Month: September 2015

Stupidity or worse in a history class

benfell

Not too terribly far away from me, a history professor should have known better:

“The whole thing started on Wednesday [September 2],” [Chiitaanibah Johnson (Navajo/Maidu), a 19-year-old sophomore student at Cal State Sacramento University] told [Indian Country Today]. “[U.S. History Professor Maury Wiseman] was talking about Native America and he said the word genocide. He paused and said ‘I don’t like to use that word because I think it is too strong for what happened’ and ‘genocide implies that it was on purpose and most native people were wiped out by European diseases.'”[1]

Read more →

  1. [1]Vincent Schilling, “History Professor Denies Native Genocide: Native Student Disagreed, Then Says Professor Expelled Her From Course,” Indian Country Today, September 6, 2015, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/09/06/history-professor-denies-native-genocide-native-student-disagrees-gets-expelled-course↩

A Pyrrhic victory: Kentucky, we have a problem

benfell
Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses. Carter County Detention Center, via the Associated Press, via the New York Times, fair use.
Fig. 1. Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses. Carter County Detention Center, via the Associated Press, via the New York Times, fair use.

So Kim Davis (figure 1), the county clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, has fought and lost a court battle—all the way to the Supreme Court—to refuse marriage licenses to same-sex couples, continued to refuse to issue said licenses, and is now in jail for civil contempt of court. And while, according to Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, such jailings are meant to coerce compliance rather than to be punitive “she could be in there for a year; it’s conceivable. Judges really don’t like it when people disobey their order.”[1] It’s hard to imagine how she thought she could prevail in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges,[2] but there are a few other clerks around the country who are also resisting.[3] Read more →

  1. [1]Alan Blinder and Tamar Lewin, “Clerk in Kentucky Chooses Jail Over Deal on Same-Sex Marriage,” New York Times, September 3, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/us/kim-davis-same-sex-marriage.html↩
  2. [2]Obergefell et al. v. Hodges, Director, Ohio Department of Health, et al., N.p. (2015).↩
  3. [3]Alan Blinder and Richard Fausset, “Kentucky Clerk Who Said ‘No’ to Gay Couples Won’t Be Alone in Court,” New York Times, September 2, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/03/us/kentucky-rowan-county-clerk-kim-davis-denies-marriage-license.html; Eliott C. McLaughlin and Catherine E. Shoichet, “Kentucky clerk gets jail time for failing to issue same-sex marriage licenses,” CNN, September 3, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/03/politics/kentucky-clerk-same-sex-marriage-kim-davis/index.html↩