Things That Piss Me Off Tuesday ~ the sodomy, racism and you can't fix stupid edition

I'll warn you all from the beginning...I'm in a mood. The VRA case just came down, and I'll write about that in a bit here. I need to calm down a little first, so logically I will write about sodomy.

^^^sarcasm. (Not that I think many of you will take what I say on Tuesdays literally...but you never know.)

Sodomy isn't hazing...
I can't believe I just typed that. Even harder to believe is the fact that there are plenty of people out there in the world who think it is.

So, this happened:

A 13 year old from Norwood, Colorado was bound with duct tape and sodomized with a pencil on a school bus by older kids at a wrestling tournament. The attackers, his teammates. One, the son of the coach.

Kid tells his parents, one of which is the principal of the local elementary school, and they go to the police. Word gets out. Then city folk force the principal to resign and the kid gets harassed constantly at school, the other students going so far as to stage a protest. The entire city gangs up on the family of the victim. They just "hazed" him.

The attackers eventually pled guilty, but only to misdemeanor charges.

I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident, but it's not.

This hazing isn't hazing. It's sodomy. It's rape. And there are cases of it all over the country, cases where the adults in charge sit on their hands with no explanation.  Until the perpetrators of these crimes are treated as such, until the adults in charge stop turning a blind eye, until we take this issue seriously, we are setting kids up to be victimized.

Racism isn't racism unless I can see it with my eyeballs
Sigh. I'm a little disappointed in the SCOTUS right now. They just struck down Section 4 of the VRA, saying that the maps drawn when the law was written aren't necessarily accurate anymore, so they can't be used to justify holding election procedures to a higher level of scrutiny in areas where voters had been disenfranchised in the past.

Congress could revisit the issue based on current conditions, but with a House controlled by the GOP, it's not likely to happen. What representative is going to admit that their constituents might be racist???

Not a single one, not in the current political environment, not where House members are constantly campaigning for re-election every two years in the digital age where everything they do and say is spun by the pundits.

Basically, the court said that since times have changed, and the states and counties involved might be different, the old law can no longer work. Racism might still exist, but Congress has to decide it's current racism, not old racism.  Racial issues are contentious, at best, and most of the areas that were in the news during the last election cycle because of this issue are the ones included on the map. Voters, like it or not, are still being disenfranchised, but the court basically said that Congress would have to re-evaluate the areas where there are problems to use this law again....and we all know how well Congress agrees about anything these days, let alone anything having to do with racial issues. (um, look at the immigration debacle for evidence of that...) 

You Can't Fix Stupid
Are you ready for this???

You might want to sit down.

Jodie Laubenberg, a Republican state representative in Texas authored a very restrictive bill on abortion. (and yes, Jodie is a woman)

She would like to do away with the rape exception even, one of the few things that almost everyone can agree about. The reason???

Are you sitting down?

She seems to think that women who are raped can just go the the emergency room and have a rape kit "clean her out".

Except that rape kits are for evidence collection, and will do NOTHING to prevent a pregnancy. We've almost become accustomed to asinine statements about rape and pregnancy being made by elected men, but to come from a woman?