Does Marriage Have Value?

Yesterday the New York Daily News reported that a Manhattan judge has given a couple who are just friends the green light to become legal co-parents to an adopted girl. What happens to that child if one of the friends meets someone and gets married? Who gets custody of the child? Is it possible to divorce a friendship?

The article reports:

The pals identified, only as LEL and KAL, met in 2000 and have been close friends since, according to court papers.

Several years ago, KAL decided she wanted to become a mom, and LEL offered to be her sperm donor.

But when she couldn’t get pregnant, they “decided to instead adopt a child together,” the court papers say.

“They spent years planning and hoping” for a child, and their dream came true in 2011, when KAL was able to adopt a child — identified as G. — from Ethiopia.

They traveled to Africa together to bring the baby home, but because they weren’t married, only KAL was able to adopt, filings say.

When they returned to the U.S., the pair petitioned Manhattan Surrogate’s Court to have LEL named as a second legal parent, even though they don’t live together and are not romantically involved.

In a landmark ruling, Judge Rita Mella did so.

“From the moment they met G,, more than two years ago now, KAL and LEL have functioned as her parents,” the judge wrote in a decision from last month.

It’s not a puppy–it’s a child. What example of a loving family will this child grow up with? If the family is one of the building blocks of our society, then what impact does this ruling have on the foundation of our society?

Enhanced by Zemanta

It Was Worse Than We Previously Thought

This article is based on two stories–one posted at the New York Times yesterday and one posted at the New York Daily News today.

The Holocaust is a horrible part of history. It is hard to understand how any person could let this happen to his neighbors and fellow countrymen. The picture painted has always been that the majority of Germans didn’t know what was going on–the camps were in isolated areas and the citizens thought that they were simply work camps. I am not sure if anyone actually believed that, but that is the story that I was told. My father was one of the soldiers who liberated one of the camps (I don’t know which one), and when I read somewhere that General Eisenhower made the citizens of the neighboring town walk through one of the camps to see what was going on there, my father confirmed that this was true.

Both the Times and the Daily News posted articles explaining that research done by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has found that there were many more camps than historians had previously been aware of.

The New York Times reports:

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

The Daily News cites the story in the New York Times:

The research team uncovered 30,000 slave camps, 1,150 Jewish ghettos, 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps, 980 concentration camps, 500 sex-slave brothels and thousands of other camps serving a myriad of wicked ends: forced abortions, mandatory euthanasia of the elderly and ill, “Germanisation” and transportation hubs to murder sites, according to the Times.

The New York Times article concludes:

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

How could the citizens of Germany let this happen? I don’t think we will ever have the answer to that question.

Enhanced by Zemanta

The New York Daily News Endorses Mitt Romney For President

The New York Daily News is not known as a Republican leaning newspaper, but they have endorsed Mitt Romney.

Here are some excerpts from the endorsement:

Paychecks are shrunken after more than a decade in which the workplace has asked more of wage earners and rewarded them less. The decline has knocked someone at the midpoint of the salary scale back to where he or she would have been in 1996.

Then, the subway fare, still paid by token, was $1.50, gasoline was $1.23 a gallon and the median rent for a stabilized apartment was $600 a month. Today, the base MetroCard subway fare is $2.25, gasoline is in the $3.90 range and the median stabilized rent is $1,050, with all the increases outpacing wage growth.

…Four years ago, the Daily News endorsed Obama, seeing a historic figure whose intelligence, political skills and empathy with common folk positioned him to build on the small practical experience he would bring to the world’s toughest job. We valued Obama’s pledge to govern with bold pragmatism and bipartisanship.

The hopes of those days went unfulfilled.

…First came emergency economic stimulus. Because Obama gave free rein to House and Senate Democrats in deciding how to spend $800 billion, the legislation was heavily designed to satisfy the party’s constituencies and hunger for social programs, and inadequately weighted toward job-multiplier projects like building and repairing bridges and railroads — including subways.

After originally projecting that the program would produce 4 million more jobs than the country now has, along with a 5% jobless rate, Obama pleads that he saved Americans from more dire straits.

Next came Obamacare. While the country bled jobs, the President battled to establish universal health insurance — without first restraining soaring medical bills. Then he pushed one of the largest social programs in U.S. history through a Democratic-controlled Congress without a single Republican vote.

R.I.P. and never to be resurrected — Obama’s promised bipartisanship.

…Romney’s approach is the stronger.

Critically, he has tailored his policies to create jobs, jobs, jobs.

The centerpieces of Romney’s plan call for spending restraint and rewriting the Internal Revenue code to lower rates by 20%. He would make up much of the lost revenue by eliminating deductions and loopholes that have made the tax system a thicket of strangling complexities. On its own, paring the personal and corporate rules to the basics would catalyze business and consumer spending.

The endorsement concludes:

Offering a rosy vision of a country already on the rise, Obama argues that he would lead a resurgence by staying the course. He posits that spending in areas such as education and clean energy would be beneficial, and he sees raising taxes on high-income earners as key to “balanced” deficit reduction. Each on its own is attractive, but the whole comes up short.

The presidential imperative of the times is to energize the economy and get deficits under control to empower the working and middle classes to again enjoy the fruits of an ascendant America.

So The News is compelled to stand with Romney.

This is a newspaper that four years ago endorsed President Obama.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Using The American Judicial System Against America

Yesterday’s New York Daily News posted an article about the circus that the trial of the 9/11 conspirators at Guantanamo has become. As you remember, one of the female defense lawyers had demanded that all female lawyers in the court wear Muslim dress. Other antics of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow defendants are detailed in a May 5th article in the U.K. Daily Mail. These antics include such things are refusing to answer the judge’s questions, delaying the trial by kneeling in prayer, removing their headphones (for translation) and reading magazines. Generally, the defendants have done anything they could to turn the proceedings into a circus. The only reason their antics are not on the front page of every newspaper is that the trial is taking place in Cuba in a military tribunal–thus illustrating the wisdom of a military trial in Cuba rather than a civlian trial in New York City.

The Daily News reports the latest antic:

As shown by their past offensive behavior, including at their all-day, long-into-the-night arraignment, the intent is to make as much of a joke of the proceedings as possible.

Their enablers now include Navy Cmdr. Walter Ruiz and four fellow defense lawyers who have demanded that President Obama, former President George W. Bush and other top officials be compelled to testify.

The petition has about as much chance of success as a snowball in the Cuban heat. It is designed to undermine the credibility of the proceedings in those precincts where KSM has fans. The insinuation is that the tribunal judge is prejudiced against the defendants by virtue of harsh presidential statements made about them in the past.

In the past America has upheld some measure of decorum at military tribunals. I am hoping we will not be manipulated into abandoning that decorum during this trial (although it seems that we already have). We already have confessions from the men on trial, the questions should be, “Do we execute them and let them become martyrs or do we let them live out their lives enjoying a lifestyle they would never achieve in their home countries–electricity, running water, beautiful weather, etc.?” It’s an interesting dilemma.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Now The Legal System Has Decided To Play God

In February, CBS News posted a story about a couple in who received more than $ 21 million in damages because of the “wrongful birth” of their son. My heart goes out to this couple–they have two small children who have severe birth defects. The suit was filed against the doctor who declared that the second child would be normal–a misdiagnosis.

On March 11, the New York Daily News reported that an Oregon couple had been awarded $2.9 million for the “wrongful birth” of their Down’s Syndrome child.

The Daily News reports:

Ariel and Deborah Levy won their “wrongful birth” suit against Legacy Health System, arguing they chose to continue their pregnancy based on what doctors told them, according to ABC News, and would have terminated it if they had not been assured their baby did not have the genetic condition.

I don’t know what to think of this. I can’t imagine the struggles involved in raising a handicapped child, but I also can’t imagine the guilt of knowing you aborted a child because you didn’t think it was perfect. There is no easy answer to this, but I think suing doctors for millions of dollars is about as far from the right answer as you can get. Is “wrongful birth” significantly different from “wrongful life?”

Enhanced by Zemanta

More Unintended Consequences Of Obamacare

Today’s New York Daily News posted an article on “The unaffordable Affordable Care Act.” The Daily News cites research by the nonprofit group The Kaiser Family Foundation which shows:

“…premiums have risen steeply under the law – with the annual premium for family coverage through an employer reaching $15,073 in 2011, an increase of 9% over the previous year. Or as Politico put it: Premiums are now costing families as much as a new car.”

The article points out that some aspects of Obamacare have already taken effect, but that the supposed ‘cost cutting’ aspects of the bill will not go into effect until 2014. Some of the parts of the bill already in effect include covering kids 26 years old and under, accepting patients with no preconditions and eliminating annual caps. All of these things logically drive up the cost for insurance companies, an increase that they logically pass on to their customers.

The 9% increase is not a random number. The Daily News reports:

Back in May, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a final rule that would allow the administration to “establish procedures for federal and state insurance experts to scrutinize premiums” starting in September of this year. Managed care companies were told they would have to justify any rate increases above 10%. Translation: They’d be put on the political hot seat.

Why are health insurance premiums going up? Anticipation of what is to come under the new law. The article reports:

Insurers pushed up costs, not only to cover anticipating an influx of new and possibly sick patience (and lack of revenue from healthy patients signing up), but also to avoid getting audited by the Obama administration before the review period kicks in.

Obamacare needs to be repealed. But it needs to be replaced with something that includes tort reform, portability across state lines, and takes the government out of the equation.

Enhanced by Zemanta