hucowmilker

[hucowmilker]

A Mormon Mom Was Barred From Entering Temples After Breastfeeding Her Baby At Church

A Mormon woman attending church in northern Utah with her four kids and husband sat down in a foyer last month, and eventually started breastfeeding her 19-month-old baby. It was a routine Sunday for the mother, who spoke to BuzzFeed News but asked to remain anonymous, until after the meetings ended and her bishop — a local lay leader akin to a pastor — called her in for a talk. “He called me in and told me that people had complained,” the woman said, “and they were just worried about the young men sexualizing my breastfeeding of my daughter.”

The conversation, she said, was “ridiculous.” “I basically told him that I wasn’t going to change what I’m doing and that the Lord is the only one that can get me to change my standpoint on this issue,” she recalled. Two weeks later, the woman said her stake president — a leader one rung above a bishop — called her in for a meeting and told her she would need to cover up while nursing “because it’s a modesty issue.” The woman said the church leader quoted a pamphlet intended for teenagers and said women “should be clothed and modest at all times so that men don’t have dirty thoughts.”

The woman, who was accompanied by her husband to the meeting, described the encounter with the stake president as contentious, recalling that she walked out three separate times. During one of those absences, she said the stake president insisted her husband needed to “control” her behavior. “While I was gone he told my husband that he needed to control me,” she continued.

When both the woman and her husband refused to budge, the stake president responded by telling them he wouldn’t sign their “temple recommends” — documents that provide Mormons access to the religion’s most sacred buildings, as well as to rites that members of the faith believe are essential for their salvation. Temples are also where Mormons hold weddings, as well as ordinances such as baptisms for the dead which are meant as a way of offering salvation to deceased ancestors.

The incident, which occurred last month, tipped off a long-simmering debate within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known commonly as the Mormon church, which has for decades foregrounded support for families as one of its most cherished values. And it has prompted the launch of a campaign to push church officials to clearly define how and where mothers are allowed to breastfeed their children.  

Carrie Salisbury, who has advocated for the church to create a policy on breastfeeding and interviewed the northern Utah woman for a blog post last week, said many other breastfeeding women have been told to cover up at church or step out of public view, though this was the first time she had heard of a local leader withholding a temple recommend.

“It’s like the comfort and the needs of the mother and the child are coming second to the comfort of the people around her,” Salisbury said. The northern Utah mother said she knows of other women who have split with the faith over similar experiences. “I’ve spoken with several other moms who have had this exact same problem,” she said. “They’ve actually even left the church because of it.”

Salisbury said the problem is the lack of a clear, church-wide policy. Laws on public breastfeeding vary from state to state, but in general it is a protected act in the US. However, the women who spoke to BuzzFeed News said that they were uncertain about the legality of breastfeeding in church because chapels are private property. They consequently want the church to take a stand.

[hucowmilker]

A Pregnant Black Woman is in Prison for Defending Herself

Last summer, a black woman in Michigan defended herself, her mother, and her 2-year-old daughter with a registered (and unloaded) gun against a woman who she and her attorneys say tried to hit them with a car. She was a concealed carry permit holder and living in an open carry state — one with a “stand your ground” law in place. Ra’s case is yet another instance of a black gun owner, with the permits to legally carry, defending themselves against violence — and getting punished for it.

Now, Siwatu-Salama Ra is serving a two-year prison sentence at Huron Valley Correctional Facility for felonious assault and felony firearm convictions. She’s seven months pregnant, and according to her attorneys, she’s receiving insufficient medical care — including being shackled to her bed during a vaginal exam — even though her pregnancy is high-risk. The case is under appeal, but the judge deciding Ra’s fate, Thomas Hathaway, has already denied a request to postpone Ra’s sentence until she gives birth.

I spoke with Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, who told me, “Siwatu should be home getting ready to deliver her baby, and being with her family. Instead, she is suffering and isolated being punished for protecting herself, her child and [her] mother. This is a shameful, shameful reality, and it’s clear that we need to challenge a criminal justice system that would try a pregnant black woman for upholding ‘stand your ground’ laws and her Second Amendment rights.”

While concealed carry permit application numbers for both black Americans and women are rising steadily, and the number of black gun owners in total has spiked since the 2016 election, they have long been unable to access the same protections their white neighbors enjoy when it comes to exercising their gun rights, including in “stand your ground” states.

The Urban Institute found that in “stand your ground” states, when white shooters kill black people, 34 percent of the resulting homicides are deemed justifiable. Only 3 percent of deaths are ruled justifiable when the shooter is black and the victim is white. Even when black shooters kill black people, those shootings are less likely to be deemed justifiable in a court of law than those involving white shooters who kill white people.

Maj Toure, founder of Black Guns Matter, a gun rights association aimed at urban communities and black Americans, told me that too often, local governments “drop the ball” when it comes to protecting the gun rights of black Americans. He referenced the case of Marissa Alexander, who served three years in prison for firing a single shot near her husband, who she said had threatened to kill her.

“You have situations where women defending their lives are sent to jail for the dumbest shit on earth. [A man] attempts to attack [a woman] and instead of killing the man, [she] shoots in the air, and that woman is facing years,” he said. “Those scenarios are outrageous and mass media and public outrage is heightened, but justice for these situations is trash.”

Making matters worse, while Black Lives Matter and other left-leaning civil rights organizations have been publicizing Ra’s case and others like it, mainstream pro-gun groups, including the National Rifle Association, have been dispiritingly quiet about the incident — though the “stand your ground” law in place in Michigan, passed in 2006, was made possible by a group working in close contact with the NRA.

[hucowmilker]

Ordinary Iranians on Trump Talks Offer: ‘Why Not Try the Americans?’

Iran’s leaders cannot stand the thought of talking to the United States and say President Trump cannot be trusted. But Jamshid Moniri, a 45-year-old building contractor sweating under the Tehran summer sun, summed up what many ordinary Iranians think. “Of course we should talk to Trump,” he said on Tuesday. “What is wrong with talks? We’d be nuts not to talk to him.” The day before, Mr. Trump, who withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran in May despite Iran’s documented compliance, said he was ready to sit down with Iran’s leaders “without preconditions.”

“I’ll meet with anybody,” Mr. Trump said in Washington. “If they want to meet, I’ll meet. Anytime they want.” On Tuesday, in Tehran, Mr. Trump’s open invitation seemed to be on everybody’s mind. Increasingly desperate, many say they would welcome any option that could ease Iran’s economic quagmire. The Iranian currency, the rial, has lost 80 percent of its value during the past year — and nearly 20 percent just in the past few days. Foreign investors have left to avoid new American sanctions that take effect starting in less than a week. And almost every week low-level protests over prices or wages erupt somewhere in the country that have the potential to spread if the economic free-fall worsens.

Mr. Moniri, the contractor, said he feared that what is considered bad now could get a lot worse. “So we should welcome talks,” he said. “Our leaders should welcome this opportunity.” But if anything, Iran’s leaders seem paralyzed by Mr. Trump’s offer. Direct talks with the United States go against their ideology. And in their minds, sitting down publicly with Mr. Trump, whom they have called particularly ignorant, capricious, arrogant and rude, would be an especially humiliating submission to imperialism and pressure.

When dealing with the United States over the past decades, Iranian leaders have often preferred to do it through secret talks, far from ordinary Iranians, who are bombarded daily with organized anti-Americanism from their schoolbooks to state television.  “There can only be talks when Trump respects the signatures of the U.S. administration in the nuclear agreement,” said Hossein Sheikholeslam, a senior adviser to Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. “Trump should reverse the pullout from the nuclear deal, or else there will be no talks.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, who has enshrined anti-Americanism as a tenet of his legacy, made clear after Mr. Trump renounced the nuclear agreement that he would never talk with the American leader. “Trump will wither away, perish, and his body will decompose, but, the Islamic Republic will still be thriving,” Mr. Khamenei proclaimed in a speech.

His view was reinforced on Tuesday by the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the powerful paramilitary force that is intensely loyal to Mr. Khamenei. “Mr. Trump! Iran is not North Korea to accept your offer for a meeting,” said the commander, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, in remarks quoted by Reuters. “Even U.S. presidents after you will not see that day.”

[hucowmilker]

Obama Administration Eases Marijuana Research Requirements

And things aren’t likely going to get better under the new administration, according to Bostwick. “From what little I’ve seen, there’s no particular reason to believe that the new president and his cabinet is going to be sympathetic towards marijuana as a medication,” he told The Scientist. “I don’t have any reason to believe our new president … is going to be easy on marijuana or that there’s going to be a whole lot of either wisdom or priority about declaring it something that needs to be studied.”

Ware, a Canadian, said he doesn’t know what to expect from the US in terms of its official stance on marijuana and research into the drug’s effects. But he remains hopeful. “I fundamentally hope that the science is what drives the policy and not something else,” he said.

“That National Academies report has identified a lot of gaps that still exist that we need answers to,” Ware added. “We shouldn’t be having these conversations 10 years from now, given that things are opening up, there is access, there are people will to take serious looks… . I think we really have to gear the science up to answering these questions.”  

Studying the health effects of marijuana just got a little easier. In a statement released last week (June 23), The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the elimination of one of four regulatory hurdles that researchers must clear in order to study medical applications for the drug.

“The president has often said that drug policy should be dictated by unimpeded science instead of ideology, and it’s great to see the Obama administration finally starting to take some real action to back that up,” Tom Angell of the pro-legalization group, Marijuana Majority told the Washington Post.

According to the Washington Post, HHS determined that the regulatory step, which entailed a review by Public Health Services (PHS) was redundant with another required review by the Food and Drug Administration. Drug Policy News reports that the Clinton administration installed the PHS review to keep the growing field of marijuana research under strict controls.

“I think it’s a sensible change; but people are being delusional if they think this will result in a flood of research on the drug,” Kevin Sabet of the anti-legalization group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, told the Washington Post. Marijuana researchers still face other unique barriers, such as the requirement to obtain all marijuana plants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

“This is progress, but the White House should also end the NIDA’s unique monopoly on marijuana production, and allow private entities to grow marijuana, thus facilitating even more important research,” Bill Piper, the Director of Drug Policy Alliance’s Office of National Affairs, told Drug Policy News.