Under New State Laws, Catholic Church Could See Tidal Wave of Abuse Suits

Following up on this morning's post about the removal of the bishop of Buffalo, New York, the Insurance Journal is reporting that the Roman Catholic Church is likely facing a tidal wave of new lawsuits as 15 states have amended their laws to extend the time within which victims of abuse can file lawsuits.  Financially, the bill for the Church as a whole within the USA alone could exceed 44 billion. As I noted to some commentators on the cross posting of the blog post on Facebook, I am not necessarily advocating for believers to give up their faith, I merely believe (i) the Catholic Church hierarchy needs to be held accountable for its misdeeds and cover ups of crimes against children and youths, and (ii) that a thorough house cleaning of the hierarchy is needed.  For good measure, the Church needs to throw away its 12th century dogma and update its positions on modern science based knowledge.  Sadly, given the Church's history of making money (and control over its members) its true god, punishing monetary judgments are likely the best way to force these needed reforms.   Here are excerpts from the Insurance Journal piece:

A wave of new laws in 15 states that allow people to make claims of sexual abuse going back decades could bring a deluge of lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Church that could surpass anything seen so far in its clergy abuse crisis.

Associated Press reporting found it could result in thousands of new cases against the church and more than $4 billion in payouts.

It’s a financial reckoning playing out in such populous Catholic strongholds as New York, California and New Jersey, among the eight states that go the furthest with “lookback windows” that allow sex abuse claims no matter how old.

That has lawyers fighting for clients with TV ads and billboards asking, “Were you abused by the church?” And Catholic dioceses are considering bankruptcy, victim compensation funds and even tapping valuable real estate to stay afloat.

“It’s like a whole new beginning for me,” said 71-year-old Nancy Holling-Lonnecker of San Diego, who plans to take advantage of an upcoming three-year window for such suits in California. Her claim dates back to the 1950s, when she says a priest repeatedly raped her in a confession booth beginning when she was 7 years old.

AP interviews with more than a dozen lawyers and clergy abuse watchdog groups offered a wide range of estimates but many said they expected at least 5,000 new cases against the church in New York, New Jersey and California alone, resulting in potential payouts that could surpass the $4 billion paid out since the clergy sex abuse first came to light in the 1980s.

Some lawyers believe payouts could be heavily influenced by the recent reawakening over sexual abuse fueled by the (hash)MeToo movement, the public shaming of accused celebrities and the explosive Pennsylvania grand jury report last year that found 300 priests abused more than 1,000 children in that state over seven decades.

“The general public is more disgusted than ever with the clergy sex abuse and the cover-up, and that will be reflected in jury verdicts,” said Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston attorney who was at the center of numerous lawsuits against the church in that city and was portrayed in the movie “Spotlight.”

This summer, when New York state opened its one-year window allowing sexual abuse suits with no statute of limitations, more than 400 cases against the church and other institutions were filed on the first day alone. That number is now up to more than 1,000, with most against the church.

New Jersey’s two-year window opens this week and California’s three-year window begins in the new year, with a new provision that allows plaintiffs to collect triple damages if a demonstrable cover-up can be shown. Arizona, Montana and Vermont opened ones earlier this year.

The church’s response weighs heavily on compensation funds and bankruptcy.

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan set up the first fund in 2016, pitching it as a way to compensate victims without walloping the church and forcing it to cut programs. It has since paid more than $67 million to 338 alleged victims, an average $200,000 each.

The idea has caught on in other states. All five dioceses in New Jersey and three in Colorado opened one, as did seven dioceses in Pennsylvania and six in California, including the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the largest in the U.S.

More drastic and increasingly more common is the bankruptcy option. Less than a month after New York’s one-year lookback window took effect, the upstate Diocese of Rochester filed for bankruptcy, the 20th diocese or religious order in the country to do so.

When a diocese files for bankruptcy, lawsuits by alleged abuse survivors are suspended and payments to them and others owed money are frozen while a federal judge decides how much to pay everyone and still leave enough for the diocese to continue to operate. It’s orderly and victims avoid costly and lengthy court cases, but they often get less than they would if they were successful in a trial.

Bankruptcy can also leave abuse survivors with a sense of justice denied because the church never has to face discovery by plaintiff lawyers and forced to hand over documents, possibly implicating higher-ups who hid the abuse. . . .  “It’s a different process in bankruptcy _ you don’t get discovery and you don’t get it in compensation programs. The truth never comes to light.”

Unfortunately, Pope Francis has been nowhere near aggressive enough in cleaning house and this failing, combined with insincere crocodile tears by bishops and cardinals has only increased victims' feeling of having been victimized twice.  One can only wonder if the Church's leadership will ever "get it" that they are the biggest obstacle. 

Media Is Ignoring Trump Lawsuits and Destruction of Records and E-mails

While the American mainstream media continues to play into the hands of Donald Trump - and actually Vladimir Putin as well - by having near orgasms in its rush to sensationalize issues surrounding Hillary Clinton's e-mails, for the most part it is utterly ignoring the 75 lawsuits involving Donald Trump.  Even more hypocritically, it is ignoring Trump's history of destroying records and e-mails despite court orders.  A piece in Politicususa looks at the Trump's lawsuits while Newsweek looks at Trump's pattern of contempt of court actions and record destruction.  First these highlights from the Newsweek piece:

Over the course of decades, Donald Trump’s companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records.

This behavior is of particular import given Trump’s frequent condemnations of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, for having deleted more than 30,000 emails from a server she used during her time as secretary of state. While Clinton and her lawyers have said all of those emails were personal, Trump has suggested repeatedly on the campaign trail that they were government documents Clinton was trying to hide and that destroying them constituted a crime. The allegation—which the FBI concluded was not supported by any evidence—is a crowd-pleaser at Trump rallies, often greeted by supporters chanting, “Lock her up!”

TRUMP’S USE OF DECEPTION and untruthful affidavits, as well as the hiding or improper destruction of documents, dates back to at least 1973, when the Republican nominee, his father and their real estate company battled the federal government over civil charges that they refused to rent apartments to African-Americans. The Trump strategy was simple: deny, impede and delay, while destroying documents the court had ordered them to hand over.

For months, the Trumps ignored the government’s discovery demands, even though court procedure in a civil or criminal case requires each side to produce relevant documents in a timely manner. . . . .  When litigation is filed or even contemplated, scrupulous lawyers and corporations immediately impose document-retention programs or require that any shredding or disposing of records be halted. Courts have handed down severe sanctions or even criminal charges of obstruction of justice against executives and companies that destroyed records because they knew they were going to be sued.

Yet when the government filed its standard discovery requests, the Trumps reacted as though seeking that information was outrageous. They argued in court that prosecutors had no case and wanted to riffle through corporate files on a fishing expedition. Once again, this led to more delays, more replies, more hearings...and another specious argument thrown out of court.

Finally, under subpoena, Trump appeared for a short deposition. When asked about the missing documents, he made a shocking admission: The Trumps had been destroying their corporate records for the previous six months and had no document-retention program. They had conducted no inspections to determine which files might have been sought in the discovery requests or might otherwise be related to the case. Instead, in order to “save space,” Trump testified, officials with his company had been tossing documents into the shredder and garbage.

In 2009, a group of plaintiffs claimed Trump duped them into buying apartments in a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, development by portraying it as one of his projects. The fine print of the dense and legalistic purchase contracts, however, revealed that Trump had agreed only to license his name to the developers, and when the project hit financial snags, he walked away from it.

In their initial disclosures in 2011, Trump and his company said they had no insurance to cover any of their liability in this case. . . . . Two years after denying that Trump had insurance that could have been used to settle the Fort Lauderdale litigation, one of his lawyers made a startling admission: Trump and his company had been insured all along for up to $5 million. But no more—the policy had recently “dried up,” the lawyer said.

PERHAPS THE WORST LEGAL CASE involving Trump and his companies hiding and destroying emails and other records involved real estate developer Cordish Cos., which, through an affiliate called Power Plant Entertainment LLC, built two American Indian casinos in Florida. 

Trump offered no evidence in support of his contention except his word, so the opposing lawyers filed extensive discovery demands, seeking emails, computer files, calendars and other records that might prove he knew about the casino deal before 2000.

A full year into the case, Trump and his company, Trump Hotels, had produced only a single box of documents, many of which were not relevant—and no emails, digital files, phone records, calendars or even documents Trump lawyers had promised to turn over. Interrogatories were still unanswered. Lawyers for Power Plant obtained a court order compelling Trump and his company to comply with the discovery demands and hand over the relevant information and documents.

In a March 2006 response, Trump’s lawyers argued that the emails and other electronic documents had not been produced because the company didn’t have them. They claimed it had no servers until 2001—the year Trump claimed he had learned of the Power Plant project. They also claimed Trump Hotels had no policy regarding retaining documents until 2003. In other words, they hadn’t turned over any emails because no emails had been saved on a Trump server.

Judge Jeffrey Streitfeld reacted with near disbelief. “I don't have the patience for this,” he said. “This has been going on too long to have to listen—and I don't mean to be disrespectful—to this double-talk. There has to be an attitude adjustment from the plaintiff.”

[B]y deposing numerous IT specialists with two Trump companies—the Trump Organization and Trump Hotels—lawyers for Power Plant gradually chipped away at it. Finally, during a deposition nine months after he had signed the deceptive affidavit, the same Trump executive admitted his assertions in it were untrue. In fact, an IBM Domino server for emails and other files had been installed in 1999, . . . These startling revelations changed nothing, however, because there was no trove of documents. The Trump records had been destroyed.

There is much more, but you get the drift: Trump and his companies are pathological lies and have nothing but contempt for the legal system and view others as suckers and targets for abuse.   The Politicususa piece follows this theme of just how crooked and unscrupulous Trump is in fact.  Here are highlights:

[H]ow many people realize that Donald Trump, at this moment, has 75 – SEVENTY-FIVE – legal issues hanging over his head.

He’s lying 20 to 35 times a day and has his followers – and with much less excuse, the mainstream media – thoroughly distracted by the Clinton email non-story so he can divert their attention away from his own legally questionable activities.

USA TODAY reported at the end of October that “Just two weeks before Election Day, at least 75 of the 4,000-plus lawsuits involving Trump and his businesses remain open, according to an ongoing, nationwide analysis of state and federal court records by USA TODAY.”

If one thing has become clear throughout this election it is that Trump does not pay his bills. Earlier, we had covered an incident where he had declined to finish paying a Florida contractor for work it did on one of his resorts, having decided that the contractor had been “paid enough,” even though it wasn’t the agreed-upon amount. Trump got nailed by the court for $300K in attorney’s fees in that case.

Just a few examples from USA TODAY’s investigation:

Trump faces significant open litigation tied to his businesses: angry members at his Jupiter, Fla. golf course say they were cheated out of refunds on their dues and a former employee at the same club claims she was fired after reporting sexual harassment. There’s a fraud case brought by Trump University students who say the mogul’s company ripped them off for tens of thousands in tuition for a sham real estate course.

Trump is also defending lawsuits tied to his campaign. A disgruntled GOP political consultant sued for $4 million saying Trump defamed her. Another suit, a class action, says the campaign violated consumer protection laws by sending unsolicited text messages.
 As pointed out by USA TODAY’s Nick Penzenstadler and John Kelly, these lawsuits will dog Trump into the White House, should he win. He will have no immunity because he is president. And America – and the world – will be treated to the spectacle of the President of the United States having to make trip after trip to the court to settle his highly questionable personal and business affairs.

There are harassment cases, sex discrimination lawsuits, fraud, unpaid bills, racist comments, defamation, cases involving Trump University. As USA TODAY notes, “as recently as last spring…New York had to take legal action to collect $8,578 in unpaid taxes on the Trump-owned company that owns the trademark Boeing 757 that jetted the mogul to campaign rallies across the country.”

And those 75 cases will likely grow. . . . All the facts – including the new disclosures about Trump’s ties to a Russian server and his potentially illegal ploy to avoid paying taxes – make it clear that if Trump the deadbeat liar drains the swamp, he will be the first one down the drain.

Many in the German media in the 1930's by laziness and default aided and abetted Hitler.  The parallels with the American media today are very disturbing.   Trump is a cheat and a perpetual liar, plain and simple.

Is Russia Working to Elect Donald Trump?

READER WARNING:  This is a long but very important post.  The mainstream new media is jumping all over the release of hacked DNC e-mails that have caused a bit of a firestorm and lead to the resignation of the DNC Chairwoman, Debbie -Wasserman-Shultz.   What they have ignored for the most part is how the e-mails may have come to be released: by Russian hackers perhaps seeking to aid in electing Donald Trump in November.  Why?  Because Trump seemingly is pushing the GOP toward more pro-Russia stances and Trump has even suggested weakening NATO - a dream come true for Vladimir Putin.  Vanity Fair looks at the e-mail story.  Another story - in my view, a much more important story - from Talking Points Memo looks at Donald Trump's financial ties to Vladimir Putin's henchmen.  I strongly urge readers to read the full Talking Points Memo piece.  Here are excerpts that should be VERY disturbing to all Americans:

Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin's increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there's quite a bit more to the story. At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

Let's start with the basic facts. There is a lot of Russian money flowing into Trump's coffers and he is conspicuously solicitous of Russian foreign policy priorities.

I'll list off some facts.

1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.

2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here's a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration ...

Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan.  Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."  Sounds completely legit. 

Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.

4. Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.

5. Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you're not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom's role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin's policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money.

7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform.  . . . . Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care. With one big exception: Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine.

This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin's orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence.

There are many other things people are alleging about hacking and all manner of other mysteries. But those points are highly speculative, some verging on conspiratorial in their thinking. I ignore them here because I've wanted to focus on unimpeachable, undisputed and publicly known facts. These alone paint a stark and highly troubling picture.

To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump's direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He's the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out 'what's going on' as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.

There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.

As for the e-mail release, here are excerpts from Vanity Fair:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager thinks last week’s hack and subsequent document dump of Democratic National Committee e-mails is coming from a controversial source. Robby Mook told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he believes Russian hackers perpetrated the leak to help Donald Trump win the election in November.

WikiLeaks released some 19,252 e-mails and 8,034 attachments that were stolen from the D.N.C. Revealed in the cache: that some D.N.C. operatives mocked supporters of Clinton’s primary challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders, that a Politico reporter sent a pre-publication draft of his article to the D.N.C. for review, and that Debbie Wasserman Schultz once asked for an inordinate number of tickets to the hit Broadway show Hamilton.

Mook’s claim that the hack was carried out by Russian operatives isn’t plucked out of thin air. The D.N.C. has had its files attacked by Russian hackers before. CNN reports that two “Russian intelligence-linked cyberattack groups” were in the D.N.C.’s networks. A Russian hacker who goes by the moniker “Guccifer 2.0” has claimed responsibility for the hack. Mook says this comes after the new Republican platform was announced, changes to which made it “more pro-Russian.”

Mook’s public stance, however, is an interesting move from the Clinton campaign. Painting the D.N.C. hack as a project of Vladimir Putin shifts the narrative away from the controversies contained within the hack itself. Instead of headlines about the suggestion that the D.N.C. was behind Clinton from the get-go, the story becomes about Republicans forming ties with an increasingly aggressive Russia.

Josh Marshall, the editor of Talking Points Memo, highlighted another troubling connection between Trump and the Kremlin. In a post on his editor’s blog, Marshall delineates the evidence that suggests Trump “appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin.” Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, also has ties to pro-Russian leaders. He lobbied for them. It’s quite damning, and worth a read.

New Evidence That Football Destroys Players' Brains

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

I will confess at the outset that I am NOT a fan of football, especially at the pro-level for a number of reasons.  First, I see pro-football as the current incarnation of the Roman gladiatorial games of old.  In my view, the wider public should not get sport and entertainment out of seeing others injure one another.  And then there are the obscene salaries that pro-football players make that are totally out of any relation to their positive contributions to society.  Adding to my aggravation is the fact that many members of the public pay not attention to world events, politics and other things that really matter in where society and the globe are headed, yet they know every detail about dumb lug football players some of whom strike  me as having the same intellect as a Percheron or a  Clydesdale (maybe even less).  Now, with a grandson, I worry the he - or more likely his father - may want him to play football when he gets older.  Therefore, I am happy that more and more studies are revealing that the sport is inherently injurious to players. Mother Jones looks at new study findings:

A new joint study by the US Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University found that 87 out of 91 former NFL players who donated their brains for examination showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease also known as CTE. The report out of the nation's largest brain bank, which received a $1 million research grant from the NFL in 2010, supports prior research suggesting that playing football could have long-lasting neurological effects over the course of an athlete's life.

As reported first by Frontline:

In total, the [Boston University] lab has found CTE in the brain tissue in 131 out of 165 individuals who, before their deaths, played football either professionally, semi-professionally, in college or in high school.

Forty percent of those who tested positive were the offensive and defensive linemen who come into contact with one another on every play of a game, according to numbers shared by the brain bank with FRONTLINE. That finding supports past research suggesting that it's the repeat, more minor head trauma that occurs regularly in football that may pose the greatest risk to players, as opposed to just the sometimes violent collisions that cause concussions.

CTE can only be accurately identified posthumously, and it's important to remember that many of the ex-players who donated their brains to BU did so because they thought they might have the disease. Still, the results are more bad news for the NFL, which for years has been criticized over its handling of concussions and brain research. The league has long denied a link between the sport and long-term brain disease . . . but in April it gained approval for a $1 billion settlement with about 5,000 retired players, resolving concussion-related lawsuits.

Dr. Ann McKee, who is the chief neuropathologist at the brain bank, told Frontline: "People think that we're blowing this out of proportion, that this is a very rare disease and that we're sensationalizing it. My response is that where I sit, this is a very real disease. We have had no problem identifying it in hundreds of players."

A Third Redistricting Lawsuit Targets Virginia's Gerrymandered Districts

Neither major political party is innocent when it comes to utilizing gerrymandered districts to retain power.  However, during the last redistricting round, the Virginia GOP took the rigging of districts to a new level, in no small part because it is the only way to hold power when the party's agenda is so increasingly out of step with the views and desires of more and more Virginians.  Two lawsuits are pending challenging the ridiculous districts the Republicans force through in 2011.  Now a third lawsuit has been filed.  The GOP will vigorously fight any changes because compact, contiguous districts could spell the end of GOP domination of the Virginia General Assembly, especially the House of Delegates.  The Washington Post looks at the latest lawsuit.  Here are highlights:

A group of Virginia residents sued state elections officials Monday over 11 legislative districts — including some in Northern Virginia — charging that they violated the state Constitution by enforcing election maps that too easily protect incumbents.

The plaintiffs argue that during the last round of redistricting, in 2011, the General Assembly drew the districts to give incumbents the best chance at holding on to their seats at the expense of geographical compactness, which the Constitution requires. If successful, the suit, which is the third recent court challenge to the state’s elections maps, could scrap the maps and send vulnerable lawmakers scrambling to compete in newly drawn districts.

The House and Senate districts in question are spread all over Virginia and include parts of Prince William County, Manassas, Manassas Park, Fairfax County and Arlington County.

“Our goal is to influence the courts to require the legislature to honor the Constitution when it draws political districts and not subjugate the Constitution to blatant political gerrymandering,” he told reporters outside the courthouse.

The lawsuit targets five House districts and six Senate districts. In the overwhelmingly Republican House, bills intended to reduce the influence of politics on redistricting have quietly disappeared in subcommittees without going to a floor vote. . . .  the Senate, where Republicans have a one-vote edge, passed three nonpartisan redistricting bills in this year’s session only to see them die in the House.

Two previous lawsuits argued that lawmakers illegally packed African American voters into both state and federal districts, diluting their influence elsewhere. One of the suits challenging a single congressional district was successful, and a federal court is sorting out a new map; in the second, judges are still deliberating challenges to a dozen House districts.

The lawsuit argues that all of the 11 targeted districts were intentionally drawn in serpentine shapes to include enough partisan households to ensure the reelection of incumbents. One district was described as a “jagged, U-shaped district surrounding and interlocking,” with another district “like a piece of a poorly designed puzzle.”

In recent years, redistricting in Virginia has helped attract candidates who appeal to the most conservative and liberal extremes, which advocates for nonpartisan redistricting blame for bringing Washington’s gridlock and polarization to Richmond.

ACLU to Challenge Pennsylvania Gay Marriage Ban

As noted in a post back in March, a Harvard Law School professor predicted that combined decisions as handed down in Perry and Windsor would open a flood gate of lawsuits challenging gay marriage bans and disparities on federal benefits based on the state of one's residency even if couples legally married in a pro-gay marriage state.  That prediction seems to be about to come true as the ACLU prepares to file a lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania's gay marriage ban.  Similar lawsuits are likely to multiple in other states with gay marriage bans.  The Daily Times looks at this development.  Here are story highlights:

The American Civil Liberties Union said it will file the first known legal challenge Tuesday seeking to overturn a state law effectively banning same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania, the only northeastern state that doesn't allow it or civil unions.

The lawsuit, to be filed in federal court in Harrisburg, also will ask a federal judge to prevent state officials from stopping gay couples from getting married. It names Gov. Tom Corbett, Attorney General Kathleen Kane and three other officials. The plaintiffs are one widow, 10 couples and one of the couples' two teenage daughters, and they include four couples who were legally married in other states but whose marriages go unrecognized by the state of Pennsylvania.

The plaintiffs, including Deb and Susan Whitewood, who have been together for 22 years, said their willingness to join the lawsuit was driven both by a desire to have the same legal and financial protections afforded to opposite-sex couples and the emotional satisfaction of seeking social justice.

"I wanted our relationship to be respected like everybody else's relationship," said Susan Whitewood, 49, who lives in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bridgeville. "That was first and foremost the reason for doing this. I wasn't looking for legal validation."

Her 16-year-old daughter, Abbey, who is also a plaintiff, said she is excited to fight for her family's values.

In the lawsuit, the ACLU said banning gay marriage satisfies no legitimate government or child welfare concerns of the state, since Pennsylvania judges routinely grant adoptions to same-sex couples that are viewed as in the best interest of the child.  "It serves only to disparage and injure lesbian and gay couples and their families," the lawsuit said.  For instance, the suit says, same-sex couples do not have access to a long list of legal and financial protections as do opposite-sex couples.

Those include an inheritance tax exemption for widows; an automatic power of attorney for spouses in health care decisions; damages and legal recourse under workers' compensation laws for a spouse who dies or is injured in the workplace; assistance programs for same-sex widows and widowers of military personnel and veterans; pension and survivor benefits for widows and widowers of public employees; Family Medical Leave Act provisions; and a spouse's Social Security retirement benefits.

In Pennsylvania, recent polls show a majority are in favor of gay marriage. In 2012, the state voted for President Barack Obama, a Democrat who supports gay marriage, and in 2010 for Corbett, a Republican who supports a constitutional amendment to permanently ban it. Bills to legalize gay marriage have gone nowhere in recent years in the Legislature, and Corbett's predecessor, Democrat Ed Rendell, did not favor the legalization of same-sex marriage while in office.

Complaint Filed to Challenge Illinois ‘Ex-Gay’ Therapist’s Professional License

In a move that needs to be undertaken around the country, several organizations have filed a complaint in Illinois seeking revocation of the professional license of clinical social worker (pictured at left) who practices scientifically-discredited “reparative therapy.”  Given that every legitimate mental health and medical association in the nation condemns so-called "reparative therapy" - a/k/a "pray away the gay therapy" - the thrust of the complaint is that the clinical social worker is acting unethically and endangering his clients.  Reparative therapy has recently been banned in California for those under 18 years of age and a similar ban effort may be launched in New Jersey.  Until such bans spread nationwide, complaints such as this one in Illinois may be the way to shut down the lies and snake oil peddled by the "ex-gay" ministry crowd and Christianist therapists who put their extremist personal beliefs (and money) ahead of the well being of their clients.  A copy of the complaint can be found here.  Here are highlights from Truth Wins Out:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, and the American Psychoanalytic Association filed a complaint today against Paul McNulty, a state-licensed clinical social worker who practices scientifically-discredited “reparative therapy” in Bloomington, Illinois. The groups lodged their complaint with the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, the agency that oversees professional licensing in that state.

In the complaint, SPLC Deputy Legal Director Christine Sun notes that the department “has the authority ‘to suspend or revoke a license, refuse to issue or renew a license or take other disciplinary action, based upon its finding of unethical, unauthorized, or unprofessional conduct.’” She also points out that bringing bias into the patient-counselor relationship is is prohibited, concluding:

“By offering and embracing scientifically unsound and potentially harmful services that reflect prejudice, Mr. McNulty appears to be in violation of the State’s licensing standards.”

McNulty’s profile boasts of his memberships in Exodus International and NARTH and says that he is “passionate” about his therapy with males “ in the areas of relationships, sexuality, same-sex attraction, and various addictions.”

I applaud this set in shutting down these therapists and bogus "clinics" like that of Michele Bachmann and her husband "Marcia" Bachmann.  A voodoo practitioner or witch doctor has just as much likelihood of "changing" someone's sexual orientation as this therapists who in my view are nothing more than unethical, parasitic quacks who prey on gays or more frequently the parents of gays.   Not by coincidence, frequently these merchants of the ex-gay myth receive financing from virulent anti-gay organizations and SPLC registered hate groups.