Conservatives either Don't KNOW the basics of biology, or they are eager to DENY IT - and to make denial LAW

I have long contended that conservatives generally, and Minnesota conservatives specifically, do not have a good grasp of basic biology - the stuff you should be able to pass in K-12. They don't do too well on other science subjects either, like seismology (earthquake science) or evolution, geology, and archeology.  (It is worth noting the latter legislator is nominally a democrat, but in fact another conservative. He likes to focus on....sigh..Bible principles and the United States Constitution; in other words, another know-nothing-and-proud-of-it.)

We are lucky if a conservative doesn't believe God plants babies in cabbage patches, to avoid the fact that babies result from SEX. 

Sadly, conservatives also seek to dumb-down others.

So long as conservatives don't understand basic anatomy, or reproductive biology, sex, gender, sexuality or sexual orientation, they have no legitimate business passing any kind of legislation relating to those topics.

That I am correct in my contention has been widely demonstrated, most recently in the state legislature with the proposed anti-trans bathroom bill, legislation which is not only badly misinformed but likely unconstitutional.  And it is demonstrated again with the recent research cited in the Minnesota Daily (h/t to my colleague at MN PP for alerting me to this story).

Conservatives lie about abortion; they try to force states to promote their lies to women as if they were factual.  They are not.

Here is, via the MN Daily, a list of the many things about which these conservatives have lied, including here in MN.  It's worse in states with a greater proportion of conservatives in power.  I have to disagree with the headline however, while Minnesota is one of the states reviewed, Minnesota was not targeted per se, and all state identifying information was removed for the review.

Study targets Minnesota abortion information

Twenty percent of content in state literature is inaccurate or misleading, the study said.

A fifth of the information in Minnesota state-produced pamphlets given to women seeking abortions has been deemed medically inaccurate by new academic research.

The study examined pamphlets produced by states that have “Woman’s Right to Know”  laws. Under this law, Minnesota requires that before moving forward with an abortion, women must receive a Minnesota Department of Health pamphlet on risks associated with abortion and fetal development, as well as information on resources if she decides to carry to term.

Rutgers University researchers looked at 23 of the 29 states with the law for the study, which will be published in print next month in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. Researchers later added information on three more states to their study online.

Minnesota was among the states with the least amount of inaccuracies, with 51 out of 250 statements deemed incorrect by professional anatomists. 

After stripping the statements of state identifiers, the panel of fetal development experts used two scales to assess the accuracy or misleading nature of each statement.  

Study co-author and Rutgers University Ph.D. Candidate Grace Howard said that in all 26 state handbooks studied, there were inaccuracies — usually descriptions of a fetus as more developed than it would be at that stage or unrealistic size and weight measurements. 

“We saw in fetal development information a tendency to describe the fetus as more advanced developmentally than it was,” she said. “You can often see that in statements about viability, size and potentiality of a fetus.”

The last few pages of the MDH pamphlet describe abortion methods, medical risks and long-term side effects, including the “emotional side of abortion” and “fetal pain” — both contentious national issues.

“We have better research on the effects of abortion, like breast cancer, fertility and mental health problems,” Howard said. “The science has been clear that abortion doesn’t actually affect these things. There is new research that very much confirms that abortion does not cause mental health problems.” 

Of all the pamphlets from the 26 states studied, the study found the most complete inaccuracies in the statements about the first trimester, during which many women get an abortion. 

For example, the panel unanimously ranked “arm and leg buds present” during the second week of pregnancy as entirely medically inaccurate, according to the study.

“A fetus doesn’t actually have fingers, toes, legs [early in the pregnancy],” Howard said. “But a statement in the brochure might say this part is forming or will form.”

Across all states, one-third of all the statements were found to be inaccurate, the study said. 

The research didn’t assess the lasting impact medical inaccuracies and misleading information has on women, but similar studies — examining women’s responses in states that offer ultrasounds or the chance to hear a fetal heartbeat before abortion — show that the vast majority of women still move forward with the procedure. 

For some women, a lack of knowledge of how abortions affect women’s health and well-being leads them to agree with statements that aren’t backed up by science, Roberts said.

We need to fix this, and conservatives will fight accurate information every step of the way. Better yet, we need to leave medical education of patients entirely up to their doctors, and butt out of this kind of informational requirement entirely. But it will take a clear majority of Democrats, and a Democratic governor for that to happen.

Conservative bigotry and Minnesota's proposed Hate Crime Legislation

image via the investmentunderground.com

Whether you wear an hijab or a yamulka, whether you speak Spanish or Swahili, or some other language than English, you shouldn't have to fear hate crimes.

I came across a couple of news stories about hate crimes in Minnesota, and an interactive map of the United States showing Trump supporter violence that included one of those stories - possibly inaccurately - in Minnesota. Please see the Minnesota instance on the map below.

The incident that shows up on the map for Minnesota was the beer mug face-bashing of a Muslim woman in an Applebee's restaurant, for speaking Swahili with her family.  The same woman testified in the judiciary committee legislative hearing on hate crimes on Friday.




To be fair, while this Minnesota incident above was, clearly, a hate crime, it is far less clear that the woman who committed the crime (allegedly) is or was a Trump supporter.  She might very well have been a supporter of one of the other candidates, or perhaps none of the numerous candidates running at the time may have been sufficiently extreme for her.  (The rest of the incidents on the interactive map appear to be more legitimately committed by Trump supporters.) However the notion the USA is, or should be, exclusively English speaking is more strongly a conservative one, and conservatives tend to reject the notion of learning foreign languages as well.  I'd go further; in my experience, Americans actually expect people in other countries to speak English to them, and object to those people speaking their own language in their own country.

The conservative position appears to be because it is more often conservative extremists  who are committing the hate crimes, not because of any legitimate rationale for opposing a change to hate crime law penalties.  Apparently hate and violence are conservative 'family values' they are trying to protect, or their notion of freedom. 

It is as ludicrous to assert that any other motive exists as it is to assert that conservative obstruction of the nomination of a replacement for Scalia to the SCOTUS is about "the will of the voters".  This is particularly evident now that Merrick Garland has been nominated and the GOP in the Senate have indicated they would confirm him after November 8th, but before the newly elected members of the Senate and the new president are sworn in if they lose the 2016 election.

Over the weekend, I watched that documentary,  "KKK: the Fight for White Supremacy"; and during the week I had caught the televised hearings from the MN lege on increasing the penalties for hate crimes in Minnesota. The woman in the Applebee's incident testified at that legislative hearing. The conservative legislators in the hearing opposed any increase in hate crime penalties, effectively trying to give cover, protection from consequences and penalties, to conservative hate criminals. They argued that to make hate crimes penalties higher was to exalt the victims of hate crimes over other victims. I certainly never heard the argument that when stiffer penalties were applied for users and vendors of the form of crack cocaine over powdered cocaine in enacting drug laws, that the victims of the harsher penalized crime were 'exalted', for example.  Rather the argument was that the harsher laws were intended as a deterrent to drug activity.   (I have yet to see anyone who reasonably believes a penalty for a crime 'exalts' the victims.)

It was interesting to me that in the state lege hearing on increasing penalties for hate crimes, one of those legislators in favor of increased hate crime law documented that of the immigrants over the time of our state's existence, only 25% came from English speaking countries, while the overwhelming majority of the other 75% did not speak English when they arrived, and spoke their native language among themselves.  In other words, who we are, who we have always been, has been multi-lingual.  Even early schools taught students in Swedish, and German, and other immigrant languages, not English.

There is an established premise of severity of penalties in law operating as a deterrent to crime.  While this does not appear to be true of the death penalty, it remains the premise for all of the legislation initiated by the right to be tough on crime that has led to our high incarceration rate.

It is worth noting that in being tough on crime, our incarceration level disproportionately locks up black and Hispanic people, largely for drug crimes and drug use, which in fact are crimes more frequently committed by relatively more affluent white people.

What distinguishes the nature of a hate crime from any other individual crime is that it is a crime against an individual or individuals which intimidates and affects a greater number of people in the same group, not only the direct victim.  This can be by intent, or it can simply be an effect; but the reality is that there is a larger and broader group of secondary victims.  In a very real sense, the direct victim of a hate crime is a proxy victim for the other members of the targeted group; attacking one is a means to attack all.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the mass shooting in a predominantly black church in South Carolina last year, where the intention was to instigate a race war, which resulted in, among other effects, the removal of the civil war battle flag from state house grounds - to the disapproval of white racists.  Both the racism and the disapproval over removal of the flag, as well as the intentional intimidation of black citizens, was evident in the BBC documentary filming in South Carolina at the time of the mass shooting, "KKK: the fight for White Supremacy".  Those members who share the same targeted group as the shooting victims emphatically express being affected, as victims of intimidation, as a result of the hate crime - and it makes sense that they would do so.  Jews similarly have expressed feeling fear in response to anti-Semitic violence and hate attacks, a reasonable response, even when they were not the direct victims.

It is past the time when conservatives must stop defending and protecting hate criminals, and to start repudiating them and penalizing them.  Republicans must take back their party from extremists and tea partiers, and become a party of principles and real values again.  Let's start with the proposed law in the Minnesota legislature.

A Poke in the metaphorical eye for Bullying

Minnesota has come more fully into the 21st century with an anti-bullying bill that passed the state legislature today.  Provisions address not only what takes place on school grounds, during school hours, but of students bullied through social media by fellow students.

Governor Dayton has announced he will sign it later today.

Conservatives hate it; they want to be able to continue gender and sexual orientation (real or just suspected) because Jesus loves bullying / religious belief.

From the STrib:

The Minnesota House passed a bill aimed at toughening the state's anti-bullying law by a vote of 69-63 early Wednesday.
The bill - the Safe and Supportive Schools Act - defines bullying, in part, as behavior that causes physical harm or fear of physical harm and "constitutes intentional infliction of emotional distress."
"This provides a strong set of tools to create a strong local anti-bullying policy and create safe educational climates in Minnesota," said Rep. Jim Davnie, DFL-Minneapolis, the bill's sponsor.
The measure already has cleared the Senate. Gov. Mark Dayton plans to sign the bill into law in a public ceremony at 4 p.m. today on State Capitol steps.
The bill would require school districts to track and investigate cases of bullying and require schools to better train staff and teachers on how to prevent it. Current law requires school districts to have a bullying policy but omits details on what the policy should contain.