Get-Out-of-Responsibility-Forever-Free Card

Divine Irony:

godlessmen:

How did you get into heaven?
Source: Source and comments

The born-again freakazoids are even worse: you don't have to repent at all before you die.  Once you're "saved," even if you're only 10 years old at the time, you're saved forever.  No amount of sin, crime, or cannibalism can keep you out of "heaven."

Fortunately, there is no heaven, and Dahmer is just as dead as his victims. 

Using Sexual Panic to Dehumanize Teachers

I seriously cannot believe this is legal.  I cannot believe there are not riots in the streets over this. I cannot believe that sexual-predator hysteria has gone this far.

From The Nation:

Iris Stevenson hurt no child, seduced no teenager, abused no student at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles. This is what her supporters say in rallying outrage that this exemplary teacher has languished for months in the gulag of administrative detention known as “teacher jail”: she doesn’t belong there.

And she doesn’t.

SNIP

If she were a de facto kidnapper, police should have been called long ago. But, no, this is not about criminality or even misconduct; it is about a larger game of control being played by School Superintendent John Deasy. That game owes quite a lot to sex, because a few years ago a scandal tripped the panic button, which Deasy has kept his finger on ever since, exploiting justified public anger over a classroom pervert to pursue a war on teachers.

The political question, then, is not just whether Stevenson belongs in teacher jail but what this institutionalized containment regimen, this sub-bureaucracy of punishment, exists for in the first place, and how the specter of sex is the cowing excuse to go after anyone.

SNIP

There is no more reason teacher jail should exist than doctor jail or fireman jail. For teachers accused of child molestation or other crimes, there is the option familiar in every other area of life: the police and, assuming there are charges and no bail, actual jail. For serious accusations pending investigation, there are leaves of absence. Alleged minor infractions do not require the disruption of classes and lives.

 

What’s happening in Los Angeles is not about reason as reasonable people understand it. A Miramonte teacher who is back at work but anxious about using her name still feels the sting of her detention. She said of Deasy’s administration: “They want to dehumanize the profession as a whole, because if you can bring this profession down, if you can make people lose trust in this profession, then you can do anything.”

This, writ large, is the legacy of moral panic: dehumanize anyone, and everyone is vulnerable.

Job Opening for Convicted Rapist

Is there a giant typo somewhere on the job description that all these guys - and why are they all guys? - think their job is to promote sexual assault?

Is the military applying the "it takes a thief to catch a thief" theory to sexual-assault prevention?

Is this whole thing the Pentagon's idea of a joke?


From the Courier:

The manager of the sexual-assault response program at Fort Campbell was arrested in a domestic dispute and relieved of his post, authorities said Thursday.   Lt. Col. Darin Haas turned himself in to police in Clarksville, Tenn., late Wednesday on charges of violating an order of protection, and stalking. Master Sgt. Pete Mayes, a spokesman for the Army post on the Tennessee-Kentucky line, said Haas was immediately removed as manager of a program meant to prevent sexual harassment and assault and encourage equal opportunity.

As Snipy at Wonkette puts it:

We have pretty much reached peak terrible when merely — MERELY — violating your protective order seems like sort of a “meh” kinda thing to do because the other dudes actually stone cold assaulted women. Listen up armed services! Stop being so bad with the sexual assaulting, and stop picking the worst possible people to police the sexual assaulting, ok? Why not take a look at the Navy and the Marines…urgh. Nevermind. Don’t go look at them. Just…just stop. We’re out of funny things to say because even we have a finite amount of jokes about sexually assaulting people when you’re the sexual assault prevention guys so knock it the fuck off.

Stop-and-Frisk to Molest

Just as rape is a crime of violence and a weapon of war, sexual assault by police is brutality intended to humiliate.

  

From Alternet:

Imagine you're 17 years old. A man with a gun and a badge has stopped you on the street and jammed his hand inside your pants, touching your penis. The girl you have a crush on is watching from nearby. That's the reality for many young men of color in New York City.

Stop-and-frisk is the controversial policing tactic in which street cops looking for weapons stop and pat down young men. Discussions of this policy in the media most often consist of alarming stats, like what percent of men targeted are black and brown ( 87% in New York) or the breach of constitutional rights the searches entail. But the reality on the ground is far less abstract. The policy amounts to a constant disruption of the lives of hundreds of thousands of young black and brown men. It's a belittling experience that could be better described as sexual assault.

Don't think it's not happening in your town.

Live By the Lie, Die By the Lie

No, not all freakazoids are sexual predators, although sometimes it does seem that all sexual predators are freakazoids. Sexual crimes by freakazoids - and the subsequent coverup of such crimes by religious authorities - get publicity not, as you might think, because of the hypocrisy, but because of the false claims that require the coverup.

When you bet the whole premise of your philosophy on the claim that a particular kind of worship of a particular kind of invisible sky wizard confers superior morality on adherents, you're just begging to be deluged by moral cripples seeking a hiding place and/or hunting ground. 

From the AP:

Three female plaintiffs claim in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that an evangelical church group covered up allegations of sexual abuse against children, failed to report accusations of misconduct to the police and discouraged its members from cooperating with law enforcement.

The lawsuit was filed in Maryland state court against Sovereign Grace Ministries, a 30-year-old family of churches, with about 100 congregations. Most of its churches are in the United States, but it has planted churches in about 21 countries.

The plaintiffs allege a conspiracy spanning more than two decades to conceal sexual abuse committed by church members. The alleged abuse happened in Maryland and northern Virginia in the 1980s and 1990s. The lawsuit accuses church representatives of permitting suspected pedophiles to interact with children, supplying them with free legal advice to avoid prosecution and forcing victims to meet with and "forgive" the person who had molested them.

"The facts show that the Church cared more about protecting its financial and institutional standing than about protecting children, its most vulnerable members," the lawsuit claims.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/10/17/2374837/lawsuit-claims-evangelical-church.html#storylink=cpy

Self-Hating Female Judges and the Sexual Predators Who Love Them

via Paul Campos:

Prosecutors contended that [Officer Evans] drank eight beers and then drove himself to the Green Room, where he flashed his badge in an attempt to get into a concert for free. While inside, he walked up behind the victim, who was a friend of a friend, put his hand up her skirt and then ran his fingers across her genitals.

When bouncers threw him out, Evans told them he was a cop and they would be arrested.

The 43-year-old former Arizona Department of Public Safety officer was facing between six months and 2 1/2 years in prison, but the crime was eligible for probation. He will not be required to register as a sex offender, according to the sentence.

The judge said she considered the defendant’s lack of a criminal record and strong community support in her sentencing.

She also advised the victim to be more vigilant.

A jury convicted Evans of sexual abuse, a class 5 felony, on July 2.

DPS fired Evans shortly after his criminal conviction and following an internal investigation, according to officials.

The judge sentencing Evans, Coconino County Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Hatch, said she hoped both the defendant and the victim would take lessons away from the case.

Bad things can happen in bars, Hatch told the victim, adding that other people might be more intoxicated than she was.

“If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened to you,” Hatch said.

Homeless guys who take a piss in an alley or 18-year-olds who fuck their 17-year-old girlfriends get their lives ruined by the label "sexual predator," but mister put-his-hand-up-her-skirt-and-then-ran-his-fingers-across-her-genitals-without-permission walks the streets and keeps his citizenship.

Don't think it doesn't happen in your town. Misogynists are everywhere, and way too many of them are female.

Spread Your Legs, Bitch - We're the IRS

Sometimes I truly believe that voting republican should get you listed for life as a sex offender.

Steve Benen:

POLICING ABORTIONS THROUGH THE IRS.... In January, Nick Baumann took a closer look at the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," and highlighted an outrageous provision that would redefine rape. The language was ultimately removed after the ensuing controversy.

This week, Baumann put the spotlight on another problem with the same law, and this one may be tougher for proponents to change.

Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?

In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans' "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops -- that is, during an audit, they'd have to determine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion.

The proposed law, also known as H.R. 3, extends the reach of the Hyde Amendment -- which bans federal funding for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at stake -- into many parts of the federal tax code. In some cases, the law would forbid using tax benefits -- like credits or deductions -- to pay for abortions or health insurance that covers abortion. If an American who used such a benefit were to be audited, Barthold said, the burden of proof would lie with the taxpayer to provide documentation, for example, that her abortion fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.

So, on the one hand, the House GOP wants to undermine the IRS's ability to actually collect revenue -- ostensibly, the agenda's purpose -- but expand the IRS's power to determine whether specific abortions meet the standards of tax law's exclusions for rape or incest.

Americans can take some solace in knowing this legislation, while certain to pass the House, has no chance whatsoever of becoming law, at least not in this Congress. But that doesn't change the fact that House Republicans are not only pushing this odious bill, they've also made it one of their top priorities of 2011.

The real-world effect of this insane bullshit is, of course, to push the Overton Window yet further over the Radical Reichtard cliff, and inure people to the fundamental precept of rethuglicanism: creatures who are not male, white, straight, Dominionist rethuglicans are sub-human.

Let's Lock Up ALL Those Who are "Sexually Dangerous"

So, the federal government now has the right to keep people it deems "sexually dangerous" locked up forever, even after they have served their criminal sentences.

That's an unconsitutional, anti-American abomination, but from this Supreme Court, what else is new?

So in the spirit of overweening Big Government Power, let me add my suggestions to the list of the kind of people who should be locked up forever for being "sexually dangerous:"

• School officials who authorize strip searches of students who carry legal OTC and prescription drugs.
• School officials and cops who conduct strip searches of students who carry legal OTC and prescription drugs.
• Judges and state education officials who find nothing wrong with school officials and cops who authorize and conduct strip searches of students who carry legal OTC and prescription drugs.
• Catholic prelates who protect and cover up for priests who rape children.
• Catholic prelates and other freakazoids who condemn millions to death by AIDS or famine by denying them access to condoms.
• Freakazoids who condemn teenagers to STDs and unwanted pregnancies by denying them the facts about sex and contraception.
• Catholic prelates and other freakazoids who condemn poor women to slow, horrifying death by sepsis from back-alley abortions by ensuring only the wealthy have access to abortion.
• Catholic prelates and other freakazoids who undermine social cohesion by denying the civil and human right of marriage to homosexuals.
• Military officials and bigots who insult the professionalism of soldiers, sailors and airmen by claiming they cannot perform their jobs in the company of homosexuals.

Start locking these sexual predators up first, then we'll discuss who are the more likely recidivists.

Naked Hysteria

As Kentucky Attorney General and U.S. Senate candidate Jack Conway seeks U.S. Supreme Court approval for the state continuing to violate state law, Alexander Cockburn in The Nation brings us a story that is directly on point:

Just how funny was that story of the man in Fairfax County, Virginia, who got up early on the morning of October 19 and walked naked into his own kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? The next significant thing that happened to 29-year-old Eric Williamson was the local cops arriving to charge him with indecent exposure. It turns out that while he was brewing the coffee, a mother who was taking her 7-year-old son along a path beside Williamson's house espied the naked Williamson and called the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who happens to be a cop.

"Yes, I wasn't wearing any clothes," Williamson said later, "but I was alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me."

The story ended up on TV, starting with Fox, and in the opening rounds the newscasters and network blogs had merciless sport with the Fairfax police for their absurd behavior. Hasn't a man the right to walk around his own home (or, in this case, rented accommodations) dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar with relevant case law: absolutely not.

Peeved by public ridicule, the Fairfax cops turned up the heat. The cop's wife started to maintain that first she saw Williamson by a glass kitchen door, then through the kitchen window. Mary Ann Jennings, a Fairfax County Police spokeswoman, stirred the pot of innuendo: "We've heard there may have been other people who had a similar incident." The cops are asking anyone who may have seen an unclothed Williamson through his windows to come forward, even if it was at a different time.

They've also been papering the neighborhood with fliers, asking for reports on any other questionable activities by anyone resembling Williamson--a white guy who's a commercial diver and who has a 5-year-old daughter, not living with him.

I'd say that if the cops keep it up, and some prosecutor scents opportunity, Williamson will be pretty lucky if they don't throw some cobbled-up indictment at him. Toss in a jailhouse snitch making his own plea deal, a faked police lineup, maybe an artist's impression of the Fairfax Flasher, and Williamson could end up losing his visitation rights and, worse comes to worst, getting ten years plus being posted for life on some sex-offender site. You think we're living in the twenty-first century, in the clinical fantasy world of CSI? Wrong. So far as forensic evidence is concerned, we remain planted in the seventeenth century with trial by ordeal, such as when they killed women as witches if they floated when thrown into a pond.

Read the whole thing.

Then do some remembering. Ever indulged in a little outdoor secluded-spot fornication? Peed behind a bush? Had entirely private sex as an 18-year-old with a 16-year-old? Think you deserve 10 years on the sex-offender registry for that? And the humiliation is the least of it. Sex offenders can't get jobs, aren't allowed to live within shouting distance of other human beings.

Yes, the vast majority of sex offenders committed and were convicted of actual sex crimes that caused genuine damage far beyond offending the sensibilities of a prudish hausfrau.

But the next time you're tempted to join the mob in demanding that all sex offenders be marooned on the moon without oxygen, consider the following facts about Kentucky's Sex Offender Registry:

The website of Covington Attorney Paul J. Dickman explains:

A broad range of lower-level felony and misdemeanor offenses are included in the categories of sexual abuse and misconduct. These offenses include unwanted touching, indecent exposure, non-consensual kissing, statutory rape, and public indecency.

But the registry itself does not distinguish between offenses. You can search by last name, email address, city, county, zip code and age of victim, but doesn't explain the circumstance. Was the man who committed 3rd-degree sexual abuse against a 14-year-old a child molester, or a guy wanking off in his car when he thought no one was looking? You can't tell. The best part is the registry's disclaimer:

"THE KENTUCKY STATE POLICE DOES NOT AND CANNOT GUARANTEE THE ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION PROVIDED ON THIS WEBSITE."

Knee-jerk, unthinking sexual hysteria is distorting our society so ludicrously that the Commonwealth's number one law enforcement officer, a man who wants to be the next U.S. Senator from Kentucky, is refusing to enforce a State Supreme Court ruling. The Herald-Leader rightly slapped him down for it.

When did it become right for the criminal justice system to ignore Kentucky Supreme Court rulings simply because officials don't want to follow them?

And how can any citizen in Kentucky feel safe with law enforcers acting with impunity?

The court ruled recently that a law restricting where registered sex offenders could live could not constitutionally be imposed on those who had already served their time before the law passed in 2006.

That makes sense. If not, any new law could exact additional punishments on former offenders of any crime — violent or nonviolent.

Of course few people would come to the defense of sex offenders, which apparently makes it easy for the state Department of Corrections to tell probation and parole officers to continue enforcing a law ruled unconstitutional.

SNIP

As the state's top law enforcement official, Conway should make that clear, in no uncertain terms, to law enforcement personnel across the state. Not doing so would raise questions about whether he, as a U.S. Senate candidate, is using this emotional issue for political grandstanding.

Every moment of time wasted on pandering to the hysterics who want the death penalty for willy-wavers is time lost to investigating real sex crimes, and arresting, convicting and incarcerating the perpetrators.

"Sorry about your five-year-old, Mrs. Smith, but we were too busy harrassing public urinators to keep an eye on that suspected serial killer."

Sex Crimes in the White House

No, that is not a teaser headline. At HuffPo, Naomi Wolf gathers the evidence, including public confessions by the perpetrators, and makes the case.

Sex crime has a telltale signature, even when those directing the outrages are some of the most powerful men and women in the United States. How extraordinary, then, to learn that one of the perpetrators of these crimes, Condoleezza Rice, has just led the debate in a special session of the United Nations Security Council on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

SNIP

We now know that the torture of prisoners was the result of a policy set in the White House by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Rice -- who actually chaired the torture meetings. The Pentagon has also acknowledged that it had authorized sexualized abuse of detainees as part of interrogation practices to be performed by female operatives. And documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union have Rumsfeld, in his own words, checking in on the sexualized humiliation of prisoners.

The sexualization of torture from the top basically turned Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay into an organized sex-crime ring in which the trafficked sex slaves were US-held prisoners. Looking at the classic S and M nature of some of this torture, it is hard not to speculate that someone setting policy was aroused by all of this. And Phillipe Sands' impeccably documented Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, now proves that sex crime was authorized and, at least one source reports, eroticized: Diane Beaver, the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantanamo who signed off on many torture techniques, told Sands about brainstorming sessions that included the use of "sexual tension," which was "culturally taboo, disrespectful, humiliating and potentially unexpected."

"These brainstorming meetings at Guantanamo produced animated discussion," writes Sands. "'Who has the glassy eyes?" Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, thirty or more of them. She was invariably the only woman in the room, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get excited, agitated, even: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas" [reported Beaver]. A wan smile crossed Beaver's face: "And I said to myself, you know what, I don't have a dick to get hard, I can stay detached."' [Sands, p 63]

SNIP

Though we can now debate what the penalty for waterboarding should be, America as a nation, maintaining an odd silence, still cannot seem to discuss the sex crimes involved.

SNIP

Silence, and even collusion, is also typical of sex crimes within a family. Americans are behaving like a dysfunctional family by shielding sex criminals in their midst through silence.

Just as sex criminals -- and the leaders who directed the use of rape and sexual abuse as a military strategy -- were tried and sentenced after the wars in Bosnia and Sierra Leone, so Americans must hold accountable those who committed, or authorized, sex crimes in US-operated prisons. Throughout the world, this perverse and graphic criminality has added fuel to anxiety about US cultural and military power. These acts need to be called by their true names -- war crimes and sex crimes -- and people in America need to demand justice for the perpetrators and their victims. As in a family, only when people start to speak out and tell the truth about rape and sexual assault can the healing begin.

Read the whole thing, if you think you can stomach the details.

Wolf doesn't say so explicitly, but those who study the use of torture know that the real purpose of torture is the sexual satisfaction of the torturer. Military leaders have known for decades that torture is worse than useless for gathering intelligence. Torture borders on counter-productive even as punishment, in that it tends to create martyrs and increase resistance by the population at large.

No, torture of defenseless prisoners is nothing more than a way for sexual deviants and impotent perverts to get their rocks off.

Just watch Smirky's face when he's making the "ticking bomb" torture defense: the glassy eyes, the lip-licking, the flared nostrils. You just know the only way he can get it up for Laura is by pretending she's a 10-year-old Iraqi boy.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.