Category Archives: Eugenics

But when a justice issues an opinion in connection with a dispute that the court has expressly declined to decide, the justice is acting outside this narrow constitutional mandate and using his or her position to influence social issues in just the way the framers thought should be left to the people and their elected representatives to resolve.

When the court declined in 2019 to accept an appeal of an Indiana law prohibiting abortions motivated by the sex, race or disability status of the fetus, Justice Thomas attached a long opinion indirectly arguing in favor of such laws by linking abortion to early-20th-century eugenics practices. Later that year, Justice Brett Kavanaugh strongly signaled that with his appointment to the court, there were a majority of conservative justices receptive to overturning old rulings giving Congress wide latitude to delegate lawmaking powers to administrative agencies. Far from acting as the dispassionate umpire of legal disputes the framers envisioned, Justice Kavanaugh was basically suggesting that new lawsuits seeking profound changes to our current system of government would be favorably received.

The issuance of cert-denial opinions also creates impartiality problems for justices obligated to resolve cases in as neutral, unbiased and fair-minded a manner as possible. To enable them to do this, the Constitution gives justices a strong position of independence from political pressures. Moreover, a federal statute reinforces this constitutional norm by requiring any justice or other federal judge to disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

And it has become routine for nominees to the court, in their Senate confirmation hearings, to refuse to answer questions about controversial legal issues like abortion and gun rights on the grounds that they might be prejudging an issue that could come before the court.

In cert-denial opinions, however, justices frequently prejudge legal questions in ways that create serious impartiality problems in cases the court later accepts for review. A stark example of this is the challenge to New Yorks requirement that people demonstrate a special self-defense need for carrying concealed firearms in public that the court is hearing on Wednesday. In a cert-denial opinion issued by Justice Thomas last year, when the court denied review of a ruling upholding a New Jersey concealed-carry requirement similar to New Yorks, he made a lengthy historical argument concluding that the Second Amendment protects some form of public carrying of firearms.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the argument now being made by the gun rights plaintiffs in the New York case. Just as troubling, in a portion of Justice Thomass opinion that Justice Kavanaugh joined, they criticized the main lower court ruling upholding New Yorks concealed-carry requirement. How can anyone seriously contend that the impartiality of these justices cannot reasonably be questioned in the New York case?

Some might argue that justices also create future impartiality problems when they issue unnecessary separate opinions or make gratuitous comments in cases the court actually does decide. These practices are not ideal and have been criticized, but in these situations at least the justices are issuing them in connection with deciding cases or controversies as authorized by the Constitution.

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Opinion | The Problem With the Supreme Courts Shadow Docket - The New York Times

Quantitative methods and the courses in which they are taught often present as if they are neutral, value-free and unbiased. However, the history of quantitative methods demonstrates an entanglement with eugenics, sexism, heterosexism, ableism and colonialism. Researchers have begun to grapple with those issues and propose ways forward in quantitative methods.

But what about the courses? How might quantitative methods courses and their instructors -- possibly unintentionally -- contribute to and reify oppressive ideologies? Too often, our taken-for-granted assumptions about the social world infiltrate the ways we teach quantitative methods. It is important for all of us who teach them to take seriously the idea of harm reduction in our teaching. We should do the work to understand how our classroom practices can reify and reinforce oppressive ideologies and narratives and look for opportunities to challenge and interrupt those ideologies and narratives. Continuing to use examples that perpetuate stereotypes about racial inferiority, that position women as subservient or objects of sexual desire, that treat trans and nonbinary individuals as disposable or imaginary, and that position ability differences as personal deficiencies inflicts ongoing harm on students, especially minoritized students.

For example, using gender as a pseudo-independent variable to illustrate methods of comparing two independent groups (like the independent samples t-test) can reinforce the false view that there are only two genders or that sex as assigned at birth and gender are interchangeable. There are also examples that compare outcomes like GRE scores by race, which can reinforce ideas of hierarchies of racial intelligence.

Quantitative methods instructors can take some simple steps to shift their teaching toward an equity orientation. They can review examples that are used in the class and replace any that:

Whenever possible, faculty should also consider using examples from real published research, even if those examples have to be contrived (for example, to produce very small data sets suitable for practicing the formulas) to match up with published patterns of results. An instructor might create a sample data set, for instance, that matches up with the results of recent work on racialized patterns in educational programs, patterns of segregation and discipline in public schools, or the ways teacher beliefs in learning styles can disadvantage students. Instructors need not have access to the original data -- they can use the published pieces to explain a research scenario to students and present simplified data that essentially reproduce the published pattern so students can learn analytic processes. In so doing, instructors also can and should make use of work authored by scholars of color, women, queer and trans researchers, and researchers with (dis)abilities, among others.

Often, when instructors seek to create fun or silly examples, they also inadvertently introduce racist, sexist, heterosexist and/or ableist stereotypes into the example. Instructors should instead consider intentionally selecting examples that demonstrate equity scholarship. As an example, my co-author Mwarumba Mwavita and I recently published a set of ANOVA design case studies, Design and Analysis in Educational Research, that focus on race and racism in education and are available for free on our SPSS or jamovi book websites. Other resources also exist, such as work on critical race research methodologies, using quantitative methods to pursue social justice ends and research methods for justice in education, along with many others.

Ive provided some basic moves that can make instruction more equitable. For instructors further along in their thinking about quantitative methods and the teaching of those methods with equity and justice in mind, I have additional suggestions:

We who teach quantitative methods can also do more to understand their histories and then critically reflect on how we might engage, renovate and rectify those methods. For example, we should share work on the use of racial statistics, white logics/methods, the ways that science has sometimes pathologized LGBTQ+ people and more. We should examine the human activity of statistics and methodologies with more intention. For example, while we make use of theories that people like the 19th-century mathematician Francis Galton developed, do we also reflect on his deep and avid support for eugenics? When we teach the ideas of people like Raymond B. Cattell, Robert Yerkes and Lewis Terman, how do we deal with their simultaneous writing on the dangers of immigrants and people of color and the threat they posed to the intelligence level of the United States?

What might it mean to deeply examine those histories with the students in our classes? I argue that we must more seriously consider the philosophical and epistemological framing of various methodologies and work with students to identify how to more equitably engage them in ways that move toward justice.

Continue reading here:

Ensuring equity, justice when teaching quantitative methods (opinion) - Inside Higher Ed

Vice's science-based Motherboard vertical is turning its attention to the DUNE-iverse. Motherboard Does Dune. For the last week, the staff has been hosting a weekly Twitch stream focusing on science topics related to the franchise. Motherboard staffers Edward Ongweso Jr., Gita Jackson, Jason Koebler, Brian Merchant, and Tim Marchman spoke with experts like Mikki Kendall about issues ranging from economics to ecology to eugenics to psychedelic spirituality.

In a series of conversations with fans, experts, and tech and science fiction writers, which will be aired onour new Twitch channel, we're going to get to the guts ofDune, and take a good hard look at one of our core but still stubbornly obscured science fictional mythologies.

We're going to look at howDunereflected and accelerated the counterculture's interest in psychedelics, drugs, and mysticism, and its controversial treatment of race and foregrounding of eugenics. We'll dive intoDune's parables about oil scarcity and threats to planetary ecology, its treatment of colonialism and geopolitics, its questionable appropriations of religion. We'll talk about how whileDunemay not ever have had a good movie adaptation, it launched an entire genre of video games that endures to this day.Duneis a weird beast.

When we're through, we'll understand a little better the future thatDunepredicted, the ways in which we are still living in that future, and why, for better and worse, its DNA, its spice, is everywhere we look.

You can listen to the audio from the three episodes (so far) via Motherboard's Cyber podcast stream.

Link:

Listen to the new Vice podcast all about the science of Dune - Boing Boing

The Biden Administration should avoid discrimination against people with disabilities in the redraft of the public charge immigration rule.

The public charge rule is slated for substantial changes under the Biden Administration. This rule establishes grounds for ineligibility for residency, visas, or entrance into the United States if an immigration officer determines that the applicant is likely to become dependent on certain government benefits.

On August 23, 2021, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking soliciting comments for a future regulatory proposal interpreting the public charge basis of exclusion for immigrants to the United States. DHS also set listening sessions and provided questions for commenters to address.

DHS plans to use this information to develop a new regulatory framework for determining whether to exclude individuals from immigration based on concerns that they may become a public charge. The public charge basis for exclusion is hugely important to individuals with disabilities who wish to immigrate to the United States or seek citizenship while already in the United States.

Historically, American immigration law has explicitly discriminated against people with disabilities. As late as the 1980s, American law prohibited 33 categories of immigrants from entry, including those with intellectual disabilities, mental illnesses, alcoholism, and people having a physical defect, disease, or disability.

In 1990, Congress repealed many of these categorical exclusions, but it retained the provision calling for inadmissibility of any alien who is likely at any time to become a public charge. As part of the immigration application process, an immigrant who may be designated as a public charge must undergo an evaluation of age, health, family status, assets, resources, financial status, and education and skills.

The public charge exclusion in the Immigration and Nationality Act traces its origins to just before the beginning of the 20th century. It was a creature of that periods obsession with the perceived decline of the American population stock and the contemporaneous rise of eugenicsthe pseudo-science of optimal human breeding and elimination of genetic inferiority.

Eugenics did not survive the Nazi regimes murderous efforts to put it into practice, but negative attitudes about disabilities, and fear of people with disabilities, never died out. Combined with the age-old bugaboo about welfare, negative attitudes about people with disabilities continue to sustain the application of the public charge exclusion to immigrants with disabling conditions.

The Trump Administration seized upon the public charge exclusion as part of its campaign against immigrants it considered unworthy of entry to the United States. It implemented a rule that greatly expanded the definition of a public charge. The rule designated as a public charge anyone receiving any amount of public cash assistance or specified in-kind aid, including Medicaid and SNAP food assistance, public housing, or other benefits, for 12 months of a 36-month period.

This new version of the public charge rule also stated that a heavily weighted negative factor for admissibility would be having a medical condition likely to require extensive treatment or interfering with the ability to provide for oneself, attend school, or work. Having a household income of less than 125 percent of the federal poverty guideline also counted against the immigrant in the likely-public-charge determination, as did being under 18 or over 61.

Before the Trump Administrations changes to the public charge rule, in-kind benefits such as Medicaid and SNAP were not considered in public charge determinations. Cash support that was not the primary basis of a persons livelihood also did not make a person a public charge. In addition, an affidavit of support from a sponsor would routinely result in waiver of exclusion on the basis of likelihood of becoming a public charge; in contrast, the new regulations restricted affidavits of support.

Because disabilities are often characterized as medical conditions, and immigrants with disabilities may have physical or mental impairments that cause them to rely on resources such as Medicaid or SNAP when and where the benefits are available and the need exists, the regulations effectively targeted disability.

The Trump-era rule had the predictable result of causing immigrants with and without disabilities to forgo needed medical and social support, undermining public health and harming immigrants family members, both citizens and noncitizens alike.

Advocates objected to the new rule, arguing that the rule was arbitrary and capricious because, among other things, it conflicted with the obligation of federal agencies under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to avoid discriminating against persons with disabilities. Although the public charge exclusion is a statutory one, the previous policies implementing the Immigration and Nationality Acts public charge provision had much less of a negative impact on individuals with disabilities. A return to previous policies offered a reasonable modification to avoid discrimination. Congress had in fact left these policies in place since 1999, when the Immigration and Nationality Service published them in a field guidance.

Soon after the Trump Administration changed the 1999 policy, several courts issued injunctions to stop implementation of the Administrations new rule. But the Supreme Court stayed the lower courts injunctions, allowing the new policy to take effect. Ultimately, the Biden Administration dropped the appeal of an injunction issued by the Northern District of Illinois, and DHS reverted to its 1999 policy.

When the Trump Administration was trying to enforce its rule, advocates for immigrants with disabilities cited the 1999 policy as the alternative. Now that the Biden Administration is asking for ideas about the new rule, the question is whether there might be something better than the 1999 policy. Since 1999, consciousness has grown about how thoughtlessly applying standard operating procedures to people with disabilities disadvantages them.

As the world has adapted to COVID-19 over the past year and a half, employers, schools, and others have drastically changed their usual operating practices. Many of those changes, such as allowing work from home and offering flexible employment schedules, serve as examples of potential reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.

It is time to recognize that physical and mental impairments do not necessarily increase the chances of becoming a public charge, particularly if employers and others follow the letter and spirit of the Americans with Disabilities Act by offering accommodations. And the availability of alternate means of supportas evidenced by an affidavit of supporteliminates the likelihood of someone becoming a public charge, even when reasonable accommodations might not be sufficient to enable self-support.

Exclusion from the community based on disability reinforces stereotypes, and is precisely the evil Congress meant to prevent with the disability discrimination laws. Rather than simply reverting to the 1999 policies, a better option would be to redraft the public charge rule to take into account the requirement of reasonable accommodations when evaluating the opportunity for self-support through employment.

Similarly, even if health status is to be considered under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the rule should recognize that a person with a physical or mental impairment can be quite healthy, even extraordinarily so, as the participants in the recent Paralympics demonstrated.

Most importantly, a new public charge rule should recognize that a person might use public benefits for a limited period without becoming a public charge in the sense of someone who needs cash public assistance as their primary source of income over the long term.

Now is the time to put a more realistic, less fearful approach to disability into the public charge rule.

This essay is part of a five-part series, entitledRegulation and Disability Rights.

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Taking Disability Discrimination Out of the Public Charge Rule - The Regulatory Review

An investigation into Imperial College Londons historical links to the British empire has recommended the university remove a statue and rename buildings and lecture theatres that celebrate scientists whose work advocated eugenics and racism.

The recommendations by the colleges independent history group are intended to address racial inequalities and improve inclusivity at the Russell Group university.

The report identified a number of problematic renowned scientific figures who have been honoured with buildings, rooms and academic positions in their names.

For example, it calls for a building named after the English biologist and anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley, lauded for determining that birds descended from dinosaurs, to be renamed due to his racist beliefs about human intelligence.

The report says Huxleys essay Emancipation Black and White espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence, a belief system of scientific racism that fed the dangerous and false ideology of eugenics; legacies of which are still felt today.

A bust of Huxley, the first dean of the Royal College of Science from 1881-85, should also be removed from display and placed in the college archives, it adds.

Lecture rooms named after influential figures who advocated eugenics, such as WD Hamilton, a lecturer in genetics at the college from 1964 to 1977, should also be renamed.

The report also flagged up concerns over endowments from the late 19th- and early 20th-century philanthropists Alfred and Otto Beit and Julius Wernher, three of the colleges most important financial donors, due to the oppressive treatment of the largely Black migrant workers in the diamond and goldmines from which they made their fortunes.

The history group recommends renaming buildings named after the Beit brothers.

It adds that if a building or room is renamed then the reason for that should be publicly explained via a plaque or a QR code.

The report also calls for the college to better mark the achievements of several undercelebrated women and black and minority ethnic scientists by setting up scholarships in their names. They include Narinder Singh Kapany, who was the first person to transmit images through fibre optics, laying the foundation for high-speed internet technology.

Staff and students will now be consulted over the recommendations before the college decides what action to take early next year.

Imperials president, Alice Gast, said: While we cannot change history, we can find ways to clarify what it means, learn lessons from it, and ensure that we are not perpetuating legacies that we find abhorrent.

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Imperial College London urged to remove statue and rename buildings - The Guardian

In the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, the scientific evidence in favor of vaccination is overwhelming. With this in mind, there are many people who see universal vaccination as the only way to bring the pandemic to an end, often invoking the mantra of follow the science. As a slogan it would seem to have a certain appeal, but the evidence suggests that the catchphrase has not actually been particularly effective at increasing vaccination rates. After all, a significant portion of the population has still refused to be vaccinated and indeed is skeptical of the science.

I am the director of the Vatican Observatory. That means that I am both a scientist and an official within the Catholic Church. I am well familiar with both scientific and clerical authority. And while I am all in favor of vaccinations, I also find myself troubled by that phrase, Follow the science. It implies that the authority of science is infallible.

[Related:Vaccine hesitancy is declining in religious communities]

But, of course, science is not infallible. Yes, the vaccine prevents the disease for the overwhelming majority of people who receive it, and even for breakthrough cases it reduces the severity of the disease. But the vaccines are not perfect. Fully vaccinated people can, and do, come down with Covidsometimes with serious effects, even if this happens rarely. To the vaccine skeptic, the fact that such failures happen at all suggests not only that the vaccine is not perfect, but it also gives credence to their fear that following the science blindly can be dangerous.

As much as we hate to admit it, that fear of blind trust in science does have an element of truth to it. Sometimes the science is wrong. I am a scientist, and I can name any number of papers I have written that have turned out to be embarrassingly incorrect. But more so, there are times in our history when the scienceor at least how it is presented to the general publichas turned out to be not merely imperfect but horrifyingly wrong.

The popularizers of science in the late 19th and early 20th centuriespeople like H. G. Wells, Alexander Graham Bell and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmesall promoted the idea of eugenics. They insisted that we could perfect the human race by eliminating supposedly inferior people. It was an idea so self-evident to these figures that anyone (including the church) who opposed it on moral grounds was seen as dangerously backward.

As a result of the popular acceptance of eugenics, it is estimated that 70,000 women, mostly minorities, were forcibly sterilized in the United States during the 20th century. Such programs continued well into the 1970s. And, of course, this was also the logic of Nazi death camps.

Because popular science had been so wrong in this case, does it logically follow that science should never be trusted? Obviously not. For one thing, science eventually got it right; indeed, eugenics had been long discredited in scientific circles decades before the fad of forced sterilizations was finally halted. (Of course, even if the science had been true, forced sterilization still would have been immoral.) One could argue that the villains in this tragic situation were the popularizers, who succumbed to the temptation of promoting oversimplified views of the science in question. But that does not excuse the scientists who got it wrong in the first place.

It goes deeper than that. The fight over following the science is really a fight over the reliability of authority in general. At the end of the day, both those who promote science and those who disdain it are looking for certainty in an uncertain universe. It is an almost Calvinistic intolerance of error; the world is black and white, and failure is not an option. If only we could be certain, we tell ourselves, if only we could be without doubt.

The irony is that science itself is actually a process based on doubt and error, and of learning how to analyze that error. In science, it is essential to know that you dont know all the answers: That is what drives you to work to learn more and to not be satisfied with what you already know.

Sadly, though, that is not how we teach science. In the introductory courses at leastand how many people ever get past the introductory courses?success in your science class means getting the same answer as you find in the back of the textbook. True, doing such rote problems in science is probably the fastest way to immerse a student into a sense of what it feels like to practice science successfully. In the same way, you have to learn to play the scales before you get to play the music. But scales are not music, and getting the answers is not science.

You only become a scientist when you are able to look at something you thought you understood and then say, Hmm, thats not right. Until you can do that, you will not even know to start looking for what went wrong.

In science, failure isnt an option; it is a requirement.

Doubt plays a role parallel to that of faith. The writer Anne Lamott summarized it perfectly when she said that the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty. It is not just that if we did not have doubts we would not need faith. It also means that doubt is the essential driver that keeps us looking for God and will not let us be satisfied with just accepting, or rejecting, the stuff we learned when we were kidslike in science.

Accepting doubt, accepting the inevitability of error, also means accepting a tolerance for other people even when they have been wrong. I still enjoy the stories of H. G. Wells, I still admire much that Oliver Wendell Holmes did as a chief justice, and I still use Alexander Graham Bells telephone, even as I abhor those peoples views on eugenics. I can accept that heroes sometimes are also sinners, even serious sinners.

Science and religion seem to be in conflict only if you think of both of them as closed books of rules and facts, each demanding infallible credulity. But thats not religion; thats fanaticism. And thats not science; thats scientism.

Science does not give you the perfect truth. But it can tell you the odds. We trust the vaccine because it vastly improves your odds of not getting sick. (The trouble is, of course, that most of us are lousy at understanding how odds work, which is why casinos and lotteries are so successful.)

There is a further irony, of course, seen in some of the vaccine-skeptic crowd. Just after they announce that they are too clever to be fooled by the experts, they then start self-dosing with some utterly inappropriate and dangerous drug that they heard about on the internet. The same folks who urge us not to be sheep are the next minute trying to cure Covid by taking drugs meant for sheep.

Why would anyone trust their lives to some random site they found on the internet? Why would we reject religion in favor of a philosophy we can read on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker? We should recognize the temptation. It is the allure of gnosticism, a desire to embrace secret knowledge. This is an urge that has been around since the Church Fathers in the second and third century, and indeed since the ancient Greeks performed esoteric rites.

But rather than heaping scorn on those who fall prey to this urge, perhaps we might want to look at where we have gone wrong in the way we teach our science and our religion. If we promote follow the science with the implication that the scientists deserve to be followed because they are smarter than you, arent we just feeding a dangerous fallacy?

If your sense of self-worth comes from thinking that you are smarter than the average person, that you are the smartest guy in the room, then a great temptation arises to never agree with the consensus of the majoritynever to be a sheep. If you are smarter than everyone else, then presumably you must know something that no one else knows. And if your beliefs come at a high costfor example, because of the scorn you endure for holding themthen you become so invested in your peculiar stance that you cant ever admit you were wrong.

And so I think this comes to the root issue: the identification of intelligence or cleverness as a criterion of superiority. Certainly the history of the church should tell us otherwise, if only we were paying attention. There were many learned theologians in the 19th century, most of them at each others throats; nearly every one of them is long forgotten in the history of the church. Instead, the saints of that era were people like Bernadette; Francis de Sales; and Thrse of Lisieux, the Little Flower. The simple people who were not concerned so much with scoring theological points as experiencing God.

Trying to understand the universe, from astronomy to medicine, is only possible when it is a response to love. It depends on loving the unlovable; trusting even when trust is uncertain; willing to forgive and learn even from those who have gone wrong in the past; living with uncertainty, even as we learn to trust.

After all, the only certain thing in life is Gods love and mercyand our need for both.

Continued here:

I am a Jesuit scientist. I'm all for vaccines, but we have to do more than just 'follow the science' - America Magazine

For me, last week's Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/Messenger outage was much ado about nothing.

I do feel sorry for those businesses that rely on Facebook, but for everyone else, it should have been a welcome break; a chance to unplug at least for a few hours. Not that some people could, really, considering they're so consumed by social media that they went to other platforms to complain about Facebook being down and put forth conspiracy theories (I mean, there was that whistle-blower on "60 Minutes" the night before).

Once it came back online, there were the usual jokes among my friends about having somehow caused the outage, but for the most part, things returned to normal. Not that that's a good thing. I spent a little time over the next few days checking out public group pages I ordinarily wouldn't (conspiracy-heavy, fact-checker-hating, primarily) to see what the denizens there were thinking.

Hoo boy. My brain still feels discombobulated. But I did see a need, especially as it's been so long for me, to talk about fact-checking.

One meme I saw complained about Facebook's fact-checkers, maintaining that no one could fact-check something in less than a minute.

Well, duh. Fact-checking can take you down a lot of rabbit holes sometimes, and to write a full fact-check with links to sources can take hours just for research, and sometimes days. So how does a fact-check get attached to something just minutes after it's posted?

If the post is unoriginal, algorithms might catch keywords and attach the appropriate fact-check, which is already written, or other users might report the post. If you thought that a fresh fact-check is done every time, disabuse yourself of that notion. Nobody has time for that, especially considering the amount of misinformation and disinformation posted on social media every hour of the day. Keyword detection is used, and if it's something that hasn't been checked before, especially in the case of trending topics, fact-checkers kick into gear and post the new fact-check as soon as it's completed.

Facebook's fact-checks are handled not by Facebook itself, but by independent third-party fact-checkers with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). Facebook writes on its Facebook Journalism Project page: "Since 2016, our fact-checking program has expanded to include more than 80 organizations working in more than 60 languages globally. The focus of the program is to address viral misinformation--provably false claims, particularly those that have the potential to mislead or harm. ...

"Fact-checkers review and rate the accuracy of stories through original reporting, which may include interviewing primary sources, consulting public data and conducting analyses of media, including photos and video. Fact-checkers do not remove content, accounts or pages from Facebook."

IFCN member organizations make a commitment, according to the Poynter Institute, to use the same standard for every fact check and let the evidence make the call. They also advocate transparency in their fact-check sources and methodology and their funding.

But sure, keep complaining about being dinged for a post about Henry Kissinger at the WHO Council on Eugenics (which doesn't exist). Confirmation bias is more important, right?

Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams wrote in The Scientific American, "Fact-checkers are human beings who live in the real world, rather than in a sociopolitical monastery. Let's abandon the pretense of objectivity and design a system of adversarial fact-checking that places the evidence for competing claims front and center."

The adversarial system they propose would have teams of fact-checkers with varying political views (which has its own issues), but the sources used to fact-check are, I believe, far more important, along with how the fact-checker operates.

Does the fact-checker link to its sources? (Those that do are more reliable, for the most part.) If so, does it link to original documents (campaign finance reports, for example) and reporting, or does it link to itself and/or opinion pieces? Does it explain how it came to its ruling? When was the fact-check published, and have there been updates and/or corrections? (A site willing to correct and update fact-checks if new information comes to light is better.) Is the fact-checker site open about its funding sources?

FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, along with Reuters, are the ones I most often turn to precisely because they do those things that make them more trustworthy. They're even willing to check memes, conspiracy theories and jokes when asked because it's been made pretty clear over the past several years that some people believe them, no matter how outrageous they are.

Lest we forget, there was that man who in 2016 fired shots in the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., in the course of "self-investigating" the theory that Hillary Clinton and others were operating a satanic child trafficking operation in the business' nonexistent basement.

Let's not have a repeat of that, please.

Assistant Editor Brenda Looper is editor of the Voices page. Read her blog at blooper0223.wordpress.com. Email her at blooper@adgnewsroom.com.

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OPINION | BRENDA LOOPER: Check the facts - Arkansas Online

The histories of homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender diversity are filled with incredible pain and enormous pride, of overwhelming repression and victorious rejoicing, of stifling invisibility and dazzling illumination. Throughout the ages, same-sex love and relationships and gender non-conformity have been called many things: from sins, sicknesses, and crimes to orientations, identities, and even gifts from God.

From the Eugenics Movement of the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth century CE and beyond, medical and psychological professions have often proposed and addressed, in starkly medical terms, the alleged deficiencies and mental diseases of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

During what has come to be known as the Eugenics movement in science (coined by Francis Galton in England in 1883 from the Greek word meaning well-born or of good origins or breeding in which the socially constructed hierarchical concept of race was codified), some members of the scientific community viewed people attracted to their own sex as constituting a distinct biological or racial type those who could be distinguished from normal people through anatomical markers.

For example, Dr. G. Frank Lydston, U. S. urologist, surgeon, and professor from Chicago, in 1889 delivered a lecture at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Chicago in which he referred to homosexuals as sexual perverts who are physically abnormal.

the unfortunate class of individuals who are characterized by perverted sexuality have been viewed in the light of their moral responsibility rather than as the victims of a physical and incidentally of a mental defect.Even to the moralist, there should be much satisfaction in the thought that a large class of sexual perverts are physically abnormal rather than morally leprous.

Also, the American medical doctor, Allan McLane Hamilton, wrote in 1896 that the [female homosexual] is usually of a masculine type, or if she presented none of the characteristics of the male, was a subject of pelvic disorder, with scanty menstruation, and was more or less hysterical and insane.

Physician, Perry M. Lichtenstein, published in 1921 that: A physical examination of [female homosexuals] will in practically every instance disclose an abnormally prominent clitoris (p. 372).

And in 1857 in France, Ambroise Tardieu wrote that: This degeneracy is evidenced in men who engage in same-sex eroticism by their underdeveloped, tapered penis resembling that of a dog, and a naturally smooth anus lacking in radial folds.

In addition, rather than considering homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender diversity merely as emotional, gender, and sexual differences along a broad spectrum of human potential, some sectors of the medical and psychological communities forced pathologizing language onto people with same-sex and bisexual attractions, and those who cross traditional constructions of gender identities and expressions.

Dr. Sigmund Freud, for example, saw homosexuality as a developmental disorder, a fixation at one of the intermediate pregenital stages. He believed this was caused, at least in part, by an incomplete resolution in males of the Oedipal complex.

Freud wrote in a 1935 letter to a mother who had asked him to treat her sons homosexuality:

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development (Freud in Lewes, 1988).

The Swiss physician, August Forel, wrote in 1905:

The [sexual] excesses of female inverts exceed those of the male,and this is their one thought night and day, almost without interruption. [Male inverts] feel the need for passive submissionand occupy themselves with feminine pursuits. Nearly all [female and male] inverts are in more or less marked degree psychopaths or neurotics.

Educational opportunities for primarily middle-class women improved somewhat during the mid-19th century in the United States. Often locked out of most institutions of higher learning, several womens colleges were founded, such as Mt. Holyoke College, Vassar, Smith College, Wellesley College, and Bryn Mawr.

There were, however, many conservative critics who attacked this new trend warning that educated women would be unfit to fill traditional roles in society, and others, like Dr. Edward Clarke, in 1873 warning that study would interfere with womens fertility, causing them chronic uterine disease.

And Dr. Havelock Ellis concluded that

Womens colleges are the great breeding ground of lesbianism. When young women are thrown together, they manifest an increasing affection by the usual tokens. They kiss each other fondly on every occasionThey learn the pleasure of direct contactand after this, the normal sex act fails to satisfy them (quoted in Faderman, 1991, p. 49).

Ellis posited that female homosexuality was increasing because of the rise of feminism, which taught women to be independent of men.

All of this has resulted in members of the medical professions committing lesbians, gay males, bisexuals, and those who transgress so-called normative gender identities and expressions (often against their will) to hospitals, mental institutions, jails, and penitentiaries, and forced pre-frontal lobotomies, electroshock, castration, and sterilization. We have been made to endure aversion therapy, reparative therapy, Christian counseling, hormonal castration, and genetic counseling.

Under this backdrop, the National Public Broadcasting (PBS) premieres for a national audience the documentary film Cured on Monday, October 11, 2021, at 10/9c (check local listings) on its Independent Lens series.

This film by Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer profiles the development, expansion, and eventual victory of activists both outside and inside the ranks of the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its manual of mental illnesses, its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and the often-contentious debate surrounding the change.

The film begins from a context in which conservative religious denominations defined homosexuals as sinful, government prosecuted homosexuals as criminal, and the psychiatric profession judged them as sick.

Interviewing key eyewitnesses, including Charles Silverstein, Rev. Magora Kennedy, Kay Lahusen, and Frank Kameny, combined with rare archival footage, this important film unearthed the history of how a relatively small group of committed and fervent activists stood up to demand one of the central tenets of liberation: the freedom to define themselves.

One of the antagonists in this drama includes physician Irving Bieber who co-authored a study in 1962, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals sponsored by the New York Society of Psychoanalysts, in which he concluded that homosexuality constituted a psychopathology that could be cured or prevented with psychoanalysis.

Bieber later was quoted in 1973 saying: A homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim (Biebers 1973 quote from New York Times, August 28, 1991).

In addition, the psychiatrist Charles Socarides, founder of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), argued that homosexuality is an illness, a neurosis, possibly caused by an over-attachment to the mother, which he too argued could be treated. Bieber and Socrarides became the authoritative and often-referenced researchers in the area of causation and treatment of homosexuality.

Cured profiles the street activism including when I and my compatriots of the Gay Liberation Front and Gay May Day collective, friends from the Mattachine Society, and members of the newly-formed Gay Activists Alliance stormed the APA convention in May 1971 at the Shorham Hotel in Washington DC as Franklin Kameny of Mattachine DC leapt upon the stage and declared war on the psychiatric profession.

The year following, APA held its next annual conference in Dallas, Texas. Barbara Gittings and Franklin Kameny again presented their views and facilitated a workshop discussion, this time joined by Dr. H. Anonymous (a.k.a. psychiatrist Dr. John E. Fryer) wearing a costume mask to hide his identity who discussed his experiences as a gay psychiatrist and member of the APA.

By 1973, the American Psychiatric Association had finally changed its designation of homosexuality for those comfortable with their sexual orientation, now asserting that it does not constitute a disorder: [H]omosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities.

Two years later, in 1975, the American Psychological Association followed suit and urged mental health professionals to take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness that has long been associated with homosexual orientations.

The American Psychiatric Association announced in its 2013 DSM-V that the diagnosis of gender identity disorder, which the manual has imposed upon transgender people since it published DSM-III in 1980, underwent what the APA subcommittee deciding on the change considered as a more neutral designation, gender dysphoria, which they saw as descriptive rather than diagnostic and pathologizing.

In the case of LGBTQ people, the scientific community has consistently deployed the medical model to investigate and pathologize the other. In so doing, heteronormativity and cissupremacy (oppression and colonization against trans people), therefore, become perceived as unremarkable or normal, unquestioned hegemonic norms against which all others are judged.

This medicalization of homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender non-conformity only served to strengthen oppression and heterosexual and cisgender privilege through its relative invisibility. Given this invisibility, issues of oppression and privilege were neither analyzed nor scrutinized, neither interrogated nor confronted by members of the dominant group.

Cured makes clear, however, the truth in Margaret Mead, the American cultural anthropologists statement: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, its the only thing that ever has.

References

Bieber, I. (1973, Dec. 23). In The A.P.A. ruling on homosexuality. An interview with two psychiatrists, Dr. Robert L. Spitzer and Dr. Irving Bieber, The New York Times.

Ellis, H. (1939). Psychology of sex. London: William Heinemann

Faderman, L. (1991). Odd girls and twilight lovers: A history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America. New York: Penguin.

Forel, A. (1905). La Question sexuelle (traduit dans de nombreuses langues), rdit en 2012: La question sexuelle expose aux adultes cultivs, prface de Christophe Granger, diteur : AUTREMENT

Freud, S. (1986) The essentials of psycho-analysis: Selected by Anna Freud. NYC: Penguin Books.

Hamilton, A. M. (1896). The civil responsibility of sexual perverts. American Journal of

Insanity, 52:503-09.

Lewes, K. (1988), The psychoanalytic theory of male homosexuality, New York: New American Library.

Lichtenstein, P. (1921). The fairy and the lady lover. Medical Review of Reviews, 27.

Lydston, G. F. (1889, Sept. 7). Clinical Lecture: Sexual Perversion, Satyriasas, and Nymphomania. Medical and Surgical Reporter, LXI(10), 553-557.

Socarides, C. (1968). The overt homosexual. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, Inc.

Tardieu, A. (1857). Etude medico-lgale sur les attentats aux moeurs. Paris: J.-B. Baillire.

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Excerpt from:

PBS to Nationally Premiered Cured Profiling the Battle of Homosexuals To Define Themselves in Psychiatry - The Good Men Project

Oct. 10Julia "Judy" Kahrl, a lifelong reproductive rights champion and an heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, has made a very public break with Pathfinder International, the global reproductive health charity founded by her father 64 years ago.

Kahrl, who lives in Arrowsic, and her brother Walter Gamble resigned from Pathfinder's board Sept. 27 over what they regard as its failure to fully disclose and reckon with the legacy of their father, Dr. Clarence Gamble, who promoted eugenics an early-20th-century movement that sought to prevent poor people, disabled people, racial minorities and others from reproducing as well as concerns about Pathfinder's management, which has presided over record turnover while paying out six-figure severance packages.

"We have lost faith in the organization's current leadership and are gravely concerned about the organization's lack of transparency," the two wrote in a letter to senior stakeholders. "We are withdrawing all financial support of Pathfinder and urging all Gamble family members to do the same."

Pathfinder has contested their description of events as "wholly inaccurate and unfounded," and board chair Roslyn Watson issued a statement Sept. 28 insinuating that Kahrl and Gamble had left because they were opposed to exposing their father's eugenicist legacy. When pressed in an interview, however, she conceded that the two had wanted greater exposure than the board believed prudent for the organization, whose reproductive rights work faces aggressive opponents at home and in many of the 20 countries it has permanent programs in.

"We do highly controversial work in countries that have strife, our abortion work was targeted by the Trump administration, and this kind of data (from our archives) could be used against our organization in ways that we cannot even imagine if it were freely available to anybody who would want it," Watson told the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram.

Story continues

LIFELONG COMMITMENT

The break is particularly dramatic given the 87-year old Kahrl's longstanding commitment to reproductive rights and Pathfinder.

Her parents were early activists for legalizing and destigmatizing contraception radical positions in the 1920s and family planning, birth control and reproductive health were commonplace dinner table conversations while she was growing up in the 1930s and '40s. Her father, physician Clarence Gamble, and mother, Sarah, were close allies of contraception pioneer Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and helped her overturn federal laws preventing the mailing of birth control materials and literature. When they founded Pathfinder in 1957, Judy joined the board, and her eldest brother, Richard, ran the organization until stepping down in 1985.

The organization promotes access to reproductive health services for women across the developing world and today receives the majority of its funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development. In its public tax returns for 2019 it reported 177 employees, a budget of $121 million and a $2.4 million operating deficit for the year, primarily due to reduced grant revenues compared with 2018.

While traveling to see Pathfinder's work in low-income parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, she has said she saw how women were empowered to improve their lives and their families' prospects by having access to comprehensive reproductive health services. She later brought her own children and then grandchildren on these trips. Her son Ben Kahrl joined the Pathfinder board in 1988.

They have close ties to Maine. Kahrl has been summering in Arrowsic since 1952. The broader Gamble family has spent summers at a cottage in Georgetown since 1960, and in his final days in 1966, Clarence Gamble was transported by ambulance from his home in Milton, Massachusetts, so he could die there. Judy Kahrl, a counselor, moved to neighboring Arrowsic full-time in 1996, and, alarmed over the growing challenge to Roe v. Wade, founded the Maine-based national advocacy group Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights (or GRR!) in 2013.

But in recent years Kahrl said she had grown increasingly concerned about the leadership at Pathfinder. The organization has experienced a 100 percent turnover in U.S. personnel in the five years it has been led by CEO Lois Quam. Several senior staff members had departed with six-figure severance packages in exchange for signing nondisclosure agreements disallowing them from speaking to board members about the circumstances of their departure, including the chief human resources officer, who Kahrl says received $216,000 after just four years on the job.

When Kahrl and her son tried to access a comprehensive outside review of Quam's job performance, they were blocked by the board's executive committee, which also declined to share the reasoning or wording of the NDAs departing staff members had signed.

"All of these things raised red flags for us and yet getting more information was a nonstarter," Ben Kahrl said in an interview with the Press Herald. "So people say, 'Do you have any evidence of malfeasance,' and the answer is that we're not sure, because we can't get the information to do proper board oversight."

Cate Lane, a former Pathfinder employee who left without signing an NDA, and who served under Quam as a technical adviser for youth and adolescents from 2017 to 2019, told the Press Herald she left because of Quam's "toxic" leadership style. She said experienced people had been systematically driven out of the organization in favor of cheaper, less capable replacements, undermining capacity and morale. "Unless somebody takes Lois out, I think Pathfinder is on a slide to irrelevance," Lane said.

Then there was the issue of Judy's father.

AN UGLY PAST

Like Margaret Sanger, Clarence Gamble had been a devotee of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, which sought to improve humanity's genetic stock by preventing people with allegedly undesirable qualities from reproducing, sometimes via forced sterilization. Undesirables typically included poor people, disabled people, those alleged to have low intelligence, and people of color. Adolf Hitler would become the most infamous of eugenicists, but prior to the Holocaust such views were broadly held among the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite of the U.S. and U.K., championed by Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill and funded by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Gamble co-founded the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947 to promote eugenic sterilization under a now-notorious state law that allowed social workers to designate people as "defective" and encourage their sterilization at state expense. Of the 7,600 people sterilized under the state's program, 85 percent were female and 40 percent were minorities. The state later negotiated reparations for survivors.

"For a million years, Dame Nature found she could develop her people only by selecting for survival the most prolific, the toughest and smartest," Gamble and a co-author wrote in a 1950 pamphlet. "In our time, notwithstanding the rapidly mounting world-wide burdens of overpopulation which are increased by limiting epidemics and salvaging weaklings, our organized efforts toward fostering breeding for quality rather than quantity can show only three decades of active development."

Judy and Ben Kahrl told the Press Herald they were highly supportive of the Pathfinder board's decision, after the police killing of George Floyd last year, to hire independent researchers to exhume Clarence's legacy from the organization's archives, including any lasting imprint his eugenicist views may have left. But they became concerned when, one year later, the archives remained sealed from view by either the board or the public.

The outside consultant's reports which the Kahrls shared with the Press Herald provided surprisingly little new information on Gamble. At one point, instead of relying on the archives, it cites a report by an anti-abortion activist group, the Population Research Institute. At another point they attribute to Clarence Gamble a note on an office memo from 1972, six years after he'd died.

"It was embarrassing, a pretty bad report," Kahrl said. "I don't know a better word than 'junk.'" The reports were never discussed by the board, she said, and even after they were submitted they were told they could not see the company archives.

Judy's nephew, Jim Epstein a grandchild of Clarence Gamble who served on the Pathfinder board through the 1980s said he shared her disappointment. "There needs to be a full reckoning," he said. "That's an essential part of the process. Our sense is that the organization has been slow-walking it."

Ben Kahrl said he was voted off the board last month after he pushed for fuller disclosure of both the documents related to his grandfather and the internal review of CEO Quam's tenure. His removal was the final straw prompting his mother and uncle Walter the only other Gamble family members on the 19-person board to resign. "I pray that there will be healing, but I feel I had done all I could do from the inside," Judy Kahrl said.

DISCLOSURE AND TRANSPARENCY

Board chair Roslyn Watson, one of Boston's leading African-American businesswomen, initially responded to the resignations with a statement suggesting the Gambles had left because they were uncomfortable with wider disclosure of their ancestor's legacy. It noted their pride in their efforts to recruit a more diverse board and address Clarence's "racially biased and unscientific personal beliefs through an independent review free from family influence." She noted they had resigned in the wake of such efforts and said they sought to "distract us from fulfilling our mission," including "commitments to racial and gender equality."

When questioned by the Press Herald, Watson conceded that the Gambles had been pushing for greater disclosure than the board wanted, including the public release of 30 boxes of documents from the 1950s and 1960s locked in the company archives.

"We're not a research organization. We have an operating responsibility for over $100 million in programs each year, and we need to safeguard that and make sure that nothing gets in the way of providing those services," said Watson, a prominent investor in Boston and Paris real estate and past general manager of the powerful Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan Airport. "Spending the majority of our time trying to protect ourselves from the raw materials out in the international sphere wouldn't serve the organization and its mission."

She said Pathfinder had to have "a forward-looking lens" and "not get stuck in a kind of rabbit warren hole of debating past behavior and what it means." She also expressed full confidence in Quam, the consultant's reports on the Gamble legacy and the state of the organization. Annual turnover is not unusually high for the international development nonprofit sector, employee satisfaction is good and fundraising is healthy, she said.

She also said the nonprofit's use of nondisclosures and severance packages is appropriate and that the Kahrls had been denied access to the independent review of Quam in accordance with board policies restricting access to the executive committee. Ben Kahrl, she said, had been voted off the board because "for two years he consistently behaved in a way that was inappropriate and undermined the board and CEO and organization." Examples, she said, included contacting country officers directly to push a personal agenda and implying to staff members that he disagreed with policy decisions made by the board and CEO.

She noted the organization is amid a strategic pivot to give more power and autonomy to individual country offices, which are staffed by people from those countries, and reduce the influence of Pathfinder's headquarters staff in Watertown, Massachusetts. She said Quam a former official at The Nature Conservancy who headed the Obama administration's Global Health Initiative had been "an exemplary leader."

Quam, whose 2018 compensation was $438,066, did not respond to an interview request made via Pathfinder's spokesperson. Pathfinder has a solid 86.7 out of 100 rating from the independent nonprofit rating service Charity Navigator, which reported 89.6 percent of Pathfinder's total expenses in 2019 went to programs.

Judy Kahrl said she's diverting her attention to other initiatives such as Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights and that Pathfinder is now in her past after more than six decades of board service.

"I resigned because I wanted more transparency," she said, "and I wanted to make a strong statement that we are absolutely opposed to eugenics and that board members need to be given the information they need to make responsible, accountable decisions."

Read the original here:

Maine philanthropist's resignation shakes global reproductive rights charity founded by her father - Yahoo News

Never thought Id see a doctor testify in an Assembly hearing that we should limit abortion because too few kids are being born with down syndrome these days, but here we are -Justin Bielinski

Democratic state legislators and some of their top aides are revealing what they REALLY think about kids with disabilities as they push back against Assembly bills protecting them.

The Assembly is pushing a slew of bills, many against abortion. One bill would seem to be a no-brainer: It would ban sex-selective, disability-selective, and other selective abortions, meaning it would ban abortions being undertaken solely on the basis of gender, race or disability. Who would oppose that? Democrats oppose even that bill, which is essentially just banning eugenics.

Oh, by the way, October is Down Syndrome Awareness month.

The most odious Democratic reaction came from a top aide to a prominent Democratic state Senator, whose tweet indicated he doesnt value the lives of kids with Down Syndrome.

AB 594 would require doctors who do a test for a congenital condition to refer the patient to a website created by DHS that would connect them to support and accurate resources. Democrats dont like that, either. AB 595 would prohibit aborting a child based on any discriminatory characteristics including a congenital diagnosis and race.

Never thought Id see a doctor testify in an Assembly hearing that we should limit abortion because too few kids are being born with down syndrome these days, but here we are, tweeted Justin Bielinski, the director of Communications and campaign manager for Democratic state Sen. Chris Larson. Justin Bielinski, who previously worked for Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, later deleted the tweet.

What a truly awful thought to have, let alone tweet out, wrote Republican State Sen. John Jagler.

Jagler shared photos of his daughter.

He wrote to Bielinski, I get that best case scenario you dont value her as a person. Worse case..you dont think she should have been born. But shes here. Shes thriving and is loved. I wonder. Does your boss, @SenChrisLarson, share your thoughts that the world would be a better place without Grace and people like her?

Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, held a media availability before the hearing complaining about all of the bills eroding womens health. She is a former executive director at abortion provider NARAL.

The efforts last week by Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature included the following bills: AB 593, related to: informed consent regarding a certain abortion-inducing drug regimen and reporting requirements for induced abortions (Vos/Kapenga) [vetoed by Evers last session]; AB 539, related to: prohibiting discrimination in organ transplantation on the basis of disability (Born/Jagler); AB 36,related to: permitting pharmacists to prescribe certain contraceptives (Kitchens/Felzkowski) [passed through the Assembly last session but not taken up by the Senate before COVID hit]; AB 594 relating to: congenital condition education resources (Dittrich/Testin); AB 595, related to: sex-selective, disability-selective, and other selective abortions [vetoed by Evers last session]; AB 6, relating to requirements forchildren born alive following abortion or attempted abortion (Steineke/Roth) [vetoed by Evers last session]; AB 493, relating to: certification of abortion providers under the Medical Assistance program (Dittrich/Stroebel) [vetoed by Evers last session]; AB 262, relating to: induced abortion reporting (Wichgers/Jacque); AB 528, relating to certification of abortion providers under the Medical Assistance program (Brandtjen/Jacque).

The hearing included testimony from Tom Kulczewski, whose son, Malix, was later found to have a heart defect after being born with Down Syndrome. Kulzczewski was accompanied by his wife and four children and testified that his doctor told them that Malix would never be eligible for a heart transplant, despite exhausting so many attempts to repair his heart condition, because he has Down Syndrome.

Two other individuals with Down Syndrome and another with autism testified in support of AB 539, asserting their right to the necessary health treatment, regardless of their disability.

Those advocating for pro-life legislation were criticized by pro-abortion committee members Sara Rodriguez (D Brookfield), and Subeck (D Madison). Committee Chair, Rep. Joe Sanfelippo had to gavel down Rodriguez, demanding that committee members return to decorum rather than attacks on those testifying such as Micah Pearce of Wisconsin Family Action.

Mainstream media never reported these details of the committee. They focused onRep. Subeck and pro-abortion doctors, revealing bias towards promoting abortion.

The following bills are scheduled to be passed through an Executive Committee Hearingof the Assembly Committee on Health next Thursday, 10/14/21: AB 6, AB 36, AB 128, AB262, AB 493, AB 528, AB 539, AB 593, AB 594, and AB 595. Also scheduled to be passed through that same Executive Committee Hearing but not heard in the 10/7/21 hearing are AB 128, AB 281, AB 290, AB 295, AB 296, AB 337, and AB 358. All bills can beaccessed by typing in their number here.

Excerpt from:

What Wisconsin Democratics Think About Disabled Kids - Wisconsin Right Now