Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Yes, Virginia, the ACLU fights for Christians, too!

(Vacation Notice for both of my readers : This will probably be my last post until my significant other and I return from winter solstice vacation in Silver City, New Mexico on the first of the new year. As we'll only have intermittent internet service while we're there, I also won't be able to timely answer emails until we return.)

According to the ACLU-haters, the American Civil Liberties Union is anti-Christian, anti-prayer, anti-religion, and anti-Christmas. 'Tain't so, Virginia. The ACLU's mission is to preserve the Bill of Rights' protections and guarantees for all people--even for Christians!

Want some proof? Following are three cases this year where the ACLU defended the right of a Christian to speak as a Christian or to practice Christianity:

October 26, 2006:

ACLU Files Suit to Protect Free Speech Rights
of Christian Wal-Mart Protestor

NATCHITOCHES, LA--[T]he American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana filed a lawsuit on behalf of a lone protestor who was denied his free expression rights by the City of Natchitoches. Edwin Crayton, a devout Christian, sought to stand in front of Wal-Mart in Natchitoches with a sign protesting Wal-Mart's alleged position on gay marriage.

"Government violates the principles in the First Amendment when it puts an overbroad permit scheme in place to restrain free speech in a public place," according to Joe Cook, Executive Director, ACLU of Louisiana. "The sweep of the ordinance is so wide that it could encompass a chance meeting on the street corner by two strangers." (rest of story here)
April 19, 2006:
ACLU of Georgia and Baptist Church File
Religious Discrimination Lawsuit

Zoning Ordinance Illegally Bars Church from Establishing
House of Worship in East Point, ACLU Says

ATLANTA - The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia...filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the Tabernacle Community Baptist Church, charging that the city of East Point, Georgia violated a federal religious discrimination law when it denied the church a zoning permit needed to establish its house of worship. (rest of story here)
January 12, 2006:
Rhode Island ACLU Files Appeal on Behalf of Christian Prisoner

Barred from Preaching at Religious Services

Wesley Spratt had been preaching during Christian services for seven years at the Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI) until 2003, when a new warden unilaterally stopped him from doing so based on vague and generalized "security" concerns. In its appeal, the ACLU argues that the preaching ban violates a federal law known as RLUIPA, which was designed to protect the religious freedom of institutionalized persons. (rest of story here)
The American Civil Liberties Union's mission is, of course, to preserve the Bill of Rights' protections and guarantees for all people and the above are but a few of the many cases across the country where the ACLU has defended the right of a Christian to speak as a Christian or to practice Christianity. California Attorney Allen Asch has done a nice job of compiling a list of such cases, which I drew on for the above examples.

But maybe the best example of ACLU's position supporting an individual's free exercise of religion is the 2004 Michigan case where the ACLU fought to get a Bible verse put back into a public school yearbook:
Michigan ACLU Wins Fight for Christian Free Speech

By Jim Brown
May 17, 2004

(AgapePress) - The American Civil Liberties Union has waged a successful battle to get a Bible verse put back into a public school yearbook.

Stevenson High School in Sterling Heights, Michigan, deleted student Abby Moler's entry from its 2001 yearbook because it was religious in nature. As valedictorian of her graduating class, Moler had submitted a biblical quote from Jeremiah 29:11 to be included in the high school yearbook.

The verse, which reads in the NIV, "'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future,'" was significant to the graduating senior, and she chose its message to share with her class. However, school officials rejected the student's choice and removed it from the yearbook before sending it to print.

The ACLU took up the cause and eventually reached a settlement with the school district over its censorship of the biblical verse. The school has agreed to place a sticker with Moler's original entry in copies of the yearbook on file at Stevenson High School, and the current yearbook staff has been instructed to write her a letter of regret. Also, the yearbook staff has been ordered not to censor other religious or political speech.

ACLU of Michigan legal director Michael Steinberg explains that the school was misguided in its apparent attempt to prevent a state endorsement of religion. "Although the school itself is prohibited from promoting one religion over another, it cannot suppress private speech that was religious," he explains, "and this was clearly a situation where they were confused. It was the private speech of the student, who was a devout Christian."

Although the ACLU is often associated with arguments against religious expression in cases involving the so-called separation of Church and State, Steinberg says his group is not averse to representing Christians. "We represent people of all religions -- usually minority religions because those are the types of religions that are most often suppressed or their free exercise rights are limited," he says.

The ACLU regularly intervenes in cases in which individuals' civil rights are being denied, including "situations where you have government suppressing the private exercise of religion by individuals," Steinberg asserts.

© 2004 AgapePress all rights reserved.
As stated by Allen Asch on his web site, the ACLU fights just as hard for individual free exercise of religion as they fight against government endorsement, sponsorship, or establishment of religion. The ACLU-haters will never recognize that fact because they never permit the truth to stand in the way of their civil liberties-ignorant denouncements.

And on that cheerful note, I wish everyone, even los pendejos, a safe, healthy and happy holiday season.

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Tuesday, December 19, 2006

School board folly

In March of 2002 the Cobb County School Board (north metro Atlanta) put the following anti-evolution sticker in a variety of its high school science books:



Today that Georgia school board abandoned its legal defense of that nonsense:

Americans United Applauds Settlement Of Georgia Lawsuit Over Evolution Disclaimer

Americans United for Separation of Church and State today lauded a Georgia public school board’s decision to drop its defense of anti-evolution disclaimers for science textbooks.

The Cobb County School Board has agreed to settle the long-running legal fracas over its 2002 decision to place anti-evolution stickers in high school biology textbooks.

In an agreement announced today, Cobb County school officials state that they will not order the placement of “any stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions, or other warnings or disclaimers bearing language substantially similar to that used on the sticker that is the subject of this action.” School officials also agreed not to take other actions that would undermine the teaching of evolution in biology classes.

“Cobb County school officials have taken the right step to ensure that their students receive a quality education,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “Students should be taught sound science, and the curriculum should not be altered at the behest of aggressive religious groups.” (Americans United press release continued here.)

The National Center for Science Education has a nice background page on this issue, from which I've lifted the following FAQs:

Frequently Asked Questions

What's wrong with the disclaimer's language?
"Theory, not fact" disclaimers have been used by creationists for years in an attempt to cast doubt on evolution. This language is misleading in several ways:

  • First, in science, the word "theory" does not mean "guess." Rather, a scientific theory is a well-tested, systematic explanation of facts. Scientific theories are well-supported and well-accepted.

  • Second, the theory of evolution is among the most important, well-tested theories in all of science; it is as fundamental to biology as atomic theory is to chemistry, the germ theory of disease to medicine, or Einstein's theory of relativity to physics.

  • Third, the sticker singles out evolution from the many theories discussed in science classes, thus implying that evolution requires special skepticism. This is not scientifically justifiable.

This may be bad science education, but why is it unconstitutional?
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires that the government be neutral in matters of religion. The government may not give special privileges to a particular religion or promote a partcular religious belief. Cooper ruled that the disclaimer, by denigrating evolution, provides special support for special creationism, a particular religious belief.

As part of their settlement of this matter, the Cobb County School Board agreed to pay $166,659 towards plaintiffs' legal costs. Add to that their own attorney costs and assorted legal fees, plus costs for time each school board member spent discussing and implementing this nonsense policy for the past five years, and it amounts to...a shameful waste of precious monies that could have gone to worthwhile and needed educational programs and services for the kids in that district. Every damn one of those school board members responsible for this profound folly should have the moral integrity to remove themselves from office.

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Monday, December 18, 2006

Farmers Branch saved from itself!

Actually, the North County Times editorial headline reads Escondido saved from itself, but all that's needed is to insert 'Farmers Branch' in place of 'Escondido' in that terrific editorial and we'd have "a step in the right direction" here in Texas, too.

We hear much about the "invasion" of illegal immigrants in North County, especially Escondido. On Wednesday night, the Escondido City Council was overrun by common sense.

A majority of council members voted in closed session to abandon the city's effort to turn the city's landlords into immigration inspectors. After the city ordinance to ban renting to illegal immigrants ran into the expensive legal buzz saw that everyone saw coming, the council belatedly admitted the obvious: Enforcing immigration laws is an effort best left to the federal government.
Uhmm, I wonder: Could the Wisdom of Crowds theory be influenced by fiscal responsibility considerations?

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The Scientific Explanation of Hell

I got a good chuckle reading this funny little story from my October 2006 edition of American Atheist magazine, so I thought I'd post it here (with slight editing) for your reading pleasure, too:

* * * * * * * *

The Scientific Explanation of Hell
submitted by Noel F. Ambery

The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa, (Cheerleader Captain and Class Valedictorian) during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night and again this morning, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven, and thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why Teresa kept shouting, "Oh my God!!!"

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A."

* * * * * * * *

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Friday, December 15, 2006

Wisdom of Crowds

Well, well, well.

Maybe, just maybe, the Wisdom of Crowds theory may prevail in Farmers Branch, Texas after all.

Seems some common sense folks in Farmers Branch came together and organized a petition campaign against their town's recently passed ordinance that forbids landlords from renting apartments to unauthorized immigrants (a matter I wrote about last month here). The petition, Let the Voters Decide, calls for a referendum vote by the citizens on whether to overturn that ordinance or not. According to JobsAnger Blogspot, the petition has over 1,400 signatures, twice as many as needed to force a vote on the matter.

Patrick McGee at the Star-Telgram reported yesterday that according to city officials, Farmers Branch now has 15 days to confirm that the signatures are from registered voters and that if so, the city council will have to either repeal the ordinance or schedule a referendum vote for May 12.

City Councilman Tim O'Hare, that town's principle anti-immigrant pusher, however, is not worried about the outcome. He told the Houston Chronicle that if it came to an election on this question, "I don't think it will be close."

The city council could legally repeal the ordinance without going through the expense of a vote, which would be the right thing for them to do, of course. But, given their unanimous support for the ordinance in the first place, I just don't think there's enough decency among the council members to do the right thing. What it looks like they will do is to spend lots of taxpayer dollars on legal fees defending this hare-brained ordinance. It's scheduled to go into effect on January 12, but several groups have indicated they may challenge it in court, including the Mexican America Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

A court will probably get the first crack at deciding this issue. But there's another just action that the wisdom-of-the-crowds theory should be given an opportunity to prove itself in: a Recall Los Pendejos petition. Every member of that Farmers Branch city council should be removed from office for wrongful conduct. And if the many are really smarter than than few, that's exactly what will happen.

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Thursday, December 14, 2006

Soy makes kids 'gay'?

Just about when you think you've heard it all, some pendejo goes and says something more stupider than Frank Zappa ever imagined possible:

"Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality."
That's according to Jim Rutz in a column he wrote Tuesday for the far-right yellow-journalism "news" blog WorldNetDaily. I've never heard of that asshole before, but it didn't take much mucking about on the web to find out that he's the author of Megashift, a book about "God’s plan to raise people from the dead to form a holy army of Christian Zombies." (Thanks to Brad R. at Sadly, No!)

In his Soy is making kids 'gay' column, Rutz also declares soy to be a “devil food” and that if you eat or drink a lot of soy "you're suppressing your masculinity and stimulating your 'female side,' physically and mentally."

How much you wanna bet that Mark Foley and Ted Haggard somehow work Rutz's theory into a defense of their recently publicized behaviors? "I don't know what came over me (sorry, no pun intended); I just had a glass of soy milk and the next thing I knew I was...sexually confused."

Sounds like MegaShit to me, Rutz.

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Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Happy Days Are Here...Again

Texas Congressional District 23 is one distrito grande...


and the folks in it yesterday selected this fellow to serve as their new congressional representative:


Rodriguez upsets incumbent Bonilla

Greg Jefferson
Express-News

Web Posted: 12/13/2006 02:13 AM CST

Former Congressman Ciro Rodriguez completed a stunning political turnaround Tuesday with an upset win over incumbent Republican Henry Bonilla that topped off the Democratic takeover of Congress.

Charles Kuffner at Off the Kuff has an interesting insight on this win:

Way back when, I thought the Dems should have made CD23 a priority. It took longer than I would have liked, and I admit that along the way I too had serious doubts about Ciro Rodriguez's ability to win (he did drop out of the race at one point, after all), but it should be crystal clear now why this was a good idea. Not just to bump the Democrats' gains up one seat to a net of 30, but to knock off a prominent Republican incumbent who might be Texas' junior Senator-elect today had Kay Bailey Hutchison chosen to come home. That's a huge deal. (emphasis mine)
Yes, that is a huge deal; the Texas senatorial team of Bonilla and Cornyn would have been a nightmare for all things just and fair.

Henry Bonilla took a hard line on immigration reform and (thankfully) it looks like folks in CD23 didn't take kindly to that approach.


¡Hasta la vista, Bonilla!

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Health care crime

Forty-nine people died yesterday in this country because they didn't have health insurance.

Forty-nine people will also die today in this country because they have no health insurance.

And 49 will die tomorrow for the same reason.

And 49 the day after that, and 49 the day after that, and another 49 the day after that, ad nauseum.

18,000 Americans die each year in America because they have no health insurance. If that's not an injustice, then I don't know what one is.

Here's how my candidate for our next president feels about this issue:

The solution to the nation’s healthcare problem is...to make sure every American has the access to quality healthcare, and the only way to do that is for Congress to pass a bill that would provide for universal not-for-profit healthcare for all Americans. There’s a bill called “Medicare for all,” and this bill in this current Congress is HR 676—the Conyers/Kucinich bill. (emphasis mine)
What's your candidate for president's position on this?

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Sunday, December 10, 2006

Chicken dinner...

My significant other and I have been invited to a friend's home for dinner next week. And as it happens, they have a cat named, I kid you not, "Chicken."

We're sure hoping this is not what they meant when they said we're having chicken for dinner...

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Big profits from unauthorized immigrants

According to Texas Comptroller, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, her December 7, 2006 report, Undocumented Immigrants in Texas: A Financial Analysis of the Impact to the State Budget and Economy, is the first comprehensive analysis any state has done of the impact of undocumented immigrants on a state's budget and economy. The Comptroller's conclusion:

The Comptroller’s office estimates the absence of the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in Texas in fiscal 2005 would have been a loss to our Gross State Product of $17.7 billion. Also, the Comptroller’s office estimates that state revenues collected from undocumented immigrants exceed what the state spent on services, with the difference being $424.7 million.

That's Texas-sized impressive: magically whisk away all of the state's unauthorized immigrants and the economy of Texas would be 18 billion big bucks poorer! As it is, with the current unauthorized immigrant population, the Lone Star state last year raked in nearly $425 million in net profit!

In a commentary piece that appeared yesterday in the Austin American-Statesman Strayhorn wrote: "The report estimates that undocumented immigrants in Texas generate more in state taxes and fees than the costs incurred by the state in providing education, health care and emergency medical services, and incarceration." (emphasis mine)

However, the Strayhorn report also concluded:

The Comptroller estimates that undocumented immigrants paid more than $513 million in fiscal 2005 in local taxes, including city, county and special district sales and property taxes. While state revenues exceed state expenditures for undocumented immigrants, local governments and hospitals experience the opposite, with the estimated difference being $928.9 million for 2005. (emphasis in original)

Despite what the anti-immigrant pushers allege, state and federal-funded health benefits for undocumented immigrants are very limited in Texas. As Strayhorn's report stated, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, food stamps, welfare, Supplemental Security Income, public housing, job opportunities for low-income individuals and child care and development. Texas counties do, however, have a fundamental responsibility under state law to provide medically necessary basic health care to their medically indigent, and costs for doing that fall on local governments and non-profit and private health care facilities. ("Medically indigent" is a term used to describe individuals who do not have health insurance and who don’t have the means to pay for the health care they need. Source: Providing Health Care to the Uninsured in Texas, p.12.)

It is critically important to keep in mind in this discussion that it's not just unauthorized immigrants that are not covered by medical insurance in this state. According to research by the U.S. Census Bureau, about 25% of Texans are uninsured, the highest percentage of uninsured than any state in the nation. Yes, local governments and non-profit and private health care facilities are absorbing costs to provide necessary basic health care to uninsured unauthorized immigrants (and not all unauthorized immigrants are uninsured--see my post here), but they're also absorbing costs to provide needed medical services to medically indigent folks born and bred in the U.S. of A.

But, you know something I don't understand in all of this? If the the anti-immigrant pushers (the folks who continuously spread wildly exaggerated figures of how much unauthorized immigration is costing the whoever the "us" is they're always talking about) are really concerned about such costs, than how come they're not agitating to eliminate all medically indigent costs? How come they're not agitating for national health-care reform?

Hey, I'm just asking.

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Thursday, December 07, 2006

Why exempt horses?

Following is an email sent to me in response to my recent appeal to the Brazos Progressives listserve asking folks to call and ask Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) to support Senate Bill 1915, the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (the sender's name and email address is omitted as I haven't sought permission to publicly identify that person):

I hate to sound insensitive but I dont understand why should horses be exempt? I think it is absurd to do so. If you are a carnivore, does it matter what type of animal flesh you eat? Horses are not slaughtered any less humanly than cows, pigs, or chickens. In Europe, horse meat is not considered any different than any other meat and is found in every grocery store and butcher and was is the menu in the cafeteria at my office. It is actually quite a bit cheaper than beef and does not taste that much different. A more reasonable effort would be to have sustainable agriculture, reduce the dependency on petrochemicals in fertilizers and artificial growth hormones.

We may be uncivilized enough to eat horses but we allow all people to marry whom ever they please.
My return email response:
For me, it's simple: horses are our companion animals, just like the dogs and cats I have in my home. I don't think we should allow slaughter of American dogs and cats for human consumption, here or abroad, and I feel the same about horses.

It's no different than the culture of India; those folks don't slaughter their cattle for human consumption (or any other consumption I'm aware of).

There's also the concern of humane horse transportation and slaughter and the fact that a majority of the horses stolen in this country wind up at one of the three U.S. horse slaughtering plants. But those are secondary issues to me.
Response to my response:
I do not feel legislation is appropriate here. That is an emotional response rather than a logical one. Legislation should be a last case scenario in the majority of cases as currently much too much, of our lives are controlled by the Government and there should be less controls not more.
There is no law in India that says you cannot slaughter cattle and beef is slaughtered and consumed in India. (http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/09/16/stories/13160467.htm .) But that is also religion rather than culture. Therefore a comparable argument would be that pork should not be eaten in the US since many people of the Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu faiths do not eat pork.
Can you say that any slaughter is humane? I think this also must be an all or nothing issue. Of course I think the current "humane" euthanasia by the ASPCA is also a waste of resources. If you are just going to kill an animal due to over supply, why shouldn't it be consumed? Of course that is a discussion that won't make me popular in most circles and anyone that knows me well would also say I am being hypocritical due to the amount of resources I use on my cat, who has no problem eating horse.
And, lastly, my response to the sender's response to my response (apologies for the tortured phrasing):
Well, I'm not aware of any rule that invalidates emotionally-driven legislation.

I stand corrected about beef consumption in India; obviously cattle aren't as sacred there as I thought.

I can't say, and neither can you, that anything is 100%, let alone certify that any slaughter is humane. It's all a matter of degrees--and everyone has his or her own level (degree) of tolerance above or below which they act or don't act upon. With respect to humane slaughter, that's saying that there are more humane ways of slaughtering animals than the sloppy and cruel methods the slaughterers would be doing left to their own scruples. There's a level of that humaneness I'm comfortable with and a definite level that I'm not.

Your argument, however, doesn't dissuade me from doing what I can to outlaw the slaughter of horses in this country for human consumption. I suspect you'd feel the same about this--emotionally speaking that is--if cat slaughter houses were to open in this country to feed the waiting mouths in Korea: http://www.rspca.org.uk/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=RSPCA/Campaigns/Dogandcatmeat.
Since sending my final response, I've mucked around a bit more on the web with respect to human consumption of dog- and cat-meat. According to the Korean Food and Drugs Administration (as reported by Animal People Online in June 2001):
"According to figures released by the Korean Food and Drugs Administration," World Society for the Protection of Animals regional representative Trevor Wheeler told ANIMAL PEOPLE in 1999, "there are 6,464 restaurants throughout Korea which have dog meat dishes on their menus. They sell 25 tons of the meat per day, and 8,428 tons per year. Another 93,600 tons of dog meat is used each year to produce 'medicinal tonics.'"
According to the same report, cats are slaughtered in Korea for reasons in addition to eating them: "cat-boiling to make a health tonic used by older women continues to increase" and that the "Moran market (just outside of Seoul and "the biggest dog- and cat-meat marketplace in South Korea") data suggests the number of cats killed per year may be circa 100,000."

I've blogged about the slaughtering of horses in this country before (here and here), and as I said above, my principle objection to it is because horses have historically served as one of our American companion animals. However, exempting animals from slaughter for human consumption on the ground they are "companion" animals gets tricky real quick. (But, heck, what in life is black and white anyway?) For example, what about rabbits? They've been raised for the purpose of humans eating their flesh, right? But many folks would vigorously defend them today as just as much a companion animal as a dog or cat. Couldn't that also be said today, too, for pidgeons? Turtles? Llamas? Pigs? If so, why shouldn't their slaughter for human consumption be legally prohibited, too, on the basis that they're a companion animal?

Then there's the matter of definitions. As voting outcomes are determined by the vote counter, and not the voters, classification of animals as companion animals or livestock depends upon who's doing the defining. It seems in most cases that horses, like ponies, donkies, and mules, are defined as livestock, but there isn't, as best as I can tell, any taxonomic-type source that serves as the overarching authority on this.

I guess it boils down to horses having a special status in our country's history and culture. As must be obvious, I don't have the training or background to discuss this issue on anything but a basic level, but I do know what I feel: I feel American horses are entitled to a special-case companion animal status and that this status should serve to prevent their slaughter in this country for human consumption. I agree with the emailer above that this is an emotional response, but I still don't think that fact invalidates the legal restriction I'm advocating for.

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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Freedom of association rights fix

The Employees Free Choice Act (EFCA) (S. 842 and H.R. 1696) is the result of the long-brewing frustration with the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a bit of which I wrote about in two previous posts (here and here). EFCA is designed to close loopholes in the NLRA that have allowed employers to harass, coerce, threaten and penalize workers who try to form unions and to refuse to bargain in good faith when new unions are formed. The following is from the AFL-CIO's summary (pdf file) of EFCA provisions:

  1. Certification on the Basis of Signed Authorizations
Provides for certification of a union as the bargaining representative if the National Labor Relations Board finds that a majority of employees in an appropriate unit has signed authorizations designating the union as its bargaining representative. Requires the board to develop model authorization language and procedures for establishing the authenticity of signed authorizations.
  1. First-Contract Mediation and Arbitration
Provides that if an employer and a union are engaged in bargaining for their first contract and are unable to reach agreement within 90 days, either party may refer the dispute to the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) for mediation. If the FMCS has been unable to bring the parties to agreement after 30 days of mediation the dispute will be referred to arbitration and the results of the arbitration shall be binding on the parties for two years. Time limits may be extended by mutual agreement of the parties.
  1. Stronger Penalties for Violations While Employees Are Attempting to Organize or Obtain a First Contract
Makes the following new provisions applicable to violations of the National Labor Relations Act committed by employers against employees during any period while employees are attempting to organize a union or negotiate a first contract with the employer:

a. Mandatory Applications for Injunctions: Provides that just as the NLRB is required to
seek a federal court injunction against a union whenever there is reasonable cause to believe that the union has violated the secondary boycott prohibitions in the act, the NLRB must seek a federal court injunction against an employer whenever there is reasonable cause to believe the employer has discharged or discriminated against employees, threatened to discharge or discriminate against employees or engaged in conduct that significantly interferes with employee rights during an organizing or first contract drive. Authorizes the courts to grant temporary restraining orders or other appropriate injunctive relief.

b. Treble Back Pay: Increases the amount an employer is required to pay when an employee
is discharged or discriminated against during an organizing campaign or first contract drive
to three times back pay.

c. Civil Penalties: Provides for civil fines of up to $20,000 per violation against employers found
to have willfully or repeatedly violated employees’ rights during an organizing campaign or first contract drive.

At least 213 House of Representative members (including about 14 Republicans) are co-sponsors of the EFCA House version (including the representative of my TX district, Chet Edwards, D-TX-17), and at least 44 Senators (including one Republican) are co-sponsors of the EFCA Senate version. (These numbers do not include any of the incoming members of the newly-elected 110th Congress.)

Employers, their shills and anti-union right-wingers argue that if enacted EFCA would deprive workers of their democratic rights to vote for or against union representation in a secret-ballot election (because of EFCA's card-check union certification provision). Let's put that spurious claim to bed right now: when it comes to workers' freedom of association, there isn't any "democratic" or "free" choice in the workplace. And anyone who argues differently is either ignorant of the facts or a liar or both.

Through the use of finely-tuned but aggressive deceitful trickery, corporations and their lawyers and consultants have turned inside out the law that is supposed to protect workers' rights of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection. (Some examples of that trickery are here, here and here.)

But with respect to card-check certification, it has always been legal (and still is) under the NLRA for an employer to recognize a union based solely on the fact that a majority of its workers sign a card designating the union as their bargaining agent. Every union that I'm aware of, including the two I worked for, IUE (now IUE-CWA) and UNITE (now UNITE-HERE), have historically used majority card-check (verified by an impartial, outside third-party) to attain employer recognition as the bargaining agent. Examples:
  • 130 workers used the card-check process at USF Bestway in Phoenix, AZ this month to certify that they desired the Teamsters to represent them.
  • Last year a little over 5,000 janitors in Houston received employer recognition for their union (SEIU) through a card-check procedure. (Just two weeks ago, in fact, the Houston janitors secured their first contract, which will more than double their income within the next 24 months.)
  • North Syracuse Police officers and staff this month secured employer recognition of their union through a card-check.
  • Thousands of Cingular Wireless workers secured their union representation through card-check.
So, if it's perfectly legal for American employers and their workers to utilize card-check procedures to establish a collective bargaining relationship, why is this provision needed in EFCA? Because under current law employers can legally refuse to recognize a a union even if 100 percent of the workers have designated one as their collective bargaining agent. Employers can, and most times do, simply demand that the NLRB conduct an election--which then gives management plenty of time to take advantage of loopholes in the NLRA (or simply violate the law) and throughly intimidate workers through an aggressive anti-union campaign. EFCA certification on the basis of signed authorizations will put an end to this prevalent abuse.

To sum it up, the law has failed and the process is broken. The repairs provided under the Employee Free Choice Act, however, will go a long way to restoring the law to its original intent, that is, to encourage the practice and procedures of collective bargaining and to assiduously protect the free association rights of American workers. EFCA should pass the 110th Congress, but the next president, not the current failed one, will be given the honor to sign it into law.

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Monday, December 04, 2006

Freedom of association rights problems

(This is part two of my Freedom of association frustration post.)

On June 20, 1964, three courageous young civil rights workers drove into Neshoba County, Mississippi to investigate the burning of an all-black congregation church where just a month earlier they had urged the congregants to register to vote. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman never left Neshoba County alive. The day after they arrived, on Father's Day, June 21, they were murdered (Chaney was beaten and tortured before being murdered) by depraved racists and then buried in an earthen dam on a farm six miles northeast of the city of Philadelphia, Mississippi. (A Neshoba County deputy sheriff and 17 others, all Ku Klux Klan members, were indicted for the crime; seven were convicted in 1967 and an eighth in 2005.)

On March 1, 1973, a little less than nine years after their murder (and three years after the seven indicted Klansmen finally went to prison for their involvement in this crime) I drove into Philadelphia, Mississippi to help organize production and maintenance workers at an electrical manufacturing plant there. It was my first organizing assignment with the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, AFL-CIO (IUE), and unlike Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, some months later I got to drive back out of Neshoba County again.

In 1973 the IUE (now merged with the Communications Workers of America) had hired me and about 11 or 12 others from around the country to serve on their recently-created Organizing Task Force. Our principle job on that task force was to organize "runaway shops," that is, factories that had closed their northern IUE-represented shops and moved lock, stock and barrel to the south for the purposes of taking advantage of low-wage southern labor and opening up anew as a non-union entity. As I recall it, that electrical manufacturing plant in Philadelphia, MS wasn't one of the runaways, but my experience during our organizing campaign there nevertheless served as a real awakening to me in terms of the harsh and frustrating worlds of civil rights and union organizing.

As I cited in my earlier post, the first section of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in part states that it is the public policy of the United States to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and to protect the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection. Oh, were it so.

In spite of that righteous and noble policy, the truth is that with near impunity employers spy on, threaten, harass, intimidate, coerce, discipline, discriminate against, and fire workers for their support of or involvement in forming or joining a labor organization. Employers also throw up numerous phony legal and quasi-legal issues that serve to intentionally and interminably delay and otherwise thwart the holding of a secret-ballot union representation election for the workers. Employers get away with doing all these things and much more because for the most part the law and the federal agency created for effectuating the law's purpose, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), long ago ceased to fully function as intended and called for under the law's stated policy.

In 2000, the world's preeminent human rights organization, Human Rights Watch (HRW), issued a report of their research into attempts by American workers to form unions and bargain with their employers. Their research showed that "freedom of association is a right under severe, often buckling pressure when workers in the United States try to exercise it." Some of Human Rights Watch's principal findings based on their research into this issue include:

Finding: Delays in NLRB and Court Procedures
Delays in the U.S. labor law system arise first in the election procedure. NLRB elections take place at least several weeks after workers file a petition seeking an election. In many cases, the election can be held up for months by employers who challenge the composition of the "appropriate bargaining unit."

An employer can also file objections to an election after it takes place, arguing that the union used unfair tactics. It takes several months to resolve these objections. But even when the NLRB rules in workers' favor and orders the company to bargain with the union, the employer can ignore the board's order. This forces workers and the NLRB to launch a new case on the refusal to bargain, often requiring years more to resolve in the courts. In many of the cases studied for this report, workers voted in favor of union representation years ago, but they are still waiting for bargaining to begin while employees' appeals are tied up in court.

Long delays also occur in unfair labor practice cases. Most cases involve alleged discrimination against union supporters or refusals to bargain in good faith. Several months pass before the cases are heard by an administrative law judge. Then several more months go by while the judge ponders a decision. The judge's decision can then be appealed to the NLRB, where often two or three years go by before a decision is issued. The NLRB's decision can then be appealed to the federal courts, where again up to three years pass before a final decision is rendered. Many of the workers in cases studied here were fired many years earlier and have won reinstatement orders from administrative judges and the NLRB, but they still wait for clogged courts to rule on employers' appeals.

Finding: Discrimination Against Union Supporters
Firing or otherwise discriminating against a worker for trying to form a union is illegal but commonplace in the United States. In the 1950s, workers who suffered reprisals for exercising the right to freedom of association numbered in the hundreds each year. In the 1960s, the number climbed into the thousands, reaching slightly over 6,000 in 1969. By the 1990s more than 20,000 workers each year were victims of discrimination for union activity - 23,580 in 1998, the most recent year for which figures are available.

An employer determined to get rid of a union activist knows that all that awaits, after years of litigation if the employer persists in appeals, is a reinstatement order the worker is likely to decline and a modest back-pay award. For many employers, it is a small price to pay to destroy a workers' organizing effort by firing its leaders.

Finding: "Predicting" Reprisals
Under U.S. law, employers and anti-union consultants they routinely hire to oppose workers' organizing have refined methods of legally "predicting" - as distinct from unlawfully threatening - workplace closures, firings, wage and benefit cuts, and other dire consequences if workers form and join a trade union. A "prediction" that the workplace will be closed if employees vote for union representation is legal if the prediction is carefully phrased and based on objective facts rather than on the employer's subjective bias.

This fine distinction in the law is not always apparent to workers or, indeed, to anyone seeking common-sense guidance on what is allowed or prohibited. Unfortunately for workers' rights, federal courts have tended to give wide leeway to employers to "predict" awful things if workers vote for a union.

One prediction a court found to be "carefully phrased" was made by the owner of an Illinois restaurant where workers sought to form a union and bargain collectively. In a tape-recorded speech in a captive-audience meeting the owner stated, "If the union exists at [the company], [the company] will fail. The cancer will eat us up and we will fall by the wayside . . . I am not making a threat. I am stating a fact. . . . I only know from my mind, from my pocketbook, how I stand on this." The NLRB found this statement unlawful. A federal appeals court reversed the board, finding the employer's statement a lawful prediction that did not interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the right to freedom of association.

At an Illinois auto parts plant where workers began organizing, a supervisor told workers, "I hope you guys are ready to pack up and move to Mexico." Again, the NLRB found that the statement was a plant closing threat. And again, the appeals court overturned the finding by the NLRB. The court said the statement was "a joke, not a threat."

Finding: Forced Attendance at Captive-Audience Meetings
Almost without limits, employers can force workers to attend captive-audience meetings on work time. Most often, these meetings include exhortations by top managers that are carefully scripted to fall within the wide latitude afforded employers under U.S. law - allowing "predictions" but not "threats" of workplace closings, for example -to deter workers from choosing union representation. Employers can fire workers for not attending the meetings. They can impose a "no questions or comments" rule at a captive-audience meeting, and discipline any worker who speaks up.

Finding: Special Vulnerability of Immigrant Workers
International human rights principles apply to all persons regardless of immigration and citizenship status. In the United States, Human Rights Watch found workers' rights violations with particular characteristics affecting immigrant workers in nearly every economic sector and geographic area examined in this report. For many, the vulnerability of their undocumented status and related fear of deportation are the most powerful forces inhibiting their exercise of the right to organize and bargain collectively.

During NLRB election campaigns employers commonly threaten to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to have workers deported. Immigrant workers are often afraid to come forward to file unfair labor practice charges or to appear as witnesses in unfair labor practice proceedings because they fear their immigration status will be challenged.

Finding: Even Legal Immigrants Unprotected
About 30,000 temporary agricultural workers enter the United States each year under a special program called H-2A giving them legal authorization to work in areas where employers claim a shortage of domestic workers. H-2A workers have a special status among migrant farmworkers. They come to the United States openly and legally. They are covered by wage laws, workers' compensation, and other standards.

But valid papers are no guarantee of protection for H-2A workers' freedom of association. As agricultural workers, they are not covered by the NLRA's anti-discrimination provision meant to protect the right to organize.

H-2A workers are tied to the growers who contract for their labor. They have no opportunity to organize for improved conditions and no opportunity to change employers to obtain better conditions. If they try to form and join a union, the grower for whom they work can cancel their work contract and have them deported.

Finding: Surface Bargaining, Weak Remedies
Even after workers form a union and bargaining begins, employers can continue to thwart workers' choice by bargaining in bad faith - going through the motions of meeting with the workers and making proposals and counterproposals without any intention of reaching an agreement. This tactic is called "surface bargaining." The problem is especially acute in newly organized workplaces where the employer has fiercely resisted workers' self-organization and resents their success.

Finding: Nullification of the Right to Strike by the Permanent-Replacement Doctrine
Under U.S. labor law, employers can hire new employees to permanently replace workers who exercise the right to strike. This doctrine runs counter to international standards recognizing the right to strike as an essential element of freedom of association. Considering the U.S. striker replacement rule, the International Labor Organization's Committee on Freedom of Association determined that the right to strike "is not really guaranteed when a worker who exercises it legally runs the risk of seeing his or her job taken up permanently by another worker, just as legally" and that permanent replacement "entails a risk of derogation from the right to strike which may affect the free exercise of trade union rights."

Despite the fact that a majority of the production and maintenance workers in that Philadelphia, Mississippi electrical manufacturing plant signed a card authorizing the IUE to serve as their bargaining agent, they didn't win their secret-ballot union representation election. And the reason they didn't is because that employer engaged in all of the violations of worker rights described in these HRW findings and then some, including discrimination and harassment against African American and Native American workers for their support of the IUE, and physical intimidation of workers and the organizing staff. (I don't recall there being any authorized or unauthorized immigrants working at that plant during that organizing campaign, but there is no doubt that employer would have readily engaged in the conduct described by HRW in their findings relative to immigrant workers had there been any of them.)

During my close to 30-year career as a labor union representative, virtually every union representation election I personally worked on or had intimate knowledge of was permeated with these and numerous other employer violations of workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively. Such violations are not isolated instances; they are the core and substance of management's massive endeavors to ensure their employees do not form or join a labor union. Long building and intense worker and union frustration levels with this situation have resulted in tactics designed to avoid using the NLRB and in efforts to reform the law to return it to its intended purpose.

To be fair, there are agents, attorneys, administrative law judges and board members of the NLRB that do excellent work in terms of the intent and purpose of the law, and many workers harmed by their employer's unfair labor practices do find some relief, albeit delayed and inadequate, through NLRB procedures. But, on a larger scale, that agency and the law it administers no longer do the job they are supposed to.

On paper, American workers have the human and legal right to represent themselves in their workplaces. In real life, however, they do not have a free and fair means for exercising their right to organize and bargain collectively. The law and process fails them and that reality needs to change. A current proposal before Congress to do just that will be the topic of my next post.


In memoriam:

(A good introduction to this civil rights history is here and here.)

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Friday, December 01, 2006

Freedom of association frustration

The frustration with our dysfunctional federal immigration policy that's driving local communities to pass housing ordinances that fine landlords who rent to unauthorized immigrants (for example, my posts here and here) is no different from the frustration driving labor unions, workers and other organizations to push for card-check union representation certification.

Although it's not well know, and not in the slightest made clear or in any manner promoted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) (aka, the "Board"), under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) it is the public policy of the United States to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining. The very first Section of the NLRA (Findings and Policies) states:

It is hereby declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.
Unfortunately, the system developed by the NLRB for American workers to secure union representation has today become so corrupt that it doesn't come anywhere close to fulfilling that policy--or living up to the most fundamental tenets of democracy.

The primary mechanism used by the NLRB for workers in the private sector to secure union representation under the NLRA (aka the Wagner Act, and which was also amended by the Taft- Hartley Act) is a secret ballot election administered by agents of the NLRB.

The way this NLRA/NLRB union representation process has historically worked, is that after securing signatures on authorization cards from a majority* of workers designating the union to serve as their collective bargaining agent, the union files a certification of representative petition with the NLRB and at the same time also turns over to them the signed authorization cards to support the petition as a showing of interest. The end goal of this process is for the Board to conduct a union representation secret ballot election among those workers for the purpose of certifying the union as the employees' collective bargaining agent. (*Although the NLRB technically only requires authorization cards be signed by 30% of the bargaining-unit workers to officially commence their election process, the actual practice used by the two major unions I worked for and the unions I knew of during my 30 years in the labor movement was petitioning the NLRB only after a majority of the workers signed up. Even though allowed to do so by NLRB rules, unions will almost never petition with less than 50% of the workers signing authorization cards for legal and practical considerations, including the knowledge that you probably would not prevail in a representation election that requires a majority vote with just a 30% showing of interest.)

The problem is that the NLRB secret ballot process has become so dysfunctional that it now serves as the major impediment to the intent and purpose of the law. Lots of folks are mighty upset and frustrated with a broken immigration policy and lots of folks are mighty upset and frustrated with this broken NLRA policy. That frustration is what's driving radical reform of both policies.

So, what are the problems with the NLRB policies and procedures? I'll write about that in my next post, but in short, ineffective enforcement and interminable delay top the list. (If you'd like to learn more now about this issue, I recommend this report (pdf file) by Dr. Gordon Lafer, an associate professor at the University of Oregon and/or Why the NLRB is Pretty Worthless by Nathan Newman.)

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Thursday, November 30, 2006

The issue is human dignity

"It's an issue of illegal immigrant people who have no right to be here in the first place." That's what Escondido, California Councilman Ed Gallo said upon learning of a recent federal judge's decision issuing a temporary restraining order blocking that city from implementing a housing ordinance it passed in October that penalizes landlords who rent to illegal immigrants.

No, that's not the issue, Mr. Gallo. The issue is how to humanely fix a dysfunctional immigration system.

Several cities across the country (including the Texas one I wrote about a few days ago whose ordinance is scheduled to go into effect on January 12 unless legally or otherwise thwarted) have passed similarly misguided regulations. They are misguided because if they're ever implemented they would create immensely larger problems for our society than the one their pushers claim they are addressing.

The first problem I have with the "illegal" immigrant debate is how can unauthorized migrants be considered "illegal" when we've invited them into our country? If I extend an invitation to you to come into my home, and you affirmatively act on that invite by stepping across my threshold, then you're obviously not in my house illegally. It's no different with respect to our country's borders. Our country has for all practical purposes invited unauthorized migration by offering up jobs--jobs that native-borns aren't falling all over themselves to become employed in. Every last one of us "legals" in this country, as well as our country itself, has benefited greatly from the labors of unauthorized migrants. With or without proper documentation, folks always have and always will emigrate to this country to make a better life for themselves and their families, and that means in almost every instance, better jobs than they might have held in the country of their birth. In turn, our society gets, to list but a few economic benefits, its homes built, its lawns and golf course fairways planted and manicured, its fruits and vegetables picked, and its dirty restaurant dishes, dirty institutional laundry, dirty cars, trucks and buses, dirty lodging accommodations, and dirty offices cleaned--almost entirely by folks who have accepted our job invitations and crossed our country's threshold without proper documentation.

And isn't it ironic that if the immigration restrictionists were to have their way with these ordinances, the very folks responsible for building our homes and apartments wouldn't be allowed to live in them.

As to the larger problems these ordinances would create, the first one is, how the hell does a landlord determine who is and who isn't someone authorized to be in this country? Employers large and small have been failing at this task for ever (some intentionally so), so what tools are these restrictionist cities giving landlords to make this determination? Umm, I'm waiting here.... Oh, I see, the pushers behind these odious ordinances haven't figured that one out--which means our courts will be burdened with illegal discrimination lawsuits filed by folks wrongly accused by their landlord for being a so-called illegal-alien.

Most problematic from a costs-to-taxpayers perspective, even assuming there was (and there isn't--yet) an accurate method available to untrained landlords to determine their tenant's or prospective tenants immigration status, what then? Surely landlords are not going to expose themselves to the ordinance's fines and they will, therefore, evict any renter suspected of being an unauthorized immigrant. Ok, let's see, with an estimated unauthorized immigrant population today in the U.S. of between 11- and 12-million, I don't think there are a sufficient number of park benches in our country that they and their family members can sleep under. So what happens then? Maybe these restrictionist cities just think the undocumented folks they evict will simply wander down the road to the next town and take up residence there (until some other narrow-minded authorities in that city passed a similar ordinance). And even if the displaced residents did take up residency in a new town, the original restrictionist cities would still welcome them back with open arms (and minimum wage cash) each morning to tend to their lawns, clean their filth, tend their farms, and build and repair their homes.

Aha, deportation is the ultimate goal the restrictionists say? Well, tell me, who's going to pay the costs (between $206 to $230 billion) related to deporting them? For a variety of reasons, economics not being the least, mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants isn't going to happen--ever.

The very most important issue, though, if these abhorrent ordinances are allowed to go into effect, is the massive human rights violations that would be inflicted upon these immigrants by forcing them from their homes. The Catholic Church has this principle exactly right:

[R]egardless of their legal status, migrants, like all persons, possess inherent human dignity which should be respected. Government policies that respect the basic human rights of the undocumented are necessary. (A Pastoral Letter Concerning Migration from the Catholic Bishops of Mexico and the United States)
The pushers of these anti-immigrant housing ordinances are morally bankrupt in not recognizing this infrangible higher law. And I simply don't understand why commonsense and right-thinking folks in those communities didn't arise to soundly defeat these proposals. There is no excuse to defeat these measures by use of the courts; a community not morally bankrupt would have stopped this craziness well before the litigation stage.

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