Author: ohwilleke

A lawsuit filed today alleges that Tyson Foods, Inc. is responsible for maintaining a segregated bathroom and break room, reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, in its Ashland, Alabama chicken processing plant. Twelve African-American employees filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, alleging that a “Whites Only” sign and a padlock denied them access to a bathroom in the Ashland plant. The complaint states that numerous white employees had keys to the bathroom that were not provided to African-American workers.

The EEOC is a party to a related suit arising from the same facts.

What is wrong with Tyson Foods?  It makes you want to scream.

The people of the front range hamlet of Ramah are very worked up over the fact that a Wiccan coven is trying to organize a fundraiser for a children’s hospital on Halloween at the local American Legion Hall. 

A Baptist minister tried to rally the town board to stop the gathering, and one woman is circulating a petition demanding that the festival be stopped. . . . Annette Manchego . . . said, “I do not want it in our town or anywhere around our town.” . . . . The Rev. Tim Tucker of Ramah Baptist Fellowship asked the town board to meet about the matter, and Town Clerk Cindy Tompkins scheduled a workshop Aug. 25 at Town Hall. . . .
Doucette-Johnson [the organizer] said some residents thought the pagans would slaughter animals and one man said he didn’t want the pagans pushing their religion down his throat. He then asked whether she would be open to a Ku Klux Klan meeting in her front yard, she said.

“That to me was like a threat,” Doucette-Johnson said.

The same man also said he could organize a cattle drive through the area to ruin the festival, Allen said. . . . Now Manchego is circulating a petition asking the American Legion Hall not to allow the rental. She said she’s collected more than 100 signatures from residents in the area and plans to present the petition to the American Legion.  If that fails, Manchego said, she’ll hold a protest Oct. 29. She said pagans have the right to practice and gather privately, but shouldn’t do so in public.

“We have vulnerable young people that don’t need this put upon them,” she said. “The festival is a pulling to get people in. Then they can work with the devil himself, which they worship. It is powerful, believe me. They can brainwash you, and before you know it, you’re staying for the midnight ritual.”

Disgusting.   I’m ashamed that my state is home to such intolerance. There is a religion whose scriptures call for religious gatherings to be held in private.  Perhaps Rev. Tucker is familiar with the passage:

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men….when thou prayest, enter into thy closet and when thou has shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret….

Matthew 6:5-6.

Cross Posted at Wash Park Prophet.

Like every American state, Louisianna and Mississippi had plenty on unmarried parents and divorced couples with children, indeed, probably more than average.

Most of those families had elaborate protocols set forth by courts regarding custody and visitation.  Many of those parents don’t communicate well with each other in the best of times.

Now, it is hard enough for families that we living together to regroup.  Parents have been separated from children.  People of evacuated by any available means.
Movie buffs may have watched “War of the Worlds” this summer.  The old story was given a new twist by throwing a divorce into the mix.  Very different and divorced parents shared responsiblity for protecting their two children during a disaster.

Now that is being replayed all across the Southern United States, tens of thousands of times.

Strictly speaking, people are violating divorce decrees all over the place this week, although since the violations are involuntary, the violators will be unlikely to be subject to contempt citations.

But, typically, those decrees and the child support decrees that accompanying them, cannot be modified, even by mutual consent, without court order.  This is a good rule in ordinary times.  It may be a major problem now.  Almost everyone in New Orleans and South of Jackson in Mississippi has vastly changed circumstances, and the relevant courts are not in session, many files have been lost, lawyers and guardians ad litem are scattered, jobs have been lost, people have relocated for the foreseeable future (it will take three months to pump NO dry they said today), and in generally, the formalities will be a horrible mess.

I can’t even begin to imagine how this particular part of the Hurricane mess will be handled.

This blog is being sued for comments posted in his blog by critical of an internet company’s business.  Of course, it takes $100 and typewriter to bring a lawsuit, and much more to win one.  But, the case deserves close monitoring by all of us in the blogosphere.

In the meantime, I urge every reader of this blog to boycott Traffic Power.com and to visit the Traffic Power Sucks page.  Internet companies that sue people who criticize them on blogs, regardless of the merits of their business, don’t deserve your patronage.

Cross posted at Wash Park Prophet.

Scripts-Howard News Service is reporting that Colorado Senator Ken Salazar has accused Colorado Springs based Focus on the Family of being “un-Christian” in its political tactics in the fight over judicial nominations.  He said in a press conference:

Ken Salazar making a political appearance.

Focus on the Family’s Vice President, Tom Minnery, responded by saying: “”I’m flabbergasted the senator would call our Christianity into question.”  Focus on the Family made headlines in January of this year for denouncing the cartoon character Sponge Bob as a homosexual.

Sponge Bob and James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family

Ken Salazar had earlier pledged to give all judges an up or down vote and is now waivering and considering siding with all other Democrats in the U.S. Senate in opposing a Republican threat to end the filibuster of judges, which Republicans now call unprecedented and unconstitutional.  The practice was used by Republicans in September of 1968 to successfully block the appointment of Abe Fortas to the United States Supreme Court is, and as recently as March 9, 2000, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is now leading the charge to end the filibuster, voted to continue the Republican filibuster of Clinton Nominee Richard Paez to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.  The concerns judges have expressed about the judges in question are summarized here.  For example, nominee Janice Brown has repeatedly denounced the New Deal which resulted in the enactment of Social Security and creation of the SEC as a “socialist revolution.”  She also suggested in a dissenting opinion, which she has called one of her ten most significant opinions, that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 might be unconstitutional under her view of the law.  Aguilar v. Avis Rent-A-Car Systems, 980 P.2d 846, 892 (Cal. 2000).

Janice Brown, U.S. Court of Appeals Nominee

None of the judges in question are from either the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, or the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which includes Colorado.  

But, this struggle has wider meaning because it comes in the context of the larger process of Ken Salazar defining himself as a moderate freshman Senator, a stance that has brought him to national prominence as a swing vote on many issues.  He has broken with his Democratic base on a number of issues in his first few months in office, including the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be the Attorney General, despite concerns raised by Gonzales’ role in formulating a pro-torture policy while White House Counsel, and the recently enacted bankruptcy bill which Salazar supported.  The current filibuster fight is the one of the first high profile fights in Congress since Salazar took office in January, where he has sided with the progressive in the party.

Prior to entering the Senate, Ken Salazar rarely had an occassion to weigh in on the “culture wars” that are a major part of politics in Colorado and nationally.  In his career as an attorney, he was mainly known for his work as a water lawyer, a fairly technocratic part of the law.  As State Attorney General, a post he won with strong rural support and backing from a number of Republicans, Salazar focused on bread and butter issues like pushing for a state “no call” list.

Salazar is a lifelong practicing Roman Catholic Christian, but faced opposition from the Catholic Church during his campaign because he does not favor legally banning abortion, despite the fact that he was running against Republican Pete Coors.  The role of the Catholic Church in Ken Salazar’s race is particularly notable because then Cardinal Ratzinger, who was just this week elevated to become Pope Benedict XVI, was consulted and his approach was viewed a touchstone in the church’s approach to the race.  Ratzinger, on one hand, agreed that Salazar himself, by being a pro-choice politician was being gravely sinful, while on the other hand, rejected the more expansive view taken by Colorado Springs Bishop Michael Sheridan in a pastoral letter, that voters would commit a sin by merely voting for Salazar, even if abortion was not an important factor in the voter’s decision, and that it was not the role of the church to tell people how to vote or sanction voters.  

Pope Benedict XVI

In yesterday’s press conference speech, Salazar appears to be defining himself as a lonely voice in Congress speaking out against religious right stances, not from a secular perspective, but from the point of view of a sincere Christian who thinks that the religious right has distorted the Christian message, a view most prominently represented in the political world now by the group Sojourners.

Cross-posted at Political State Report and Daily Kos

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate makes one of the most solid and comprehensive arguments against pharmacists having a right to refuse to dispense emergency conception on moral grounds that I have seen.

She also notes that “Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich filed a 150-day emergency rule requiring drugstores to either fill prescriptions or otherwise accommodate their patients.”
In my own Colorado, our Republican Governor Owens vetoed a law (sponsored by my own state senator) that would have simply required that emergency rooms inform rape victims of the existence of emergency contraception.

This was supposed to protect the rights of Catholic Hospitals to practice their religion.  But, whose rights are more important: The rights of a corporation to practice its religion, or the rights of the ER staff who are being gagged by their employer to the extent that they cannot meet the standard of care for their profession, and the right of their patients who are rape victims to prevent a potential pregancy forced upon them at the butt of a gun.  Republicans just don’t care about women who have been raped.

Well, the Governor of Colorado doesn’t anyway.  Plenty of Republicans in the state legislature did support establishing notification of the existence of emergency contraception as part of the standard of care for treating rape victims, and plenty of people who are opposed to even abortion in general, both don’t have a problem with emergency contraception, which is simply a high dose birth control pill administered shortly after the incident in question, and don’t have a problem even with abortion in a rape case, something that happens in 50% of pregnancies that result from rape.

As was the case during the Republican overreach in the Terri Schiavo case, the people at the top of the “other party” are out of touch with the vast majority of ordinary Americans.

Republicans complain about the “Nanny State”.  Well, the latest Republican efforts to involve themselves in an intimate end of life decision based on statements from a woman’s husband and two other people on what she would have wanted found credible by a court by clear and convincing evidence, and on the ability of rape victims to mitigate the harm they have suffered, is far worse.  It is little more than thralldom to the state, and that is un-American.