Free Birth Control!!! (Whether you want it or not)

Conversation between Federal Government and citizen.

Maybe I should use a different finger to make my point

Well hello there subject citizen! I’m here to help you. From now on all of your birth control pills are gonna be free!! No co-pays or deductibles. Isn’t that special? You can thank me later.

What’s that friend? You say you don’t need or use birth control pills? Hmm. Well that’s no problem because future HIV screenings, breast pumps, sterilization procedures, domestic violence counseling and screening, well-woman tests, and STD counseling are gonna be free!!! Isn’t that wonderful? Aren't you just quivering with joy and gratitude? I know I would be. 

Oh. You say you’re an XY human being and not an XX human being. Well see I’m afraid these benefits apply only to people with XX chromosomes.  You XY's will just have to continue to pay on your own for gender specific issues. I think that’s fair. Since I’m the Federal government, what I say goes. I got your equal protection right here pal.

Ehh. Speak up sonny it’s hard to hear you with my head in the clouds. Oh, you say you have firm and deeply felt religious, financial or moral objections to paying for other people’s birth control? I thought we went over this before. That’s just too bad partner. Life is not fair. I think it’s a good idea. You will just have to violate your religious objections. What’s the big deal anyway?  So your premiums rise so that other people can have “free” birth control? It’s “free” to them isn’t it? And that’s a heck of a selling point, you must admit.

Yes I know that virtually all plans already provide birth control, 99% of women who have had sex have used at least one contraceptive method, impoverished women are covered by Medicaid and most teen mothers said lack of access to birth control was not a problem. I read that new study which showed that higher income women (who were presumably paying co-pays for their birth control) had much lower rates of unplanned pregnancies than poor women (who were often covered by Medicaid)  So? Shouldn't you be ecstatic to pay more so that they can pay less? Stop mumbling about the inefficiency of subsidizing something someone was already doing.

Oh cut out that blubbering. So you have diabetes or colon cancer or prostate cancer or black lung or heart disease or optic neuritis or MS or Parkinson's or high cholesterol or obesity or any number of other LIFE THREATENING conditions. Tell it to someone who cares. You will still have to pay out of pocket for office visits and co-pays for medications related to preventing or treating those conditions. Those diseases either disproportionately impact men or impact men and women equally. I certainly can’t preen as the great savior of women’s health if I’m trying to reduce costs for both genders now can I sport? Any of this getting through to you kid?

Yes, that's right, everyone has the absolute individual right to use or not use birth control as they see fit. I'm glad you're finally seeing the light there buddy. I knew this would get through your thick skull eventually!! We agree on something. Finally!!

I want YOU to pay for birth control

Eh. No. Just because everyone has the individual right to use or not use birth control as they see fit doesn't mean that you have the individual right to pick a plan that doesn't include birth control OR that you have the individual right not to pay for other people's birth control. They have the right to choose; you have the duty to pay for their choices. What are you some sort of nutty libertarian? How dare you express preference as to what goods and services you want to buy with your own money. You say you have nothing against anyone using birth control you just don't want them to reach into your pocket to pay for it? Stop oppressing me with logic. The same people who smugly shout if you don't like abortion don't have one also say if you don't need birth control pay for mine anyway. And that makes all the sense in the world to me. Yes it sure does. No I won't explain how.

Say you'll sue? Yeah, so what I just lost in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC where I tried to argue that there was no ministerial exception to federal employment laws. That's a completely different case. I don't see any issue with church and state coming together as long as the state gets to tell the church what to do. And I do so love telling churches what to do. I know I said if you liked your health plan you could keep it but you know I said a lot of things. And stop whining about the Amish or Christian Scientists getting religious exemptions. I like them. You, I don't like.

So you say you might drop insurance coverage or close up shop rather than pay for coverage that violates your deeply held ethical, religious, philosophical or moral beliefs? Well that is a road you don't want to travel down my friend. If you're smart you'll get with the program. I have this handy dandy new indefinite detention law that I can't wait to try out. Go ahead. I dare you. I double dare you. I double DOG dare you.

QUESTIONS
1) Do you think the new HHS policy is a good thing? If so why?
2) If people who object decide to pay fines or drop coverage what should the Federal government do?
3) Is this a threat to religious freedom and/or freedom of conscience?
4) Do you recognize the "double DOG dare" reference?

Battered Woman Syndrome-Real or Not

What does self-defense mean to you?

To me it's a pretty simple concept. Someone is threatening your life, the lives of those you love or of innocent bystanders and the only way to end that threat is to use deadly force against the person or persons making that threat. This means that either you can't leave, you are under no reasonable obligation to leave (i.e. you're in your home or your car) and the threat is imminent or immediate.

This last to me is pretty important. It's not really self-defense in a legal or moral sense of the term in my non-lawyerly mind if someone threatens you on Monday and on Saturday you see them and shoot them in the back while they're unarmed. Now of course they may have deserved it but that's not really self-defense. Or is it?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York jury cleared a woman who shot dead her retired police officer husband of murder on Thursday in a case that had been seen as a test of the battered-woman defense.

Barbara Sheehan, 50, was acquitted of second-degree murder after three days of deliberations by the jury in state Supreme Court in Queens but was found guilty of a lesser charge of gun possession.

Sheehan's lawyers successfully argued that she fired only after her husband threatened to kill her, and Sheehan and her grown children had testified about the violent household ruled by Raymond Sheehan, 49, a former New York City Police sergeant. Both the prosecution and defense said the beatings and bruises came to an end on February 18, 2008, when Sheehan shot her husband 11 times in their Queens home.

Legal experts said the case was a test of the battered-woman defense, in which the history of abuse is explored to explain a woman's mental state at the time she is accused of committing a crime.

Key to the battered-woman defense is the issue of self defense. New York state law justifies the use of lethal force in response to an immediate threat to life. Under the battered-woman defense, lethal force can sometimes be justified even if the threat may not appear immediate. Court documents said the shooting happened after Sheehan refused to go on vacation with her husband. She testified she was scared because he had threatened to kill her if she didn't go.

Prosecutors said Sheehan shot her husband 11 times using two guns the former police officer had at home. Her husband was in the bathroom shaving before Sheehan shot him.

Story

I don't doubt that abuse was going on. Likely these two people didn't need to share the same home any longer. And I have never ever ever understood how anyone can go to bed and sleep if their partner is SERIOUSLY upset. Because after all, sleeping in front of someone who is seething with anger at you just doesn't seem super prudent on anyone's part, no matter their gender.

There was no abuse in my immediate family though I have since known people who were either abusers or abusees and sometimes both. It's a tricky situation. The best rule imo is to say "no hands for any reason at any time". On the other hand I know that people do have fights and each person has the right to defend themselves. Everyone's tolerance for intimate violence is different. I simply can't imagine staying in a situation where someone was verbally, let alone physically abusing me.

That said, I do not like one bit the concept of "battered woman syndrome".

From afar, it appears as if a few of these woman kills man stories aren't about self-defense as much as they are about someone deciding they aren't going to take it any more or being angry over past humiliations and abuse. And I really don't like the idea of any sort of syndrome being available as a defense to someone only depending on their particular inalienable characteristic. The law -especially laws around killing people- should be blind to that sort of thing as much as possible. I've been on the planet a while now and one thing that I know is that although men and women differ in some key ways, morality isn't among them.

Shooting someone eleven times while they're shaving and then saying they deserved it because of previous incidents, I don't know. Is there a "battered man defense"? Would anyone seriously believe or sympathize with a man who killed his wife or girlfriend because he was "battered" and felt threatened? I don't think so. What's YOUR take?

QUESTIONS

1) Do you believe that battered woman syndrome should be permissible as a defense?

2) Is there ever any reason for a woman or man to hit each other?

3) Should abused spouses have to try to leave the situation before they can kill the other and claim self-defense?

4) Should you be able to kill people for what they might do as opposed to what they are doing?

DSK Accuser Speaks Out!

The Guinean woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault, Nafissatou Diallo, has come out publicly to tell her side of the story. You can watch her here on Good Morning America. She also gave an interview with Newsweek here. This is evidently pretty unusual for an alleged rape victim. Given that everything seems to indicate that the prosecutors do not intend to move forward with the case, this could be her method of pressuring them not to drop the case. Diallo will be doing a Nightline interview on Tuesday.

“Hello? Housekeeping.”

The maid hovered in the suite’s large living room, just inside the entrance. The 32-year-old Guinean, an employee of the Sofitel hotel, had been told by a room-service waiter that room 2806 was now free for cleaning, “Hello? Housekeeping,” the maid called out again. No reply. The door to the bedroom, to her left, was open, and she could see part of the bed. She glanced around the living room for luggage, saw none. “Hello? Housekeeping.” Then a naked man with white hair suddenly appeared, as if out of nowhere.

That’s how Nafissatou Diallo describes the start of the explosive incident on Saturday, May 14, that would forever change her life—and that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and, until that moment, the man tipped to be the next president of France. Now the woman known universally as the “DSK maid” has broken her public silence for the first time, talking for more than three hours with NEWSWEEK at the office of her attorneys, Thompson Wigdor, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue.

I honestly can't call it. Strauss-Kahn has a long history of alleged extra marital affairs. He has also been accused of rape by a French writer, Tristane Banon, whose mother also weirdly claimed she had brutal consensual sex with DSK.  Ms. Diallo holds to her story and says she wants DSK to go to jail. But since she lied to the grand jury and prosecutors does she have any credibility now?

Unsurprisingly DSK's lawyers were not amused and put out this terse statement.

Ms. Diallo is the first accuser in history to conduct a media campaign to persuade a prosecutor to pursue charges against a person from whom she wants money.  Her lawyers and public relations consultants have orchestrated an unprecedented number of media events and rallies to bring pressure on the prosecutors in this case after she had to admit  her extraordinary efforts to mislead them. Her lawyers know that her claim for money suffers a fatal blow when the criminal charges are dismissed, as they must be.

This conduct by lawyers  is unprofessional and it violates fundamental rules of professional conduct for lawyers. Its obvious purpose is to inflame public opinion against a defendant in a pending criminal case. The fact is, however, that  the number of rallies, press conferences, and media events they have orchestrated is exceeded only by the number of lies and misstatements  she has made to law enforcement, friends, medical professionals and reporters.
It is time for this unseemly circus to stop.

QUESTIONS:

Do these developments change your mind about what might have happened?

Do you think it's time to do away with anonymity for alleged rape victims? If not why not?

If someone lies about one thing is it safe to presume they will lie about other things?

Like and Equal are not the same thing at all!

Let's say that Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Duane Allman, Eddie Hazel or BB King,after picking up a guitar and passing through an arduous 10,000 hours or more of constant practice, repetition and study which put them on the verge of greatness, had then been told that they needed to forget about their music dreams and go drive a truck because there weren't enough women that were interested in playing the guitar. Assume this was backed up by law.

That sounds ridiculous yes?

That is the state of college athletics today.  It is one thing to do outreach to people, remove barriers and confront stereotypes, or from time to time give a nod to someone who is equally qualified but underrepresented in a given field. I support that. I support affirmative action and expanding the field of applicants.

But to rule as a matter of law that everyone must be doing the same thing in the same proportion is something I don't support. In fact I think it's insanely misguided. This is current policy thanks to Title IX.

The recent NYT article on Title IX implementation made it clear that many colleges are having to cook the books to meet the requirements.

Ever since Congress passed the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX, universities have opened their gyms and athletic fields to millions of women who previously did not have chances to play. But as women have surged into a majority on campus in recent years, many institutions have resorted to subterfuge to make it look as if they are offering more spots to women.

At the University of South Florida, more than half of the 71 women on the cross-country roster failed to run a race in 2009. Asked about it, a few laughed and said they did not know they were on the team.

At Marshall University, the women’s tennis coach recently invited three freshmen onto the team even though he knew they were not good enough to practice against his scholarship athletes, let alone compete. They could come to practice whenever they liked, he told them, and would not have to travel with the team.

At Cornell, only when the 34 fencers on the women’s team take off their protective masks at practice does it become clear that 15 of them are men. Texas A&M and Duke are among the elite women’s basketball teams that also take advantage of a federal loophole that allows them to report male practice players as female participants.

This law and its proportionality based interpretation and enforcement are based on both faulty assumptions about men and women and increasingly just good old fashioned bigotry.

If a female athlete can show that she or other young women suffer from unequal training facilities or discrimination in making a team or staying on a team then she may have a case that she should pursue to the fullest extent of the law. I would completely support her in doing so.

But what Title IX means in practice is that because only X number of women is interested in collegiate sports, then only X number of men can be interested in sports. This is unfair. Men and women (on average) have different interests. We can argue for decades about the extent to which this is biological or environmental but trying to pretend that it doesn't exist is downright silly. In order to pretend that young men and women have the same interest in sports we are preventing young men from playing sports and then congratulating ourselves on our ability to be sober and fairminded.

The flip side of this is that the supporters of Title IX virtually never seem to be interested in "fixing" those areas of endeavor where women outnumber men. The news that women now outnumber men in colleges and earn more degrees invites cheers from this crowd, not reflection. Hmmm..

 

No one is seriously arguing that college English, Art History, Women's' Studies or Sociology Departments must turn away qualified interested young women students in favor of attracting less qualified barely interested young men. Imagine if a qualified female nurse were told "I'm sorry you can't study/work here because the male/female nurse ratio is not where the government thinks it should be".

Now many colleges need federal funding. No one wants to get sued. So colleges have gamely tried to square the circle. But if female athletes are so few and far between compared to the number of males that colleges are double counting women or mislabelling men , one would hope folks would realize things have gone DRASTICALLY wrong with this law.

Again, men and women are not identical. They do not necessarily share (on average) proportionate interest in the same hobbies or professions.  And that's okay!!! This is so egregious in college athletics because you are literally stopping people with a strong interest from unpaid participation in their chosen activity while trying to shanghai people with less interest to participate. How is that logical, fair or efficient?

The time is long past due for a fair, intelligent common sense approach. Just because more males than females are interested in a given activity doesn't automatically indicate discrimination or mean that the state needs to intervene.

I grew up playing fantasy role playing games and collecting a vast number of fantasy/sci-fi books. Most (not all) of the people I knew who were doing the same thing were also males. I guess to make things "equal" someone should have prevented us from enjoying our hobbies.

On this issue feminists are like King Canute trying to hold back the tide. Like him they will fail.

The big problem with Title IX is that having tasted "success" in the field of college sports, some of its partisans see no reason not to extend it onwards to college and high school academics  Not surprisingly they are interested in any field where young men dominate (engineering, computer sci, physics, economics ) the usual suspects. It's the camel's nose in the tent or as Peter Clemenza said in The Godfather, "You gotta stop them at the beginning".

Eventually this will lead EXACTLY to what Kurt Vonnegut described over 40 years ago. Of course Vonnegut was a noted liberal and radical. Today Vonnegut's story of Harrison Bergeron reads like hyperconservative fear mongering. Go figure. I read this story back in eighth grade but never thought I'd see us slouching along that path.

QUESTIONS:

Why is this law (Title IX) constitutional?

What does "gender equity in sports" mean to you?

Is it really fair or prudent to create a zero-sum game between male and female college athletes?

Does equal mean equal opportunity or equal results?
Do you think Title IX should also apply to academics?

Do you recognize the book that this post's title is drawn from?

Is Leon Walker a Criminal?

If I call from work and the phone is busy

I never, never, never, never, never ask who was on the line (oh no)

If I get home late she don’t ask any questions (no she don’t, you know why)

Cause she’s got her thing going and you know I’ve got mine

-Isaac Hayes “One Big Unhappy Family”

Married people lose some freedom of action and privacy. That’s life. A marriage where one spouse is constantly telling the other one to mind his or her own business is one that probably won’t last. Her business becomes his business and vice versa. On the other hand married or not, people still are individuals and have some expectation of privacy, don’t they?

Leon Walker worried that his wife Clara was cheating on him with her allegedly abusive second husband. He decided to check her email accounts. He found proof of her affair and notified her first ex-husband, who decided to use this information in a custody dispute. Ex #1 was supposedly concerned that his child was being exposed to possible abuse by Ex #2. Leon was also allegedly apprehensive about his own child's safety.

So what right? This is nothing new. Some happy or trusting spouses have joint email accounts which either may use. They sometimes share their passwords with each other. Less trusting or more private spouses often keep an eye on each other and may even occasionally surreptitiously check emails, text messages, voicemails, etc. Morally such actions may be somewhat dubious but it’s not like the police are going to arrest you or the local prosecutor will try to convict you of hacking or spying or anything like that. Well not usually anyway….  

 

Free Press Article 

Legal experts say it's the first time the statute has been used in a domestic case, and it might be hard to prove. "It's going to be interesting because there are no clear legal answers here," said Frederick Lane, a Vermont attorney and nationally recognized expert who has published five books on electronic privacy. The fact that the two still were living together, and that Leon Walker had routine access to the computer, may help him, Lane said.

"I would guess there is enough gray area to suggest that she could not have an absolute expectation of privacy," he said.

About 45% of divorce cases involve some snooping -- and gathering -- of e-mail, Facebook and other online material, Lane said. But he added that those are generally used by the warring parties for civil reasons -- not for criminal prosecution.

I would think similar actions could take place in almost any breakup as people seek information that they can use for greater leverage in divorce or custody hearings. Both men and women have been known to lie. What was sharing a password two years ago when the marriage was happy could become an invasion of privacy when the couple decides to divorce. It appears to me that the prosecutor is using the law incorrectly here. So far judges have refused to throw out the charges.

Computer Crime Law 

I don’t understand how a man can be charged with hacking into a computer that was either paid for by him or may be joint marital property. The computer also exists in a location that is either his or jointly owned/rented.  This criminal case could make divorces even more contentious than they already are since the option of jailing someone along with divorcing them would be incredibly tempting for many people who aren’t saints. And I don’t know too many saints.

BTW Adultery is still against the law in Michigan.  It is a felony.

But the prosecutor has not charged the woman with the crime of adultery.

Is this an appropriate application of the Michigan computer crime law? Does this man deserve five years in prison? Would you change your opinion if the genders were reversed and the woman was facing possible incarceration for snooping? Does a spouse have a right (legal or moral) to know if his or her partner is cheating? Should the woman be charged with adultery?