Day 799 Saturday March 16, 2019
597 Days to the 2020 election and 675 Days to Inauguration Day
The Continuing and Expanding Creep Show
Rachel had a segment last night that was really really creepy. There’s this guy appointed by Trump to oversee kids in detention centers that came here to seek legal immigration status. He’s a big Roman Catholic Church guy and is a member of The Knights of Columbus. As far as I knew they raised money for fireworks on the Fourth of July, but they also do other things. This guy has published articles saying abortion should not be allowed and that contraception is the same thing as abortion and should not be allowed.
He heads up an agency where there are girls in his care. Some of these girls are pregnant. Last year a girl who was pregnant wanted an abortion. He did everything he could to stop her from getting an abortion, including not letting her go to see a doctor. He was taken to court. He lost. It was made a class action suit and he was no longer allowed to obstruct a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. This was in March of 2018. It turns out he had been keeping a spreadsheet of all the pregnant girls in his care.
This is where it gets creepy. He had each girl identified by number, when they reported their pregnancy, how they got pregnant, whether they wanted an abortion, when their last menstrual cycle was, and how far along their pregnancy was. The express purpose of this report was to try and prevent these young women from getting an abortion, to delay the procedure until their pregnancy was too far along.
He was prevented from stopping these women from getting abortions in March of 2018, but he is still keeping the report going. There is no reason for the report other than to try and prevent women from getting the attention they seek. This week under a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) a group got hold of the report. It’s 28 pages long! I don’t know how many entries there are on a page but let’s say it’s 20. That’s 560 women! If 30 per page it’s 840 and at 40 per page it’s 1120. Yikes.
Besides being creepy, unconstitutional, and weird I got to wonder if it’s criminal. I would think denying someone their Constitutional rights is some sort of legal violation. Yet, there it is. This guy is still in the job.
So, not only does the Roman Catholic Church have to worry about male priests as pedophiles attacking young boys; it also has to deal with one of their big male civilian institutions promoting some weird part of its doctrine in illegal ways.
For a brief history lesson, The Catholic Church had a number of odd ducks that got pushed to the edges of their control. That place was Ireland. The RC priests from Ireland were the ones that really got the Roman Catholic Church going in America. So we are blessed/cursed with a rather puritanical extreme version of Roman Catholicism, which was also reinforced by the Puritans who escaped Europe to get away from religious suppression so they could form their own version of it.
It was in reaction to the Puritans that Roger Williams escaped the Massachusetts Bay Colony, went to England and convinced Parliament to let him set up a new colony based on the odd idea of religious and political freedom and to let him try this really unusyal idea called democracy. Thus Rhode Island was founded in 1636.
I’m sorry, but have you ever met anyone who believed in god that didn’t think their god was THE GOD? The best I’ve ever seen is a kind of laissez-faire attitude toward it.
Lisa Randall, well known physicist and author, as a child was curious and when she was told heaven was in the sky and god was in the clouds wanted to know which cloud god was in. It’s a rather practical question. Naturally, the adults laughed and pooh-poohed her. But it’s a valid question. The fact that those who believe can’t answer it points out the problem with religion in general. In “A History of God” Karen Armstrong writes about the changing role god is cast in. Each time there is something that is a problem factually or logically then there is an explanation, which ends up that god shrinks from that part of what was claimed before. As the notion of god continues, one could say that it is the notion of the reasoning for that which we can’t explain.
It seems humans want to understand. When the knowledge required is not available then they say god of the gods did it, or are responsible, etc.
I contend that whatever embodiment of god a culture has is due to parents and grand-parents saying anything they can to get the kid to stop asking, “Why?”
There’s an interesting new Great Courses out entitled, “How Jesus Became God.” Interesting. I mean. When he started out he wasn’t god. That came later. I guess at Nicene, but maybe before. He had a good PR man in St. Paul. If it weren’t for Paul, none of this would have happened. There were a lot of bare foot guys wandering around the Levant 2,000 years ago yelling about the Romans and claiming they had good news. But it took the right combination to start a new religion.
That’s not what I meant to talk about. Sorry.
Rick Gates! Remember him. Paul Manafort’s second in command? Part of the Trump Inauguration Committee? Yeah, baby. He was due to be sentenced yesterday, and for the fifth time Mueller’s team asked for a continuance because Rick was still cooperating with on-going investigations. Some thought once Manafort was sentenced that Gates’ work would be done. Apparently not. Ongoing investigations? Really? Which ones?
Are we talking about the investigations into the Inaugural Committee? If so is it the one in New York, DC, New Jersey, or the Federal one out of the Southern District of New York? So many investigations to pick from.
Let’s make a list:
Trump Organization taxes,
Trump University scam,
Trump Foundation – criminal fraud,
Manafort, Gates criminal activities,
Cohen criminal activities,
Russian social media criminal activities,
Flynn criminal activities,
Russian hacking,
Collusion with Wikileaks,
Campaign finance criminal activities,
Inauguration criminal activities,
Trump nepotism and emoluments violations,
Obstruction of Justice.
Now who might be investigating:
Robert Mueller – Special Counsel,
Southern District of New York – Federal Prosecutors,
Eastern District of Virginia – Federal Prosecutors,
Florida Souther District Federal Court,
New York States Attorney,
Manhattan District Attorney,
Then there’s the House Committees:
Oversight,
Intelligence,
Judiciary,
Financial Services,
Foreign Affairs,
Ways and Means,
But other than that I can’t think of anyone or anything, but I may have missed a few.
Don’t you miss the days of Obama’s tan suit, or Hillary having a picture taken?
597 Days to the 2020 election and 675 Days to Inauguration Day
PS Four Days til Kukulcan shows his tail on the Castillo at Chichen Itza on the Vernal Equinox. (March 20, 2019.)
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