Ebola and the Law

Posted on August 8, 2014 by wellsdc

If that’s not an eye-catching seminar title, then I don’t know what is. At a friend’s suggestion, I’ll be virtually attending a webinar entitled “Ebola and the Law: What You Need to Know” this coming Tuesday.

Usually, lawyers get continuing education credits learning about dull regulatory updates and such—there’s only so much you can do to make caselaw updates exciting. This is unlikely to be much different, really, but how many CLE’s talk about what “legal powers and duties health department personnel have if an Ebola outbreak occurs in the U.S.”? We can submit questions for the speakers. I’m sort of tempted to ask if a fuel-air bomb is within the scope of the CDC’s authority (that happened in the movie Outbreak), but I’m afraid I might not like the answer.

I’ll post a follow-up about the webinar itself.

What I’m Reading, July 29, 2014

Posted on July 29, 2014 by wellsdc

Religious Exemptions and Public Policy: Freedom to Discriminate, Genevieve Cato, Burnt Orange Report, July 26, 2014

Key to the legal fight to allow discrimination under the guise of religious freedom is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which, under Justice Alito, has become the primary tool for justifying these rulings of religious exemptions. It was also the basis for a ruling by a Texas judge in December, when she determined that three religious universities in Texas should not be required to cover methods of birth control they believe cause abortions.

***

The Catholic bishops had great success with what are called “conscience clauses,” which are laws created to allow certain employees to refuse service if it violates their religious belief. The most widely-used example of this is allowing pharmacists to refuse to sell birth control to consumers if it is against their religion. But this is completely counter to the way many Catholics understand the concept of religious conscience in the first place. “Individuals have conscience,” Smith explained, “not institutions.” Further, conscience is not about enforcing your beliefs on another person by refusing to sell someone their medical prescription. It is an individual journey for each Catholic person. This is why Smith refuses to use the term “conscience clause” and instead calls them what they are: “refusal clauses.” [Emphasis in original.]

Face It, Women: The NFL Does Not Give a Shit About You, Erin Gloria Ryan, Jezebel, July 26, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, July 28, 2014

Posted on July 28, 2014 by wellsdc

Paul Ryan’s “insult” strategy: Why his anti-poverty contract is so grotesque, Simon Maloy, Salon, July 24, 2014

The entire document is premised on the notion that the poor are poor largely because they lack sufficient incentive to improve their station in life. Blame for this is, of course, foisted upon the government programs themselves. “The biggest snag in the safety net is that it discourages work,” Ryan’s document observes. “Many federal programs are means-tested, so as families earn more money, they get less aid. Any system that concentrates on the most vulnerable will face this tension.”

If that’s “the biggest snag,” then the safety net is doing pretty well. Ryan and the GOP have been pushing this argument that government benefits breed complacency among their recipients for quite some time, but the evidence just isn’t there to back it up.

No One I Know Will Ever Be Arrested For Smoking Pot, Atrios, Eschaton, July 27, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, July 15, 2014

Posted on July 15, 2014 by wellsdc

How Humanism Helps With Depression — Except When It Doesn’t, Greta Christina, Greta Christina’s Blog, July 9, 2014

As regular readers may know, I’ve been diagnosed with clinical depression. My form of it is chronic and episodic: I’m not depressed all the time, I’m not even depressed most of the time, but I’ve had episodes of serious depression intermittently throughout my adult life. I had a very bad bout of it starting about a year and a half ago. I’m pulling out of it now, but my mental health is still somewhat fragile, I still have to be extra careful with my self-care routines, and I still have relapses into fairly bad episodes now and then. And I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be a humanist with depression, and how these experiences intertwine.

For the most part, my humanism helps. For one thing, I don’t experience any religious guilt—or religious anger—over my depression. I don’t have any sense that I’m letting down my god, that I’m doing something horrible to him by feeling glum and crappy about this wonderful gift of life he’s given me. I don’t have any sense that my god is letting me down. I don’t think my depression is divine punishment or some sort of obscure lesson, and I’m not racking my brains trying to figure out what I did to deserve this. I accept that my depression is a medical condition, and I have it because of genetics, early environmental influences, and other causes and effects in the physical universe.

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” Judge Richard Kopf, Hercules and the umpire, July 11, 2014 Continue reading →

Why Do People Help Us, Exactly?

Posted on July 15, 2014 by wellsdc

We¹ seem to have great difficulty keeping our promises.

1. By “we,” I actually mean Congress, but we elect the losers.

This Former Divorce Lawyer Stands Up for a Republican, Sort of, Just for a Second

Posted on July 10, 2014 by wellsdc

I’ve seen this meme floating around a bit today on Facebook (h/t Jason), even though it’s from an article dated March 22, 2014. I wanted to set a few things straight about it. (This is adapted from a Facebook comment I left.)

Sen. Richard Ross, Asshole of the Day, March 22, 2014. Proposed a bill to make women going through divorce get a judge's permission to date or have sex.

The meme shows a picture of Massachusetts State Senator Richard Ross, and names him Asshole of the Day for March 22, 2014. It then states, “Proposed a bill to make women going through divorce get a judge’s permission to date or have sex.”

First of all, Sen. Ross introduced the bill at the request of a constituent, apparently based on a Massachusetts procedural rule that allows anyone to introduce legislation. The senator has stated that he does not actually endorse the bill, so I guess I really don’t understand how Massachusetts does legislating.

The meme is misleading because it only mentions women going through a divorce, and it does not mention anything about the bill only applying to divorces with children. The bill is terrible, but not for the reasons stated by the Asshole of the Day site. The change made by the bill would apply to both men and women….at least on paper. This is actually a relatively common feature of divorces with kids, in my experience (with some very important differences I’ll discuss below). Here’s the text of the amended provision:

In divorce, separation, or 209A proceedings involving children and a marital home, the party remaining in the home shall not conduct a dating or sexual relationship within the home until a divorce is final and all financial and custody issues are resolved, unless the express permission is granted by the courts.

The idea behind this, in Texas at least, is to keep the kids’ situation reasonably stable while the divorce is pending—in Texas that’s a minimum of 60 days from the filing date, but in some states it’s as much as 6-12 months. Having new significant others around while the divorce is still pending, the theory goes, is not in the “best interest of the children” (which is the gold standard in every state that I know of.)

Now, in practice, is this a good idea to have as a statute covering all divorces with children? Hell no. It assumes that children need to be shielded, and can be shielded, from the grittier details of a divorce in all cases, and that’s not remotely correct. Note that the bill doesn’t make distinctions between infants (who don’t care), the toddler-to-tween range (who would probably be the most affected), and teenagers (the wildcard). Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, July 7, 2014

Posted on July 7, 2014 by wellsdc

Introducing TV’s Best Female Monster Yet, Lili Loofbourow, New York Magazine, July 3, 2014

In horror, once a person has been cast as a victim, a victim they remain — or at best, a deeply damaged survivor. In Orphan Black, the victim becomes the monster becomes the victim again with bewildering and humorous ease. Just when you think you’ve settled, the camera cocks its head, says “don’t be baby,” and refuses to let things be so simple. The camera confounds our relationship to Helena by seesawing the horror script, and in doing so, makes us rethink what a female monster can be. You’re forced to shift your sympathies on a shot-by-shot basis.

Judge says man who raped sleeping woman is not a “classic rapist,” just “lost control”, Katie McDonough, Salon, July 3, 2014 Continue reading →

Happy Fourth of July! We’ve Brought a Flag.

Posted on July 4, 2014 by wellsdc

Just a friendly reminder that federal law proscribes certain uses of the American flag*, but has no means for enforcing those restrictions (nor are they particularly constitutional.)

Click to embiggen

Joining us in a bit of holiday subversion is model Jessiqa Pace (photo via brytips.wordpress.com).

Also, remember: no flag, no country: Continue reading →

Dog Abuse, Neglect in Arizona

Posted on June 26, 2014 by wellsdc

You’ve probably heard about Green Acre Kennel, the dog-boarding facility in Gilbert, Arizona where at least twenty (the count seems to vary from one news source to another) dead dogs were discovered last weekend. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (yes, that Sheriff Joe) initially called it an “accident,” but has now announced that he will conduct a “thorough investigation.” Here’s a quick guide to the legal issues involved.

Arizona, along with every other state in the U.S., has felony provisions for animal cruelty. Arizona’s law went into effect in 1999, according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund. A report on the case at The Daily Beast looks at the civil liability angle. In many states, such as Texas, civil liability for causing injury or death to an animal—meaning a pet in this sort of case—is limited to the animal’s fair market value. It does not include other compensatory damages, nor does it includes any sort of noneconomic damages for what is, for many people, the loss of a family member. The Daily Beast‘s article discusses some of the civil claims that may arise under one Arizona lawyer’s take on that state’s laws: Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, June 23, 2014

Posted on June 23, 2014 by wellsdc

Atheism has a big race problem that no one’s talking about, Sikivu Hutchinson, Washington Post, June 16, 2014

White atheists have a markedly different agenda. They are, on average, more affluent than the general population. Their children don’t attend overcrowded “dropout mills” where they are criminalized, subjected to “drill and kill” curricula and shunted off to prison, subminimum-wage jobs or chronic unemployment. White organizations go to battle over church/state separation and creationism in schools.

They largely ignore the fact that black nonbelievers face a racial and gender divide precipitated by rollbacks on affirmative action, voting rights, affordable housing, reproductive rights, education and job opportunities. With the highest national rates of juvenile incarceration, as well as suspension and expulsion in K-12 schools, African American youth in particular have been deeply impacted by these assaults on civil rights. According to the Education Trust, “If current trends continue, only one in twenty African American students in the state of California will go on to a four-year college or university.”

But when we look to atheist and humanist organizations for solidarity on these issues, there is a staggering lack of interest. And though some mainstream atheist organizations have jumped on the “diversity” bandwagon, they haven’t seriously grappled with the issue. Simply trotting out atheists of color to speak about “diversity” at overwhelmingly white conferences doesn’t cut it. As Kim Veal of the Black Freethinkers network notes, this kind of tokenism exhibits a superficial interest in “minorities, but not in minority issues.”

The Missing Clause in Scalia’s First Amendment, Scott Lemieux, Lawyers, Guns & Money, June 17, 2014

Continue reading →

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