Thought Snax

This billboard appeared in an African-American neighborhood of Harrisburg, PA.  Did no one’s WTF Alarm go off?

When our office was downtown, many Fridays there was a group of people who would gather on the corner, literally wave Bibles, and yell at passersby to convert, be saved, etc.  And not a “good news” sort of yelling; a “you’re gonna burn in hell” sort of yelling.  I’d wonder, each time I saw them, “has anyone in the history of religion converted because they were yelled at?”  I concluded that these people were not out on the corner to actually convert or save people, but to give themselves the warm fuzzy feeling of religious superiority.

The atheists behind this sign and the “Imaginary Friend” sign I wrote about earlier are cut from the same cloth.  They’re just yelling at the rest of us that they’re right and we’re wrong.  It’s not going to convince anyone, but — like the corner-yellers — it will give them the warm fuzzy feeling of religious superiority.

Since I’m a gmail & Google Docs user, I signed up for Google +, immediately connected with six people, and am never motivated to check it once I’ve caught up with my peeps on Facebook.  Apparently neither is anyone else.  So Google dug deep into its vaunted stockpile of information about me — law nerd browsing habits, clothing orders from LL Bean and Lands End, Lifehacker addiction — and sent the following email designed to lure me back to Google +:

Uh, no.  Thanks. Really, I’ll pass on another time sink, this one devoted to Victoria Justice’s new favorite hat, Britney Spears, and some random dude I’ve never heard of.

I’ve been percolating a post about religion and religious tolerance.  It started around the time of Tebowmania, and each time I’d think I had just the right angle, something new and blogworthy would happen, like a panel of celibate dudes lecturing the world on contraception.  That post may still occur, but this snippet (sorry!) was too good to wait:

Stephen Colbert on Thursday tackled the practice of posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims into the Mormon church.  . . . But “Jews don’t baptize, so instead I will now proxy-circumcise all the dead Mormons,” Colbert said.

The practice of posthumous baptism is fascinating to me from a number of angles.  Given that Jews don’t believe that baptism has any significance, our collective response should logically be “knock yourselves out, guys.  Enjoy the swim.”  But for sheer creepiness, it is really hard to outdo.  If I got word that my Jewish ancestors were being, well, not “baptized,” because that is not a meaningful concept to me, but invoked during a Mormon pool party the upshot of which is to say that their religion is better than mine, I’d be good and annoyed.  And creeped out.

Stephen Colbert has the answer.  Posthumous conversion of Mormons to Jews!

(I couldn’t get the Comedy Central video clip to embed, and I’ve wasted just about enough jury-instruction-drafting time trying.  For the full, hilarious, clip, click here.)

I’m thinking of proxy converting everyone, living or dead, to my religion:  Unaffiliated Skeptic With A Working Hypothesis of Monotheism.  Our main sacrament is Trying to Figure Out What It All Means.  All of my new converts would wander around in the same state of religious confusion in which I dwell, engaging in the Sacrament by asking each other, “What do you think it all means?” and listening respectfully to the answer.   No special clothing or food required.  And most importantly, no oppressing, killing, or even legislating against anyone else’s faith.

Though what this judge thought it meant is beyond me.  The awesome Barry Roseman posts a quote of the day for a bunch of us civil rights lawyer types.  Here was today’s:

The commission says that the company fired [Donnica Venters] because she wanted to pump breast-milk.  Discrimination because of pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical discrimination is unlawful.  Related conditions can include cramping, dizziness, and nausea while pregnant.

Even if the company’s claim that she was fired for abandonment is meant to hide the real reason — she was wanted to pump breast-milk — lactation is not pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition.   She gave birth on December 11, 2009.  After that day, she was no longer pregnant and her pregnancy-related conditions ended.

Firing someone because of lactation or breast-pumping is not sex discrimination.*

Hold on.  You may have missed the last line, so I’ll re-WordPress-special-quote-function it:

Firing someone because of lactation or breast-pumping is not sex discrimination.

Makes total sense:  none of the men were permitted to lactate or pump breast milk at work either.  QED!

*****************

* EEOC v. Housing Funding II, Ltd., 11-cv-02442 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 2, 2012), slip op. at 2.

Just last month I was being cynical about Republican efforts to prevent voting fraud by making sure that students and poor people don’t vote.  But thank goodness the Republicans are on the ball, so we could catch poor student Charlie White and punish him for his voting transgressions.

Oh.  Wait.

Jury finds Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White guilty on 6 of 7 felony charges

Do you love that his name is Charlie White as much as I do?   And it’s really a Republican hypocrisy two-fer, because it turned out that his vote fraud, er, “confusion” was, well, I’ll let IndyStar.com break it to you gently:

The charges stemmed from confusion over where White lived when he campaigned for secretary of state in late 2009 and 2010. White claimed that he lived at his ex-wife’s home on the east side of Fishers. But the jury convicted him based on allegations that he actually lived in a townhouse on the opposite side of town that he bought for him and his then-fiancé. The townhouse was outside his Fishers Town Council district.

Note that it’s “confusion” when a conservative politician bails on his wife, shacks up with his fiancé, and fails to notify the secretary of state so he can stay on the city council of the city in which he no longer lives, but potential “fraud” when an 84-year-old woman who has voted in every election since 1948 doesn’t have a birth certificate because she was born at home in 1927.

Expand & protect.

Lunch yesterday with my awesome friend Susie Greene, who has just produced/published this multimedia investigation into solitary confinement.  Extra bonus awesomeness, it features ass-kicking DU clinical professor Laura Rovner.   The video will expand your brain into the toxic arena of solitary confinement.  You thought it was just a few days “in the hole” for bad behavior.  Think again.

And, um, protect.  After lunch — at the (perfectly appropriate) prodding of Susie and Tim — Susie took me ski-helmet shopping.   I have been trying to convince myself that having skied for 40ish years without a helmet, I was somehow grandfathered (grandmothered?) in.   But even I had to admit, finally, that this made no damn sense.  So now I’ll look like this when I ski:

Or more realistically:

One of the (many many) things I love about legal research is that you can get swept up in the interesting stories that cases tell, many of them totally irrelevant to the point you’re researching.   This is also a happy by-product of ADD.   I think of it as the legal research scenic route, and have no fear, I don’t bill for it.

Today’s scenic route was not so scenic, but was instead a startling history lesson.  I’ll let it speak for itself:

The Court notes that until 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) counseled its members to maintain segregated neighborhoods in the interest of maintaining property values. The Code of Ethics of the NAREB provided until then that:  ‘A REALTOR SHOULD NEVER BE INSTRUMENTAL IN INTRODUCING INTO A NEIGHBORHOOD A CHARACTER OF PROPERTY OR OCCUPANCY, MEMBERS OF ANY RACE OR NATIONALITY, OR ANY INDIVIDUALS WHOSE PRESENCE WILL CLEARLY BE DETRIMENTAL TO PROPERTY VALUES IN THAT NEIGHBORHOOD.’

Zuch v. Hussey, 394 F. Supp. 1028, 1054 n.12 (E.D. Mich. 1975).

So, yeah, we’ve made some progress.

Gratuitous political comment:  and this is what Ron Paul would take us back to.

Newt Gingrich asks: “Do you want to move towards American exceptionalism, reassert the Constitution, reassert the nature of America, or do you, in fact, want to become a secular, European, sort of bureaucratic socialist society?”

Evidently his own answer is, “neither, thanks; I prefer a dictatorship.”

How do we know this?  Because he has decided to abandon the rule of law, one of the key things that makes America exceptional.

On “Face the Nation,” Gingrich announced not only that court decisions that are out of step with popular opinion should be ignored, but that as president he might have judges arrested by the Capitol Police or the U.S. Marshals.

Ignoring court decisions and having judges arrested is what dictatorships do.

He was referring to a decision to keep a public high school graduation secular, something required by the Constitution.  But ignoring unpopular opinions would not only let us establish government-ordained religion and reinstitute racial segregation, it would let undermine one of the pillars of our economy.   I’m thinking foreclosures are fairly unpopular decisions these days — shall we be allowed to ignore them?  How about evictions?  Don’t want to pay a judgment for breach of contract?  Form a mob and show how unpopular it is!

In my field, decisions tossing ADA cases based on procedural grounds such as standing or mootness are unpopular.  Shall we ignore them and bring our sledgehammers with us when we visit inaccessible facilities?  (Do NOT tempt me!)

Or are we only allowed to ignore decisions that are unpopular with conservatives?

And this guy is supposed to be the brain trust of the Republican party?

What’s funny is that Gingrich is smart.  He knows how important the rule of law is, which also means that he knows he’s full of shit.  But he has apparently decided that the only way to win this time around is graft the arrogance that has always been a side effect of his intelligence to some sort of random right wing slogan generator to create a FrankenCandidate who would be immensely entertaining if he weren’t so frightening.

And finally we have the Republican party 2011:  proclaiming conservative values while embracing a someone with three marriages and multiple affairs; decrying elitism while embracing a pompous windbag with a $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s; and proclaiming American exceptionalism while rejecting the rule of law.

The New Yorker recently published an article on premature birth that inspired this thoroughly appalling letter:

So let me get this straight:  Instead of ensuring that our educational system teaches all of our children, we should “accept death,” lest we be excessively sentimental to the detriment of . . . the special education students to whom we so desperately — but  apparently inappropriately? — want to cling.  What does Linda Bonin of Kirkland Washington think we should do instead?   Administer the PSAT prenatally?   What really frosts my shorts is that Ms. Bonin was almost certainly regarded as a good person — someone who liked to help people — possibly even by the parents of the special education students whose very existence she regretted, unsentimentally.

Who the hell is Ms. Bonin to decide that her students didn’t deserve to live.  Who are any of us?