Mother Jones Daily: Briefing
Courting a Victory
Nicaragua's Abortion Fight
Criminalizing Dissent
LAW & JUSTICE
Courting a Victory
Minor breakthroughs at the legislative level have gay rights activists hopeful that discriminatory practices against gays, or at least those sanctioned by the books, are on the outs. On Wednesday, the culmination of a four-year debate surrounding a law in Texas will be tried by the Supreme Court, reports the Associated Press. The law, its opponents argue, openly targets gays by making oral and anal sex illegal only when performed between members of the same sex. Four other states besides Texas have similar laws, but the Texas law drew attention when two men were arrested in their homes and fined for engaging in a sex act.
Proponents of the Texas law defend it on moral grounds, citing laws against gambling, drug use and prostitution as comparative, and denying any paralells drawn between the current Texas law and racial segregation laws. But the Washington Post's Ellen Goodman has a different take on what she calls "one of [the US's] own Taliban moments":
[I]n many ways, the case coming before the Supreme Court feels less like a trailblazer than a mop-up action. "The idea that the state has the authority to police bedrooms and tell people which body parts they can touch is shockingly cruel and embarrassing," says [gay-rights lawyer Evan Wolfson]. Beyond that, it has real-life consequences.
The Texas misdemeanor not only disqualified John Lawrence and Tyron Garner from being employed in more than a dozen professions, but it would require them to register as sex offenders in at least four states. It's been used against public employment of gays and in custody disputes.
A bill recently put to rest in Minnesota could have exemplified that point, had it passed. The bill, authored by Republican state Senator Michael Jungbauer, aimed to exclude gays from the Minnesota Human Rights Act in order to "keep homosexual practices from being taught in the schools," reports Conrad deFiebre of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Jungbauer took up the cause when approached by what he referred to as "somewhat fanatical" mothers who worried that their children were "a captive audience to homosexual propaganda," as Republican Senator Warren Lidner put it. But excluding gays from the Human Rights Act, the Minnesota Senate ruled, would do nothing for schoolchildren and serve to justify discrimination against gays seeking employment or housing.
The victories, however, remain small. In its most recent sodomy case in 1986, the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia law similar to the current Texas law, as the AP reports. And while the Minnesota bill is withdrawn for the moment, Lidner, despite facing an ethics complaint for comments he made in the bill's defense, may try to present a rewritten version to the Senate in the future.
FOREIGN NEWS
Nicaragua's Abortion Fight
The rape and pregnancy of a nine-year-old Nicaraguan girl in Costa Rica, followed by her subsequent abortion in Nicaragua, have sparked a torrent of debate and controversy in this staunchly Catholic nation where nearly all abortion is illegal.
After the nine-year-old (nicknamed "Rosa") -- the daughter of a Nicaraguan migrant worker -- was denied an abortion in Costa Rica, she was aided in returning to Nicaragua to seek the procedure by the Women's Network Against Violence (also called "Women Against Violence), reports John Rice of the Associated Press. Current Nicaraguan law allows only "therapeutic abortions," a category which Rice notes is "only vaguely defined," and news of the story brought the entire country into a flurry of impassioned and polarized debate on whether or not Rosa should abort. In a nation that holds a "Day of the Unborn Child," even an abortion for a nine-year-old rape victim is tremendously controversial.
As directives flew every which way, the abortion was carried out discreetly on February 20. And then, adds Rice, the "fury only intensified." Lucia Salvo, a Health Minister strongly against the abortion, resigned in disgust. Many church officials made vitriolic proclamations.
Indeed, reports Tim Rogers of Costa Rica's Tico Times, the Nicaraguan Catholic Church subsequently issued " a blanket excommunication of Rosa's parents, the doctors who performed the procedure and everyone else involved." Juanita Jiménez, a lawyer for Women Against Violence, jokingly responded: "Almost everyone in Nicaragua supported the girl's right to an abortion; what is the church going to do, excommunicate half the population?"
And, while various activists now look into authorities' attempts to block Rosa from getting the abortion -- which includes filing criminal complaints against the Nicaraguan government for negligence, the Nicaraguan Prosecutor's Office has also "opened an investigation of the private Managua clinic that performed the abortion, as well as the leaders of the Women Against Violence group."
A poll cited in Nicaragua's La Prensa suggests that 64 percent of the population favors Rosa's right to the abortion, while only 27 percent believe that she should have had the child.
LAW & JUSTICE
Criminalizing Dissent
Right-wing anger toward antiwar protesters reached its logical, absurd conclusion in Oregon yesterday, with the introduction of a bill that would redefine protesters who block traffic and disrupt commerce as terrorists.
The brainchild of a Portland legislator and police detective, the proposed law is so broadly drawn that it would include not just rowdy peace protesters but tree spiking eco-militants and even -- as per an earlier, draft version -- Critical Mass bicyclists, the Oregonian's Harry Esteve reports. While the bill's new draft isn't as severe as its previous incarnation, the punishment it prescribes for protesters who get out of hand is no less draconian: life in prison.
Other states have also introduced anti-terrorism statutes recently, Esteve notes, but none zero in on domestic dissent so keenly. Among the provisions are requirements that local police departments cooperate with federal investigators and that files be kept on suspects indefinitely. The bill isn't likely to pass even in diluted form, but civil libertarians are on guard anyway.
"The initial bill was 'ludicrous,' said David Fidanque, executive director of the ACLU of Oregon. The amended version isn't much better, he says.
'We think this bill is a much graver threat to the freedoms that all Oregonians hold dear than is created by any terrorist,' Fidanque says. 'It will do nothing to make us safer, and would do a lot to undermine our constitutional rights.'"
