Pope Francis has created an interesting situation when it comes to political alliances. On the one hand, he has said some very positive things on the injustices waged against the poor, the evil of massive inequality with the rich getting much richer at the expense of the poor, and the importance of combating global warming and the resulting climate change.
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Back in April, I wrote about a ballot initiative proposed in California by a lawyer Matt McLaughlin that called for the death for anyone who engaged in homosexual activities. He called it the Sodomite Suppression Act though it quickly became dubbed the “Shoot the Gays” petition.
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Case of justice officials charged with torture to go forward
One of the appalling features of the US justice system is the fact that members of the government have been able to escape prosecution for authorizing and carrying out torture even though torture is blatantly illegal. Now there is a small chance that this might change.
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Arranged marriages are not common in the US where women and men have many opportunities to meet one another in co-educational schools, workplaces, and social settings. This creates, from the point of view of highly traditional families, a ‘problem’ in that when allowed to mix freely in cosmopolitan settings, people might well fall in love with those who do not share their own ethnic or racial or religious backgrounds.
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In a previous post, I expressed some pessimism that southern states would disassociate themselves from the confederate flag, pointing out that the determination of fans and owners of the Cleveland Indians baseball team to retain their racist mascot in the face of opprobrium shows the strength that symbols have on people. If a baseball mascot could not be gotten rid of, what are the chances of doing so for a flag in a nation that fetishizes flags?
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Recently John Oliver exposed the abusive practices by the four big companies who exploit chicken farmers by misleading them with various promises that entice them into signing contracts that result in a form of indentured servitude, and being protected by some members from Congress, funded by the big chicken lobby, who blocked any corrective legislation. The video got over 3 million viewers on YouTube. I linked to the clip and wrote about this issue earlier.
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There are many problems with the American criminal justice system. It is too easily prone to use excessive and even lethal violence, it can be very abusive, it treats people differently based on their color and/or socio-economic status, it incarcerates people for too many things and for too long, it kills people using the death penalty, it tortures, and so on. But there is one other feature that is less discussed and that is the fact that it is not uncommon for prisoners to be kept in solitary confinement for very long periods of time, even though we know that this can cause serious psychological damage. Some states like Texas and Virginia automatically put death row inmates in solitary confinement irrespective of whether they are judged to pose a danger or not.
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In an interview with Marc Maron, president Obama used the n-word quite casually while making the pretty obvious point that its use or non-use should not be the measure of the state of racism in the US. Of course, his use of the word gave many people the vapors. As a result, the rest of the hour-long interview has been pretty much ignored but you can get a synopsis here.
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As the time approaches when the US Supreme Court will weigh in with its ruling on same-sex marriage, anticipation is running high on both sides. There are two possible days when the opinion will be released, on this coming Thursday or (more likely) the following Monday, June 29, the last day of the term, although it is always possible that the justices might extend the term if they are finding it hard to finalize their opinions due to sharp disagreements. There are just seven cases where oral arguments were heard and for which no rulings have been given, and those include the Obamacare and the same-sex marriage cases.
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In the wake of the murders in Charleston, SC, even president Obama seems resigned to the fact that there seems to be little or no chance of even slightly reducing the ease with which lethal weapons are available to practically anyone so that they can engage in carrying out their violent fantasies. As a result we are reduced to rhetoric and symbolism, such as calls for the confederate flag to be removed from its mast on the state capital grounds
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