Posts Tagged ‘law’

Don’t Say Gay in Tennessee

Saturday, May 21st, 2011

I gather it’s not easy being gay in Tennessee. If you listen to country music, most of it seems to be about the value and nobility of small town life — hard labor, cheap beer, and church on Sunday. There’s not much room in there for difference, let alone anything not considered manly. It seems the rest of the state isn’t much different from Nashville’s music. The state senate has recently approved a bill that would prevent teachers from discussing anything related to homosexuality before the ninth grade.

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Anti-Vax’ers Lose In California

Saturday, January 1st, 2011

Remember the bit I posted a while back about autism causing whooping cough?  Some parents, afraid that vaccines caused autism despite plentiful evidence to the contrary and even outright debunking of the original “study” that first made the claim, have been deciding not to get their children immunized, including opting out of the whooping cough vaccine.  Not surprisingly, that resulted in an increase in the incidence of the disease.  That won’t be happening in California any more, however, thanks to a new law going into effect.

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Adoption Not Final In North Carolina

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

Imagine adopting a child and being that child’s parent for nearly a decade and then being told, oops, you’re not the parent after all.  Now imagine that the reason for this is that the child’s birth mother, with whom you were raising the child, didn’t give up her parental rights.  That’s the ruling handed down by the North Carolina Supreme Court on Monday.  Apparently, if an unmarried man wants to be a father to his partner’s child but isn’t the biological father, the mother has to give up her parental rights.

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What Schools Must Have

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

As insane as it might seem, when times are tough, economically, it’s always education — the future of our society, our country, even our species — that seems to get cut first.  School nurses get laid off, along with librarians and counselors.  Art classes are pretty much gone, as are the band and orchestras of our youth.  There’s no money for after school activities and lunches are made off-site and trucked in like military MREs.  Now, however, a California court has ruled that there is one part of the school day that simply can’t be cut, regardless of how bad a fiscal crisis a school district is facing.

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