.

Conclusion: The Republicans are deeply, deeply fragmented--we know that--and self-destructing, popularity-wise, with the American people. They know very well how to take care of themselves and their rich friends, the wealthy and big business, the corporations. What they don't know is that they need to take care of the country and the American people. Or how to do it.

The Libertarians aren't even really a political party (no real national committee, no organization) and the "Tea Party" is a rather small collection of people with a wide variety of opinions but no real core values they share other than "smaller government" but that's what the Republicans and Libertarians have been hawking for years now.

If the Democrats and President Obama can pass the trimmed-down "line item veto" this President is pushing for, cut earmarks, shrink spending that way and then act, as soon as possible, on the eventual conclusions of the bipartisan panel to cut government spending, we will stay much more cohesive and strong and be able to weather the political storms now and into the future.

That's a lot of "ifs".

But I believe we can do it.

Yet another protected Catholic pedophile priest

This time, in Alaska:

"Alaska Natives are accusing the Catholic Church of using their remote villages as a dumping ground' for child-molesting priests—and blaming the president of Seattle University for letting it happen.

"According to the allegations, Father Joseph Lundowski molested or raped James Does 29, 59–71, and 73–94, plus Janet Does 4–7—a total of 40 children—giving them 'hard candy, money he stole from the collection plate, cooked food, baked goods, beer, sacramental wine, brandy, and/or better grades (silver, blue, or gold stars) on their catechism assignments in exchange for sexual favors.'"

I needn't go on here, about this. If you want more information and to read more of the story, go to the link at the bottom of this post.

My points here, now, are the same as I always post:

--The Catholic Church needs to own up to its wrong doings;

--It needs to explore what happened, where and to whom;

--It needs to see if anyone is guilty of any laws;

--If anyone is guilty of these laws, they should be put up for possible trial;

--They need to see if anyone in the church is guilty of cover up;

--Catholics themselves need to demand response and responsibility from the church leaders--priests, bishops, cardinals, even up to and including the pope himself--to respond to these problems;

--They need to make clear that covering up any abuses in the future will not be tolerated;

--Finally, the Catholic Church needs to put structures into place so that any abuses do get reported so they don't happen again.

A "hat tip" to America Blog (Americablog.com) for today's post, bringing this to my attention.

Link to original post: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-pedophiles-paradise/Content?oid=1065017