Motley Moose – Archive

Remember Hobby Lobby?  That corporate use of personal religious freedom to make decisions about employees’ benefits?  

Guess what?  Did anyone really think that decision would stay put and never been seen again?  Because Wheaton College decision came out 3 days later?  But still, maybe, just maybe it could have been buried.  

But wait!  The Fundamentalist LDS, have decided not to pay kids to harvest pecans.  The Department of Labor is investigating labor violations.  FLDS leaders claim they do not have to testify because “religious freedom.”  

So I wonder what else the FLDS have religious freedom for?  Perhaps child sex assault?  Do we need to let Warren Jeffs out of prison because of “religious freedom”?

Do Lutherans have the same protection?  How about followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Judge David Sam is in a federal court, and overruled another judge who was a magistrate.  I am not a lawyer and welcome the help of lawyers to explain this better.  It just seems to be that “religious freedom” just became a huge legal reason to not do anything you didn’t feel like doing.  

Ironically, the judge deciding the case chose to not investigate the religious beliefs:  

“It is not for the Court to “inquir[e] into the theological merit of the belief in question,” Sam wrote, citing the Hobby Lobby decision.  “The determination of what is a ‘religious’ belief or practice is more often than not a difficult and delicate task …. However, the resolution of that question is not to turn upon a judicial perception of the particular belief or practice in question; religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection.”

Ben Winslow for Fox-13

I think that any religious group could have cited Hobby Lobby in any variety of cases, and it is just luck that it happened here first. This is not limited to the FLDS.  And please remember, this is not an opportunity for you to bash the LDS.  If you need to do that, please write your own diary.  

Please do not use this diary for LDS or Mormon bashing.  

I am reposting this from a diary I did a few years ago on GOS.  Forgive me if you have seen this before, but since we are preparing our children to go back to school, I thought it was apt.

I saw a news program (sorry, I can’t remember which one and can’t find the link) that suggested homelessness is up by 60%.  They also indicated that the face of homelessness has changed as well.  Many of the newly homeless are intact families who had been working at jobs that paid the bills.  The homeless population is not comprised of the old male drunks we see in the Salvation Army ads.   The number of homeless children is growing and they need help.  The problem is not going away.  Over the summer, they have nowhere to go.

The following may help understand of the life of a homeless child.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.  

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven’s part, our part  

To murmur name upon name,  

As a mother names her child  

When sleep at last has come  

On limbs that had run wild.  

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;  

Was it needless death after all?

Easter, 1916 ~ William Butler Yeats

Last week, my life was transformed in a most marvelous way: I became a grandmother, quite an accomplishment for an infertile person who spent nearly two decades in the pursuit of motherhood.

I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that both my ex-husband and I brought our own biological limitations to the conception process. Either of us paired with someone else might have been able to reproduce, but that really wasn’t the point. Still, when one marries into a large Irish Catholic family, childlessness is a suboptimal outcome.  In the end, though, my childlessness enabled me to divorce amicably and without complication after 19.9 years of a marriage that lacked a great deal more than the pitter patter of little feet.

In an ironic twist, I then married Mr. Carolina, a man who’d fathered two sons, then had a vasectomy back in the 1970’s, when this was A Very Progressive thing to do. Now that I’ve turned the corner of menopause, it’s clear that reproduction is off the table… not that I would have wanted children in this marriage. Relations with my two step sons who were in high school and college when I married their father were already strained. The older son (“James”) remained estranged for over a dozen years; the other (“Drew”) who was always closer to his father held out for a short while, then yielded to the inexorable pull of love and enjoyed a great relationship with both of us.  

Hi my moosey friends, I need some help.

It looks like I may have found a job, assuming everything goes through correctly. If it does, I will be an independent contract counselor working for a counseling agency. Sounds like something someone who just finished a counseling program should be able to handle, right?

Not exactly.

All of the time I’ve spent studying the field of psychology, I’ve planned to work with adults – ideally in a hospital setting. I have studied adults almost exclusively, and all of my internship experience was done in a clinic which took no one under the age of 19.

But the woman who hired me plans to place me primarily at an elementary school working as a counselor/behavior specialist with “problem” children for grades PK-5. I am passingly familiar with the school – and its reputation. A friend of mine tutors students there after classes, and he says it is very troubled – that a lot of the kids are difficult to teach and control. The families who send their children there are mostly low income, as evidenced by data I found on the school which indicated that over 90% of the students are eligible for free lunches. My boss says there is a total caseload at the school of 52. The school only has about 250 students, meaning that an unusually large percentage of the kids are considered problematic.  

Kids care more about being healthy than some might give them credit for. A lot of kids might beg mom for sugary cereals, but it turns out that they aren’t necessarily after the sugar itself. According to a new study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, given a choice between cereals in plain boxes labeled “healthy” and “sugary,” most kids will pick the healthy cereal. This indicates that some of the messages kids are being sent about the importance of a balanced diet and leading a healthy life are making an impact. Unfortunately, when a colorful cartoon character is placed on a cereal box, kids tend to choose it no matter what it tastes like.

It is a dream. I recognize that right away. I’ve never been in the room before, nor do I recognize the doctor at my side or the gaunt, sickly child who lies in the hospital bed before us.

I ask, “Is there anything…?”