discrimination

Los Angeles, CA (1-12-09) - In a shocking new tactic attempting to ban peaceful protesters from picketing the Scientology compound known as "Gold Base" near Hemet, CA, Scientology lawyers have obtained medical information regarding two protesters, and are using their HIV positive status in an attempt to prevent them from picketing at the location.

Worldwide pickets against Scientology have surged in the last year, and Scientology has been fighting to stop them, especially near the Hemet compound. Scientology has used tactics ranging from physical attacks, false reports to police, and the emission of an estimated 110db organ note from loudspeakers in an attempt to drown out the protesters' chants.

The latest tactics, however, are downright sickening, illegal, and an insult to members of the LGBT community and HIV patients worldwide.

Attorney Graham Berry and activists "Angry Gay Pope" (AGP) and "Happy Smurf" (a former Scientologist) are openly homosexual. Scientology, which policy states that homosexuals are "low on the tone scale" and should be "disposed of quietly and without sorrow", has obtained AGP and Happy Smurf's private records and discovered that they are HIV positive.

An Oregon church dedicated to equal civil protections for the GLBT community has announced that its clergy will not sign off on marriages for straight couples until gay and lesbian families have the same access to marriage as do straights.

A Jan. 5 article in the Ashland Daily Tidings reported that the First Congregational United Church of Christ's Rev. Pam Shepherd, seeing the act of signing marriage licenses for heterosexual couples as a form of discrimination against gays and lesbians, decided that in the name of fairness no licenses should be dignified with the signature of the church's clergy until all families receive equal treatment under the law.

"I'm completely public about being a racist and Nazi," he says. "I get into fights maybe twice a month, because some niggers will get pissed off with it." Every time a black person enters the bar, he emits a hiss of disapproval.

"I just don't want to be around them," he tells me. "I don't want to look at them, I don't want them near me, I don't want to smell them. And people say, 'Oh people who are racialist you've never hung around black people'... bullshit, I've showered with them, I've lived with them, I don't like them... they're fucking savages, they're tribal motherfuckers, they are different to us, how they think, how they conduct themselves."

Despite his vitriolic racism Fogarty wasn't worried about not being allowed into the army. Military protocol stipulates that each new recruit with suspicious tattoos must write an explanation about the divinity and meaning of their body art. Fogarty's are quite clearly the kind written about in ARP 600-15 -- a Nordic warrior, and a Celtic cross. But this didn't hinder him. "They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo and I made up some stuff and that was that," he says. Fogarty was enlisted and stationed in the 3rd Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart, GA, the largest Army installation east of the Mississippi River.

This happened in 1997 even before the new military attitude to tattoos really took hold as troops were needed ever more desperately. It shows that regulations were loose before and have got even looser. Now more Fogarty's are getting through, as the commanders in the army hierarchy admit to a liberalism that wasn't in place previously.

...

The Army tome which deals with all the multifarious obligations that a soldier must uphold in the military is called AR 600-20, or "Army Command Policy". It devotes one of 125 pages to the problem of extremism, and states the policy generally as: "Participation in extremist organizations and activities by Army personnel is inconsistent with the responsibilities of military service".

...

There is no mention that membership itself is prohibited; it is the public display of allegiance that is barred. The options available to a Commander should these rules be transgressed are involuntary separation, reclassification action or bar to reenlistment actions, or other administrative or disciplinary action 'deemed appropriate' by the Commander.

...

Fogarty was dragged away from his girlfriend when he was positioned in Georgia. And the woman, who would later be the mother of Fogarty's first child, born in 1999, grew angry. "She hated that I was in the military," he says. Her anger became so acute that, according to Fogarty, she sent a dossier of pictures to his military command that showed him at white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies, as well as performing his racist rock for Attack.

"They hauled me before some sort of committee, and showed me the pictures and asked me what they were. I just denied it and said my girlfriend was a spiteful bitch, which is true.

"They knew what I was about, but they let it go because I'm a great soldier, and they knew that."

The person heading the investigation was Command Sgt. Maj. Tommy Dunn. I contacted him and he claimed he couldn't remember who Sgt. Fogarty was. "It's funny," says Fogarty when I tell him, "he gave me medals and everything."

...

Fogarty gives me the latest Attack album, "Survival". The jacket is a picture of him in military fatigues while in Iraq and his songs give a clear indication of his thoughts on his time there. "Eye For An Eye" opens with the lines: "A slow painful death I strive/ Why are you still alive?" The chorus includes the lines: "It's our turn to watch you bleed/ It's our turn to tear you limb from limb... We will leave no survivors of this bloody war.
"
"In Battle" includes the lines "In battle there are no laws... Its kill or be killed, die with the rest... Relief came when I pulled the trigger and watched you die/ I can't stop laughing everytime I remember you start to cry/ Watch you cry!"

"To tell you the truth I hate Arabs more than anybody," he says at Lowry Zoo. "For the simple fact I've served over there and seen how they live. They're just a backward people... them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I'm concerned, their customs, everything to do with the Middle East is just repugnant to me."

But he believes the war can be won. "You have to break these people's will to fight, the only reason they are fighting is that there is some sort of profit to it, or its not that bad, that the Americans are not going to do what they did in World War Two and kill everybody."

Would he nuke Baghdad? "Fuck yeah! ... If we had occupying force cracking down on spitting on sidewalk would you spit on sidewalk if they shot you in the head for it? Go in with iron-fist, this is how you will live, if you don't we'll kill you... Quit pussy footing around, listen to us or die."

...

Fogarty was confident enough of carte blanche from the military that during his break from service in January 2004, he flew not back to see his family in the U.S but to Dresden, Germany to give a concert to 2,500 skinheads, on the army’s budget.

In 2003, a team led by J. Correll flashed random photos of white and black faces, some superimposed with guns, others with harmless items such as cell phones and wallets. They asked college students to press one key indicating "shoot" the suspect, and another indicating "don't shoot." The students were more likely to mistakenly fire at black faces that were unarmed compared to unarmed white faces.

But what about police officers? With their special training and rules about when to fire, perhaps they will do better. A study by E. Ashby Plant and B. Michelle Peruche tested police officers on a similar task.

...

48 mostly white police officers who volunteered to participate in the project were told only that the study was about "decisions to shoot." They had 630 milliseconds after each face was displayed to press the "shoot" or "don't shoot" button on the computer running the test. As the test began, results were the same as with college students: Police officers were more likely to mistakenly shoot black suspects holding harmless items than white suspects holding the same items. They made an average of 3.63 errors over 20 trials when the suspect was black, but only 2.65 errors when the suspect was white.

But an interesting result occurred as the test continued. After another 80 trials, about 40 of which included the key situation of a person holding a harmless object, the disparity between reactions to white and black suspects disappeared. During the second half of the experiment, the average number of errors for black suspects diminished to 2.60, statistically indistinguishable from the rate for white suspects.

A Memphis police officer is accused of beating up someone under arrest. The person seen being attacked on the tape is a transexual. She says the attack is a hate crime.

Now the FBI is investigating. One officer is off the job, and another is on desk duty.

Duanna Johnson says the officer beat her up after calling her all sorts of names and making fun of her sexuality.

On the videotape you see Johnson being attacked. One officer is holding Johnson back, while another throws punches.

When we decided to pursue a domestic adoption nearly five years ago, my husband and I -- both of us white -- decided that we were open to adopting transracially. We were naïve about this -- we really didn't understand the challenges for children adopted transracially -- but when we started researching agencies we made note of their cross-cultural adoption programs.

We are in Columbus, OH and we wanted a local agency. We knew we didn't want to adopt across state lines because things get iffy when you start mixing up adoption laws. (Every state has its own rules and regulations.) Also we were hoping for an open adoption and I knew it would be unlikely that we could have regular visits between our family and our child's birth family if airfare became an issue.

We narrowed it down to three agencies in our city. (One other agency had religious requirements we would not meet being an interfaith Jewish/Christian family.) Only one called us back and that's the agency we chose.

The three agencies we looked at all had separate programs with different costs that were dependent on characteristics of the child -- namely children with "special needs" or of African descent cost less to adopt. White kids, kids of mixed race not including black -- it's the full fee to adopt them. Black kids and kids with special needs -- about half.

...

When we approached the agency we offered to pay the full fee and take whatever baby came our way. The social workers told us that we had to choose a program and that given that we were open to “any race,” we would be placed with a black child because there were fewer waiting parents in that program.

“You may as well get the fee break,” one told us. “Because if you are open to adopting a black baby, you will get a black baby.”

What's next, smart ones carrying a 10% premium?

The California Supreme Court ruled today that same-sex couples should be permitted to marry, rejecting state marriage laws as discriminatory.

The state high court's 4-3 ruling was unlikely to end the debate over gay matrimony in California. A group has circulated petitions for a November ballot initiative that would amend the state Constitution to block same-sex marriage, while the Legislature has twice passed bills to authorize gay marriage. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed both.

The long-awaited court opinion, written by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, stemmed from San Francisco's highly publicized same-sex weddings, which in 2004 helped spur a conservative backlash in a presidential election year and a national dialogue over gay rights.

Local mirror of CA Supreme Court's Decision Overturning Gay Marriage Ban As Unconstitutional

The first, much-anticipated benefits of personalized medicine are being lost or diluted for many Americans who are too afraid that genetic information may be used against them to take advantage of its growing availability.

In some cases, doctors say, patients who could make more informed health care decisions if they learned whether they had inherited an elevated risk of diseases like breast and colon cancer refuse to do so because of the potentially dire economic consequences.

Others enter a kind of genetic underground, spending hundreds or thousands of dollars of their own money for DNA tests that an insurer would otherwise cover, so as to avoid scrutiny. Those who do find out they are likely or certain to develop a particular genetic condition often beg doctors not to mention it in their records.

I've got a friend in New York who just went through this and I'm gathering all the legal documents to publicize that case. The outcome was beyond outrageous. The mother, who had full custody during the divorce and custody fight, lost custody because the father would make the child attend church while the mother would not.

This despite the fact that the father had multiple drunk driving arrests and even admitted under oath that he still drove with the child in the car after drinking. This also despite the fact that he had a history of violence, enough to warrant a personal protection order granted to the mother. But the judge felt that raising the child in a "Christian" environment trumped all of that.

A new study by Michigan State sociologist Ralph Pyle presented at this month's joint meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association in Tampa, Fla., shows how all sides in the conservative-liberal religious divide have work to do in combating prejudice and promoting tolerance.

Pyle measured nearly 3,000 responses from General Social Survey data from 1998-2004 on several issues such as openness to racial intermarriage and racially mixed neighborhoods and ranked religious groups on a scale of anti-black and anti-immigrant attitudes.

He found that moderate Protestants held the strongest anti-black attitudes. The next most prejudiced group? Liberal Protestants.

As expected, black Protestants were the least prejudiced against blacks. But they were the most prejudiced against immigrants. Conservative Protestants were the second most prejudiced group against immigrants. Jews, Catholics and other religious groups showed less prejudice to both groups, being particularly open to immigrants.

The good news for religious groups: People who go to church regularly were less likely to be prejudiced, Pyle said. The bad news is people with no religious affiliation were also much less likely to be prejudiced than individuals showing modest levels of commitment to their faith, those who attend services monthly or less.

Emphasis mine.

So it's a problem that the heathens of the country are less likely to be a bigot that all the people who believe in some big invisible guy? And the thiests complain that without a god, there are no morals.