I was never "hit". I was grabbed by the wrists, dragged down stairs, and then pulled across a living room floor and pulled down concrete steps outside.

I was also told that domestic violence includes making threats towards me, my family, and my friends. Is this true? Because if so, than I will have plently of evidence that I can print off. He also broke my cell phone by snapping it in half, and punched my bathroom wall (tiles) breaking the tiles, and broke the inside of the passenger side of my car. Should I take pictures of all these things?

Any information would be very helpful. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Sure. Get all the evidence you possibly can, as soon as you can. Just be sure to turn it ALL over to the District Attorney as soon as possible. There are discovery rules that apply and if you don’t do this, the evidence may not be admissible in court. You can’t just show up in court the day of the trial with your evidence. The defense has to have had an opportunity to see it.

I’m thrilled to see someone finally follow through with prosecuting a batterer. Kudos to you!

It seems to be a self feeding thing. The abused person feels inadequate and keeps returning. The abuser sees this as acceptance of their cruel behavior.

I would agree that the best thing anyone can do is get out of this type of relationship fast. It is unlikely to change.

They use this excuse to abuse, torment, murder and rape women. The most common example is "Women be submissive to your husbands"

A LOT of men took that as "Ok then that gives me the right to treat my wife as a slave, beat her when she disobeys and rape her when she refuses to have sex with me"

Even Pastors descriminate against women. They say that women should NOT speak in church, they should be seen not heard. That they cannot speak to the pastor for advice but go to another woman. That women are nothing but objects that bring men down to temptation and that they can’t control themselves so that means: They cannot be alone with another man, if in a meeting with a pastor even with the husband or another guy, she must bring another woman.

Is this what God intended? For women to feel guilty about their own gender, to take full responsibility of men not being able to control themselves?
To be expected to be treated as dirt and if a woman refuses to be treated this way she should be corrected?

It happens in society every day!

I think the bottom line is that men are sinners. I think all things God created are for good. Satan finds a way to use it for evil though. For example, sex is created for good. Sex outside of how God intended it to be causes hurt feelings among other things.

Satan uses Bible verses out of context too, like in Matthew 4:6 he had the nerve to tempt Jesus with using the Bible.

It’s interesting how people can find Bible verses for other people and don’t see the ones that are talking to them. Matthew 7:3 "Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?

It’s good to look at the whole passage:
Colossians 3:17-19 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (18) Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. (19) Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them.

If women are treated harshly and told to submit, they might quote the rest of the passage to help keep him in check.

As far as not being alone with a pastor, I can kind of see the reasoning. I have helped out in Christian youth camps and stuff and I was advised not to be alone with a girl. The reason given was that if they accused me of something, it’s my word against hers.

I haven’t heard pastors say that, "women are nothing but objects that bring men down to temptation". If yours does, maybe it’s time to find a different church, because I don’t see that in my Bible.

You spent 300 years arguing that the earth was the center of the universe – after the Copernican Theory had demonstrated that it orbited the sun; and it was not until 1992 that the Catholic Church “forgave” Galileo for his support of the Copernican universe.

You have spent 150 years fighting the exact same battle and using the exact same strategy and tactics against evolution.

You have tried and failed for the last 150 years to amend the US Constitution to explicitly include and promote your religious doctrine.

America’s Bible Belt, where you are the majority demographic and dominate the political system, has the highest rates of domestic violence, shooting people, drunk driving and vehicular related deaths; divorce, teen pregnancy, and STD infection in the entire nation. And as a group, you have the nation’s lowest education and personal income levels.

These are not examples of honorable, courageous, and educated people fighting the good fight – they are examples of people who relentlessly, thoughtlessly, and endlessly defend one stupid and worthless idea after another, and whose accomplishments, as a group, throughout history and over a broad range of different social-political-geographic opportunities have been significantly and consistently well below the average of everyone else.
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Thela Hun Ginjeet –

I don’t play well with others and I’ve never had the aptitude or temperament for group behavior.

And, did I mention my allergy to structure and authority?
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pstod ==

Altruistic assistance provided unconditionally and without a self-serving or mandate-from-God motive gets my support, even if I personally have no use for the group doing the "good".

My opinion is that there are negatives that come with the positive, and their absolute value may be greater.

Mostly, however, I do not see that as relevant here.

Don’t lie about the historical record so you can commit a crime against the Constitution – then give a homeless person a dollar – and call everything even.

I thiink that policially active conservative theists (of every kind, everywhere, and always) offer no long-term upside to anyone other than perhaps themselves.

Bush said that he invaded Iraq because God told him to "smite" something. And, that is the attitude and motivation I object to because it is a recipe for failure
that, when followed, has time after time resulted in more human misery and suffering than anything else.
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pstod –

I know the audience and I know how rare it is to get a response that consists of more than a catch phrase or assumed divine first principle of some kind.

I’m waiting to catch a flight. If I want to influence anything, I’ll take my opinion some place where it has a chance to get off the ground.

Occasionally, however, there will be someone especially literate and well-read, and while it is even more difficult for me to understand how they fit into the group, if I have an exchange with them, I go with my most civil style and restict my comments to specific non-personal targets.

I like running across really smart people; it’s usually fun because we both know where the off-limits lines are drawn and so the game is redefined with different rules.

Maybe sometime I can give you my hypothesis that stupidity is a natural-social force that over time equalizes groups and societies, thus preventing indefinite donmination by one society /nation over everyone else.
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Pfo –

I did not pressent any correlations. There is not a single Pearson r anywhere to be found. (And, given the applied statistics graduate school thing and the 15 years of applied global climate reseach at a top-ten lab – I’m pretty sure that I’d recognize a correlation coefficient if I saw one.)

And, I probably would have picked up on any sampling issues with the social /. religious /whatever categories since I also did the graduate school thing in Anthropology and have conducted similar analyses of my own.

In any case, the numbers are available in numerous sources conducted at various times and they are consistent.

The ones I used happen to refer specfically to Christians.

Further, the pattern is the same cross-culturally.

Galileo was in and out of trouble and there was a lot of politcal negotiating.

Galileo was lucky because he had friends in high places, otherwise his justice would have been swift and severe.
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Pfo –

And if you want to swim in the deep water with professionals, you better bring more than cute phrases. That crap might fly in high school or fool the typical Y!A pretender, but it does not work here.

The shallowness of your remarks betrays the shallowness of your understanding.
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mia delight –

Fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, and Jews are the same person in different clothing. They all trace their origin to Abraham and they all worship the same judgmental and humanity-hating God. The only reason conservative Christians aren’t running around whacking off heads and burning people alive is America’s secular rule of law and the Constitutional barrier designed to keep them outside of the public sector.

No Islamic terrorist has ever laid a finger on the US Constitution, but conservative Christians have never hidden their hated of its secular humanist framework. They exploit as a weakness the tendency of most people to try and treat them with decency and respect, and use it (along with their constant whining about being persecuted) to advance their own self-interest.
People have been too “Christian” in their acceptance of these wanna-be head-whackers. The truth is they deserve no respect or acceptance because they give none. Their goal is to carry out the mandate of their murderous SOB God to gather every soul they can and to kill those who resist. And they have an impressive historical rap sheet documenting their willingness, ability, and skill at carrying out the killing part.

I really dont think that fundimentalist will break the cycle, they have plans to continue and expand their circle of misinformation. Around a a year ago I watched a program on TV that was about the goal of some of the Christian colleges ,to encourage its students to enter politics ,to use their proposed position to advance "Christian ideals". Sounds good doesn’t it, most dictatorships do at first.
The thought of these United States becoming a new Rome only Southern Baptist style,would make our forefathers roll over in their graves.
The job of our political representatives is to represent the people not a religion. Out of all the religions on earth, fundamentalists are the most undereducated on earth. The most gullible and difficult to engage in any type of discussion. If their ministers told them that birds were related to angels, they would believe it defend it, and then make a song about it. They believe word for word, tales from a bronze age nomadic tribe who stole their stories from other cultures . They believe that a boat could hold all the animals in the world, they believe in a demon who hides dinosaur bones in the ground to fool us. They believe humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. Here is a good one ,a man went to hell and had the good sense to bring a camera so he could show everyone. They do not question these outragious ideas ,after all they are told by moral men. The same ones who commit embezelment freely, adultery ,use drugs and steal money from someones grandmother`s social security checks. Yes, these are the people I want to take my education from, Im sure that the Doctor degree they have ,is from Walmart.

i am wondering because i might be pregnant and he wants me to get an abortion so he doesnt go to jail.
is it true or a bunch of bull??
p.s. i dont want to charge him with anything.
i love him.
and i just dont want my parents to.

If the age of consent in your state is under 16, then yes. However, courts usually go easier on minors. The real problem is guys who are in their 20s and get underage girls pregnant.

I have thought about this quite a bit over the years. The wide spread of opinions is incredible, matched only by the passion of the activists on all sides. This is an issue that few people are even able to have a civilized discussion about. Complicating it further is that there are few that hold a black-and-white few of the issue. The majority of people in the US see abortion as a giant grey area with varying degrees of abortion considered acceptable. Very few people hold the position of unlimited abortion access or no abortion under any circumstances. Below is the process I went through to come up with my position on the matter.

First, I asked myself the question at what point does a human being obtain "personhood" and as such gain all the legal and moral protections that status entitles them to? There are some who say that the point of personhood is 28 days AFTER birth, at which point you still should be allowed to abort. In fact, there is a professor of ethics at Princeton University that actively advocates this position. This is the position that spurred “Born Alive” legislation that says if a woman has an abortion and the baby survives, that doctors cannot withhold care and let the baby die on the operating table. Others say up to the point of birth. These folks would hold that partial birth abortion is a reasonable procedure. Or perhaps just before while the mother is in labor. Or 6 months of gestation or 3 months or three weeks. I wrestled with this for a long time.

Then I looked at the issue a different way. Does human life have an imputed value or an intrinsic one? If we say that it is imputed, meaning the value is derived from something else, some outside criteria, then any one of the above positions would be equally valid. We as a society would decide what criteria to select. My problem with this is what criteria do you use? On what basis is a baby at 6 weeks more valuable than a baby at 5 weeks? Is a baby that has not yet developed a heart still a baby? This hit really hard on my wife and I when we lost one of our children. Lynne had a miscarriage a few years ago. When people with strong pro-choice sentiments gave us their condolences, they referred to the fetus as a child, even though she (we named her Grace, even though we do not know for sure if she was a she or a he. It made it easier to explain to the children what happened and easier for Lynne and I to grieve our loss) was at the same gestational point, 9 weeks, that they believed abortion was merely removing some unwanted tissue of the mother. So, the criteria used is whether or not a child is wanted. If that is so, then why?

By similar logic, if the value of human life is imputed, it can also be taken away, depending on what some person or group of persons believe that life is worth. So if you happen to be mentally retarded or black or Jewish, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to be killed off for the good of the community if they believe it. I have a friend who is paralyzed from the neck down. There are some in the world who would look at her and say that she has no quality of life or that the money and effort to support her would be better used on others. They would have her die due to her handicap. But knowing her the way I do I find the notion that she is without a quality of life to be ridiculous on its face. She is a writer, a painter, a social worker, and heads up an international charity. I’d call that a pretty good quality of life. So would her husband who married her years after her accident put her in the wheelchair. Thus, the imputed value logic is shown to me to be completely arbitrary. Following any of the “prior to this point it is not human but at this one on it is” positions is likewise arbitrary and does not answer the question of personhood.

But consider the proposition that human life has an intrinsic value. That it is valuable simply because it is human life and no other reason. No measure or quantification of the value of it, it is and that is enough. It is sort of like gold. Gold is valuable because it is gold, not because we as a society stood up one day and said, “we are going to make gold valuable”. Gold has an intrinsic value as opposed to an imputed value, such as paper currency. Paper currency is worthless in and of itself. It has value only because we say it has a certain value.

This position then would support a clear line between human life and not human life. With this position, you are a human at the point that you have a unique genetic code. In other words, at inception. Prior to inception, there was no “you”. The male and female reproductive components in and of themselves are not a unique genetic code, but merely parts of the donors. It is only when they combine to create new life do “you” begin to be a person.

The notion of intrinsic value also carries forward throughout life. My mother-in-law was on dialysis for several months before diabetes finally took her life. There are many who would have said that she should just die and not burden the rest of us. If those persons held the position that human life has imputed value, I can understand. I however, believe that human life is intrinsically valuable and worth preserving and protecting for as long as possible. Thus, we should protect life at the beginning and at the end and at all points in between.

So, we come full circle back to the question of abortion. Should it be outlawed? My answer, since I believe in the intrinsic value of human life, is that for the most part it should. Why only “for the most part”? Because there are times when you have to weigh the life of two humans and pick one to live and one to die. My sister-in-law faced such a problem once. She got pregnant from her husband and it turned out to be a tubal pregnancy. Had the child been allowed to grow inside of her, it would have killed her before the baby would have been able to survive on its own. Thus, in weighing these two lives, one would have to conclude that the baby would have to die in order to save the mother’s life. What about cases of rape or incest? I have 5 daughters (yes, that was no typo) and the thought of one of them being raped is always lurking in the back of my mind. If one of them should get pregnant as a result, the hard decision would be to let that child live. Pregnancy is not the extremely dangerous event of the past. Rarely do people die from giving birth. Many more die as a result of complications after an abortion. But the bottom line is that the child is innocent of any crime, so why punish it? I’m not saying it is an easy choice and I can certainly sympathize with those who have had to make it. Perhaps they even made the wrong choice. But, God is a loving and forgiving God, who can even forgive the taking of a human life. Which is what abortion is.

Revolu is performed as a “bomba,” a native rhythm from Puerto Rico brought to the Island by enslaved Africans and later banned as it was considered a music of resistence. “Revolu” can be found in the CD Cortijo’s Tribe by Aurora & Zon del Barrio. www.zondelbarrio.com or download it through itunes.

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