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Sanders addresses the Vatican on how income inequality is killing the planet

by JudeMathis Posted on April 15, 2016

Sanders addresses the Vatican on how income inequality is killing the planet

By on 15 Apr 2016commentsShare

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited the Vatican on Friday to address a conference on social, economic, and environmental justice. Pope Francis, who is currently in Greece addressing the Syrian refugee crisis, was not in attendance, but Sanders praised the pontiff’s commitment to social justice and made several pointed remarks on the rising inequality between the world’s rich and everyone else — and how that wealth inequality affects the planet.

An excerpt from his speech:

The widening gaps between the rich and poor, the desperation of the marginalized, the power of corporations over politics, is not a phenomenon of the United States alone. The excesses of the unregulated global economy have caused even more damage in the developing countries. They suffer not only from the boom-bust cycles on Wall Street, but from a world economy that puts profits over pollution, oil companies over climate safety, and arms trade over peace. […]

Our youth are no longer satisfied with corrupt and broken politics and an economy of stark inequality and injustice. They are not satisfied with the destruction of our environment by a fossil fuel industry whose greed has put short term profits ahead of climate change and the future of our planet. They want to live in harmony with nature, not destroy it.

Sanders’ comments mirrored much of what he has been saying on the campaign trail, but some in the church doubt the Senator’s appearance at the Vatican will have much of an impact on Catholic voters. “I don’t think that Bernie Sanders going to the Vatican is going to help Bernie with Catholics any more than Ted Cruz going to a matzo factory is going to help him with the Jewish vote,” Matt Malone, editor of Jesuit magazine America, told the Associated Press, pointing out that conferences such as this are exceedingly common, and the Pope rarely attends.

You can read the full text of Sanders’ speech here.

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Sanders addresses the Vatican on how income inequality is killing the planet

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This Catholic Hospital Failed Women Who Were Suffering Miscarriages

by NganDeBeuzevill Posted on February 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a shocking investigation for the Guardian, Mother Jones alum Molly Redden describes a Catholic hospital in Muskegon, Michigan, in which hospital policies concerning reproductive health were guided by recommendations from the US Conference of Bishops. This resulted in a 17-month pattern whereby women who were miscarrying were refused medical intervention, resulting in dangerous cases of sepsis, emotional trauma, and unnecessary surgery.

A report that documents five cases of women whose miscarriages were treated in this manner was leaked to the Guardian. None of the pregnancies had progressed past 20 weeks, making viability outside the womb unlikely even in the best circumstances. None of the infants in these cases survived. Redden reports:

The woman inside the ambulance was miscarrying. That was clear from the foul-smelling fluid leaving her body. As the vehicle wailed toward the hospital, a doctor waiting for her arrival phoned a specialist, who was unequivocal: the baby would die. The woman might follow. Induce labor immediately.

But staff at the Mercy Health Partners hospital in Muskegon, Michigan would not induce labor for another 10 hours. Instead, they followed a set of directives written by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that forbid terminating a pregnancy unless the mother is in grave condition. Doctors decided they would delay until the woman showed signs of sepsis—a life-threatening response to an advanced infection—or the fetal heart stopped on its own.

In the end, it was sepsis. When the woman delivered, at 1:41 a.m., doctors had been watching her temperature climb for more than eight hours. Her infant lived for 65 minutes.

This story is just one example of how a single Catholic hospital risked the health of five different women in a span of 17 months, according to a new report leaked to the Guardian.

The report, by a former Muskegon County health official, Faith Groesbeck, accuses Mercy Health Partners of forcing five women between August 2009 and December 2010 to undergo dangerous miscarriages by giving them no other option.

Redden also revealed that all five women had symptoms that indicated immediate delivery was the safest option, but that option was never communicated to the patients. Redden delved into the complexities of the Catholic Church’s directives on reproductive health, which guided Mercy Health Partners’ interpretation that apparently prevented the hospital from providing necessary care and information to patients.

An OB-GYN reviewed the report provided by Redden and the Guardian and concluded that, given the nature of the miscarriages that were described, most physicians would “absolutely urge” inducing labor.

Redden noted that Catholic hospitals nationwide are on the rise—the number of Catholic hospitals increased by 16 percent between 2010 and 2011—while the number of secular, private, and other religious hospitals has declined. Experts in Catholic health care told the Guardian that the bishop’s directives should never interfere with emergency care.

Here is the Guardian’s entire story. You can also find one of Redden’s Mother Jones features, “The War on Women is Over—And Women Lost,” here.

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This Catholic Hospital Failed Women Who Were Suffering Miscarriages

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Kasich’s Spiritual Adviser Thinks Gay Rights Activists Are Fascist "Thought Nazis"

by ParthenBucher Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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After his strong second-place finish in the New Hampshire Republican primary Tuesday, Ohio Gov. John Kasich is being lauded as the race’s most viable compassionate conservative and an antidote to candidates such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Donald Trump who have campaigned on their harshness toward, well, just about everyone.

But Kasich’s views on social issues aren’t so far apart from those of the rest of the GOP field. Take gay rights and gay marriage, issues for which Kasich is considered more moderate than his opponents. Kasich won kudos in August for his thoughtful response during a Republican debate to a question about gay marriage. He said that while he doesn’t agree with the idea in principle, that didn’t keep him from attending the same-sex wedding of a good friend. He also insisted that if one of his daughters turned out to be gay, he would certainly still love her. Kasich called on people to “treat everybody with respect and let them share in this great American dream.”

Despite his calls for tolerance, Kasich is part of a religious community that was built almost entirely on opposition to liberalized religious views on gays and lesbians. Kasich attends St. Augustine Anglican Church, in Westerville, Ohio, a church that was created in 2011 as part of a splinter group, the Anglican Church in North America, that broke with the Episcopal Church after it ordained Gene Robinson, a gay man, as a bishop. Kasich’s denomination doesn’t allow women to serve as bishops or ordain gays and lesbians as clergy, as it considers noncelibate homosexual relationships to be sinful.

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Kasich’s Spiritual Adviser Thinks Gay Rights Activists Are Fascist "Thought Nazis"

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We Were Sued by a Billionaire Political Donor. We Won. Here’s What Happened.

by MaggieCdqtb Posted on October 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today we are happy to announce a monumental legal victory for Mother Jones: A judge in Idaho has ruled in our favor on all claims in a defamation case filed by a major Republican donor, Frank VanderSloot, and his company, Melaleuca Inc. In a decision issued Tuesday, the court found that Mother Jones did not defame VanderSloot or Melaleuca because “all of the statements at issue are non-actionable truth or substantial truth.” The court also found that the statements were protected as fair comment under the First Amendment.

Read the full ruling here.

This is the culmination of a lengthy, expensive legal saga that began three years ago when the 2012 presidential primaries were in full swing. On February 6, 2012, we published an article about VanderSloot after it emerged that his company, Melaleuca, and its subsidiaries had given $1 million to Mitt Romney’s super-PAC. The piece noted that VanderSloot had gone to unusual lengths to oppose gay rights in Idaho, and that Melaleuca had run into trouble with regulators.

VanderSloot’s lawyers sent us a letter complaining about the article. We reviewed their concerns and posted a correction about a few details. So far, not an uncommon scenario; it’s something every newsroom deals with from time to time.

But that September, we broke the story of Romney’s 47 percent comments, which some have argued cost the GOP the White House. Four months later, VanderSloot—who was also one of Gov. Romney’s national finance chairs—filed a defamation lawsuit against Mother Jones as well as Stephanie Mencimer, the reporter of the article, and Monika personally (for her tweet about the piece).

People have asked us whether we think these two things were connected, and the honest answer is that we have no idea. What we do know is that the take-no-prisoners legal assault from VanderSloot and Melaleuca has consumed a good part of the past two and a half years and has cost millions (yes, millions) in legal fees. In the course of the litigation, VanderSloot sued a former small-town Idaho newspaper reporter whose confrontation with him we mentioned in our article. His lawyers asked a judge to let them rifle through the internal records of the Obama campaign. They deposed a representative of the campaign in pursuit of a baseless theory that Mother Jones conspired with Obama’s team to defame VanderSloot. They tried to get one of our lawyers disqualified because his firm had once done work for Melaleuca. They intrusively questioned our employees—our reporter was grilled about whether she had attended a Super Bowl party the night she finalized the article.

Legally, what we fought over was what, precisely, the terms “bashing” and “outing” meant in the context of our article. (Read the decision for yourself.) But make no mistake: This was not a dispute over a few words. It was a push, by a superrich businessman and donor, to wipe out news coverage that he disapproved of. Had he been successful, it would have been a chilling indicator that the 0.01 percent can control not only the financing of political campaigns, but also media coverage of those campaigns.

Throughout this lawsuit, VanderSloot appeared to be engaged in rewriting his own history of opposing the expansion of civil rights to LGBT people. His complaint focused on two things: He asserted that we defamed him by “falsely stating that Mr. VanderSloot ‘bashed’ and ‘publicly outed a reporter.'” He also claimed that Monika’s tweet about the article defamed him by referring to “gay-bashing.”

In a way, there was something ironically hopeful about this: A conservative Republican—someone who not long ago was quoted saying it was “child abuse” to put a film about gay parents on public television—had apparently come to believe that to call him a gay-basher was so damaging to his reputation that he must fight the argument at virtually any cost. It’s a sign of just how far America has moved in just a few years that this entire case felt like something from a time capsule.

To be sure, VanderSloot has much at stake in reworking his public profile. He’s now widely recognized as one of the megadonors who will help determine who wins the 2016 GOP nomination. He has vowed to be even more “financially active” than he was in 2012, when he raised between $2 million and $5 million for Romney. In burnishing his image as a national figure, he might like people to forget about certain aspects of his past, such as the fact that he financed an ad campaign to amend the state constitution to ban marriage equality. (One of the ads pointed out that such an amendment would also prevent marriages between “a person and an animal.”)

“I have learned a great deal about the debate of homosexuality and sexual orientation,” he wrote in an op-ed this past February. “I believe that gay people should have the same freedoms and rights as any other individual.”

That’s a fascinating story. But it’s also a frightening one. If VanderSloot had prevailed, he would have proven that with enough money to throw at lawyers, you can wipe the slate. You can go after those who document the past and the present, and if you can’t make them cry “uncle” you can at least append a legal asterisk to their work forevermore.

That’s why we’ve pushed back. Frank VanderSloot may have evolved along with America. We respect that. But it doesn’t erase the past.

Perhaps fittingly, a major element in this case about the right of the press to afflict the powerful was a piece of investigative journalism. In 2005, a young reporter at the 26,000-circulation Post Register in Idaho Falls got a tip about a pedophile in the local Boy Scouts. The reporter, Peter Zuckerman, dug into the story and discovered legal documents indicating that Scout leaders had received multiple warnings about a camp employee but had not removed him. The documents also indicated that the man’s bishop in the Mormon Church had been warned about him as early as 1988 and had sent him to counseling, but had told the Scouts years later that he saw no reason the man should not be a camp leader. In one case, according to a court decision, a 10-year-old’s parents told Scout leaders they were concerned about the man’s behavior. When he was arrested the following year, Scout leaders learned that he had molested the child, but decided not to tell the parents.

The series made a huge splash. It won a string of prestigious journalism awards. It became the subject of a PBS documentary. But there were also angry phone calls to the paper. Advertisers pulled out. And Frank VanderSloot got involved.

VanderSloot is reportedly the richest man in Idaho, and among the most powerful. His company, Melaleuca, sells tea-tree oil supplements and personal-care products via an Avon-like system of individual marketers who recruit others to sell. His net worth has been estimated as $1.2 billion, and for decades he has been a major power in Idaho politics, especially on LGBT issues. He financed an ad campaign that helped defeat a state Supreme Court justice on grounds that she might vote to legalize same-sex marriage. His wife gave $100,000 to the campaign to pass the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 in California.

In the late 1990s, he helped pay for billboards across the state protesting Idaho public television’s plan to air a film intended to teach kids respect for different kinds of families. The government, he said, should not “be spending our tax dollars to bring the homosexual lifestyle into the classroom and introduce it to our children as being normal, right, acceptable, and good and an appropriate lifestyle for them or anyone else to be living.”

VanderSloot has long been active in the Mormon church, and he was a strong supporter of the Boy Scouts. When the Post Register‘s series ran, he swung into action. He took out full-page ads in the paper attacking the investigation and Peter Zuckerman, the 26-year-old lead reporter on the series. One of the ads noted that Zuckerman had written an article about his sexual orientation for a journalism site while on a fellowship in Florida. The ad said he had declared “that he is homosexual and admitted that it is very difficult for him to be objective on things he feels strongly about.”

“Much has been said on a local radio station and throughout the community,” VanderSloot’s ad continued, “speculating that the Boy Scouts’ position of not letting gay men be Scout Leaders, and the LDS Church’s position that marriage should be between a man and a woman may have caused Zuckerman to attack the scouts and the LDS Church through his journalism.”

“We think it would be very unfair for anyone to conclude that is what is behind Zuckerman’s motives,” the ad continued. “It would be wrong to do. The only known facts are, that for whatever reason, Zuckerman chose to weave a story that unfairly, and without merit, paints Scout leaders and church leaders to appear unscrupulous, and blames them for the molestation of little children.” Decoding the message between the lines is left as an exercise for the reader.

The ads had a dramatic impact. Though Zuckerman had been open about his sexual orientation before he came to Idaho, his editor Dean Miller later wrote that in Idaho Falls the reporter “was not ‘out’ to anyone but family, a few colleagues at the paper (including me), and his close friends.” Zuckerman had already gotten some negative reactions after a local talk show with a tiny audience discussed his sexual orientation. But according to Miller’s article and Zuckerman’s testimony in the litigation, things got much worse after VanderSloot’s ads. “Strangers started ringing Peter’s doorbell at night,” Miller said. “Despite the harassment, Peter kept coming to work and chasing down leads on other pedophiles in the Grand Teton Council. I spoke at his church one Sunday and meant it when I said that I hope my son grows into as much of a man as Peter had.” (Later that year, Zuckerman moved to Portland, where he took a job with the Oregonian while his partner was elected the city’s first openly gay mayor.)

Fast forward to 2012. Miller’s article about the Boy Scouts controversy was one of the stories that our reporter Stephanie Mencimer found after VanderSloot’s name popped up in the January campaign finance filings. It was the first presidential election of the dark-money era, and Mother Jones‘ politics team had zeroed in on the huge new super-PACs being created to pump unrestricted money into campaigns of both parties. VanderSloot stood out because Melaleuca was among the top contributors to Restore Our Future, the super-PAC supporting Romney. Mencimer wrote an article about him that included a few paragraphs on his history of anti-gay-rights activism and his run-in with the Post Register.

Those paragraphs are what VanderSloot and Melaleuca sued us over. They filed the suit in Bonneville County, Idaho, and asked for damages of up to $74,999—exactly $1 under the amount at which the lawsuit could have been removed to federal court. That ensured the case would be decided by jurors from the community where his company is the biggest employer and the sponsor of everything from the minor league ballpark to the Fourth of July fireworks.

Since then, Mother Jones and our insurance company have had to spend at least $2.5 million defending ourselves. We also took up the defense of Zuckerman, whom VanderSloot sued halfway through the case for talking to Rachel Maddow about his experience. (VanderSloot did not sue MSNBC or its deep-pocketed parent company, Comcast. Make of that what you will.)

Here’s a moment that gives you a sense of what it was like. At one point, Zuckerman was subjected to roughly 10 hours of grilling by VanderSloot’s lawyers about every detail of the controversy in Idaho Falls, including the breakup with his boyfriend of five years. (VanderSloot also threatened to sue the ex-boyfriend, backing off only after he recanted statements he’d made about the Boy Scouts episode.) As the lawyers kept probing, Zuckerman broke down and cried as he testified that the time after the ads appeared was one of the darkest periods of his life. VanderSloot, who had flown to Portland for the occasion, sternly looked on. (His lawsuit against Zuckerman is ongoing.)

And that wasn’t the end of it. VanderSloot’s legal team subpoenaed the Obama campaign, which had run ads naming him as a major Republican donor. Apparently they believed we had somehow fed the campaign that information—never mind that our article, and the Federal Election Commission data that prompted it—was on the internet for anyone to read.

When officials from the Obama campaign refused to turn over their records—offering to confirm under oath that there had been no communication between them and Mother Jones—VanderSloot’s lawyers dragged them into court, resulting in the spectacle of a major GOP donor seeking access to the Democratic campaign’s emails. His lawyers did the same thing to a political researcher who had gathered information on VanderSloot and who also had no connection to Mother Jones.

This kind of legal onslaught is enormously taxing. Last year, Lowell Bergman, the legendary 60 Minutes producer (whose story of exposing Big Tobacco was chronicled in the Oscar-nominated film The Insider), talked about a “chill in the air” as investigative reporters confront billionaires who can hurt a news organization profoundly whether or not they win in court: “There are individuals and institutions with very deep pockets and unaccountable private power who don’t like the way we report. One example is a case involving Mother Jones…A superrich plaintiff is spending millions of dollars while he bleeds the magazine and ties up its staff.”

Litigation like this, Bergman said, is “being used to tame the press, to cause publishers and broadcasters to decide whether to stand up or stand down, to self-censor.”

Over the past three years, we’ve had to face that decision over and over again. Should we just cave in—retract our article or let VanderSloot get a judgment against us—and make this all go away? It wasn’t an easy choice, but we decided to fight back. Because it’s not just about us. It’s about everyone who relies on Mother Jones to report the facts as we find them. It’s about the Fourth Estate’s check on those who would use their outsized influence and ability to finance political campaigns to control the direction of the country. It’s about making sure that in a time when media is always under pressure to buckle to politicians or big-money interests, you can trust that someone will stand up and go after the truth.

And it’s about one more thing. Just a few years ago, no one thought that America could move so far, so fast, toward respecting the rights of gays and lesbians. No one thought that by 2015 same-sex couples would have a constitutional right to marry or, for that matter, that the Boy Scouts would rescind their ban against gay troop leaders and the Mormon Church would back them up. That happened because a lot of people stood up to threats and discrimination. They came out to their families and communities. They declared their love for everyone to see. They didn’t let themselves be intimidated. Nor will we.

Postscript: In her decision Tuesday, the district court judge found in our favor on every single claim VanderSloot had made. She also included a passage expressing her own opinion of Mother Jones, and of political news coverage in general. For his part, Vandersloot issued a statement saying he had been “absolutely vindicated” and announced that he was setting up a $1 million fund to pay the legal expenses of people wanting to sue Mother Jones or other members of the “liberal press.” We’ll leave it with the reaction from our lawyer, James Chadwick: This was “a little like the LA Clippers claiming they won the NBA Finals. I think everyone can see what’s going on here.”

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We Were Sued by a Billionaire Political Donor. We Won. Here’s What Happened.

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Conservative Group Blasts the Pope: "Paganism" Has "Entered the Church"

by Jesus44Ccz Posted on September 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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A leading group of climate change skeptics is concerned that paganism is creeping into the Catholic Church. That was the message delivered by Gene Koprowski, director of marketing at the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, at a press conference in Philadelphia Thursday.

The event, which Heartland had billed as a challenge to Pope Francis’ “views on global warming and the nature of capitalism,” was recorded by the liberal group American Bridge. Talking Points Memo first reported on the video Friday. You can watch an excerpt above.

The pope, who is visiting the United States next week, has called on policymakers to take action to control climate change and has criticized the excesses of free market capitalism. According to Koprowski, when Heartland staffers first began reading news stories about the pope speaking out on climate, they were “shocked that the pope was buying into this left-wing political craze that is global warming.” So in April, Heartland sent a delegation of climate skeptics to Rome to offer a “prebuttal” to a Vatican climate summit in an attempt to change the pope’s mind.

“When the Vatican leapt into the controversy on climate science, we were initially under the impression that His Holiness was a victim of bad advice from bad advisers,” Koprowski said Thursday. “There were people from the UN who were population control advocates. There were people from other left-wing groups who were advising the pontiff.”

But Koprowski said that after the pope released his landmark encyclical calling for action on climate change, he began to suspect that “something more may be afoot.” Koprowski then invoked pagan rituals and “nature worship” that he said were “seeping into the Church” during the Middle Ages, adding: “I’m wondering, as a scholar, if pagan forms are returning to the Church this day.”

Koprowski concluded: “I would say, contrary to some of the criticism, that this is not communism that has entered the church. It’s, rather, paganism.”

Heartland and Koprowski did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Conservative Group Blasts the Pope: "Paganism" Has "Entered the Church"

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Jerry Brown Should Sign California’s Assisted Suicide Bill

by HilarioGilpin Posted on September 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back in June, California Governor Jerry Brown called a special session of the legislature to deal with highway funding and health care financing. That special session is now over, and no agreement was reached on either of those things. But that’s no reason to waste a special session, and legislators did manage to pass bills on drone regulation, medical marijuana, climate change, oil spills, an LA County transit tax, family leave, racial profiling, and several other things.

They also took advantage of the fact that committee assignments are different during special sessions to resurrect an aid-in-dying bill that had failed earlier in the year:

The End of Life Option Act, which passed in the state Assembly Wednesday, would allow patients to seek aid-in-dying options so long as they are given six months or less to live by two doctors, submit a written request and two oral requests at least 15 days apart and possess the mental capacity to make their own health care decisions.

If you pass these hurdles, you’ll get a prescription for a lethal dose of sedatives. You can then decide for yourself if and when you ever use them. The California bill, which is modeled on a similar law in Oregon, sunsets after ten years and includes a requirement that doctors speak to the patient privately. Will these safeguards be enough to persuade Brown to sign it? No one knows:

“You’d need some kind of séance to figure out what he’s going to do,” says Jack Citrin, director of the Institute of Government Studies at UC Berkeley. “He plays his cards very close to the vest.”

….Brown is Catholic, even at one point considering becoming a priest….“He’s in an interesting dance with the Catholic Church,” says Gar Culbert, a California State University-Los Angeles political science professor. “He wants the church to participate in advocating for policies that are environmentally friendly, so he wants to stay on good terms.”

Brown might also feel that the bill’s safeguards against abuse still aren’t sufficient:

In spite of the bill’s provision about coercion, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, director of the medical ethics program at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, said that low-income and underinsured patients would inevitably feel pressure from family members to end their own lives in some cases, when the cost of continued treatment would be astronomical compared with the cost of a few lethal pills.

He pointed to a case in Oregon involving Barbara Wagner, a cancer patient who said that her insurance plan had refused to cover an expensive treatment but did offer to pay for “physician aid in dying.”

“As soon as this is introduced, it immediately becomes the cheapest and most expedient way to deal with complicated end-of-life situations,” Dr. Kheriaty said. “You’re seeing the push for assisted suicide from generally white, upper-middle-class people, who are least likely to be pressured. You’re not seeing support from the underinsured and economically marginalized. Those people want access to better health care.”

There isn’t much to say to people who object to assisted suicide on religious grounds. If the Catholic Church says it’s a sin, then it’s a sin.

For Catholics, anyway. But that shouldn’t affect the rest of us. We should be allowed to decide this on secular grounds. And with the obvious caveat that nothing is ever perfect, the safeguards in this bill are pretty good. Here are a few bullet points:

Assisted suicide just isn’t very popular, law or no law. In Oregon, prescriptions for lethal drugs have been written for 1,327 people over the past two decades and 859 people have ended up using them. In 2013, lethal drugs were used by only 105 people out of a total of 34,000 who died that year.
The Barbara Wagner case cited above is misleading. Yes, her insurance company covered assisted suicide. And yes, it also refused to cover a particularly expensive cancer therapy. But those are simply two separate and unrelated parts of her coverage. The way the sentence is written makes it sound as if someone specifically made a decision to deny the cancer treatment and offer her some lethal drugs instead. That’s not at all what happened.
There is endless speculation that people will be pressured into dying by greedy heirs who either want to inherit right now or who don’t want to see their inheritance drained away on expensive end-of-life treatments. Coercion is a legitimate issue, but California’s law goes to considerable lengths to address it. You need two doctors. You have to be within six months of dying. You’re required to meet with the doctors in private. And you have to submit multiple requests at least 15 days apart. That said, improper coercion almost certainly happens on occasion. But outside of the movies, there’s just no evidence that it happens other than very rarely. It’s usually just the opposite, with family members urging further treatment until there’s literally nothing left to try.

I want to add an additional, more personal argument. A few years ago a friend’s father was dying of cancer. He was a physician himself, and had decided long before to take his own life before he lost the ability to make decisions. But because it was illegal, he had to make sure that his kids couldn’t be held even remotely responsible. So he decided not to tell anyone when the time came.

Luckily, a friend talked him out of this at the last minute. He called his kids, and they came out to say goodbye one last time. But it was a close-run thing. If that hadn’t happened, his family would never have seen him before he died. They would have heard about it via a phone call from the coroner’s office.

That’s not how this should have to happen. It’s common knowledge that sometimes people who are close to death take their own lives, legal or not. But they shouldn’t have to do it earlier than necessary, just because they’re afraid they might lose the physical ability to act if they wait a little longer. Nor should they be afraid to have their family around because they want to make sure nobody is held legally responsible for assisting them.

California’s bill won’t affect very many people. Assisted suicide just isn’t a very popular option. But for those who choose that path, a safe and legal alternative is more humane both for them and for their families. Just having the option available makes it more likely that they’ll wait until they truly want to die, and that they’ll do it surrounded by their loved ones, rather than alone in a bedroom somewhere. I hope Jerry Brown thinks about this while he’s deciding whether to sign this bill.

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Jerry Brown Should Sign California’s Assisted Suicide Bill

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"Political Correctness" Is Mostly Just Code For Not Insulting People

by PhilipConyers Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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S.E. Cupp says that Donald Trump’s rise can be laid at the feet of liberal political correctness. Ed Kilgore isn’t buying:

Is that the source of all this hysteria? Conservative media accounts of random college speech code incidents and the occasional dumb move by a school principal? Something that affects maybe a tenth of one percent of the population?

Well….maybe. When it’s on a 24/7 loop on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, it probably seems like an epidemic. I can see it raising a lot of hackles. But let’s continue:

I’m sorry, I don’t buy it. The Trump supporters and proto-Trump supporters I know are upset by things like having to listen to Spanish-language messages on customer service lines, not being able to call women “chicks” without someone frowning at them, and having to stop telling racist jokes at work. That’s what “political correctness” is code for: having to worry about the sensitivities of people who were invisible or submissive not that very long ago.

If Cupp is right and I’m not, then let’s all cooperate in convincing Republican politicians and conservative pundits to stop using the term “political correctness” and come right and and tell us what the beef is about. Is it really “trigger warning” requirements at scattered liberal arts colleges? Or is it this whole new world we’re in where people have to question old habits? When Ben Carson calls inhibitions about torturing terrorism suspects “political correctness,” it’s pretty clear he’s yet another apostle for the Church of the Day Before Yesterday, when America was never wrong and dissenters kept their mouths shut.

I could do with a little less speech policing from all sides, frankly. It gets a little tiresome sometimes. Still, the truth is that Ed is right: for the vast, vast majority of us, it leaves our lives entirely unaffected as long as you can avoid flat-out slurs against women, blacks, gays, Jews, and so forth. Really, that’s about 99 percent of it. Is that really so hard?

Excerpt from – 

"Political Correctness" Is Mostly Just Code For Not Insulting People

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Reddit’s Racist Trolls Are Psyched About CEO Ellen Pao’s Resignation

by Everett2430 Posted on July 10, 2015

Mother Jones

In the minutes following today’s announcement that Ellen Pao, Reddit’s embattled interim CEO, would be stepping down, users of the site responded with glee. Pao has been widely criticized for her tone-deaf firing of a popular employee and years of mistreatment of the site’s unpaid moderators. Yet beneath the celebration lurked a disturbing undercurrent of racism. As of 2:45 p.m. PST, the second most “upvoted” comment beneath the announcement was this:

The biggest problem with the comment isn’t the mocking of Pao’s Asian name. It’s the commenter’s handle, “DylanStormRoof.” Dylann Roof, of course, is the young man accused of massacring nine people at South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last month.

Other Redditors quickly alleged that DylanStormRoof moderates a notoriously racist subreddit:

Reddit’s trolls have been out to get Pao ever since she shut down five toxic subreddits last month, including one called r/shitniggerssay. They also aren’t psyched that she called out Silicon Valley’s misogynistic culture. That’s not to say that Pao’s handling of Reddit’s most controversial communities is the only reason she’s unpopular with users of the site, which is, after all, the 10th most trafficked on the internet. But today’s reaction illustrates the challenges her replacement, Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, will face if he wants to rein in the site’s most offensive tendencies.

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Reddit’s Racist Trolls Are Psyched About CEO Ellen Pao’s Resignation

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California Should Allow Physician-Aided Suicide

by emevoqtig Posted on July 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greece has pressed the self-destruct button, and no one knows what will happen next. Here in California, we are debating whether to create a self-destruct button, and no one knows what will happen next.

(Did you like that segue? Huh? Did you?)

In California’s case, the self-destruct button comes in the form of SB 128, and it is both more personal and more literal than Greece’s:

The measure, which would allow terminally ill people to end their lives with a doctor’s help, passed the Senate last month on essentially a party-line vote, 23-15 — Democrats for, Republicans against.

Because the bill whips up emotion about morality based on religious beliefs and raises questions concerning medical ethics, it makes many legislators uncomfortable politically and personally.

The proposal is slated for its first Assembly hearing Tuesday in the Health Committee. But sponsors say it’s short two to five votes. Ten are needed to clear the 19-member panel.

A handful of Southern California Democrats, mostly Latinos under pressure from the Catholic Church, are withholding support.

Great. Yet another reason for me to be revolted by the Catholic Church. If they believe that suicide is a sin, that’s fine. They should forbid suicide among Catholics. But I’m not Catholic, and it’s no sin for me. So go mind your own business, folks, and represent the will of all Californians, who overwhelmingly support bringing our state into the 21st century. There is no excuse for forcing terminal patients to endure excruciating pain for months if they don’t want to. It’s time to put the Dark Ages behind us.

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California Should Allow Physician-Aided Suicide

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It’s Time for the Black Rights Movement to Finally Embrace Gay Rights

by KelvinNobelius Posted on July 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last Friday’s Supreme Court ruling to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide was a milestone for the LGBT rights movement. While it didn’t give gay Americans complete equality in every aspect of their lives, the decision provided a long-sought-after victory: an acknowledgement that their love is equal in the eyes of the law.

This last year has also seen a dramatic rise in visibility for transgender celebrities—Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, and Caitlyn Jenner among them—drawing attention to the legal discrimination and socioeconomic inequalities faced by the transgender community, especially transgender people of color, and those on the economic margins of society.

But not everyone is fond of Friday’s ruling, or of the so-called “transgender tipping-point“—including parts of the black community.

Of course, I’ve noticed support for LGBT rights from within the black community over these last few weeks: NBCBLK, NBC’s showcase for stories by and about the black community, featured a black church in DC that performs same-sex marriages and employs LGBT clergy; Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., where he was murdered two weeks ago, was celebrated by some as a gay ally in the statehouse; and there’s a push underway to get the Black Lives Matter Movement, criticized for focusing too narrowly on straight black men, to address violence facing women and LGBT people, especially black transwomen.

But I’ve seen a lot of pushback from black people as well.

On social media, I’ve seen black people imply that marriage equality is a frivolous concern, and that gay people shouldn’t have received the right to marry before black people got the right to walk down the street without being shot by the police. I’ve seen black people argue against gay marriage by pointing out that it’s still not legal to smoke weed in most of the US. Then there are those who reject gay marriage and homosexuality as a sin. Despite steady growth across the entire US population, support for same-sex marriage amongst black Americans remains in the minority, and is lower amongst black Protestants than all other religious groups except white evangelicals.

I’ve seen some in the black community also reject transgender people. In one argument that totally misunderstands what it means to be trans, some suggested that Caitlyn Jenner was “pretending” to be a woman, and that black people who embraced Jenner were hypocritical for accepting her while at the same time rejecting Rachel Dolezal for pretending to be black.

The simple truth is this: It’s problematic for members of any one marginalized group to challenge the progress made by members of another, especially when both groups suffer as a result of the same system—a system that favors being white, male, straight and “cisgender”—a term used by academics and advocates to describe the opposite of trans.

But it is especially problematic for black people to reject the LGBT rights struggle, especially when, over the past year, black people have been particularly vocal about their own racial oppression, via sustained, high-profile protests that have swept the nation.

Most glaringly, it’s problematic because blackness and LGBT identities are not mutually exclusive. There are lesbian black women, gay black men, bisexual black people, transgender black men and women, “genderqueer” black people—identifying as neither gender or both—and black people who are any combination of any of the above.

And black LGBT people and their allies have made incredible contributions to the black liberation struggle—from Bayard Rustin during the Civil Rights Movement, to Audre Lorde, a poet, feminist, and LGBT advocate, to the three women who founded the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter and the organization that birthed the movement—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.

Activism like this is even more inspiring than most because, in addition to state-sanctioned racism, LGBT people face state-sanctioned homophobia and transphobia in the form of unchecked employment and wage discrimination, housing discrimination, health care disparities, increased risk of brutality at the hands of police, and so much more. And then, ridicule and violence, oftentimes from within the black communities they call home.

Thirty-four percent of black transgender people live in extreme poverty—a rate three times that of black people as a whole and eight times that of the general US population. Homelessness is rife. Only 19 states have state-wide non-discrimination laws that cover both sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2013, two-thirds of all LGBT homicide victims were transgender women of color, while LGBT people are more likely to be subjected to hostility, brutality, and unjust arrest from police after reporting a crime against them. And forty-three percent of black gay youth have attempted suicide as a result of issues related to their sexual orientation.

Through anti-LGBT bigotry, we add to the marginalization of these black folk, making a bleak situation worse.

Black people should be fighting for them, not the reverse. Yet, so many LGBT people are down for us, despite the fact that we so often remind them that, no, we are not down for them. This must change.

There is no caveat or asterisk on the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” All black lives matter, not just the ones you are comfortable with. You cannot be pro-black if you oppress black people. And, more importantly, you cannot love all black people if you oppress black people. You do not mean “black lives matter” if you protest when an unarmed straight black man is killed by the police because they are black, but don’t care about the the many transgender black women who have been murdered this year because they were trans.

If we are to liberate black people as a whole, then we must combat all forms of discrimination against black people, including anti-LGBT discrimination and that which we inflict upon them from within our own communities. The struggle must be multi-layered, just like the identities of black people. Every chain must be broken.

If black people do not come to grips with the homophobia and transphobia within our own communities, then all black people will never be free. That, indeed, would be a tragedy that we brought upon ourselves. I, for one, join the LGBT community—black LGBT people—in celebrating a milestone in their struggle for freedom.

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It’s Time for the Black Rights Movement to Finally Embrace Gay Rights

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