As proverbial wisdom teaches:

The one who states their case first seems right,
until another comes and states theirs.

This is a controversy clash that won’t go away.

“…allowing same-sex couples to force religious individuals or organizations to act out of accord with their faith is not cost-free either. Their dignity is no less affected. Unless claims rooted in equal protection under the law are to sweep away claims rooted in freedom of religion, a more sensitive balancing approach is essential…

If past rulings are any guide, it is religious rights that are likely to be “obliterated” by an emerging popular majority supporting same-sex relationships — and it seems unlikely that the California courts will intervene. That’s a shame.”

From opinions article in LA Times, contributed by Marc D. Stern - general counsel of the American Jewish Congress and a contributor to a forthcoming book, “Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty.”

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If this doesn’t prove a point, I don’t know what does.

CT: San Francisco Chronicle

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While the following opinion may end up betraying my general apathy about America’s supposed pastime, I’ve been confused lately in reflecting on the drastic inconsistency of rationales regarding granting amnesty - one of leniency for steroid users in baseball, and one of strictness towards undocumented immigrants.

One the one side, there are multi-millionaires being (more…)

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I have mixed reaction to this proposal to change this LAPD practice (Special Order 40) regarding inquiring about the immigration status of known gang members. I’m all for suppressing criminal activity - even though I question the effectiveness of blanketly deporting undocumented criminals - but I am concerned for how undocumented victims and potential witnesses might be impacted by a change in practice.

NOTE: National Geographic did a program that addresses the impact of gangs and immigration practices - World’s Most Dangerous Gang

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While Jen, Isa’s respite care provider, creates a ferocious giggle from Isa in tickling her, I’m closely watching the Democratic debate.  So far, I’m scoring points to Obama on healthcare and the housing crisis, and to Clinton on immigration.

Obama scored browny points by making seperate references to a child with cerebral palsy and the deplorable educational reality of children in East Los Angeles.

More to come.

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It used to be that the perception of what distinguished public school education from private school education was the access based on cost. By this think, public school education was accessible to all because the cost was subsidized by the government, whereas private school education was only accessible to those that could subsidize the cost themselves.

This article on the current notion of desegregation, aka (more…)

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Needless to say, I’m highly invested in how this kind of issue goes. Whether Tom Freston, former Viacom exec, is a saint or not, I appreciate his stated motivation, as the article quotes it:

“In a statement, he said he contributed reimbursements he received from the city — and will donate future ones — to a special-education support center in a public school. He says he is pursuing the case so other children, “without jumping through hoops,” can attend appropriate schools “regardless of their family’s financial means.“

My snooty answer to the question - especially when asked in light of schools that already fail typically developing students, before we even begin to talk about special needs students - is whenever public schools fail to provide what they’re supposed to with the tax-payer funds they’ve been alloted, then other means should be funded. It’s why I’ve begun to swing towards a pro-choice stance on the models that vouchers and charter schools provide.

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• Troubled Belmont Learning Complex could actually be finished by 2008.

• “Brown is the new White” T-shirt controversy reported by Fox News. Shirts sold here. I have mixed feelings about the intersection of humor and history on this whole story.

• Zoning changes approved in Downtown LA - not sure if this is positive for affordable housing or not.

• Bush administration pursuing tougher enforcement (o aqui) - employer sanctions against hiring undocumented workers, increased border presence.

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This from Ruben Navarrette, Jr. :

“The restrictionists and those pundits who have taken up their cause claim that race and ethnicity aren’t even part of the discussion and that those who oppose giving illegal immigrants a shot at legal status would feel the same way if the immigrants were coming from Canada instead of Mexico.

They say their concerns are limited to border security and the rule of law, and have nothing to do with nativism or xenophobia. And they reject any suggestion that the debate was hostile to Hispanics…

The people who buy into this demagoguery say the country is being colonized. That harkens back to what Benjamin Franklin said in the 1700s about German immigrants making up “a colony of aliens.”

A lot of what Franklin said about the Germans was rank bigotry. The same goes for what other generations of Americans would later say about Italians, Irish, Jews and other immigrants – even if they came legally.

What poison. Thank goodness we got that out of our system. “

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I must be onto something, since someone else is writing a entire book on my ideas.

Peter Lim - Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee - is currently writing a book entitled Xenophobia to Philozenia: A Trinitarian Theology of Immigration. He is quoted in several recent articles about the New Sanctuary Movement (read their pledge), including (more…)

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Reports on Turkey’s national elections:
The BEFORE (reported Saturday):

To most Turkish voters the election is a referendum on the AK Party’s record, which is strikingly good. The effects of AK’s “silent revolution” are evident everywhere.

And the AFTER (reported today.)

Accepting victory before a crowd of delighted supporters at his party’s headquarters in Ankara, the capital, Mr Erdogan immediately pledged to keep up efforts to join the EU. He also addressed fears among millions of urban and middle-class Turks that his party is bent on unravelling decades of determinedly secular rule launched under the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk. “No matter who you voted for, I respect your choice,” Mr Erdogan said.

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In the Sunday LA Times Opinion, there was a commentary - Keep adoption assistance - about some possible changes (read: reductions) to the assistance for families with special needs adoptions.

Of course, money isn’t the reason parents adopt. And for children who require around-the-clock care for medical conditions such as seizures or routine needs such as bathing, even the highest rate may not cover all expenses, particularly if a parent stops working full time. Still, the loss of aid money could make families think twice about adopting children with the most severe disabilities.

I wish that weren’t true, but considering how many children wait for adoptive families, reducing anything that provides assistance for the most vulnerable is sad.

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I’ve written before (and see below for more previous posts) on the intersection of biblical Christian faith as it informs the current immigration issues in our country. In the much debated topic, I believe that nations have a right and responsibility to maintain and protect its borders. And that currently, the U.S. border is being dangerously exploited in human trafficking. In the same language of rights and responsibilities, I believe that citizens should obey the laws, as the often over-cited text in Romans 13:1implies:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.

As such, I believe it is open to debate about the best way to address border security, or to enforce current laws, or to confront the exploitation of workers, or to deal with the crisis of the health care system or social services or education. These things are open to debate.

What is not open to debate is (more…)

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Thus says The Economist about Boyle Heights in this article - “Escape from LA: Los Angeles is losing its illegal immigrants. That’s bad news.” The article goes on to talk about the negative impact of the declining number of immigrants coming to Los Angeles. Read it.

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Every since my jury duty service last June, I’ve been thinking a lot about gangs in Los Angeles. Prevention. Intervention. Detention. Suppression. I’ve read some interesting articles in the last few weeks that have spurned my thinking.

This one from LA Weekly focused on the city’s council’s $100 million gang prevention/intervention program - LA Bridges. They mostly focus on some of the major failings & shortcomings of the program - some serious needs that need to be addressed.

There was an interesting response to that article in a later LA Weekly (read here). One thing I hadn’t thought about regarding gangs was this:

“Psychologists and professionals will tell you these days that the gang lifestyle is a learned antisocial behavior that our youth can quickly become obsessed with, especially when family and community members all too often turn a blind eye to it. This “behavior,” which has a whole different set of morals, can also in many ways parallel the disease concept of many popular addictions, such as alcohol, drugs and gambling.”

I had no idea about the parallels with chemical or behavioral addictions.

Then the LA Times has published several recent articles on gang-activity & law enforcement in Los Angles, including this one that cites a recent report calling for a new gang czar to coordinate a comprehensive plan to battle the gang issues in LA. “After a quarter century of a multibillion-dollar war on gangs, there are six times as many gangs and at least double the number of gang members in the region,” the report states. And this one that talk about the challenges facing that plan.

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My law-school friend Mark sent me this link to a CSM story on the 20 year anniversary of the 1986 congressional “amnesty” program that ultimately allowed 3 million immigrants to gain residency or citizenship.

“An amnesty cleans people who have broken the law,” says former US Rep. Romano Mazzoli (D) of Kentucky. He and former US Sen. Alan Simpson (R) of Wyoming were the primary architects and cosponsors of IRCA. “But in our bill, you had to prove that you were a law-abiding person who honored the institutions of our country…. So you can take your pick of euphemisms, but if you use the word ‘amnesty,’ people will get angry, throw their hands up in the air, and scream: ‘They’re rewarding people for misbehaving!’ “

While I respect an aspect of the “law-abiding society” argument of the anti-immigration rhetoric, it has always bothered me how willing those same folks are to either turn a blind eye or just raise their hands in ambivalence to the law-breaking employers that hire undocumented workers and often pay below a legal wage. (Not to mention the social benefit to prices from all of those products & services).

William King Jr., was the Western regional director of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and responsible for carrying out the amnesty program. He says that he had hope that the legislation would work at first. But IRCA was a three-legged stool, he says. One leg was employer sanctions, another was increased border security, and the third was the amnesty program. “In truth, only the amnesty program became a fact,” he says, and the effort failed.

I think that three-legged stool is the only legitimate means by which the current immigration dilemma can be tackled. To address the issue from only 1 or 2 legs means we’ll only end up on our a$&es.

P.S. Family experience does add to my view of the ‘86 amnesty. Some members of my family rightly & legally benefited from it, a few others wrongly & fraudulently benefited from it, and even others wrongly & inexplicably were tossed under the bus despite meeting all of the requirements and goals. I’m not sure how to interpret that - all systems have their holes. But whatever it says, the immigration debate is not mere theory or simple political machination (see here for “machination”).

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…before becoming the parent of a child with special needs. But this is the kind of stuff I’ll be paying lots of attention to now.

The 6th annual week of celebration of and advocacy for inclusion in U.S. schools is scheduled for December 4-8, and materials are available now on the National Inclusive Schools Week site to help you mark the week in your area. Among the resources are a Celebration Kit, applications for a national Poster/Essay Contest with prizes donated by Scholastic, sample letters to the editor to customize and send to your local paper, and suggestions for making a donation of money or items needed.

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OK. So waited until the proverbial 11th hour to go and vote, but Veronica & I made it to the polls at around 7:15pm to make sure our vote was cast. For Veronica, this was only her 2nd election since becoming a citizen in March, so she has the mixture of being really nervous and also really fired up.

It has been quite the 8 months of civic growth for Veronica - becoming a citizen after 17 years in the U.S., voting for the first time in her adult life, and receiving her first jury summons!! She has been paying taxes for years, so I don’t know what else she can do to experience her new citizenship.

P.S. Maybe more importantly, we also exercised all of our voting power tonight in voting for Dancing with the Stars. For our household, that means 10 votes from 2 cell phones, 5 votes from the house phone, plus 10 more votes on-line!! Needless to say, it will be Emmitt squaring off versus Mario next week…

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Great LA Times opinion piece by Pat Morrison (Oxy graduate, btw) on the immigration debate and the prospect of building a 700-mile fence along the 2,000 mile southern border.

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• Interesting article in The Economist - “Turning Grey” - about the relevance or effectiveness of the IMF and the World Bank.

• Religion & Politics article from Christian Science Monitor about former Senator Jack Danforth: “The question is not whether people of faith should engage in politics, but how we should go about doing so … and whether we become a divisive or reconciling force in our country.”

• LA Business Journal report about recent Worker’s Comp bill that was vetoed by the governor. (Sometimes I miss my old Worker’s Comp days…)

• Satire gone too far? (Imagine that) This time, Elen Nordegren and husband Tiger Woods the victims.

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