Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalWithout brave women, men in ministry would not have had a day of reckoning
On Thursday leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention released a 205-page list with the names of pastors and others affiliated with the SBC and different Baptist denominations who have been accused of sexual abuse for decades. The release follows an explosive investigative report into alleged sexual misconduct by Southern Baptist Convention clergy members.
This moment of reckoning would not have been possible without women speaking truth to power, belying the theological understanding that they are meant to be submissive to men in positions of authority in the church and home.
By publicly calling out pastors who they say have sexually abused them, women are challenging men in ministry seeking to cull sympathy and retain authority. In a now widely circulated video from a service at the New Life Christian Church and World Outreach in Warsaw, Indiana, last Sunday, we saw an example of this on full display.
Shortly after Pastor John Lowe II pleaded for his congregation to seek “the saving knowledge of Christ,” he said he had “a confession.” He wanted to “follow a biblical process of confession, repentance and forgiveness,” which would lead up to him finally admitting that he had committed adultery. He stressed that it was 20 years ago and was with one person, and as a way to hammer home that he was doing the upstanding thing, he said he would not “use the Bible to defend, protect and deflect my past sin.” He continued, “I have no defense. I committed the adultery. To say it plainly, I didn’t make a mistake. … I need to say that, and you deserve to hear it.”
He asked the congregation for forgiveness and announced that he was stepping aside from ministry responsibilities and submitting to recommendations from the church board. As Lowe placed the microphone down and stepped offstage, he received a standing ovation.
But he had left out key details. And as the applause continued, a woman and her husband stepped up to the pulpit to fill in what these details were. The clapping died down as the woman began: “I lived in a prison of lies and shame. Lying to protect the Lowe family … having suicidal thoughts, not realizing what had been truly done to me … I would still be in a prison if my brother … had not approached me just two weeks ago with what he had seen as a teenager that bothered him all these years. His pastor, in bed, with his younger sister, a T-shirt and underwear on. People knew but were too afraid to come forward, and they have now. The lies and the manipulation have to stop.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/southern-baptist-leaders-sex-abuse-reckoning-brave-women-rcna30950
Sick and tired of men making themselves out to be "victims" in these cases. STAND DOWN when you are called out!
Cowardice is the point of white supremacy, too
Perspective by Damon Young
My familiarity with Buffalo’s demographics isn’t quite what it was when I was in school there 20 years ago. But I remember enough that when I first saw breaking news alerts of a mass shooting in the city and read that it happened on Jefferson Avenue, I knew it was us who’d been shot before even knowing it was us. Some streets in some neighborhoods in some cities are just where you will always find regular Black people, and Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo is one of them. “Regular” here is not a pejorative. Nor is it an implication that there’s such a thing as irregular Black people. Just a way to describe working-class people doing nothing but living their lives on a sunny Saturday. Sleeping in. Tending lawns. Walking pets. Washing cars. Watching nephews. Grilling meat. Sipping tea. Getting nails did. And maybe going to the grocery store too.
It’s this banality — the purposeful obliviousness of the assumed safety of minding your damn business — that Payton Gendron allegedly hoped and prepared for. The 10 people killed weren’t just randomly chosen sitting ducks. They were targeted specifically because they were defenseless. Specifically because they included church ladies and retired grandparents with no real chance to fight or even run. That he was equipped with an assault rifle and outfitted with protective armor isn’t just more proof of an unfair fight. It’s proof that making the fight as unfair as possible was the whole point. Is the whole point.
We already know Payton Gendron too. We didn’t know his name until the news reported on it, but we know him. He’s Dylann Roof walking into a Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., and murdering nine people after watching them pray. And Dylann Roof is Robert Gregory Bowers allegedly killing 11 people during Shabbat morning services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. And Robert Gregory Bowers is Patrick Crusius saying he drove 10 hours to a Walmart in El Paso to kill as many Mexicans as he could.
These men, with their alleged sneak attacks on the unarmed and the unsuspecting, are no different than the mobs of dozens, hundreds, thousands gathered to lynch just one person. Like the hundreds in 1918 who hung Mary Turner upside down from a tree, doused her in gasoline and motor oil, set her on fire, and split her abdomen open with a knife. She was eight-months pregnant, and her unborn child fell to the ground and was murdered too. Or the domestic terrorists in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s attacking Black neighborhoods, Black schools and Black churches — with fire, bricks, bullets and bombs — at night and while hiding behind white sheets and citizens’ groups. Or the entire communities — masses of faces, full-throated and frothing — out to intimidate a 6-year-old going to class.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/05/26/damon-young-buffalo-shooting-cowardice-is-point-white-supremacy-too/?itid=hp_magazine
Trans Girl Reportedly Attacked Due to Far-Right Conspiracy Theories About Uvalde
A 17-year-old transgender girl was reportedly attacked in El Paso on Tuesday night, after the far-right spread false rumors online blaming a transgender woman for the Texas school massacre that left 19 children and two teachers dead earlier this week.
The girl, Tracey, told the Los Angeles Blade that she was approached by four men as she headed back to a halfway house where she lives after being kicked out by her parents for being trans. One of them grabbed her arm, she said, and told her, “Oh, look, it has a dick.”
“Yeah, you know they’re perverting kids instead of killing them,” Tracey said the man added.
“Yeah, you know it was one of your sisters who killed those kids. You’re a mental health freak!” one of the other men reportedly said.
Tracey managed to get away. She said she tried to report the attack to El Paso Police, but they refused to take a report.
After VICE News contacted the El Paso Police Department about the Los Angeles Blade article on Friday, police said that they had attempted to contact its author for more information. The department was unable to reach the author, who, the police said, had not contacted any public information officers in the department.
“The El Paso Police Department takes all reports of crimes from every victim with the utmost importance and dignity owed to the victim. At the moment the information we have is all third-party information from either social media or now your inquiry,” police said in an email. “The name Tracey alone is insufficient to research further.”
“I’m not aware of any situation like that,” a spokesperson for the El Paso Police Department told VICE News. The department did not immediately respond to a follow-up email asking for comment on the Los Angeles Blade report.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3va5m/texas-school-shooter-trans-conspiracy-attack
Opinion: What Steve Kerr and Beto O'Rourke are exposing for all the world to see
Opinion by Peniel Joseph
Millions of Americans have responded to the horrific mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde with wrenching and public displays of anger, sadness and rage against the nation’s broken political system. This latest tragedy comes a little more than one week after 10 people were killed in a racist hate crime that purposefully targeted Buffalo’s Black community. The massacre in Uvalde coincided, almost to the day, with the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder.
Two years later it is worth questioning: how much has really changed?
That’s a question without a satisfying answer. But as so many in America grieve and grapple with their anger, it’s striking that a chorus of White men are among the loudest and most visible voices exposing the fundamental crisis of American democracy, for all the world to see. There is something particularly significant about the fact that three high-profile White men, all leaders in different fields, are speaking out about the underlying crisis that allowed the horrors in Uvalde and elsewhere to continue unabated. So much of contemporary American politics seems to pit people of color on one side and a declining White majority on the other. And yet Steve Kerr, Matthew McConaughey and Beto O’Rourke all serve as courageous models for a progressive White male identity that challenges systems of oppression, speaks truth to power and confronts the divisions of our current moment by publicly highlighting the gap between the nation’s professed values and a more bitter reality that allows nineteen children to be killed in such grotesque fashion.
Steve Kerr, the three-time NBA championship-winning head coach of the Golden State Warriors, conducted a news conference Tuesday that turned into a bold political sermon. “When are we going to do something?” demanded Kerr, who challenged all Americans to let their voices be heard and to demand justice in the memory of those lost in Uvalde and Buffalo. Kerr, a longtime advocate for gun reform whose own family has been touched by violence, has a history of making powerful political statements.
There was also actor Matthew McConaughey, who was born in Uvalde. He released a statement after the shooting that openly questioned the nation’s moral and political values. “We cannot exhale, make excuses, and once again accept these realities as the status quo,” observed McConaughey.
A similarly enraged Beto O’Rourke, a former presidential contender now running for Texas governor, interrupted a Wednesday news conference with Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, to publicly accuse Abbott of “doing nothing” to halt gun violence, besides perfunctory statements and news conferences that avoid the heart of the issue. Abbott is currently scheduled to speak at the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention Friday in Houston.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/26/opinions/uvalde-mass-shooting-kerr-mcconaughey-orourke-joseph/index.html
Russian Defense Insider Finally Admits Ukraine F*ck Up
Russian State Duma Deputy Defense Committee Chairman Vladimir Shamanov has admitted in an interview that the most glaring mistake of the Russian war in Ukraine was that the Kremlin expected Ukrainians to greet the Russian military with open arms.
Going in to Ukraine in February, expecting to “be greeted with flowers,” was a big mistake, Shamanov said in an interview with journalist Oksana Kravtsova.
“Those who expected that we [in Ukraine] would be met with flowers, this is one of the main mistakes that we felt very keenly in the first five days,” he said, according to RBC.
The Kremlin and Russian officials have framed the invasion into Ukraine as a “special military operation” designed as a peacekeeping mission to save Ukrainians from alleged Nazis and genocide, people who the Kremlin insisted desperately wanted the Russian government’s help—claims that are not based in reality.
“The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime,” Putin said on the eve of the invasion on Feb. 24. “To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”
For years, Putin has repeated baseless claims that Ukrainians have been persecuting Russians and Russian-speaking citizens. The United States has repeatedly said that Russia was likely using claims of genocide to justify an invasion into Ukraine.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/vladimir-shamanov-russian-defense-insider-finally-admits-ukraine-fck-up-as-putins-war-bogs-down?ref=home
Maker of Uvalde shooter's rifle is deep-pocketed GOP donor
The owners of Daniel Defense, the manufacturer of the rifle apparently used in the massacre of 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., are deep-pocketed Republican donors, giving to candidates and committees at the federal and state level aligned against limits on access to assault rifles and other semiautomatic weapons.
The owners of the Georgia-based company have donated more than $70,000 directly to GOP candidates for federal office this election cycle, according to a review of filings with the Federal Election Commission. Daniel Defense itself gave $100,000 last year to a PAC backing incumbent Republican senators.
The spending by Marvin C. Daniel and his wife, Cindy D. Daniel, illustrates the financial clout of the gun industry, even as political spending by the flagship National Rifle Association has declined in recent years. And it shows how surging gun sales during the coronavirus pandemic have empowered manufacturers to expand their marketing and political advocacy, experts said.
Daniel Defense manufactured about 52,000 firearms in 2020, compared to about 32,000 in 2019, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“The ability of the industry to use money to advance its policy agenda has increased given the dramatic rise in firearm sales that we’ve seen over the last two or three years,” said Timothy D. Lytton, a law professor at Georgia State University. “The industry is much better equipped to further its lobbying interests, independent of the NRA.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/27/texas-shooting-gun-manufacturer-donations/?itid=hp-banner-main
If Roe falls, more women will be prosecuted for miscarriages
By Radley Balko
About 10 years ago, a longtime state medical examiner in Texas and Mississippi told me something that has stuck with me ever since. He said there’s a type of prosecutor who believes that innocent babies just don’t die on their own. “They don’t believe in accidents,” he said, “especially when the parents are poor. Someone must be at fault. So someone has to pay.”
It isn’t hard to find cases to back up his theory. I’ve previously written about Hattie Douglas, a Mississippi woman who was arrested and jailed for a year for killing her infant son with alcohol poisoning until a lab concluded a medical examiner had botched the test results. There’s Sabrina Butler, who spent two years on death row for murdering her infant son, until doctors later concluded the baby likely died of kidney disease. Jeffrey Havard is still serving a life sentence for killing his girlfriend’s 6-month-old, despite multiple affidavits from medical professionals concluding the forensic evidence against him was junk science. In 2012, a Georgia woman was convicted of vehicular homicide after her 4-year-old son was killed by a hit-and-run driver, because she and her son were jaywalking at the time.
Other medical examiners and defense attorneys have since echoed the sentiment, pointing to cases in which prosecutors utilized scientifically dubious expert testimony to secure convictions after a baby has died. Many point to shaken baby syndrome, a diagnosis that swept through the criminal legal system in the 1990s. The diagnosis has since come under fire in the scientific community, but it’s still given weight in much of the country, including Mississippi, where just last year the state’s Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to uphold a conviction based on the theory.
It’s against this history that criminal defense and civil rights groups have expressed alarm over Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. If some prosecutors already believe babies don’t die without criminal culpability, it stands to reason that as state legislatures push fetal personhood back to fertilization, the same logic will be applied to miscarriages. Women who miscarry could be investigated for using alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drugs, or engaging in other behavior prosecutors deem risky.
In fact, this is already happening. In 2007, a Lowndes County, Miss. grand jury indicted Rennie Gibbs with murder after a stillbirth when traces of a cocaine byproduct were found in her blood. In 2020, an Oklahoma woman was charged after methamphetamine was found in her system (despite a medical examiner’s conclusion that it played no role in the miscarriage). In 2019, an Alabama woman was charged with manslaughter for starting an argument with another woman, who then shot her, killing her fetus.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/26/if-roe-falls-more-women-will-be-prosecuted-miscarriages/?itid=hp_opinions
And we won't even talk about the doctors that will be prosecuted for cleaning up after a miscarriage....
Grieving husband of teacher killed in Texas school shooting has died, family says
Source: NBC News
The husband of one of the teachers killed in a Texas school shooting this week collapsed and died on Thursday while preparing for his wife's funeral, the family said.
Joe Garcia had been married to high school sweetheart, Irma Garcia, for 24 years before she was gunned down Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
“I don’t even know how to feel. I don’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it” that Joe Garcia has passed away, Irma Garcia's nephew, John Martinez, told NBC News.
Irma Garcia and co-teacher Eva Mireles were both killed along with 19 children at the school that's about 85 miles west of San Antonio.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/grieving-husband-teacher-killed-texas-school-shooting-died-family-says-rcna30717
The horror just goes on.....
After 40 years in law enforcement, this is my message to the GOP about gun rights
By Cedric Alexander, MSNBC law enforcement analyst
The first time I chose to swear an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution was in 1977, when I became a deputy sheriff in Leon County (Tallahassee), Florida. Each time I assumed a new responsibility in my 40-year career in law enforcement, I chose to swear that same oath.
I consider the Constitution and my allegiance to it sacred. But I will not use that great document as an altar on which to sacrifice innocent people, like grandparents shopping for food at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, people gathered in a church in Laguna Woods, California, or second, third and fourth graders attending a public elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Such sacrifices have seemingly become a uniquely American blood ritual. And in the lockstep of that ritual, many Republican lawmakers anoint themselves in the Second Amendment and invariably choose to block even the most modest of commonsense gun safety legislation.
It is past time for the GOP to stop acting as though the Second Amendment does not allow for limits on guns. Amid serial mass killings in America, the enactment of gun laws fails year after year. In law enforcement, I have seen the importance of balancing the rights of people with the law. The same is true when it comes to the Constitution.
Like virtually every right and prohibition in the Constitution, the Second Amendment is subject to legislation that defines and regulates its application.
In 1939’s U.S. v. Miller, the Supreme Court decided that the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of” state militias and “must be interpreted and applied” narrowly in that context. This was effectively nullified by a 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which held that the Second Amendment confers on an individual the right to possess firearms unrelated to service in a state militia. Even so, a subsequent ruling in 2010, McDonald v. Chicago, kept the door open to commonsense gun laws, including state and federal laws prohibiting felons and the mentally ill from possessing firearms and regulations prohibiting firearms inside public schools.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/gop-hiding-behind-second-amendment-school-shootings-gun-control-rcna30586
Abbott said the shooter had a 'mental health' issue. A month ago, he slashed funding to help.
Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that the Uvalde school shooter had a "mental health challenge" and the state needed to "do a better job with mental health" — yet in April he slashed $211 million from the department that oversees mental health programs.
In addition, Texas ranked last out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia for overall access to mental health care, according to the 2021 State of Mental Health in America report.
"We as a state, we as a society, need to do a better job with mental health," Abbott said during a news conference at Robb Elementary School, where a gunman shot and killed 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday.
His remarks came just a day after an outraged Connecticut senator called out lawmakers opposed to gun control who seek to blame mental illness for the most recent school shooting and others before it.
In rejecting suggestions that stronger gun control laws could have prevented the tragedy, Abbott conceded the slain 18-year-old suspect had no known mental health issues or criminal history but said, "Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge.”
His assertions drew rebukes from public health experts and scholars who study mass murderers, as well as from his Democratic gubernatorial rival Beto O’Rourke, who was ejected from the news conference after storming the stage and accusing the pro-gun Republican of “doing nothing” to stop gun violence.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/abbott-calls-texas-school-shooting-mental-health-issue-cut-state-spend-rcna30557
Methinks Hot Wheels is the one with the mental health issue!
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