Twenty-Five Things that Caught My Eye Today: The Priority of the Family & More
1. ‘Choose — I kill you or rape you’: abuse accusations surge in Ethiopia’s war
Tewadrous, the refugee camp doctor, described two other rape cases he had handled. One woman, who said she had escaped from Rawyan town in Tigray, told of three soldiers she identified as Amhara special forces knocking at her door, the doctor said. When she refused them entry, they broke in and assaulted her.
An aid worker in the town of Wukro told Reuters victims had recounted how a husband was forced to kneel and watch while his wife was raped by soldiers they identified as Eritrean.
Head of disability charity Sense Richard Kramer said: ‘Disabled people are three times more likely to die from Covid-19, than non-disabled people.
‘This is even greater for particular groups, such as those with a learning disability.
‘And yet, throughout this pandemic, disabled people and their needs haven’t been prioritised.
‘From the lack of infrastructure to allow those forced to shield to access food and medicine during the first lockdown, to the cuts in social care support affecting those living independently and families caring for them at home, they have largely been forgotten, left without sufficient support, information and communication.
3. Tracey Alvino: COVID nursing home deaths: Andrew Cuomo is running from his part in my dad’s death
As the staff feared getting sick, [my father] was made to eat with his face down in a dish like a dog because the aide refused to help him. He sat in his waste for hours on end. He didn’t even have his teeth brushed for days. Then, on March 25, the Cuomo administration ordered recovering coronavirus patients to be placed into nursing homes and forbid nursing homes from requiring patients to be tested. Sadly, my father was exposed to COVID-19 and started to show symptoms.
. . .
Now we know Cuomo wasn’t counting my father as among the deaths associated with nursing homes.
The New York Attorney General’s Office released a report in January that said the state may be undercounting COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents by as much as 50% because it doesn’t include residents who were transferred to hospitals. That means the true death toll of New York nursing home residents is around 13,000 people, as opposed to the state’s 8,677 figure.
4. Texas boy, 12, hangs himself after battling depression amid COVID-19
5. Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: The Teachers Unions Roll Over Biden
Mr. Biden figured that his support for the teachers union agenda, along with more money, would get the unions to reopen the schools. Instead he’s discovering what America’s parents have learned in the last year: Unions run the schools, and no one—not parents, not school districts, not mayors, and not even a new Democratic President—will tell them what to do. So it’s one day a week, pal. Get used to it.
. . .
A University of Pennsylvania study estimates that each month of school closures costs students between $12,000 and $15,000 in future earnings. The earnings hit will be greatest for minority and poor children in cities. Private and suburban schools that aren’t controlled by unions have managed to reopen safely, though not because they have more money.
6. New York Times: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired.
7. The “Equality Act” Threatens Children Waiting to Be Adopted
If the “Equality Act” becomes law, it would add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as protected classes to laws prohibiting discrimination. And while proponents of this law claim it would promote “tolerance” or “inclusion,” in reality, it poses a serious risk to religious liberty.
And children waiting for loving homes will be collateral damage. How?
Because the “Equality Act” aims to decrease the number of organizations that are working to find children loving homes.
8. Erin Hawley: The recent assault on our home and attacks on my family are not civil discourse
The assault on our home, followed by weeks of personal attacks on our family (from the simple, but sinister, “watch your back,” to much more colorful and descriptive texts, emails, and phone calls) are not civil discourse. They are just meant to frighten.
9. Brett D. Schaefer: America Should Not Have Rejoined the Flawed United Nations Human Rights Council
The Council’s obsession with Israel is only the tip of the iceberg of HRC failures. Blinken insists that “[w]hen it works well, the Human Rights Council shines a spotlight on countries with the worst human rights records and can serve as an important forum for those fighting injustice and tyranny.” True, when it is not attacking Israel, the Council can condemn human right situations in pariah states like North Korea or adopt resolutions requesting technical assistance with willing governments such as Georgia.
But when it comes to the tough cases and influential governments, the Council is almost invariably silent. Specifically, the HRC has been unable or unwilling to adopt resolutions condemning serious human rights abuses by China, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, and other human rights offenders, even when the United States was a member of the Council.
10. Alabama prisoner to Supreme Court: let me pray with my pastor at the hour of my death
“Allowing clergy to be present for condemned prisoners at the moment of death is an ancient and common practice, one that Alabama is familiar with,” said Diana Verm, senior counsel at Becket. “In fact, until 2019, Alabama not only allowed but required clergy in the death chamber. That shows Alabama is less concerned about security than it is about litigation tactics.”
11. Mona Charen: Mitt Romney Is Trying to Save Policymaking
Romney’s proposal is also pro-life. Family incomes tend to decline in the second half of pregnancy, so Romney’s child allowance would begin four months before a child’s birth. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, some 28 percent of abortion patients cite financial worries as one of the reasons for terminating a pregnancy.
12. Helen Andrews: Why Bother With Family?
Not everyone wants a white picket fence, two-point-five children, a male breadwinner, and a stay-at-home mom. There’s plenty of room for pluralism. But stable families are good. Marriage is good. Babies are good. Public policy should acknowledge that. If conservatives won’t, who will?
13. Lyman Stone: Escaping the Parent Trap
Pro-natal policy should be justified simply in terms of what people want—that is, desired childbearing. As fertility rates have declined around the world, they have reached a critical threshold: not the much-heralded “replacement rate” at which point the average woman’s childbearing will balance mortality in the long run, but the even-more-important “preferred fertility rate” at which the average woman is having the number of children she wants to have.
14. Grazie Pozo Christie: Pompeo Handed Biden a Gift on China
Hundreds of thousands of children have been stolen from their parents and sent to “boarding schools” where their language, culture, religion, and natural attachments are ground out of them. And these are just the Uighur children that manage to be born. A prominent component of China’s plan to exterminate the Uighurs is the reduction of their population through forced sterilization, abortion, and forced insertion of contraceptive devices.
. . .
The fact is that China’s growing global influence makes countries loath to speak out against the Communist Party’s crimes against humanity. American leadership is needed to turn the tide and encourage other nations to take punitive measures against China, such as the Trump administration’s sanctions against senior Party leaders involved in the atrocities. But this is just a start. President Biden needs to focus his attention like a laser on the human rights catastrophe of our age and land us on the right side of history.
15. USA Today: Denver successfully sent mental health professionals, not police, to hundreds of calls
“Overall, the first six months has kind of been a proof of concept of what we wanted,” said Vinnie Cervantes, a member of Denver Alliance for Street Health Response, one of the organizations involved with the STAR program. “We’ve continued to try to work to make it something that is truly a community-city partnership.”
16. New York Times: Rhode Island Kept Its Schools Open. This Is What Happened.
Raimondo, who has two children in private school, has said that she sees school openings as a matter of equity. Governors in many red states insisted on school openings back in the fall — Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, threatened to cut off funding in all but the hardest-hit regions if they offered only remote instruction — but perhaps no other Democratic governor has matched Raimondo’s dedication to the cause and her effectiveness in execution. When Rhode Island’s school-opening plan had fully rolled out by late September, only one public-school district, Pawtucket, was primarily remote.
17.
Archeologists found a buried Baptist church in Colonial Williamsburg, VA. This church, First Baptist Church, was founded by slaves in 1776. https://t.co/VWuvaS5Byc
— Colson Center (@ColsonCenter) February 11, 2021
The manuscript was formerly kept in the Great Al-Tahira Immaculate Conception Cathedral (pictured below), the Syriac Catholic cathedral in Bakhdida, also known as Qaraqosh. The cathedral was plundered and set alight when the Islamic State had control of the town from 2014 to 2016.
19. Alysse ElHage: Five Ideas for Strengthening a Pandemic-Stressed Marriage
Even as we try to overlook our spouse’s most irritating traits, we should also make an effort to recognize the positive things our spouse does every day, things we might have taken for granted in the past. And if there is one thing this pandemic has taught us, it is just how much we took for granted — whether it is being able to worship in church, drop our kids off for in-person school, or even find a grocery store shelf full of disinfecting wipes.
20.
"getting married cuts a man's chances of committing a crime by half, both for property crimes and for violent crimes" https://t.co/b9vS73o7FY
— Brad Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) February 11, 2021
21. Francis X. Maier: Hope and Her Daughters
If our leaders want national unity — and we should pray that Joe Biden and his administration will learn from the mistakes of Trump and his critics — then they cannot demonize and punish their opponents. They cannot turn their reverence for the Republic, the law, and our public buildings and institutions on and off like a spigot, according to their party’s current agenda. If our leaders want national healing, they need to respect and listen to people they disagree with and don’t like. When they don’t, bad things happen. What took place on January 6 at the Capitol was an echo from the right of what had happened on the left in cities around the country throughout 2020. It was ugly and dangerous and self-defeating — but rightly or wrongly, many people feel it was inevitable. Populist fury will subside, but resentment of our political class and distrust of our public institutions will grow.
22. Arthur C. Brooks: The Type of Love That Makes People Happiest
Falling in love can be exhilarating, but it isn’t the secret to happiness per se. You might more accurately say that falling in love is the start-up cost for happiness—an exhilarating but stressful stage we have to endure to get to the relationships that actually fulfill us.
. . .
The secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love. This does not mean just sticking together legally: Research shows that being married only accounts for 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life. The important thing for well-being is relationship satisfaction, and that depends on what psychologists call “companionate love” — love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.
23. With museums shuttered, Paris churches are ‘well worth a mass’
24. Alex Trebek Wardrobe Donated To Homeless Organization For Job Interviews
“During his last day on set, Alex extolled the virtues of everyone opening up their hands and their hearts to those who are suffering,” said Mike Richards, Executive Producer, Jeopardy!. “Donating his wardrobe to those who are working to rebuild their lives is the perfect way to begin to honor that last request.”
Circumstances may not allow for much community quite yet. Most of us haven’t been vaccinated and so can’t yet return to work or school or church, or to whatever circle of friends or relatives we’ve been pining to rejoin. Still, we can always dig in our heels and hope against hope that when this all this is finally over, our growing hunger will be shared by others. Not just for a return to normal social life, but for a springtime rebirth of true community.
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