January 29, 2015

Some interesting context to the Christian Right's opposition to gays and abortion

In 1934, a special Gestapo (Secret State Police) division on homosexuals was set up. One of its first acts was to order the police "pink lists" from all over Germany. The police had been compiling these lists of suspected homosexual men since 1900. On September 1, 1935, a harsher, amended version of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, originally framed in 1871, went into effect, punishing a broad range of "lewd and lascivious" behavior between men. In 1936, Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler created a Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion: Special Office (II S), a subdepartment of Executive Department II of the Gestapo. The linking of homosexuality and abortion reflected the Nazi regimes population policies to promote a higher birthrate of its "Aryan" population. On this subject Himmler spoke in Bad Tölz on February 18, 1937, before a group of high-ranking SS officers on the dangers both homosexuality and abortion posed to the German birthrate.

And a fact I was unaware of:

After the war, homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution, and reparations were refused. Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 remained in effect in the Federal Republic (West Germany) until 1969, so that well after liberation, homosexuals continued to fear arrest and incarceration.

http://www.ushmm.org/learn/students/learning-materials-and-resources/homosexuals-victims-of-the-nazi-era/persecution-of-homosexuals

January 26, 2015

The Supreme Court Allowed A Man To Be Executed, Then They Took His Case

Source: Think Progress

Just over a week ago, the Supreme Court denied a stay of execution to an Oklahoma inmate named Charles Warner over the dissent of the Court’s four more liberal members. According to Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, the drug cocktail that Oklahoma planned to use on Warner was too likely to result in the “needless infliction of severe pain” to be permissible under the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments. Sotomayor, however, only garnered four votes for her position, and she needed five to halt the execution.

Nevertheless, on Friday, just over a week after Warner received a fatal dose of the poisonous cocktail Sotomayor criticized in her opinion, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear Warner’s case after all.

Under normal circumstances, Warner’s death would moot his case. Subject only to narrow exceptions, the Supreme Court only has jurisdiction over cases where a decision in a particularly party’s favor is likely to redress an injury that party experienced. And the justices only have the power to destroy life. They do not have the power to resurrect the dead.

Warner, however, is one of four death row inmates who challenged the use of a potentially unreliable sedative that may allow inmates to experience considerable pain during their executions. The other three, at least as of this writing, are still alive.

Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/01/26/3615214/supreme-court-allows-oklahoma-execute-man-decide-take-case/

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Just a note to the Pope: If ever some Catholics needed excommunication...

This is evil AND malicious.