Human Rights

23,000

 

…Deaths in the last three years of Mexico’s drug war. While U.S. prohibitions create thousands of criminals, Calderón reassures us they’re mostly killing each other. Of course plenty of cops, govt. officials, and innocent kids are in that figure, too. With the Mexican economy going South—especially tourism—parents will just have to hope their children don’t go into…the only highly profitable industry.

I see this situation as definitive proof that our current drug policies are immoral. At the very least the federal government should not strong arm other countries into fighting the supply of drugs into the U.S. We have no business imposing these harms outside our borders.

Mexicans would be wise to boot their “wage war on the cartels” politicians and try to regulate the supply chain, or return to the good old days when suppliers to the U.S. market were quietly ignored by law enforcement.

Walter McKay provides ongoing coverage on the LEAP blog.

It wasn’t torture when America did it.

 

Suuure. Salon’s Mark Benjamin on what our last Vice President has described as “a dunk in the water”. Disturbing.

Also looks like Obama’s (unsurprisingly) caving on civilian trials. Nothing says “rule of law” like pre-trial torture sessions and determining location and rule of court by political theater. KSM may be a mass murdering bastard, but aren’t we supposed to be better than regimes who use show trials? Don’t we usually sanction or invade regimes like that?

AFA Leader Would Like to Fix Gays by Force of Law

 

I support the American Family Association’s right to pay for the Tebow ad—Americans have no right to not see promotions of ideas they might disagree with—but the AFA’s new leader, Rev. Bryan Fischer, should be watched. He has an interesting idea to fix a country that’s so broken that gays can…continue to exist: Fischer suggests we legally force all “active homosexuals” through an “effective reparative therapy program”.

Did your stomach just turn a little? Classically Liberal gives this the skewering it deserves, pointing out the necessary costs to taxpayers, to civil liberties, and the innocents caught up in the eventual SWAT raids. Don’t think for a moment there wouldn’t be raids. The war on drugs has gradually eroded away quite a bit of the privacies and 4th Amendment protections that could be expected in the earlier days of the war on gays. If you gotta catch ’em in the act, no knock warrants would be the norm. Oh, but what a new industry we could build on fixing gays—there’s a lot of em and more every year!

I eagerly await to read Fischer’s proposed law. Who would set the standards for these programs? What would suffice as proof of efficacy? Would the desire for non-traditional sex with the opposite sex be considered satisfactory or still in need of repair? What would be the penalty of “failing to stop acting gay”? Indefinite therapy? Body chemistry experimentation? Jail time? If a gay is homosexually assaulted in jail, would that get him/her more therapy, more jail-time, or both? Would we re-open the previous research done on gays in asylums and institutions? If gay sex is an offense, would we not need to label them all “sex offenders”?

The whole notion is thoroughly disgusting. Classically Liberal points out—if we’re to make our laws truly consistent with the guiding passages—surely there will be goodies for straight people, too.

The alleged Pauline verse also says that this applies to “whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.” I suppose we will need courts to determine “sound doctrine” from unsound doctrine. And, I know people like you well, I grew up with you guys and went to your schools. So I know that by unsound doctrine you mean, and this is only a partial list: Mormons, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, Scientologists, Quakers, Shakers, Unitarians, Muslims, humanists, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, Christadelphians, and hundreds of other sects, cults and churches. Even the mainstream Protestants aren’t of “sound doctrine” in the eye of fundamentalists. Once “sound doctrine” is put under federal law there is no limit to who can be incarcerated in your moral America.

And in case he missed anyone: anyone having had engaged in premarital/extramarital/oral/anal sex, of course. If we’re truly going to protect the American Family, we’re going to need to break down a lot more doors.