Femen's Topless Sextremists Invade the US
Gangs
of attractive, topless women condemning religion, agitating against
misogyny, and fighting dictatorship. And now the feminists of Femen are
setting up shop in the United States. Their controversial leader tells
us why.
“Dictatorship in its pure form originated in Ukraine, that’s why we are coming today here to pee on this face--in the face who is bringing dictatorship to Ukraine under the protection and influence of Russia and Putin,” Inna Shevchenko tells a phalanx of tittering reporters and photographers, in heavily accented English. “We are giving an alarm to Europe that we need help, and no one has to hear [Yanukovych’s] face. We just have to pee on his opinion.”
In 2008, a handful of female students in Ukraine formed a women’s rights group to protest sex tourism and prostitution, calling themselves Femen. A year later, 19-year-old Shevchenko received a message on Facebook asking her to join the movement. The Femen girls hooted, hollered, and held up posters calling for an end to patriarchy and Ukraine’s burgeoning sex industry, but no one paid much attention until they adopted a head-turning strategy: painting feminist messages on their tits. Femen has transformed into a global movement led by Shevchenko and backed by 250 activists in nine countries. It now plans to open its first outpost in the United States.
The Daily Beast talked to Shevchenko about taking off her top for feminism, banning religion, and the violence that has overtaken her native Ukraine.
Why does Femen need a branch in the United States?
Femen has been developing as an international movement since 2012. During this time we’ve spread Femen to many places, setting up branches in nine countries. Our goal is to occupy the world with Femen’s tactics of modern feminism, and we appear in countries when called upon by women to come there. We set up Femen branches when women say "we need Femen in my country" and where some are ready to act as sextremists.
American women expressed their support and impatience when fighting puritanism and conservatism using Femen tactics. We got the call, so we’re giving an answer and helping commit Femen revolution in the United States.
Who is Femen aiming to target in the U.S.? Will you take on religion, politicians, and public figures you consider to be misogynists?
I can't name enemies, as it’s strategic information that we don't share. But I can assure you sure that once American women are trained and ready to act as Femen, every place of gender injustice, every representative of patriarchal culture, will be a target of Femen USA.
We will not leave religious institutions in peace, with their lobbying for anti-women policies. And Republican politicians will not walk the streets without worry [if they] lobby for anti-women laws. Femen is a special troop of reaction and punishment.
Femen has gotten a lot of media attention, particularly for staging topless protests. The Guardian recently wondered whether “the breasts are obscuring the message.” Everyone knows who Femen is, so the bare-breasted demonstrations are clearly working. But does everyone know what Femen is trying to accomplish?
Everyone has to know what our mission is, what Femen’s goal is. We exist as a radical nonviolent women's group of street activists acting with the goal of pointing to problems, to force society to recognize and react to them. To recognize a problem is the first step in solving it. Femen is taking off the masks of those who wear them. We show gender injustice, we catch missioners of patriarchy.
Femen’s tactic is a dramaturgy of gender reality. Femen’s idea is transforming the sexist point of view of naked a woman's body; we show it not as weak and smiley, but aggressive and powerful.“I can't tolerate such an intolerant thing as religion.”
Femen is a group of street activists acting in the field of public opinion. Femen has the world’s eyes to prostitution and sextourism in Eastern Europe; we were the first who reacted to the proposed law forbidding abortions is Spain; we were denouncing Viktor Yanukovych’s dictatorial regime that everyone is now fighting right when he was elected president.
What is Femen’s role in—and position on—the current uprising in Ukraine?
On February 7, 2010, Femen staged its first topless demonstration in Ukraine. It was the day Yanukovych was elected president. And then, for the first time, five topless Femen activists broke into a polling station shouting slogans like “The war will start soon.”
Now it’s February 2014 and we’re at a war in Ukraine--the war Femen warned about. We were first fighters and then victims of the regime, being persecuted and forced to flee. The revolution in Ukraine that has lasted for three months started as a protest against Yanukovych backing out of EU agreements. It transformed into a demand to rebuild the country’s entire political system. Neither the government nor the opposition were ready for such a huge riot by Ukrainians. And because of the president’s inability to understand the situation, combined with the weakness of the opposition, Ukraine is now on the edge of national catastrophe.
What are your thoughts about the news that former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko--a powerful female politician--has been released from prison?
About Tymoshenko, I'd say that she already showed with her [term in office] that she doesn't bring anything to the country. She betrayed the ideas of the Orange Revolution and, unfortunately, despite being a woman in politics she never says a word in the name of gender equality or women's rights in Ukraine--and it is badly needed there.
But Ukraine needs new blood. Ukraine has had the same politicians for 20 years and this is why the country is in a national crisis now. Tymoshenko won’t bring anything new. She definitely won't be my hero anymore, even though she was during the Orange Revolution.
Femen protests sex trafficking and sex tourism. Yet your group is considered “sex positive” (you even call yourselves “sextremists”). You want prostitution decriminalized but the solicitation of prostitutes to remain criminal. Are you also against the porn industry?
We fight the sex industry in general, not its component parts. Porn is one instrument [of the sex industry]--it’s a promotion of men's sexual domination and exploitation of women. We demand the criminalization of prostitutes’ clients as a way to fight violence against and exploitation of women.
Sex business is a business owned by men--for men--and women are just an instrument to earn money and pleasure.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, you said that you “strongly believe that one day religion has to be forbidden, the same way fascism was forbidden." Do you think this instinct is at cross-purposes with other aspects of your activism? Isn’t this a totalitarian instinct?
Well, my personal emotions regarding religion are expressed in a very radical way sometimes. And I do not regret it and will repeat it again and again. I can't tolerate such an intolerant thing as religion. I don't want to respect my enemies, I want to fight them. You call this a "totalitarian instinct.” I wouldn’t. I named evil as evil. I said something bad is bad.
We can't clean up the world from religion completely and I wouldn’t suggest banning it. But I call to give religion the small place [in society] that it deserves: as fantasy, literature, etc. But not as the only truth and law. As it’s still that way for billions around the world.
Religion is not a personal issue anymore, it has become political. It doesn't exist only to provide moral support anymore, but to replace constitutions and supplant human rights with [religious] tradition.
Religion is oppression and we are going to fight it with whatever “instincts” necessary.
In August 2012, you took a chainsaw to a 13-foot cross in Kiev to protest religion and Pussy Riot’s prison sentence. Next came arrest attempts and death threats, forcing you to seek political asylum in France, where women had expressed interest in becoming affiliated with Femen. But some conservatives are now making moves to try and make Femen illegal sect in the country. Would you leave France because of the backlash?
Me leave a fight? Never. I can leave to spread our ideas, as I’ll do in the United States. Or as I did in Spain last month. But I never leave any of those places where we start the fight.
France became my second homeland. I’m a refugee here and the European headquarters of Femen is now based in Paris.
As for the reaction of French conservatives’ reactions...well, what can be better than a riot by fascists opposing you? If the extreme right is fighting you, it means you’re endangering their ideology. And this is proof that Femen is on the side of good.
I don't want to be loved by fascists and religious fanatics. I want them to be irritated by women's freedom and bravery.
Photo by Pool photo by Jim Lo Scalzo
Politics
02.23.14
Spy Chief: We Can’t Stop Another Snowden
James Clapper spent his life protecting secrets. Then came the biggest leak of all.
Clapper, 72, a 51 year veteran in the intelligence community, is also the first director of national intelligence to hold the post when the annual intelligence budgets are being slashed instead of fattened. (Between 2002 and 2010 the annual intelligence community budget doubled from around $40 billion to $80 billion.) Add to this the fact that the legal authority Clapper needs to command the 16 intelligence agencies under his control is murky at best.
And in the last eight months at least, a growing chorus in Congress and the media are calling for him to resign. Meanwhile his friends and colleagues inside the classified government see Clapper as a scapegoat whose reputation has been unfairly rubbished.
Snowden pilfered documents from databases designed to share intelligence more broadly within the government. Promoting this integration of secrets is the primary mission of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The office was created on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission that faulted the intelligence agencies for jealously guarding information that could have prevented the attacks of that day. Clapper and his predecessors were supposed to help transform the intelligence community’s “need to know” culture to one of “need to share.” Snowden (and Chelsea Manning before him) were able to exploit the reforms promoted by the office Clapper now leads.Snowden and Manning were able to exploit the reforms promoted by the office Clapper now leads.
***
Covering nearly an entire wall of the waiting area outside Clapper’s office is a wooden relief sculpture dedicated to the U.S. Constitution. It contains a flag, a rendition of the constitutional assembly, and a copy of the document itself. It also has a plaque that reads, “What is the magic of the Constitution? The magic is how it states: We, the people. For the first time in history, government was about the people, not about the leader.”
Clapper said that in retrospect it would have been better for the government to acknowledge the collection of call records when the program started after 9/11. Even long-time critics applaud him for that.
“I think he deserves credit for rethinking the calculation over secrecy,” said Steve Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “I think post-Snowden, he quickly realized that declassification and disclosure would serve the interests of the intelligence community.”
Clapper also acknowledges that the very human nature of the bureaucracy he controls virtually insures that more mass disclosures are inevitable. “In the end,” he says, “we will never ever be able to guarantee that there will not be an Edward Snowden or another Chelsea Manning because this is a large enterprise composed of human beings with all their idiosyncrasies.”
Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, concurs: “I do think he recognizes that we are in a new normal after Snowden where we can’t operate with the expectation where nothing will get out,” he said. “If you are going to be dealing with the world where there are these disclosures you have to be more transparent to make the case to the public what you are doing and not doing.”
Wyden in a statement told The Daily Beast, "It's true that no one knows what is going through a witness's head when they are sitting at the witness table, other than the witness himself. Unfortunately, over the past several years a number of senior officials have repeatedly made misleading and inaccurate statements about domestic surveillance at congressional hearings and in other public settings.” Others are less charitable. Last month Sen. Rand Paul, the libertarian Republican from Kentucky, said if Snowden was to face justice, he should “share a jail cell with James Clapper” for lying to Congress.
“Well Senator Paul says I should get to know [Snowden] by being in the same prison cell with him, which I don’t think is a good idea,” Clapper told The Daily Beast last week. “Probably wouldn’t be in Mr. Snowden’s best interest.”“You have to appreciate the sadness that he felt. This wasn’t an act of genius from a foreign adversary but an insider who got past the most rudimentary of controls.”
The charges against his integrity bother Clapper. “I would rather not hear that or see that,” he said. “It’s tough on my family, I will tell you that. My son is a high school teacher and he has a tendency, or he is getting over it, to internalize a lot of this.” Those who know and have worked with Clapper also say it’s unfair to call him dishonest. Rhodes said President Obama values Clapper because “he’s a straight shooter who doesn’t put any spin on the ball.”
That’s a quality not often apparent when Clapper testifies before congressional committees, a part of his job that he admits makes him uncomfortable. One senior intelligence official who works closely with him said the director sometimes tells his staff after these hearings, “Let me tell you what it looks like from under the bus.”
Clapper sometimes calls the unclassified hearings where testifies “stump the chump,” meaning that it’s often a chance for members of Congress to make the leader of the intelligence community look clueless.
On more than one occasion the chump has been stumped. Following the fall of Egyptian strong man Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Clapper testified that the Muslim Brotherhood was a “largely secular” organization. His press office at the time had to issue a clarification. A few months later, Sen. Lindsey Graham called for Clapper to resign after he predicted that Muammar Gaddaffi’s forces would likely prevail in Libya at the very moment the White House was preparing to intervene on behalf of the late Libyan dictator’s opposition.
Clapper said in the interview that he has learned in these hearings to be careful about not offending other countries that partner closely and discreetly with the United States. He said that he often has to “beat around the bush, you got to go classified and this sort of thing. That is the awkwardness of testifying about intelligence matters in public. So as a consequence, yes, it’s not that I don’t like it, it’s not that I don’t like it, I’m not very comfortable doing it.”
Despite these public stumbles, Obama asked Clapper to remain in his job for the second term. Rhodes said Clapper’s relationship with Obama was “very good.” Nonetheless, given his distaste for testifying, not to mention his knack for gaffes under oath, it comes as no surprise that even Clapper’s allies question whether he should be the public face of the American intelligence community. Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence says, “He should not be the PR guy for the intelligence community, he should be the roll up your sleeves guy.”
***
After Vietnam, Clapper was a rising star. Three months after anti-war protestors broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pa. and took documents that proved a massive domestic spying program, Clapper started as a military assistant to the NSA director. “It was actually more stressful than combat,” he said of his time at the NSA. The raid on the FBI office was the first major exposure that rocked the intelligence community in the 1970s. Eventually Congress learned the NSA was also snooping on U.S. citizens through programs code named Minaret and Shamrock. In reaction Congress created a secret court that oversaw foreign intelligence surveillance inside the United States. Clapper draws a sharp distinction between the domesting spyingunveiled in the 1970s—“a managed, conscious, witting effort” to spy on Americans—and what’s transpired since 9/11 and “all the folderol of section 215 of the Patriot Act.”
Clapper ended his military career as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. By the end of 1995, he was out of government but still part of the intelligence community, taking jobs in the private sector with intelligence contractors and eventually running the contractors’ trade association.
In 2001, Clapper returned to government service when he was given the reins of a backwater intelligence agency known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. By all accounts he transformed the enterprise, changing its name to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and creating his own “int,” or field of intelligence GEOINT or Geospatial Intelligence. GEOINT combines satellite imagery with intelligence gleaned from signal intercepts, human spying, and other sources to provide detailed displays for troops and policy makers. At a 2010 dedication ceremony for the NGA’s new campus in Springfield, Va., he beamed, remarking that only a few years ago the entire place was just an idea in his head. He then looked over at Letitia Long, the incoming director of the agency and one of his protégés, and promised that as soon as he was sworn in as director of national intelligence, “the meddling will continue.”
Clapper was asked to leave his post at NGA before his term expired in 2006 in part because he clashed at the time with Don Rumsfeld, President Bush’s powerful secretary of defense.One of their points of contention was the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The job was created in response to a recommendation from the 9/11 Commission that found the intelligence community needed to integrate its intelligence more seamlessly.
Clapper was gone less than a year later, and he and his wife believed they were out of the government for good. But in 2007, he was called back into the intelligence community by an old friend, Robert Gates, who Bush had tapped to replace Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Clapper says he was reluctant to rejoin the administration that got rid of him before. His wife bought a countdown clock that marked off the time until the end of Bush’s second term–Gates had one, too–when Clapper would be expected to leave his new post. But Gates would outlast Bush, and Clapper would outlast them both.
Clapper initially worked for Gates as his Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, putting him in the odd position of fighting for the budgetary control he argued a few years earlier should be given to the DNI. Then, in 2010 Gates asked Clapper to replace Admiral Dennis Blair as the director of national intelligence. At first Clapper refused. “I was approaching 70 years old, I just didn’t want to do it anymore and the big thing (is) I did not want to go through another confirmation,” he said. That evening he went home and told his wife that he was refusing the job. He thought he would earn some points with her considering her opposition to him taking the job as undersecretary. But she surprised him when she asked him how he could refuse the position. That evening he wrote Gates a note that he delivered the next day, a Friday. On Tuesday, “I was in the Oval for a look-me-over audition,” he recalls. After that it was all ovcr but the paperwork. “When the commander in chief asks you--I’m a duty guy at heart, so I said I’d do it.”
Not many would disagree that Clapper has done a creditable job at ODNI. He has avoided over-reaching as his predecessor, Dennis Blair, did when he tried to appoint CIA station chiefs at embassies over the objections of the agency’s director. He has also managed to trim costs in an era of sequestration. Rep. Rogers gives Clapper high marks for containing costs on the construction of spy satellites. In 2012, Clapper ordered major cuts to a multi-billion commercial satellite imagery program run by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency known as “Enhanced View.” In some ways it was a move against his own interests-- Clapper served on the board of GeoEye after leaving government in 2006. As a result of the cuts, the two contractors that provided the imagery GeoEye and for DigitalGlobe were forced to merge. He has even managed to keep a sense of humor, albeit a grim one: Eight days after the first Guardian story about Snowden, Clapper joked in a speech at the annual INSA banquet, “Some of you expressed surprise that I showed up—so many emails to read!”
But Clapper has also failed fundamentally to stanch the leakage of secrets so emblematic of his tenure atop the community. When he first took the job in 2010 it was the height of the Wikileaks mass disclosures with Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. He signaled early on that he may have to rethink the ODNI’s prime directive of need to share and refocus on the need to know. But it was not just Manning that bothered Clapper, who also lambasted the proliferation of national security leaks in the media as well.
In Washington, being the guy on a mission to stamp out leaks is a bit like being the lone narc at Woodstock. The town has been awash in unauthorized and semi-authorized disclosures for years and until recently hardly anyone went to jail for it. Clapper however was nonetheless determined. After Wikileaks, he authorized the creation of what he called in an interview “mousetraps” to help detect what is known as the “insider threat,” or the officer or analyst who discloses secrets to the public or an adversary. Clapper in the interview said that he was pressing for a new information sharing system for the entire intelligence community that would audit every single data transaction. Those mousetraps however failed to detect Snowden.
The Snowden leaks would be horrible to any spy chief, but for a man like Clapper they were particularly horrifying. “This is his life,” said Norton Schwartz, a retired Air Force general who is a friend of Clapper. “This is his community, the thing that he did professionally to defend the nation.”
When Clapper spoke publicly at first about the Snowden disclosures he described the feeling as “literally gut-wrenching.” Here was a man who had spent his life in espionage wars with the Russians, the Viet Cong, and al Qaeda, a man who had spent years railing against leaks. And now, this. “You have to appreciate the sadness that he felt,” Schwartz said. “This was not the result of an act of genius from a foreign intelligence adversary but rather the act of an insider who got past even the most rudimentary of controls.”
And maybe the worst part for Clapper is, he still doesn’t get why Snowden did it. Clapper sees himself as the man who’s opened up the intelligence community to public scrutiny, who keeps the Constitution on his wall, and who’s endured the endless congressional grillings—all while keeping Americans safe. How could Snowden, a fellow intelligence analyst and contractor, not see that? “Maybe if I had I’d understand him better because I have trouble understanding what he did or what he’d do,” the director said. “From my standpoint, the damage he’s done. I could almost accept it or understand it if this were simply about his concerns about so-called domestic surveillance programs. But what he did, what he took, what he has exposed, goes way, way, way beyond the so-called domestic surveillance programs.”
For now Clapper says he does not mind carrying around so many secrets. Like every intelligence professional he says it’s what he does not know that keeps him up at night. But nonetheless Clapper still is pained at all the secrets he has seen revealed. “It’s gut wrenching for me to see so much of this so casually exposed,” he said. “It’s terrible.”
Photo by Ross D. Franklin
U.S. News
02.23.14
Conservative Christians Selectively Apply Biblical Teachings in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate
What conservative Christians miss in the religious liberties debate swirling around same-sex marriage.
All eyes have shifted to Governor Jan Brewer, who must now decide whether to sign the bill. Similar legislation died in Kansas last week, but has also been introduced in Ohio, Mississippi, Idaho, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Oklahoma.
The Arizona law seems to apply to services beyond those tied to weddings, but same-sex weddings are the impetus for these bills. Specifically, they are in response to lawsuits against three different Christians who refused to photograph, bake a cake, and sell flowers for same-sex weddings. The backers of these laws claim that a Christian cannot, in good conscience, provide a good or service for a same-sex wedding because it violates the teachings of Christianity.
If these bills become law, we could see same-sex couples being denied service not just by photographers and florists, but also restaurants and hotels and pretty much anyone else who can tie their discrimination to a religious belief.
Many on the left and right can agree that nobody should be unnecessarily forced to violate their conscience. But in order to violate a Christian’s conscience, the government would have to force them to affirm something in which they don’t believe. This is why the first line of analysis here has to be whether society really believes that baking a wedding cake or arranging flowers or taking pictures (or providing any other service) is an affirmation. This case simply has not been made, nor can it be, because it defies logic. If you lined up 100 married couples and asked them if their florist “affirmed” their wedding, they would be baffled by the question.
Strangely, conservative Christians seem to have little interest in this level of analysis and jump right to complaints about their legal and constitutional rights. It’s not that these rights don’t matter. Rather, they should be a secondary issue for Christians. Before considering legal rights, Christians wrestling with this issue must first resolve the primary issue of whether the Bible calls Christians to deny services to people who are engaging in behavior they believe violates the teachings of Christianity regarding marriage. The answer is, it does not.
Nor does the Bible teach that providing such a service should be construed as participation or affirmation. Yet Christian conservatives continue to claim that it does. So it seems that the backers of these bills don’t actually believe what they are saying. Because if they truly believe that a vendor service is an affirmation, then they need to explain why it is only gay and lesbian weddings that violate their conscience.
If you refuse to photograph one unbiblical wedding, you should refuse to photograph them all. If not, you'll be seen as a hypocrite and as a known Christian, heap shame on the Gospel. As all Christians know, Jesus saved his harshest words for the hypocritical behavior of religious people. So, if Christian wedding vendors want to live by a law the Bible does not prescribe, they must at least be consistent.
Before agreeing to provide a good or service for a wedding, Christian vendors must verify that both future spouses have had genuine conversion experiences and are “equally yoked” (2 Corinthians 6:14) or they will be complicit with joining righteousness with unrighteousness. They must confirm that neither spouse has been unbiblically divorced (Matthew 19). If one has been divorced, vendors should ask why. Or perhaps you don’t even have to ask. You may already know that the couple’s previous marriages ended because they just decided it wasn’t working, not because there were biblical grounds for divorce. In which case, you can’t provide them a service if you believe such a service is affirming their union.
If your hotel is hosting the wedding and you don’t see rings on both individual’s fingers, you must refuse to rent them only one room. The unmarried couple must remain in separate rooms until after the ceremony. Otherwise, you may be complicit in fornication. And of course, you must not under any circumstances rent a room to a gay or lesbian couple.
These are serious issues to many Christians. So serious, that many pastors will not marry couples that fall into some of these categories.
Performing a marriage ceremony is a case where the first criterion in the analysis is met: it is without question affirming a marriage. Even so, orthodox Christian pastors have not singled out gay weddings in the way that the people backing these bills have. While these pastors won’t perform a gay or lesbian wedding, many also would not perform a wedding where one of the participants was unbiblically divorced, nor would they perform a wedding between a non-believer and a believer or a one between two atheists. Christian wedding vendors and the leaders admonishing them to turn away gay wedding customers seem unconcerned about all these other categories of unbiblical marriages.
The truth is, telling wedding vendors to only provide goods and services for “biblical” ceremonies is an exercise in futility. There is not a baker or florist or photographer in existence who hasn’t provided services for an unbiblical wedding. Perhaps that’s why Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, stated in a column this week that a photographer should refuse to film a same-sex wedding but for all other weddings, “need not investigate … whether the wedding you are photographing is Christ-honoring.”
Apparently, ignorance is bliss. This makes sure to put just one kind of “unbiblical” marriage in a special category. Why? Moore uses the example of a pastor presiding over an unbiblical heterosexual wedding. He says that would be “wrong” but it would still be a marriage recognized by God, whereas a same-sex wedding would be wrong and not recognized by God.
So, Moore–a sincere Christian and a leader we respect–is telling Christian vendors that it’s okay to do something “wrong” by providing services for a heterosexual wedding as long as they don’t know its unbiblical. But do we really believe that Christians don’t know that many weddings they provide service for are unbiblical without “investigating?” That’s a real stretch.
Rather than protecting the conscience rights of Christians, this looks a lot more like randomly applying religious belief in a way that discriminates against and marginalizes one group of people, while turning a blind eye to another group. It’s hard to believe that Jesus was ever for that.
Jonathan Merritt is senior columnist for Religion News Service and author of A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars and Jesus is Better Than You Imagined. His writing has been published by The Atlantic, USA Today, National Journal, Christianity Today, and The Washington Post. He holds a Master of Divinity from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a Master of Theology from Emory University. Follow him: @jonathanmerritt.
Photo by Rick Bowmer
U.S. News
02.23.14
Fringe Factor: More Carbon Dioxide, Please
A
Utah legislator says double the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, an
Idaho bill would allow doctors to refuse service to gays and single
mothers, and an ex-border patrol vigilante is running for California
governor.
Utah state Rep. Jerry Anderson wants to redefine the term “air contaminants” in proposed state legislation limiting regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide. In fact, the retired science teacher argued at a committee hearing this week that, contrary to credible climate research, we could and probably should double the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere. “We are short of carbon dioxide for the needs of the plants,” Anderson said. “Concentrations reached 600 parts per million at the time of the dinosaurs and they did quite well.” Joe Andrade, a retired University of Utah engineering professor countered Anderson’s claims, telling the Salt Lake Tribune that such carbon levels may not be toxic to humans but would be toxic to the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans and warming the planet.
Idaho Bill Allows Doctors to Refuse Gays, Single Mothers
Idaho state Rep. Lynn Luker has introduced legislation allowing doctors to deny gay people and unwed mothers medical treatment, allowing teachers to deny educating gay students, and allowing psychologists to provide faith-based counseling all under the argument that they are exercising their religious beliefs. “We’ve seen the government attempt to come in and dictate who a church should hire for their personnel,” Luker told Idaho’s House State Affairs Committee, which unanimously approved the bill. “We’ve seen the government mandate health care which requires businesses and individuals to support paying for ... contraceptions against their religious feelings.” Other states, such as Arizona, have introduced similar bills following the New Mexico Supreme Court’s ruling last year in favor of a gay couple who sued a photographer for refusing to photograph their nuptials.
Ex-Border Patrol Vigilante Runs for California Governor
One of the only candidates challenging incumbent California Governor Jerry Brown so far is a Tea Party favorite and former Minuteman border patrol leader who last year was detained at the LA/Ontario airport for having a loaded gun in his carry-on. Republican assemblyman Tim Donnelly officially kicked off his 2014 gubernatorial campaign at a furniture factory in November, declaring, “I want to let Jerry Brown know that ... not only are we coming for him, but the people of the state of California are coming for their freedom back.” But before he made his big announcement this week, Donnelly had already released one of the strangest campaign ads this year—if not ever. In it, the cowboy hat-clad assemblyman derides Gov. Brown’s ban on lead ammunition, uses the word “sexiest” twice (first, to describe his wife as the “sexiest woman in California,” and then in pledging to make California “the sexiest place on the planet to do business.”) The icing on the cake, though, is Cuban-American singer Maria Conchita, who stands beside Donnelly with her dog Tequila, translating his words into Spanish and declaring, “He has big ones ... and he is angry.”
NY Senator Wants His Corruption Trial Delayed
You’ve got to hand it to Malcolm A. Smith: at least he’s determined. The New York state senator decided to proceed with his re-election campaign even after he was charged with attempted bribery to gain a spot on the New York City mayoral ballot. Now the Queens Democrat has asked a judge to push back his corruption trial, so that it doesn’t ruin his chances of re-election. The office of the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York has already said it opposes Smith’s request, which “frustrates the public’s interest in a timely resolution of the pending criminal charges.” But, hey, it doesn’t hurt to ask, right?
PARTNER CONTENT
Mothers of Invention
02.23.14
LuminAID: Providing Light When Disaster Strikes
Toyota
and Women in the World honor Anna Stork and Andrea Sreshta, co-founders
of the LuminAid disaster-relief lights, as Mothers of Invention.
The lightbulb first went on after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Stark and Sreshta recognized that most disaster-relief aid focused on providing shelter and food, leaving victims in the dark. They believed that good design and innovative technology could illuminate the victims' darkest hours. They built the first LuminAID prototype in their kitchens, not knowing that a year later, they would have a chance to benefit from their own invention: When an earthquake struck while they were visiting Tokyo, they discovered the profound value of light without power. Experiencing LuminAID's life-altering assistance first-hand gave them the incentive to raise funds for their project.
Stark and Sreshta are being honored as Mothers of Invention by Toyota and Women in the World. Watch below to hear more from Stark and Sreshta on how LuminAID works, and how it is enlightening disaster-relief work.
This content is partner content, and was not necessarily written or created by The Daily Beast editorial team.
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