The Christian right-wing group in Ohio that spearheaded the anti-gay referendum on the 2004 ballot is now using the law to defend domestic battery against unmarried women. That’s not an exaggeration or some unintended side-effect. They filed an amicus brief on behalf of a batterer, arguing that it’s legal to commit battery if you’re not married, because their hate bill prohibits any legal protections - including against criminal assault - for unmarried couples.
In an ugly development that has so far received little national attention, Citizens for Community Values (CCV) recently filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Ohio Supreme Court in support of a man accused of assaulting his girlfriend, with whom he resides. The man is being prosecuted under Ohio’s domestic violence law, which makes it a crime for someone to cause physical harm to a person who is “a spouse, a person living as a spouse, or a former spouse of the offender.”
CCV was the primary group urging adoption of Ohio’s 2004 anti-gay constitutional amendment. At the time, legal scholars warned that the amendment could have far reaching implications for all unmarried couples—gay or not—including the possibility that domestic violence legislation could be overturned.
Now, Citizens for Community Values is trying to do just that. Their brief contends that the domestic violence law creates and recognizes a “legal status” for “marriage-mimicking relationships” that is prohibited by the new constitutional amendment, and that the man therefore cannot be prosecuted under that law for attacking his girlfriend.
Note that this was predicted in advance. I can only hope that most voters who supported the hate bill assumed that nobody would actually behave in this way. The culture-war Christians exceeded expectations (perhaps; they’ve merely lived up to mine).
This is the kind of thing, much too frequent and increasingly so in recent years, that tells us what these people are really about. Their greatest advantage so far is that it’s hard to actually believe they really mean what they say - that it’s OK to beat your girlfriend because gays are icky; that you’re required to bear a rapist’s child because women are of less value than zygotes; that you’re required to spend years slowly dying in pain because they don’t approve your choice of treatment. But as they become bolder they increasingly prove they really do mean it - that there’s no limit to what they’ll do or who they’ll hurt to service their own hateful impulses.
The first lesson we need to learn is that they are just what they seem.
Relevant Adjectives: crazy, vicious, bigoted, ugly, misogynist, reactionary, paranoid, deceptive, subversive, theocratic, oppressive, fascist, addle-pated, pin-headed, violence-loving, thuggish, dangerous. [season to taste]
September 7th, 2006
|
General, Politics, Legal Issues, Church & State, Religion, Culture |
67 comments
Scientists in Australia may have found a way to use a type of photosynthesis to make solar cells more efficient:
Synthetic molecules that mimic chlorophyll in plants may one day form the basis of highly efficient solar cells, say Australian researchers.
Professor Max Crossley’s molecular electronics group at the University of Sydney recently presented its research at the International Conference on Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines in Rome.
“Nature has evolved this very efficient process, over millions of years, for harvesting light and then converting it into energy,” says Crossley.
“We’re trying to mimic aspects of natural photosynthesis.”
… Based on what nature delivers, they expect to eventually have much more efficient solar cells than exist at the moment.
A leaf is about 30-40% efficient at converting light to electricity and this compares with just a 12% efficiency for conventional silicon-based solar cells.
“We have the basis of a biomimetic organic photovoltaic device or solar cell,” says Crossley.
“In the long term what we’re trying to do is have something we can simply paint on a roof, like a thin layer.”
If this pans out, it will obviously be huge news. And it demonstrates the importance of funding basic scientific research. This is not a minor tweak; it is an entirely new way of looking at the problem. Things like this are one reason the Bush Administration has been such a disaster. Faced with the need to wean the country away from carbon based fuels for a variety of reasons and a public ready to listen to a pitch for more funding for basic scientific research in these areas, the Bush Administration did nothing of any significance. Their tax cuts at all costs economic policy has left no money and their energy policy has largely consisted of paying oil companies to dig out oil they were going to dig out anyway. Research has been less than an after thought.
That attitude slows down the rate of progress. Basic research is a lot like fertilizer. At first, it looks like you’ve just spread crap all over the place. But eventually flowers grow. The Bush Administration is refusing to fertilize a critical area of research, slowing the pace of advancement at a time when we as a nation need to make as much progress as possible in the shortest amount of time.
September 7th, 2006
|
Politics, Economics, Environment, Science, Iraq, Terrorism, Technology, Iran |
3 comments
The freedom, for example, to invade a small country, overthrow its democratically elected government, and install a puppet government that then wages war on its own poor and helpless while we look on and do nothing:
A study in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet suggests that, despite the presence of a Canadian-led United Nations police force and UN peacekeepers, 8,000 people have been killed and 35,000 women and girls raped in Port-au-Prince alone since the ouster of then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.
Montreal Haitian groups say the peer-reviewed study by U.S. social workers confirms what the Canadian and Quebec governments have always denied: a massive campaign of repression against Haiti’s poor under the post-Aristide regime of Gerard Latortue, the country’s U.S.-appointed prime minister, from March 2004 to last June.
Haiti Action Montreal, an advocacy group, decried the violence yesterday and what it says is Canada’s role in perpetuating it.
Bush likes to talk a good game about democracy, but, as Haiti proves, it is just talk. Do you really think that the terrorists aren’t pointing at Haiti to demonstrate that the US uses concern for democracy as nothing ore than an excuse to install puppets who are quite happy to keep the locals from interfering with Western interests? And based on the evidence from Haiti, how is anyone supposed to argue otherwise?
Bush has no foreign policy beyond blowing shit up and hoping to intimidate everyone on the planet. If they were serious about the importance of democracy, they never would have overthrown the government of Haiti to begin with, much less let their puppet turn into a kind of junior league Baby Doc. But they aren’t serious; they just need a better sound bite for the home crowd than “safety through thuggery”.
September 7th, 2006
|
Politics |
4 comments
