Louisiana Female Teacher Commits Sexual Assault And Child Abuse

I don't have much to say about this story other than to repeat what should be blindingly obvious.

Women are not more morally upright than men. 

Women are just as capable as men of committing sexual assault.

Some women will assist in or direct sexual assault.

Making  gendered assumptions about the identity of the victim and criminal can make us miss the true perpetrator.

I am glad that this woman was caught. I would bet that this is not the first time or only time that she has done something like this.

I am not sure that I agree with the death penalty or that it should apply in situations where no one was killed.

I do know though, that if this woman happened to depart the world in a sudden and violent event in prison, I don't think many people would be shedding tears. 

I know I wouldn't. Also, it's a teacher and cop who are involved. Bad cops exist.

A former Louisiana middle school teacher has been sentenced to 40 years behind bars after admitting she fed students cupcakes laced with the sperm of her ex-husband, an ex-sheriff’s lieutenant.
Cynthia Perkins, 36, was sentenced Friday to 40 years of hard labor without the possibility of probation or parole. 

Judge says FGM is not a Federal Crime

This story touched a lot of different controversial topics: conservative judicial attempts to limit federal legislative authority, immigrant and religious refusal to hew to American standards, women's rights and feminism, double standards around FGM and male circumcision, and even American civil rights history where the federal government turned a blind eye to racist malfeasance in various states, claiming that it was the state's responsibility to bring charges, not the federal government's. 

Detroit — Federal prosecutors will not appeal a judge's order dismissing female genital mutilation charges in the first criminal case of its kind nationwide, concluding the law is weak and needs to be rewritten. The decision delivers a setback to international human-rights groups opposed to female genital mutilation that have closely followed a case that has raised awareness in the U.S. of a controversial procedure and prompted Michigan to enact new state laws criminalizing the procedure. 

"Although the department has determined not to appeal the district court's decision, it recognizes the severity of the charged conduct, its lifelong impact on victims, and the importance of a federal prohibition on FGM committed on minors," Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote in a letter to Congress on Wednesday.

Roy Moore Child Abuse Allegations

It would be ideal if we all could soberly and objectively judge allegations based on evidence and how truthful we think the accused and accused are being. That's difficult to do even in a court of law. It's almost impossible to do outside of it. This is especially the case when the time between the alleged crime and the reveal of the alleged crime has been years. So we shouldn't immediately believe the worst of people that we don't like for political reasons or even prejudicial ones. At the same time we shouldn't dismiss allegations against people that we do like or people who share certain immutable characteristics with us. It can be true that victims can wait for years to speak out for valid and understandable reasons. It can also be the case that people make accusations that aren't true. My automatic belief of an accuser's story is limited to my relatives, loved ones or people that I know pretty well. With other people having some evidence besides their word is a good thing. In cases where the alleged crime is long past I want to know if the alleged victim told someone about the crime at the time it occurred or made a change in his or her behavior. If that happened then I'm more likely to believe them. Abuse of a child is one of the most heinous crimes out there. There is nothing to excuse it. And yet we excuse things like that all of the time. There are too many musicians to name who have had "consensual" relationships with groupies under the age of consent. There are some filmmakers who have sexually assaulted people. We still recognize their artistic talent. Maybe that's starting to change? Or maybe this breaking news is all a conspiracy. That's certainly what some will believe.

Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore. It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat— was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing.

“He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’ ” says Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, 71. “I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl.” Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. 

Who Makes Medical Decisions for You (or your kids)?

I have a bit of a libertarian left leaning streak when it comes to private decisions around your life, health, sexuality and so on. Basically if you're not bothering anyone I think the government should leave you alone. That's true whether you're a black New Yorker walking down the street or a white twenty-five year old who doesn't see a need to purchase health insurance. And I feel even more strongly about someone coming between a parent and a child. However intellectual honesty compels admission that there are some cases where government not only has the right but the duty to interfere with your decision making and/or that which impacts your children. We don't look kindly on heroin addicts. We look even less kindly on heroin addicts who share their drugs with their children. I don't care if someone wants to be a sex worker. If that person wants to recruit their underage child into their line of work then they should be as Bo Diddley sang, placed "so far back in the jail that they'll have to pump air in". You can't open a factory and dump lead in the water. And so on.

Those are obvious calls though. Medical care decisions are more complex.
Doctors and scientists have knowledge and information that the rest of us lack. There's nothing magical about that. It's their line of work. A doctor would likely look just as out of place in your line of work if you're not a doctor. If a doctor suggests an action plan for a particular disease you're probably going to listen to him/her..again assuming you're not a doctor yourself with the same or greater knowledge as the bozo who barely made it through medical school and has his papers routinely rejected by scientific journals.

BUT

The doctor does not own you. You can ignore the doctor's advice and continue doing everything the doctor told you not to do. None know the hour or day of our death. Ignoring the doctor's advice is probably a bad idea (lung cancer patient continuing his three pack a day habit, diabetes or gout sufferer continuing to eat second/third helpings at dinner and TONS of sugary desserts), but again, there are people who do just that and against all odds live longer and healthier than they should. There are some diseases for which the cure is almost as bad as if not worse than the disease. If the doctor tells us that we need to have a limb amputated, have our reproductive systems removed, have our digestive systems altered so that we have to use a colostomy bag or have chemotherapy, some of us might decide that we'd rather live with the disease instead of taking the cure. At least we might want to consider options. So we'd tell the doctor no thanks and keep it moving.

But what if the doctor smiled nastily and said, "No dummy I don't think you understood. That wasn't a request.You're getting the treatment whether you like it or not!"

An appeals court has sided with a hospital that wants to force a 10-year-old Amish girl to resume chemotherapy after her parents decided to stop the treatments. The court ruled that a county judge must reconsider his decision that blocked Akron Children's Hospital's attempt to give an attorney who's also a registered nurse limited guardianship over Sarah Hershberger and the power to make medical decisions for her. The hospital believes Sarah's leukemia is very treatable but says she will die without chemotherapy.

The judge in Medina County in northeast Ohio had ruled in July that Sarah's parents had the right to make medical decisions for her. The appeals court ruling issued Tuesday said the judge failed to consider whether appointing a guardian would be in the girl's best interest. It also disagreed with the judge's decision that said he could only transfer guardianship if the parents were found unfit. The family's attorney, John Oberholtzer, said Wednesday that the ruling essentially ordered the judge to disregard the rights of the parents. Andy Hershberger, the girl's father, said the family agreed to begin two years of treatments for Sarah last spring but stopped a second round of chemotherapy in June because it was making her extremely sick.

"It put her down for two days. She was not like her normal self," he said. "We just thought we cannot do this to her." 

Sarah begged her parents to stop the chemotherapy and they agreed after a great deal of prayer, Hershberger said. The family, members of an insular Amish community, shuns many facets of modern life and is deeply religious...

LINK
I'm usually going to follow my doctor's orders. But there have been people quite close to me who have died from cancer. And it's my firm unyielding belief that the treatments killed them just as much as the disease did. If I ever got a cancer diagnosis I would think long and hard about my treatment plan. I've also known loved ones who, despite being repeatedly told that their diet and lifestyle would literally kill them, stubbornly refused to make changes and promptly died, just as the doctors told them they would.

For me the fundamental question is who decides on the course of treatment, the doctor or the patient? I believe that freedom requires that the patient decides. 

And if the patient is too young to decide her fate, then her parents get the last word. If the parents happen to be moronic that's unbelievably unfortunate, but as most parents are not moronic I don't want the government stepping in to override medical decisions unless the decision is obviously insane and the person will die immediately. For example, some devout fundamentalists of various religions do not believe that a woman should be viewed (naked, without her hair/face covered, at all) by any man except her husband. Let's say there was a car accident and a badly injured woman was trapped in a burning car. The only way to save her requires cutting through her outer garments. She will temporarily be only partially clothed. Her husband (sitting safely on the curb) objects on religious grounds. Clearly emergency personnel should ignore him and rescue the woman before she's burned to death. If that same woman goes to the doctor, is told she needs a hysterectomy and declines it on religious or personal grounds, I don't want the government overriding her choice and sending her to the surgeons. 

But those are adults. What about kids? Isn't that different? Doesn't the government have a role to play?

Parents, not the government, are the primary and best caretakers. They have responsibility for their child's medical care. Obviously they will need help on occasion. There are many decisions that parents make regarding their children. This includes everything from when, if or how to tell them the facts of life, to their diet, to what sort of social activities they engage in, to which books they can read, to when or whether to take them off life support after they've been in a coma. It's truly an awesome responsibility. So absent some immediate certainty of death, provable neglect or irrationality, I think the parents should have final say. Choosing not to undergo chemotherapy is not to my mind the same thing as drilling a hole in your child's head in order to let the demons out. It's not an easy call to watch a parent make what I think is a bad decision but I think it's the right one. Of course I could be full of it. It wouldn't be the first time. 

What do you think is the right decision here?

Who should have the final word? The state and/or hospital or the parents?

Limits to Religious Freedom: Circumcision and Herpes

I'm not religious although I don't think I'm necessarily anti-religious. People can believe what they like and within certain constraints act as they like based on their religious beliefs. If you want to believe that there's someone in the sky watching you or some Force in the universe that is interested in the doings of human beings, it doesn't really impact me. Go for it.  I came down on the side of the Catholic Church over the contraception provision controversy. Basically I think that as long as you aren't hurting anyone else the state should pretty much stay out of your affairs. I think that's a general good rule for most citizens and it's a constitutionally protected right for religious institutions. You mind your business and I will mind mine. Good fences make good neighbors. Each captain runs his own crew. We all have to tend our own gardens. Live and let live. And so on.
But.............
There are limits. You don't get to sacrifice babies to Baal. You don't get to force your children to become temple prostitutes for Ishtar. The Catholic Church has no constitutional right to priest-boy sex. Although your religion might find dogs unclean you can't go around banning or killing other people's dogs. And it's iffy because parents do have the right to oversee and direct medical care for their minor children but if a parent wanted to use prayer instead of medicine to treat a gunshot wound to a child I would not lose sleep if the state intervened, treated the child and arrested the parent. Those sorts of actions would make me hostile to religion, not just because the religious person is accepting myths that to me make no sense, but because they are harming other people. That's the red line I think.


So if you tell me that your religion requires that a grown man undertake bloody oral genital contact with a baby so that said baby becomes an acceptable member of your religious society , then I'm gonna reach for my baseball bat and keep a close eye on you while I call the cops. Because that is FAR across any sort of red line.

A baby died at a New York hospital in September after contracting herpes from a controversial circumcision ritual.The infant died at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, where the cause of death was listed as "disseminated herpes simplex virus Type 1, complicating ritual circumcision with oral suction," according to the New York Daily News.

Now, the Brooklyn District Attorney's office is looking further into the case, the Jewish Week reports. The boy is the second New York area infant in recent years to die from complications related to the Orthodox Jewish ritual of metzitzah b'peh, during which "the mohel places his mouth on the freshly circumcised penis to draw blood away from the cut,"according to the New York City Department of Heath.For its part, the state health department — then headed by Antonina Novello, appointed by Republican Gov. Pataki, who himself had strong ties to the Orthodox community — reached its own agreement with chasidic leaders in June of 2006, hailed by Rabbi Niederman in a press release as a “historic protocol” and the one to which Zwiebel referred to above.

The 2010 letter to rabbis from the commissioner of the state health department, referenced above, noted that “over the past five years” there have been “several documented cases” of herpes simplex Type 1 viruses in newborns who underwent metzitzah b’peh in New York City. 

When it came to light that two more babies had been infected (apparently not by Fischer), Frieden issued an “Open Letter to the Jewish Community,” which recommended — but stopped short of requiring — a cessation of the practice altogether, instead endorsing alternatives to the practice, like using a sterile glass tube (which is done in modern Orthodox circles). 

Now putting aside the generally accepted hypocrisy that male circumcision is just fine while female circumcision is a Stone Age evil that must be stamped out, it seems to me that whatever your feelings might be about the propriety of chopping away genital tissue from newborns, at the very least you would have to admit that a man having oral contact with a boy's bleeding penis as part of a religious ritual is not safe and shouldn't be legal. 

Unfortunately because of political considerations in New York this has not attracted a huge amount of media attention. Finally law enforcement is looking into it because of the death of the babies, but honestly it never should have come to that. This is something where religion and state must clash and the state MUST win. The men who performed this deed should be identified, arrested and prosecuted with the full vigor of the law. The city and state of New York need to give out information about the health dangers of this practice and convince parents not to allow it. And finally if the parents refuse to change their behavior they ought to be arrested and charged the same way we would charge any other parent who harms a child. I don't see a lot of grey here. It's black and white for me. Man putting his mouth on boy's privates= man going to jail.

But what do you think?

1) Should this practice be outlawed? Do you see religious freedom problems?

2) Should the parents and/or rabbi go to jail?

3) Is focus on this practice anti-religious?

4) If outlawed would this interfere with parental prerogatives?

Sympathy for the Devil?

Martyrs to Intrusive Government or Racist Abusers?

Do you have sympathy for the Devil? You may remember that in New Jersey, just about two years prior, this Mommy Racist and Daddy Racist tried to get a ShopRite to make a birthday cake that read "Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler". The store refused and the goobers had to go elsewhere. A Wal-Mart agreed to their request. Go figure. At the time the only controversy was over the right to freedom of expression and the right to refuse service.
However these parents appear to be neo-Nazis (though they deny it) and white supremacists who have given all of their children Nazi inspired names-Adolf Hitler, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation, and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie. The incident with the cake evidently placed them on the radar screen of local child protective services. They lost their children. And so far they haven't gotten them back.

The 5-year-old boy, named for the infamous Nazi leader, and his two sisters were taken by New Jersey child welfare officials in 2009.An appeals court ruled last year that Heath and Deborah Campbell should not regain custody of the children, citing the parents' disabilities and the risk of serious injury to their children.

A family court previously found that there was evidence the children had been abused or neglected, but the details were not released because of a gag order.The Campbells, who picketed outside of a child services office in Flemington on Tuesday, have repeatedly spoken out, claiming the children were taken because of their names and nothing more.

"The judge and [the Division of Youth and Family Services] told us that there was no evidence of abuse and that it was the names!" Heath Campbell told NBC 10 News in Philadelphia. "They were taken over the children's names."

LINK
It appears that someone is lying here but because of the gag order and family privacy it's not easy for an outsider to determine which party (the state or the parents) is telling the truth. Obviously anyone who abuses children shouldn't be around them and ought to be locked up ASAP. The Penn State tragedy brings that home in a very real way. So if there's actual abuse or neglect then the state is absolutely doing the right thing by removing the children from the home. I think we'd have 100% agreement on that.

On the other hand what if the state is doing an end-run around the concept of abuse or neglect in a physical or sexual manner, and making the claim that merely giving children those names and presumably teaching them hatred is in and of itself abuse or neglect? We know that sometimes states can be rather presumptuous and hasty in deciding to remove children from their home based on rather flimsy evidence or just plain and simple dislike of the parents' lifestyle.

There are many people who grew up in homes that had political, religious or racial beliefs that were far outside the mainstream. That's not enough to take someone's children away from them.  If I want to teach my child to hate someone based on the color of their skin or their religion or heritage, that's an immoral decision, but it's one that a parent gets to make with impunity. It's not the state's business.

I don't have a good take on this incident one way or the other.

Questions
1) Abuse allegations aside, have these parents proven to be unfit?
2) Should the state be able to veto certain names for children?
3) Do we have the proper balance between protecting children and familial independence?

TSA Pats Down Six Year Old Girl

I was going to write out a very long essay explaining why I think these TSA searches are demeaning, illegal and unconstitutional. Many of the TSA's processes need to be stopped for good.  But honestly I  (a) don't have the time, (b) am far too angry having watched that smirking saurian Napolitano defend the practice on MSNBC's Morning Joe and (c) think that this video and the parent's statements tell the truth of what all this is about far more than I ever could hope to do.

“Nobody likes to see those kinds of things, in we doing that even though it was done professionally according to the protocols,” Napolitano said. “But, what TSA is doing is reexamining those protocols all the time. It’s all in relation to threat – what is the threat? And one of the things we do see is if you categorically remove a group from any type of screening, well those who seek to do us harm will then exploit that group. So you have to be very careful on how you do it.”

BS!!!! This is a big heaping pile of BS. And it stinks.

The whole issue with the 9-11 attacks and attempted attacks since then is that they have fundamentally and perhaps permanently altered our ideas about guilt and innocence and which is more important to find. Additionally they have tragically reduced people's interest in freedom and increased their interest in so-called security. This goes far beyond left and right. It's about who has interest in freedom and who does not.
To live anywhere is to accept risk. This week, somewhere in this country a mother is abusing her children. Some young man is going to shoot some other young man. A woman will be raped. Someone will drive drunk. Someone will get into a fist fight at a bar. Someone is abusing their spouse or planning to have them bumped off for the insurance money. As I am writing this some nut could come shoot up the place. Someone is turning a blind eye to worker safety in favor of profit. Someone is planning what she thinks will be the perfect embezzlement. Someone is robbing a liquor store and shooting the owners. And so on.

Generally speaking, we don't allow the police to fan out and break into people's homes they THINK will commit those crimes and search for evidence. With a few exceptions, we don't allow police to search people walking down the street just because. And we certainly don't base our justice system or everyday rules in society on the theory that it is better that 10,000 innocent people have their rights violated than let one guilty man go free. The government can not provide 100% security. But it can strip you of your rights.

Eventually, some determined terrorist will hide a bomb in his or her body cavities. What then?
Does this mean every other citizen, regardless of age, gender, or personal beliefs about privacy must then submit to public cavity searches?  Free prostate exam/pap smear with every 5000 miles flown??
This is ridiculous. The TSA should be severely limited in these sorts of searches. I would much rather see a honest debate about current immigration policies- i.e. is it really a good idea to allow immigration from countries we are currently bombing? The example of Faisal Shahzad would seem to indicate that maybe, just maybe it might not be. You can not invade the world and then invite the people you've invaded to come to your country. Some might hold grudges. Some hail from places where grudge holding is damn near a statutory requirement of citizenship.
If that girl in the video had been my kin I don't think I could have tolerated that.
The TSA needs to be forced to stop these searches. I don't care about the possibility of attack. There are some rights which are simply fundamental. If we are putting our hands down the pants of six year olds, it is WAY PAST time to reject this entire paradigm.

What do you think? Is the TSA doing the best it can, or is this a power grab by the exact sort of people who shouldn't have this sort of power? Should children be exempt from these searches? Are you okay with strangers feeling on you in public? How do we tell children don't let anyone touch you in certain places...except for the TSA agents, their police backups, etc.

Are Chinese Mothers Superior?

Are Chinese Mothers Superior?

The Wall Street Journal recently published an excerpt from a new book  (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) by Amy Chua, (Yale Law Professor, Harvard Law grad (cum laude), writer and apparently a very intelligent person) that seemed to answer yes to that question.  When I read the article I thought it was a satire but it wasn’t.  I couldn’t imagine the Wall Street Journal or any other mainstream publication publishing anything that apparently endorsed the superiority of Caucasian/Black/Latino mothers.

To be fair both in the article and especially after publication Chua was careful to parse her words just enough to not endorse a generalized belief in the absolute superiority of every Chinese mother or suggest that there weren’t demanding no-nonsense mothers to be found in every group. She stated that she would not have chosen the title for the Wall Street Journal excerpt and that her book details a journey from one place to another, where she becomes a different kind of parent.  Chua explains

Still there is more than a hint of ethnic chauvinism or to be more precise, gender based ethnic chauvinism that runs throughout the excerpts shown.

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.

There are stereotypes about every group on the planet.  Is it acceptable if one group endorses the positive stereotypes about itself?  Honestly I think everyone does that in private sometimes.

What was not mentioned in the piece but does deserve some scrutiny is the higher than average suicide rates of Asian-Americans, Chinese-Americans and Chinese in general. Asian American women age 15-24 have the highest suicide rate  among all ethnic groups. Not surprisingly there are also higher rates of depression among both Chinese Americans and Asian Americans.

Still there is no direct causal evidence that the extreme parenting styles used at one time by Chua are behind those somber statistics. It’s just conjecture on my part.  I can’t imagine growing up with a parent who would never let me choose my own activities or who forced me to play the piano or violin (and only the piano or violin).  I’m not sure Chua is typical even among Chinese mothers.  I do like the idea of demanding the best from your children. I don’t think you do that by tyrannizing them, threatening to throw away or burn their toys or insisting that they only play a particular Western instrument and a particular Western music style.  

Is this sort of style one that you could use if you are or intend to become a parent?  Do the higher academic achievement rates of Chinese-Americans justify the Chua tactics? If your parent never allowed you to attend a sleepover or choose your own activities would you harbor any resentment?  Is this no big deal as every group is secretly convinced they are superior in some fashion or another?