Women Born Transsexual

From Salon:   http://www.salon.com/2014/07/02/police_out_of_control_7_horrifying_examples_of_americas_militarized_state/

Senior citizen killed at home watching baseball. Infants, pregnant women mistreated. SWAT cops, way out of control

Ian Blair
Wednesday, Jul 2, 2014

Last week, Alecia Phonesavanh penned an essay for Salon called “A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son,” describing the nightmare she and her family suffered during a Special Weapons and Tactics raid that left her toddler in critical condition.

“After the SWAT team broke down the door, they threw a flashbang grenade inside,” Phonesavanh writes. “It landed in my son’s crib.”

Three weeks later, Phonesavanh’s son, Bounkham (fondly nicknamed “Bou Bou”), remains hospitalized, still covered in burns and with a hole in his chest that leaves the white of his ribs exposed. His injuries are said to be life-threatening.

The shock of the incident still lingers:

I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him. He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn’t see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he’d just lost a tooth. It was only hours later when they finally let us drive to the hospital that we found out Bou Bou was in the intensive burn unit and that he’d been placed into a medically induced coma.

The trauma inflicted on the Phonesavanh household is part of a growing trend taking place in police departments across the country: Law enforcement is increasingly deploying paramilitary forces to raid and terrorize neighborhoods.

According to a recent study conducted by the ACLU, “American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight.”

The use of such tactics, according to the ACLU, drastically increases the risk of needless violence and the unnecessary destruction of property, while completely undermining constitutional protections for individual liberties.

The report outlines more than “800 SWAT deployments conducted by 20 law enforcement agencies during the years 2011-2012.” Often times, law enforcement is using SWAT to search people’s homes for drugs. According to data released by law enforcement agencies, 62 percent of deployments were for drug searches. Not surprisingly, many of the casualties of such raids have been suffered by communities of color.

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2014/07/02/police_out_of_control_7_horrifying_examples_of_americas_militarized_state/

From Mother Jones:  http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/hobby-lobby-bill-gothard-institute-basic-life-principles

The crafts store chain and its owners gave millions in backing to controversial evangelical Bill Gothard and his Institute in Basic Life Principles.

By David Corn and Molly Redden
Wed Jul. 2, 2014

For a decade or so, Hobby Lobby and its owners, the Green family, have been generous benefactors of a Christian ministry that until recently was run by Bill Gothard, a controversial religious leader who has long promoted a strict and authoritarian version of Christianity. Gothard, a prominent champion of Christian home-schooling, has decried the evils of dating, rock music, and Cabbage Patch dolls; claimed public education teaches children “how to commit suicide” and undermines spirituality; contended that mental illness is merely “varying degrees of irresponsibility”; and urged wives to “submit to the leadership” of their husbands. Critics of Gothard have associated him with Christian Reconstructionism, an ultrafundamentalist movement that yearns for a theocracy, and accused him of running a cultlike organization. In March, he was pressured to resign from his ministry, the Institute in Basic Life Principles, after being accused by more than 30 women of sexual harassment and molestation—a charge Gothard denies.

The Institute traces it origins to 1964, when Gothard designed a college seminar based on biblical principles to help teenagers. The ministry says it was established “for the purpose of introducing people to the Lord Jesus Christ” and to give individuals, families, businesses, and governments “clear instruction and training on how to find success by following God’s principles found in Scripture.” The group, which operates what it calls “training centers” across the United States and abroad, says more than 2.5 million people have attended its paid events, which have brought in tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Gothard and the Institute have drawn support from conservative politicians, including Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue. The Duggar family, the stars of the reality show 19 Kids and Counting, have been high-profile advocates of Gothard’s home-schooling curriculum and seminars. (One of Gothard’s alleged victims has called on the Duggars to break with Gothard and the Institute.) Don Venoit, a conservative evangelical who has long been a critic of Gothard, contends that Gothard’s approach to Christian theology emphasizing obedience to authority creates a “culture of fear.” In 1984, Ronald Allen, now a professor of Bible exposition at Dallas Theological Seminary, observed that Gothard’s teachings were “a parody of patriarchalism” and “the basest form of male chauvinism I have ever heard in a Christian context.” He added, “Gothard has lost the biblical balance of the relationship between women and men as equals in relationship. His view is basically anti-woman.”

According to the 79-year-old Gothard, the Greens and Hobby Lobby—which this week won a landmark Supreme Court case with a decision ruling that the firm does not have to adhere to the Obamacare mandate requiring companies to cover contraception in their employee health plans—have supported the Institute in Basic Life Principles for 10 to 15 years, primarily by obtaining four or five facilities for the ministry. In 2001, the Greens, through a family trust, sold Gothard’s group a 2,250-acre campus in Big Sandy, Texas, for $10. The campus, which has a landing strip and aircraft hangar, now houses the Institute’s International ALERT Academy, a boot camp where young men train in disaster response techniques. The academy also runs a program for girls 15 and older. The website for that program notes that “skirts are required to encourage the girls to remain feminine in an active lifestyle.” The application—under the heading “mental health”—asks girls if they are struggling with “day dreaming,” “fantasy,” or “lustful thoughts.”

In 2000, Hobby Lobby donated a 529,717-square-foot building in Little Rock, Arkansas, to Gothard’s outfit. The company had purchased this property, a former Veterans Affairs building, two years earlier for $299,000. The Institute now runs a prison ministry out of this location, providing curriculum to a faith-based Arkansas Department of Corrections program known as Principles and Applications for Life. For about a decade, according to Gothard, the Institute leased the ground floor of the building for $1 per year to the Little Rock Police Department for use as its downtown station. Now, Gothard says, the police are paying a regular rental fee.

Continue reading at:  http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/hobby-lobby-bill-gothard-institute-basic-life-principles