As abortion ban proposals make their way nationwide, some GOP states are taking the opportunity to propose other horrific laws. A bill, HB 233, has been proposed in the Tennessee state legislature that would establish a common-law marriage between “one man” and “one woman,” WKRN reported.
Bill sponsors claim the proposed bill would add a new marriage option for residents. “So, all this bill does is give an alternative form of marriage for those pastors and other individuals who have a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in our law,” Tom Leatherwood said. “There is not an explicit age limit.”
However, while the sponsors claim it expands marriage options, they fail to mention the consequences of having no age limit. Since the bill eliminates an age requirement for marriage, child advocates believe it opens the door for child sex abuse. This is because, without an age requirement, there is a possibility of child marriages.
The move is clearly a step back for the state because the state only signed laws prohibiting the marriage of minors under the age of 17 in 2018. According to The Tennessean, the 2018 bill prohibited anyone under the age of 17 from marrying in Tennessee and anyone under 18 from marrying someone who is four or more years older.
Previous laws before this one allowed a judge to waive the minimum age limit for marriage if guardians of a child consented.
Various state representatives have pushed back on the bill, including Rep. Mike Stewart, who said he didn’t understand the motivation behind removing the age requirements. “I don’t think any normal person thinks we shouldn’t have an age requirement for marriage.”
He added the potential increase in sex abuse. “It should not be there as it’s basically a get out of jail free card for people who are basically committing statutory rape—I mean it’s completely ridiculous, so that’s another reason why this terrible bill should be eliminated,” Steward said.
According to state data obtained by Unchained at Last, Tennessee granted at least 37 marriage licenses to 17-year-old girls in 2014, the only minors in that year. Additionally, UNICEF found 300,000 girls and boys were married before 18 in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018.
Removing an age limit only opens up doors for these statistics to grow. GOP states are clearly making moves to take the country in the opposite direction.
“The Sexual Assault Center does not believe the age of consent for marriage should be any younger than it already is. It makes children more vulnerable to coercion and manipulation from predators, sexual and other,” the Sexual Assault Center of Middle Tennessee said in a statement to WKRN.
“A judge found Assembly Speaker Robin Vos in contempt of court Wednesday for failing to release documents related to a Republican-run review of the 2020 election,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Wednesday. “Dane County Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn determined the Rochester Republican and the Assembly as a whole adopted ‘a collective and abject disregard for the court’s order’ from four months ago to turn over documents sought by the liberal group American Oversight under the state’s open records law. She ordered Vos and the Assembly to turn over records within 14 days and to each pay $1,000 per day if they fail to do that.”
In Arizona, the Cyber Ninjas are being fined $50,000 a day.
“Bailey-Rihn in November ruled Vos and others had to release copies of emails, calendars and other documents about the election review. Vos produced some records but not others as he argued the requests should have been made to Michael Gableman, the former state Supreme Court justice he hired to oversee the election review,” the newspaper added. “Bailey-Rihn noted state law requires government officials to treat records from contractors like Gableman the same as their own records. That policy is meant to prevent officials from using contractors to evade their obligations under the open records law, she noted.”
Vos has approved spending $676,000 in taxpayer money on the Gableman investigation.
This is not a family in Ukraine. This is a picture of a family in the US trying to survive by living in a large old van. This is what some kids going to school deal with. This is why reducing free meals is so horrible. This is parents trying to work to keep their children fed and clothed yet can not afford the cost of housing in the US. In some areas rents rose by 66%. Yes that number is true. How can anyone deal with this? Why is the wealthy allowed to profit from the misery of families?
Republicans eliminate precedent all the time. SCOTUS wants to overturn decided cases like Roe v Wade. Why would the worst president of all time, who personifies obstruction of justice, benefit from precedent?
“The average citizen views today’s Supreme Court as highly politicized because we all saw what our politicians did to it. The Republican political hardball, and the brazen dishonesty that was used to justify it, Trumpified the court with three out of nine justices — one stolen from the first Black president, one rammed through just days before the 2020 election, and one with a surprise resignation. Now, no one is shocked that a court forged with such political bad faith is making bad decisions with nakedly political overtones.”
This illegitimate SCOTUS majority does not interpret laws. They abuse their power to impose their regressive, revanchist, theocratic will on a population that does not respect them, did not vote for them, and has no way at all to hold them accountable.
I don’t know how, but this has to change.
Just when you think the three new judges are the worst, Clarence makes sure you know he is horrible, too.
What the right calls sexual indoctrination is the idea that gay or trans people exist and are normal. The only parents the right wants to have a say are right wing maga parents, the rest of the parents get told to shut up. They are trying to win the culture war by making even the exposure to LGBTQ+ people illegal. Even though kids are exposed to straight couples and straight sexuality all the time. So it is not about the sexual indoctrination of kids, it is about the idea they hate anyone different from them and don’t want kids to know about them until they have been taught to hate them.
Because this is not happening! It is a lie and misinformation from those that are anti-trans or using it as a political wedge issue. Men are not suddenly deciding they are not good enough to win in a sport as a man so will up-end their lives and face unending discrimination to live their life as a woman so they can compete as a female to win. Where the fuck to start to explain how stupid this idea is. First if a guy is not good enough to win against male competitors it is doubtful that after they take the necessary treatments to qualify to play on a women team they would win there either. Second what guy who is a male gender is going to stop his entire way of life that makes him happy and start living in a way that will make life harder for him and could cost him his entire sexual enjoyment / life. How is he going to date the girls he likes if he is not the man he was but a girl like them? If he was in to men who liked men, they wont date him because he is a girl now. So he is giving up that. How about his family, are they OK with it? How about his political friends, if Republican he loses all them. This is why the idea of guys just claiming to be girls falls apart and is not happening. Think it through people. If it was a huge problem it would be happening every day in every sport, and it is not. If all the trans women were winning all the awards, setting all the records, and winning every event it would be daily news. But it isn’t because they are not. Look at the scores, look at the totality of the wins, look at the awards. Most often the trans person is working harder and has less support, and only sometimes wins. The records are still held by non trans women. It is simply bigotry. Sort of like when black people were allowed to play sport with white people. It was said white people couldn’t win anymore. Yet they do. They still play and they still win.
She declined to become entangled in verbal traps. Anything else? Yawn. The Cons. are pissed that she is much smarter than they are. The point is that her job isn’t to define things. Her job is to interpret and rule on the law when presented with evidence and arguments in court. Cases which come before the Supreme Court are not going to be simple ones. They will be cases which challenge the edges of established definitions. Asking a candidate to decide without first hearing the arguments in a particular case is basically asking them if they would like to disqualify themselves for the position.
Oh, haha, it’s totally the Fed’s fault, even though CEOs are BRAGGING about their record profits they’ve “earned” by hiking prices across the board for everything under the sun. The GQP is having a sh*tfit over gas prices. They would do the same if Biden did anything to stop Big Oil’s obscene profiteering. The same for every other issue today.
Several hundred Russian troops reportedly rushed to a special medical facility in Belarus after digging in radioactive soil in a forest near the infamous nuclear plant.
Barbie Latza Nadeau
Correspondent-At-Large
SeanGallup
Several hundred Russian soldiers were forced to hastily withdraw from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine after suffering “acute radiation sickness” from contaminated soil, according to Ukrainian officials.
The troops, who dug trenches in a contaminated Red Forest near the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, are now reportedly being treated in a special medical facility in Gomel, Belarus. The forest is so named because thousands of pine trees turned red during the 1986 nuclear disaster. The area is considered so highly toxic that not even highly specialized Chernobyl workers are allowed to enter the zone.
Energoatom, the Ukrainian agency in charge of the country’s nuclear power stations, said the Russian soldiers had panicked and fled.
“It has been confirmed that the occupiers who seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and other facilities in the Exclusion Zone set off in two columns towards Ukraine’s border with Belarus. The occupiers announced their intentions to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant this morning to the Ukrainian personnel of the station,” the agency said in a statement on Telegram, adding that a small number of Russians still remained at the facility.
The agency said it had also confirmed reports of Russian forces digging trenches in the Red Forest, “the most polluted in the entire exclusion zone.”
“Not surprisingly, the occupiers received significant doses of radiation and panicked at the first sign of illness. And it showed up very quickly.”
Local reports suggest that seven buses with the zapped troops arrived in Gomel early Thursday. Journalists on the ground have also reported “ghost buses” of dead soldiers being transported from Belarus to Russia under the cover of dark.
U.S. intelligence reported Wednesday that Russian forces began withdrawing from the defunct site. Russia said the withdrawal from Chernobyl was part of a pledge to scale back the invasion. But Ukrainian media says it is actually because the troops were “irradiated” from the contaminated soil.
“Another batch of Russian irradiated terrorists who seized the Chernobyl zone was brought to the Belarusian Radiation Medicine Center in Gomel today,” Yaroslav Yemelianenko, who works for the Public Council at the State Agency of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone Management, posted on Facebook. “There are rules for dealing with this territory.”
The Chernobyl facility fell to Russian control on Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion. Workers were on duty for more than 600 hours before being allowed a shift change. International concern grew immediately when Russian troops moved heavy military hardware through the area, kicking up radioactive dust without any protective equipment. Forest fires in the area also raised concern about environmental contamination.
Digging trenches in the forest—considered the most contaminated area of the site—drew widespread ridicule from Ukrainians who work at the site.
As the Russian president signs a decree to call up another 134,500 conscripts, his troops in Ukraine want out.
Allison Quinn
News Editor
Reuters
Russia’s Vladimir Putin is calling up another 134,500 conscripts even as more and more of his own soldiers appear to be turning on him over humiliating losses in Ukraine.
According to a decree published on a Russian government portal Thursday, the troops will be called to begin service on April 1 until July 15. The Defense Ministry promised earlier this week that they “will not be sent to any hot spots,” and that all those called up in last spring’s draft will be sent home.
But those assurances seem likely to be overshadowed by a multitude of reports that say Russia’s senseless war against Ukraine has been marred by lies from the top down, with Russian troops claiming they were misled into the war and Putin’s own advisers said to be shielding him from the extent of the devastating losses.
Even as Putin signed the decree on Thursday, Ukraine’s Security Service released an intercepted call said to capture a Russian soldier railing against the incompetence of his own army.
“Our brigade has totally shit themselves. There are losses, many wounded,” he tells his wife.
Asked if the losses are a result of someone screwing up, he offers a blunt response: “The whole army with us is stupid morons.”
“It’s unclear why we are even here,” he says.
Another recording shared by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, captures a man identified as a Russian soldier named Maksim asking his mother what is being shown on Russian television, and if there are reports “they’re saying they will change anything.”
“Everything’s bad, almost no one among us is left. They said we will keep going until the very end, until everyone is killed,” he tells his mother.
Asked if his senior officer was still with the unit, he replies: “No, he dumped us yesterday. We’re all dead in the water if he left.”
The new recordings come just hours after Western officials said there was growing evidence of disarray and disillusionment among Russian troops, with Britain’s spy chief citing reports of troops “refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft.”
It was against this backdrop that Russian defense officials claimed they would cut down hostilities around the Ukrainian capital and shift their focus instead to the east of the country—an announcement met with mockery and skepticism among Ukrainian officials, who said the Kremlin was trying to spin their numerous setbacks into a “mission accomplished” scenario.
Perhaps as part of that long game, the Kremlin has now reportedly begun implementing plans to send psychologists from the FSB into Kherson, a city in the south of Ukraine where residents continue to resist the Russian forces who took over after the Feb. 24 invasion.
“To implement a scenario for the creation of another pseudo-republic in the territory of the Kherson region, there is work underway by employees of the FSB, 652 groups of information and psychological operations and officers of the 12th Main Directorate of the [Russian] General Staff,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in a statement Thursday.
Ukrainian officials said the FSB effort is an attempt to brainwash residents into supporting their new Russian authorities.
Russian law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges are also said to be on their way to occupied territories in Ukraine, with reports of Russian police officers being asked to take “business trips” to parts of the Donbas in Ukraine’s east.
Catherine and his cousin Carla, Guevedoces in the Dominican Republic
The discovery of a small community in the Dominican Republic, where some males are born looking like girls and only grow penises at puberty, has led to the development of a blockbuster drug that has helped millions of people, writes Michael Mosley.
Johnny lives in a small town in the Dominican Republic where he, and others like him, are known as “Guevedoces”, which effectively translates as “penis at twelve”.
We came across Johnny when we were filming for a new BBC Two series Countdown to Life, which looks at how we develop in the womb and how those changes, normal and abnormal, impact us later in life.
Like the other Guevedoces, Johnny was brought up as a girl because he had no visible testes or penis and what appeared to be a vagina. It is only when he approached puberty that his penis grew and testicles descended.
Johnny, once known as Felicita, remembers going to school in a little red dress, though he says he was never happy doing girl things.
Find out more
Watch the second episode of Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You, Against the Odds, on BBC Two at 21:00 on Monday 21 September, or catch up afterwards on iPlayer.
“I never liked to dress as a girl and when they bought me toys for girls I never bothered playing with them – when I saw a group of boys I would stop to play ball with them.”
When he became obviously male he was taunted at school, and responded with his fists.
“They used to say I was a devil, nasty things, bad words and I had no choice but to fight them because they were crossing the line.”
We also filmed with Carla, who at the age of seven is on the brink of changing into Carlos. His mother has seen the change coming for quite a while.
“When she turned five I noticed that whenever she saw one of her male friends she wanted to fight with him. Her muscles and chest began growing. You could see she was going to be a boy. I love her however she is. Girl or boy, it makes no difference.”
So why does it happen? Well, one of the first people to study this unusual condition was Dr Julianne Imperato-McGinley, from Cornell Medical College in New York. In the 1970s she made her way to this remote part of the Dominican Republic, drawn by extraordinary reports of girls turning into boys.
When she got there she found the rumours were true. She did lots of studies on the Guevedoces (including what must have been rather painful biopsies of their testicles) before finally unravelling the mystery of what was going on.
When you are conceived you normally have a pair of X chromosomes if you are to become a girl and a set of XY chromosomes if you are destined to be male.
For the first weeks of life in womb you are neither, though in both sexes nipples start to grow.
Then, around eight weeks after conception, the sex hormones kick in. If you’re genetically male the Y chromosome instructs your gonads to become testicles and sends testosterone to a structure called the tubercle, where it is converted into a more potent hormone called dihydro-testosterone This in turn transforms the tubercle into a penis. If you’re female and you don’t make dihydro-testosterone then your tubercle becomes a clitoris.
When Imperato-McGinley investigated the Guevedoces she discovered the reason they don’t have male genitalia when they are born is because they are deficient in an enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase, which normally converts testosterone into dihydro-testosterone.
This deficiency seems to be a genetic condition, quite common in this part of the Dominican Republic, but vanishingly rare elsewhere. So the boys, despite having an XY chromosome, appear female when they are born. At puberty, like other boys, they get a second surge of testosterone. This time the body does respond and they sprout muscles, testes and a penis.
Imperato-McGinley’s thorough medical investigations showed that in most cases their new, male equipment seems to work fine and that most Guevedoces live out their lives as men, though some go through an operation and remain female.
Another thing that Imperato-McGinley discovered, which would have profound implications for many men around the world, was that the Guevedoces tend to have small prostates.
This observation, made in 1974, was picked up by Roy Vagelos, head of research at the multinational pharmaceutical giant, Merck. He thought this was extremely interesting and set in progress research which led to the development of what has become a best-selling drug, finasteride, which blocks the action of 5-alpha-reductase, mimicking the lack of dihydro-testosterone seen in the Guevedoces.
My wife, who is a GP, routinely prescribes finasteride as it is an effective way to treat benign enlargement of the prostate, a real curse for many men as they get older. Finasteride is also used to treat male pattern baldness.
This is still a controversial topic and one I explore later in the film when I meet Mati, who decided from the earliest age that though “he” looked like a boy, Mati was really a girl.
As for Johnny, since he developed male genitalia he has had a number of short term girlfriends, but he is still looking for love. “I’d like to get married and have children, a partner who will stand by me through good and bad,” he sighs wistfully.
More from the Magazine
The number of children aged 10 and under who have been referred to NHS support services to help deal with transgender feelings has more than quadrupled in the last six years, the Victoria Derbyshire programme has learned. Here is the story of two of the youngest transgender children in the UK – with permission from their parents and with the support of the children’s schools.
She declined to become entangled in verbal traps. Anything else? Yawn. The Cons. are pissed that she is much smarter than they are. The point is that her job isn’t to define things. Her job is to interpret and rule on the law when presented with evidence and arguments in court. Cases which come before the Supreme Court are not going to be simple ones. They will be cases which challenge the edges of established definitions. Asking a candidate to decide without first hearing the arguments in a particular case is basically asking them if they would like to disqualify themselves for the position.