Another Baby Dies of Herpes in Ritual Circumcision By Orthodox Jews

NEW YORK -- Prosecutors are investigating the death of a baby who contracted herpes after a "ritual circumcision with oral suction," in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish ceremony.

The ceremony, known in Hebrew as metzitzah b'peh, takes place during a ceremony known as the bris.

During the ceremony, a circumcision practitioner, or mohel, removes the foreskin from the baby's penis, and with his mouth sucks the blood from the incision to cleanse the wound.

In 2004, city health officials say another baby boy died after a similar circumcision was carried out in Rockland County. [1]

Politifact:Planned Parenthood = Planned Genocide?

Cain claims Planned Parenthood founded for "planned genocide"

This presidential election season, Georgia’s homegrown prospect Herman Cain is talking about race.

Cain, a black, conservative Republican, recently said the media is "scared that a real black man may run against Barack Obama."

And there’s this one about pro-abortion rights group Planned Parenthood:

"When Margaret Sanger - check my history - started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world," Cain said during a talk in Washington, D.C., at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group.

"It's planned genocide," Cain added. He wants the U.S. Congress to yank funding for Planned Parenthood, which receives about $75 million a year to provide non-abortion health services.

Was Planned Parenthood founded to help kill unborn black babies?

Cain asked his audience to check his history. So, we did.

First, a disclaimer. Cain, who has launched a presidential exploratory committee, was a talk show host on AM 750 and now 95.5 FM WSB, which, like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is part of Cox Media Group.

Cain has more political heft than your average talking head. The former CEO of Godfather Pizza beat a six-term U.S. congressman to finish second in Georgia’s 2004 U.S. Senate Republican primary. The Morehouse grad has eight honorary doctorate degrees and has authored four books, and he serves on several corporate boards.

Now some history. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger is credited with making birth control legal and widely available.

Born 1879, Sanger, who was white, blamed her mother’s death on her frequent pregnancies. At the time, speaking about birth control could lead to arrest. She thought that if women could legally control the number of children they bore, their health and economic conditions would improve.

We consulted with scholarship, Cain’s camp, anti-abortion groups, Sanger’s biographer, and multiple experts on Cain’s claim.

The supposed evidence that Sanger supported black genocide is a loose collection of her most objectionable statements, her ties to the disgraced eugenics movement, and her work on what was called the Negro Project. That effort, started in 1939, brought birth control services (but not abortion) to black communities in the South.

These facts don’t come close to supporting Cain’s claim.

Eugenics was once a wildly popular theory that the human race can be improved through better breeding and genetics. It drew together backers as diverse as President Theodore Roosevelt and black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois.

At its best, the U.S. movement pushed for better prenatal care. At its worst, it enabled forced sterilization laws and let claims that blacks and immigrants were inferior to masquerade as science.

Sanger welcomed some of the movement’s more notorious leaders onto the board of a predecessor to Planned Parenthood. She also endorsed paying pensions to women of low intelligence who agreed to be sterilized.

But we found no evidence that Sanger advocated - privately or publicly - for anything even resembling the "genocide" of blacks, or that she thought blacks are genetically inferior.

Every academic PolitiFact Georgia consulted said that Cain’s claim is wrong.

"I have never run into any serious academic reference of Sanger or others wanting to ‘kill black babies,’" Indiana University professor Ruth Engs, a eugenics movement expert, told PolitiFact Georgia in an e-mail.

What’s worse, Cain got his facts mixed up.

Sanger’s first birth control clinic opened in 1916 in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., which was mostly Irish and Jewish.

When she did open a Harlem clinic in the early 1930s, about half of its patients were white. Members of the black establishment, including DuBois and black newspaper the Amsterdam News, supported it. This was hardly the pro-genocide camp.

None of these centers performed abortions.

Those who think Sanger wanted black genocide cite the Negro Project. But even their strongest evidence, a passage from a letter she wrote advocating that organizers recruit black ministers for the project, does not come close to proving a genocidal plot.

Sanger wrote that "We don’t want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs."

But her correspondence shows this sentence advocates for black doctors and ministers to play leadership roles in the Negro Project to avoid misunderstandings. Lynchings and Jim Crow laws gave blacks good reason to be wary of attempts to limit the number of children they bore. In Harlem, she hired a black doctor and social worker to quell those fears.

The facts of the Negro Project suggest nothing more genocidal than a public health project. Black leaders DuBois and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and the pastor of the influential black Abyssinian Baptist Church were members of its advisory council. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt was supportive.

For Sanger to launch a genocidal plot behind their backs and leave no true evidence in her numerous writings would require powers just shy of witchcraft.

Really, calling the Negro Project a genocidal plot defies common sense. Why would Sanger try to destroy a race of people by giving them access to the very thing she thought could make life better?

Planned Parenthood’s early objective was not to "help kill black babies before they came into the world."

Sanger failed to rise above the ethnic and racial paternalism of her time, but that’s a far cry from being genocidal.

Cain’s claim is a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card. We rate it Pants on Fire. [1]

Why do we need another place of worship if there is already one there?

One of the arguments against the Sufi mosque near Ground Zero was that there was already a Salafi mosque in the basement of one of the nearby buildings.  This is an old argument. I found this quote in one of my Baptist history books.

"I [Fristoe]  knew the General Court to refuse a license for a Baptist meeting-house in the county of Richmond, because there was a Presbyterian meeting-house already in the county, although the Act of Toleration considered them distinct societies." ~ 1772

William Fristoe "History of the Ketocton Baptist Association" 1766-1808 pg 73[1]

Radiolab: Patient Zero

Around 1908, HIV jumped into the human population. Around 1966, HIV entered into the United States.

• It is thought that HIV originated after a chimp in Cameroon ate two different species of monkey with two xenospecific viruses.  These viruses by chance managed to infect the same cell.  During the duplication process, the enzymes duplicated parts of the two viruses into the same virus.
• Also they explore the origin of the high five
• First they tackle Typhoid Mary

New York 1984 "Lacks a Rational Basis"

Mario Liberta married Denise in 1978 and began beating her their first year. In 1980, Denise obtained a court order requiring her husband to move out and stay away from her. Mario was allowed a visit with their son each weekend.  In March of 1981, Mario failed to visit his son, one weekend, and called Denise the following Tuesday to request a visit. Mario and his friend picked up Denise and their son  and took them to a hotel where Mario was currently living. Once at the hotel, the friend left. Mario then raped and sodomized* Denise under threat of death.  He forced their preschooler son to watch. Afterwards Mario allowed the mother and son to leave.  Denise reported the incident the following day.

Denise filed a felony complaint against Mario and he was indicted for first degree rape and sodomy. He argued that the “marital exemption” allowed both the rape and sodomy. What mattered here was the legal definition of marriage under New York statutes.  The state of New York did not consider a couple married if they met certain separation criteria. Mario argued that he and his wife were married just separated.  New York however did not consider a couple married if they were separated "pursuant to a valid and effective: order issued by a court of competent jurisdiction which by its terms or in its effect requires such living apart."  The People argued that the court order that Denise obtained in 1980 met this definition so they were not married.

 The trial court agreed with Mario however and dismissed the indictment.  The trial court argued that "the temporary order of protection did not require Mario and Denise to live apart from each other, but instead required only that he remain away from her, and that therefore the "marital exemption" applied." The New York Intermediate Appellate Court reversed and remanded the case for trial.  They concluded the court order "by its terms or in its effect requires such living apart".  Mario was not legally married at the time of the rape.  Notice the "marriage exemption" means that the act itself is not what makes it a crime.  The courts are quibbling over the status of their marriage, not the details of the rape itself.  

Mario was convicted and became the first husband in New York history to be convicted for raping his wife.  He appealed and in 1984, the New York Court of Appeals** unanimously upheld his conviction.  The Court of Appeals did not just affirm that he was not legally married, they struck down the marriage exemption itself.  

The "marital exemption" to sections 130.35 and 130.50 of the Penal Law under which a married man ordinarily cannot be convicted of forcibly raping or sodomizing his wife, lacks a rational basis for distinguishing between marital rape and nonmarital rape and, therefore, violates the equal protection clauses of both the Federal and State Constitutions (US Const, 14th Amdt, § 1; NY Const, art I, § 11). The various rationales which have been asserted in defense of the exemption are either based upon archaic notions about the consent and property rights incident to marriage or are simply unable to withstand even the slightest scrutiny.

The New York Court of Appeals became the first high state court to invalidated an explicit statutory exemption for marital rape.  The New Jersey Supreme Court was the first high state court to strike down the marriage exemption.  However there was no New Jersey statute with the marital exemption.  The source for the marital exemption was Hale's Rule when it was first used in 1977.  The New Jersey Supreme Court essentially ruled that Hale's Rule did not exist.  New York actually had the marital exemption codified into law.  The Court of Appeals invalidated this portion of New York law.

The New York State Legislator tried in 1981 to remove the marital exemption, but was unable to pass a bill. Ultimately the courts had to do it for them.  Notice the Court cited the US Constitution as justification.  This is the only court I know that did so.   So far I only have looked at New Jersey, New York, Michigan, and Virginia.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

*The sodomy was forced fellatio which was considered sodomy at the time by New York

**Unlike most states the New York Court of Appeals is the highest court in the New York State.  New York does have a New York Supreme Court, but it handles mostly trial cases.