Catholic school faces backlash for not hiring a lesbian

Lauren Brown applied for and got a job as counselor at the Catholic all-girls St. Mary’s Academy. But the school later learned that she is a lesbian. And so like good Catholics, they withdrew the offer. And in the time-honored Catholic way, they tried to buy her silence by offering her a year’s salary and benefits if she would keep quiet about why she was not being hired.
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GOP goes through the stages of grief

There is a well-known idea proposed by psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross that people pass though five stages of grief when they are given a diagnosis of a terminal illness: (1) Denial (2) Anger (3) Bargaining (4) Depression (5) Acceptance. Some have expanded this to seven stages, adding Shock/Disbelief and Guilt: (1) Shock or Disbelief (2) Denial (3) Anger (4) Bargaining (5) Guilt (6) Depression (7) Acceptance and Hope.
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Time to end thoughts and prayers and actually do something

[This post has been updated as new information comes in.]

And so we have another mass shooting less than a week after the last one. This time 14 people were murdered and 17 wounded in a matter of minutes because people were able to easily and legally obtain the kinds of lethal weaponry that combat troops use. And as usual, those opposed to any kind of reasonable checks on the ability to obtain such weapons have tried to find ways to not address this glaring problem.
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Call for Bush, Cheney, and others to be prosecuted

Human Rights Watch, a major human rights group in the US, has issued a report detailing all the abuses committed by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others and calling for them to be prosecuted.

It is now well established that following the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operated a global, state-sanctioned program in which it abducted scores of people throughout the world, held them in secret detention—sometimes for years—or “rendered” them to various countries, and tortured or otherwise ill-treated them. While the program officially ended in 2009, the cover-up of these crimes appears to be ongoing.

Many detainees were held by the CIA in pitch-dark windowless cells, chained to walls, naked or diapered, for weeks or months at a time. The CIA forced them into painful stress positions that made it impossible for them to lie down or sleep for days, to the point where many hallucinated or begged to be killed to end their misery. It used “waterboarding” and similar techniques to cause near suffocation or drowning, crammed detainees naked into tiny boxes, and prevented them from bathing, using toilets, or cutting their hair or nails for months. “We looked like monsters,” one detainee said of his appearance while in CIA custody.
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Dealing with religious grief

I recently heard that an old college friend of mine’s husband had died in Sri Lanka so I called her twice, once just after the funeral and then again a few weeks later. My friend is a lovely, gentle, generous person who is also a very religious evangelical Christian. When I reached her soon after the funeral, I learned that her husband had been in excellent health and had gone in for routine bypass surgery and, from what she described to me, seemed to have been the victim of a surgical misadventure.
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