Random Politics & Religion #10

(Newser) – The rate at which women die in Texas from pregnancy-related complications is higher than in any other US state—or even in the rest of the developed world, reports the Guardian. A study in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology found that the maternal mortality rate in Texas doubled in a two-year span, from about 18 per 100,000 births in 2010—a year with 72 deaths—to about 36 in 2012, which saw 148 deaths. In the 48 states not including Texas and California, the rate was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2014, up 27% from 18.8 in 2000. California was the only state to see a drop. The authors say the hike in the death rate in Texas—no other state saw a similar uptick—is difficult to explain "in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval," per the Guardian.

The Huffington Post notes the rise coincided with the state slashing health care funding for women. Women's health advocates blame a Republican-led state legislature that gutted Texas' family-planning funding by two-thirds—$73.6 million out of its $111.5 million was cut in 2011, the year that maternal deaths spiked—forcing the shuttering of 80 clinics that provided birth control, cancer screenings, and other services. Dr. Lisa Hollier, who heads a state task force looking into the problem, told the Dallas Morning News that they don't "have a specific answer at this time." Dr. Daniel Grossman of the University of Texas at Austin called the study findings a "tragedy" and an "embarrassment" and told the Morning News, "This is a problem we should be able to address and fix."

Ah, #10, the one Rooks should've made.

He refused. :(

Red threads are not to be used for frivolous shitposting

Red posts, on the other hand, are shitposteriffic as always

Thanks for not shutting this down over the weekend.

Red posts, on the other hand, are shitposteriffic as always

In 2002, the Supreme Court barred the execution of the intellectually disabled. But it gave states a lot of leeway to decide just who was, in the language of the day, “mentally HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE.”

Texas took a creative approach, adopting what one judge there later called “the Lennie standard.” That sounds like a reference to an august precedent, but it is not. The Lennie in question is Lennie Small, the dim, hulking farmhand in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”

The Lennie in question is fictional.

Still, Judge Cathy Cochran of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals wrote in 2004 that Lennie should be a legal touchstone.

“Most Texas citizens might agree that Steinbeck’s Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt” from the death penalty, she wrote. “But, does a consensus of Texas citizens agree that all persons who might legitimately qualify for assistance under the social services definition of mental retardation be exempt from an otherwise constitutional penalty?”

Judge Cochran, who later said she had reread “all of Steinbeck” in the 1960s while living above Cannery Row in Monterey, Calif., listed seven factors that could spare someone like Lennie, whose rash killing of a young woman was seemingly accidental.

For instance: “Has the person formulated plans and carried them through or is his conduct impulsive?”

And: “Can the person hide facts or lie effectively?”

This fall, in Moore v. Texas, No. 15-797, the United States Supreme Court will consider whether the Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas’ highest court for criminal matters, went astray last year in upholding the death sentence of Bobby J. Moore based in part on outdated medical criteria and in part on the Lennie standard.

Mr. Moore killed James McCarble, a 70-year-old grocery clerk, during a robbery in 1980 in Houston.

No one disputes that Mr. Moore is at least mentally challenged or, as a psychologist testifying for the prosecution put it at a 2014 hearing, that he most likely “suffers from borderline intellectual functioning.”

Mr. Moore reached his teenage years without understanding how to tell time, the days of the week or the relationship between subtraction and addition. His I.Q. has been measured as high as 78 and as low as 57, averaging around 70. On the other hand, the psychologist testified, the young Bobby Moore had shown skill at mowing lawns and playing pool.

The state judge who heard this evidence, relying on current medical standards on intellectual disability, concluded that executing Mr. Moore would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

But the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the ruling, saying the judge had made a mistake in “employing the definition of intellectual disability presently used.”

Under medical standards from 1992, endorsed in Judge Cochran’s 2004 opinion, Mr. Moore was not intellectually disabled, the appeals court said. The court added that the seven factors listed in the 2004 opinion weighed heavily against Mr. Moore. He had, for instance, worn a wig during the robbery and tried to hide his shotgun in two plastic bags, which prosecutors said was evidence of forethought and planning.

In dissent, Judge Elsa Alcala said the 1992 medical standards used by the majority were “outdated and erroneous.” As for the seven factors, she wrote that “the Lennie standard does not meet the requirements of the federal Constitution.”

“I would set forth a standard,” Judge Alcala wrote, “that does not include any reference to a fictional character.”

In a brief, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, defended the seven factors, though without mentioning Lennie. He also urged the Supreme Court to let judges and juries, rather than medical professionals, decide who should be spared the death penalty.

That echoed a 2014 dissent from Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who said it was a bad idea to rely on the shifting views of medical experts to decide who must be spared execution based on intellectual disability. The majority in that case, Hall v. Florida, struck down Florida’s I.Q. score cutoff of 70 as too rigid.

In doing so, Justice Alito wrote, the majority had effectively overruled the part of its 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision that had allowed states to use their own definitions of intellectual disability, and instead imposed “the evolving standards of professional societies, most notably the American Psychiatric Association.”

An article last year in the Yale Law Journal presented an intriguing alternative to the evolving standards that bothered Justice Alito. Drawing on historical materials, Michael Clemente, then a law student at Yale and now a law clerk for a federal judge, demonstrated that the original understanding of the Eighth Amendment, based on English common law, barred the execution of people whose mental abilities were below those of an ordinary child of 14.

Such a standard, steeped in originalism, a mode of constitutional interpretation embraced by Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, would seem to spare both Mr. Moore and Lennie. On the other hand, it is not clear that Lennie himself would have escaped execution under Texas’ Lennie standard. He did, for instance, try to conceal his crime, hiding his victim’s body.

In a 1937 interview with The New York Times, John Steinbeck said he had based Lennie on a man who had killed a ranch foreman but was shown leniency. “Lennie was a real person,” Mr. Steinbeck said. “He’s in an insane asylum in California right now.”

Seventy-five years later, Mr. Steinbeck’s son Thomas heard about Texas’ Lennie standard.

“The character of Lennie was never intended to be used to diagnose a medical condition like intellectual disability,” Thomas Steinbeck said in a 2012 statement. “I find the whole premise to be insulting, outrageous, ridiculous and profoundly tragic.”

“I am certain that if my father, John Steinbeck, were here, he would be deeply angry and ashamed to see his work used in this way,” he said. “And the last thing you ever wanted to do was to make John Steinbeck angry.”

A federal judge in Texas has blocked the Obama administration's order that requires public schools to let transgender students use the bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their chosen gender identity.

In a temporary injunction signed Sunday, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor ruled that the federal education law known as Title IX "is not ambiguous" about sex being defined as "the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth."

Texas and 12 other states challenged the White House directive as unconstitutional.

The judge also sided with Republican state leaders who argued that schools should have been allowed to weigh in before the White House directive was announced in May.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, had argued that halting the Obama order before school began was necessary because districts risked losing federal education dollars if they did not comply. Federal officials did not explicitly make that threat upon issuing the directive, although they also never ruled out the possibility.

"This president is attempting to rewrite the laws enacted by the elected representatives of the people and is threating to take away federal funding from schools to force them to conform," Paxton said. "That cannot be allowed to continue, which is why we took action to protect states and school districts."

The Justice Department issued a brief statement saying it was disappointed in the ruling and was now reviewing its options.

The ruling does not prohibit schools that allow transgender students to use the facilities of their choice from continuing to do so.

Transgender rights in public schools are a growing legal battleground. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Virginia school board can block for now a transgender male from using the boys' restroom while justices decide whether to fully intervene.

Paul Castillo is a Dallas attorney for the gay rights group Lambda Legal, which had urged the court to let the White House directive stand. He said the latest ruling was a continuation of attacks on transgender people.

"I think today is going to be a hard day for transgender students," Castillo said. "The decision is certainly emotional and certainly an attack on transgender students' dignity."

The federal government issued the mandate days after the Justice Department sued North Carolina over a state law that requires people to use public bathrooms that correspond with the sex on their birth certificate, which U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch likened to policies of racial segregation. Republicans have argued such laws are commonsense privacy safeguards.

The Obama administration had told the court that recipients of federal education dollars were "clearly on notice" that anti-discrimination polices must be followed. Texas alone gets roughly $10 billion in federal education funds.

The lawsuit was filed in May by Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah and Georgia, and the Republican governors of Maine, Mississippi and Kentucky. Two small school districts in Arizona and Texas, which have fewer than 600 students combined and no transgender persons on their campuses, also joined the effort to prevent the directive from being enforced.

Last year, O'Connor granted an order that temporarily blocked federal rules that would have expanded medical leave benefits to some gay couples.

Our country doesn't have enough problems if we're worrying about where trans people ***.

But what about guys who say that they are really girls going into women's locker rooms, and not getting in trouble for it?

But what about guys who say that they are really girls going into women's locker rooms, and not getting in trouble for it?

This executive order shouldn't have been issued. If Obama really had an issue about this, he should have taken it to Congress, and when they ignored him, he shouldn't have told schools to obey him or lose federal funding from it.

He isn't supposed to be a monarch, but he is certainly acting like one.

All none of them.

All none of them.

This rule doesn't help at all, except pushes Obama's agenda on public schools under threat of federal funding.

Well, considering that this isn't a law, but a rule that Obama decreed to schools, you are partially right.

But to say that nobody would do that would also be saying that only transgenders will use this "rule" honestly.

Which we both know that won't happen. All this "rule" will do is let the pervert kids get away with peeping. Transgender children, among other issues they have, aren't going to be effected one way or another on this issue. There are so few of these children that the schools already know who they are and already made accommodations for most of them.

This rule doesn't help at all, except pushes Obama's agenda on public schools under threat of federal funding.

What kinda bathrooms do you guys have anyway? We've always had 1 person bathrooms here in school so this isn't even an issue

1 person meaning only 1 person at a time or 1 bathroom for the entire school?

Because either of those I can see that.

1 person at a time, several bathrooms

1 person at a time, several bathrooms

Ours are multiple people at a time with stalls and standing urinals. Ever seen an American movie with public restrooms? Like that pretty much.

Ours are multiple people at a time with stalls and standing urinals. Ever seen an American movie with public restrooms? Like that pretty much.