Police in Simpsonville, South Carolina have charged Peggy Louise Atkins with third-degree criminal sexual conduct for abusing a toddler while employed as a nurse for a company hired by Medicare and paid by the state Department of Social Services. The offender was observed by foster parents with the 2-year-old girl in an "inappropriate position" in order to sexually stimulate Atkins.
For background, click headlines below to read previous articles:
Lt. Timmie Williams of the Simpsonville Police Department said the nurse was taken into custody Wednesday after a 2-year-old was abused at a home in the Westwood subdivision on April 18.
The warrant alleges Atkins committed a "lewd or lascivious act" upon the body of a 2-year-old girl.
A foster parent filed the complaint, saying the nurse had the child in an "inappropriate position," Williams said.
The [arrest] warrant says Atkins “… willfully and lewdly commit lewd or lascivious act upon or with the body of a 2-year-old female victim (EM), with the intent of arousing, appealing to, or gratifying the list, passions, or sexual desires of the defendant.”
The warrant says probable cause came from witness statements and photographic evidence.
. . . The 2-year-old’s birth mother tells us she believes her daughter’s suffering could have been prevented . . . [and] says her 2-year-old daughter can’t move or speak and needs daily medical care. Last year, she was left paralyzed from her father’s abuse. After her baby went to the hospital, the state never let her bring her home.
The liberal media is avidly reporting the "fantastic news" of 9-year-old Stormi, a boy whose foster mother dresses him as a girl, for selling thousands of Girl Scout Cookies online to sexual revolutionaries. The boy from Herrin, in downstate Illinois, struck out selling door-to-door after his neighbor told him, "Nobody wants to buy cookies from a boy in a dress."
Stormi was knocking on doors with her foster mother [Kim] last month when a man at one home expressed opposition to the Girl Scouts of America’s inclusive policies by insulting a little girl.
. . . “Stormi’s Cookie World,” her online shop, has passed its goal of selling over 2,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, the site showed Tuesday night. Stormi’s family is donating cookies to “local foster kids like me,” she wrote on the site.
The Girl Scouts have allowed transgender girls to join since 2011, CNN reported last spring. The right-wing American Family Association started a petition in May saying Girl Scouts of America has “lost its moral compass” and accusing it of a new policy saying “Boys dressing as girls can join.” Over 40,000 people had signed Tuesday night.
The national organization's official policy states it places transgender girls on a "case-by-case basis" and that the organization can serve them with a safe setting if the child lives as a girl and is recognized as one by friends and family. Jay Strobel, a spokesman for Girl Scouts of Southern Illinois, told The Washington Post Stormi’s efforts are “amazing” in an interview.
Stormi started selling her cookies through the Girl Scouts’s online portal, Digital Cookies, last week. . . .
Supporters have rallied around Stormi’s cause.
A New York-based comedy duo gave people who bought Stormi’s cookies free admission to a show. A California multimedia musical agreed to donate a box for every ticket sold.
An LGBTQ support group in Idaho sent out a call for support, too. . . .
After a troop in Colorado admitted a 7-year-old transgender girl in 2011, several Girl Scout troops in Louisiana disbanded in protest and a California teen called for a boycott.
Now that Democrats control all of Colorado state government, a homosexual unions law will be enacted by March to circumvent the voters' defeat of civil unions and passage of the state constitutional one-man-one-woman amendment. Gay Agenda supporters say the amendment was passed in the dark ages of 2006 -- apparently before voters evolved to the current enlightened hedonistic condition.
“Human history has shown us that the most important institution is not government, it’s the family. And the family is a heterosexual couple raising and rearing children. I believe this [law] is not a small change or a refinement to the concept of marriage, I believe this is a distinct step away from what marriage is and does not serve our culture or our state.” -- Colorado State Sen. Kevin Lundberg
A Senate committee on Wednesday passed a bill allowing gay couples to form civil unions despite protests it violates religious freedoms and overrides the will of Coloradans.
The outcome of civil unions this session is not in doubt: Democrats control the Senate, House and the governor's mansion. But that didn't stop a string of witnesses from testifying for more than four hours, urging the bill's passage or its death.
Kellie Fiedorek with the Alliance Defending Freedom said the bill "fails to provide significant safeguards for the religious liberties of all Coloradans."
Carrie Gordon Earll with CitizenLink, an arm of Focus on the Family, said the bill isn't about benefits, but about moving toward redefining marriage.
Similar bills failed during the past two legislative sessions. The most recent attempt was defeated in dramatic 11th-hour fashion last spring, when Republicans who controlled the House didn’t bring the bill up for a vote before the session ended.
Two openly gay senators and two openly gay representatives are sponsoring the bill. The acting chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, which heard testimony from dozens of people on both sides of the issue, is also gay.
[In testimony, President and CEO of Catholic Charities of Central Colorado, Mark] Rohlena was concerned about the major difference between this year’s bill and the one from last year. The current version no longer includes a provision exempting adoption agencies that disagree with civil unions from placing children with same-sex couples. Catholic Charities, Rohlena said, only arranges adoptions to opposite sex couples who are married.
At a “pro-marriage” rally on the Capitol’s west steps Friday, opponents of civil unions legislation that would grant same-sex couples equal protection under the law denounced it as “bigoted” and “hatred.”
Another speaker argued that the measure actually “persecutes” the religious.
Why isn’t the [religious] exemption for adoption agencies in the bill this year?
Because Democrats, who found it discriminatory, won the election and no longer have to worry about securing Republican votes.
Pretty simple, really.
To read the entire opinion column above, CLICK HERE.
. . . this time the legislation faces a less uncertain fate and is expected to land on Gov. John Hickenlooper’s desk in March.
As in its two previous hearings before the committee, a cavalcade of supporters and opponents trooped before lawmakers, some waving Bibles and others brandishing stories about their commitment to committed couples, whether gay or straight.
“This to me is a bullying bill against those of us who believe in God’s teaching on homosexual behavior,” said Rosina Kovar, who gained notoriety and brief Internet fame two years ago with explicit testimony about bodily functions.
“This is a discrimination against their religious values. It’s a judgment call on the part of the state to say we will force them to participate in what they consider to be morally wrong,” [State Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud] said, predicting lawsuits will ensue if the bill is adopted.
Far and away the biggest problem for the Catholic community, and for the rights of other faith communities, is the matter of religious liberty. To demand that Catholic adoptive agencies place children in a household of two adults of the same sex is to eviscerate their Catholicity. There is no getting around it.
It is not without meaning that Senate Bill 11 explicitly says, “A priest, minister, rabbi or other official of a religious institution or denomination or an Indian nation or tribe is not required to certify a civil union in violation of his or her right to free exercise of religion.” So if the sponsors of the bill recognize the religious liberty implications of forcing the clergy to give their blessings to homosexual unions, they should also recognize the religious liberty implications of forcing religious social service agencies to give their blessings to such arrangements. To offer one exemption but not the other is illogical and unconstitutional.
To read the entire opinion column above, CLICK HERE.
If the legislation passes this year, civil unions for two people of any sex would be legally equivalent to marriage under state law. The 2012 Colorado Senate bill proposing to create the unions had stated that the bill “shall not be interpreted to require a child-placement agency to place a child for adoption” with a couple in a civil union.
That language, however, is absent from the 2013 bill, S.B. 11.
[Mark Rohlena, president and CEO of Catholic Charities of Central Colorado, said] “we probably would cease the operation of our adoption programs [due to this law].”
Rohlena said the Colorado state Constitution, like Catholic teaching, defines marriage as only between a man and a woman. He said this recognizes “the importance of that traditional marriage relationship for stability and advancement in society.”
In April 2011, Gill’s lawyer, Ted Trimpa, told Denver’s Fox 31 News that Gill could spend as much as $2 million in 2012 Colorado political races to shift the state House to Democrat control.
The Democrats took control of the Colorado House in the 2012 elections and elected Rep. Mark Ferrandino as the first gay Speaker of the House. He is co-sponsoring the bill with Sen. Pat Steadman.
Illinois County Judge John Schmidt in Springfield has countered Gov. Quinn's decision to terminate state contracts with Catholic Charities because of its Christian bounds on placing children, who are wards of the state, with unmarried and/or "gay couples."
The order is temporary and a hearing will take place in August on the issue.
. . . Schmidt said that his order freezes the state’s contract with Catholic Charities as it was before the state decided to cut it off earlier this month.
Three Catholic Charities groups sought the injunction to continue serving families and abiding by Catholic principles that prohibit placing children with unmarried cohabiting couples.
The state wants to end foster care and adoption contracts with Catholic Charities in Joliet and elsewhere in a dispute centered on the new Illinois civil union law and questions of religious freedom.
The Department of Children and Family Services last week sent a letter to Catholic Charities in the dioceses of Joliet, Springfield, Peoria and Belleville informing the agencies that they will not get contracts for adoptions and foster care in 2012.
A DCFS spokesman said Catholic Charities violates the law because of its practice of referring gay and unmarried couples to other agencies that provide adoption and foster care services.
The issue is the same as it was last year in Washington, when the City Council approved same-sex marriage. Catholic Charities, one of the D.C. area’s largest social service providers, said same-sex marriage violates core church tenets and it couldn’t be in the position of validating gay relationships by placing children in the homes of same-sex couples.
While church officials initially said the passage of the law could force Catholic Charities to end its work with the city, ultimately church lawyers crafted a policy that proved controversial: Washington’s Catholic Charities ended spousal benefits for all new employees in order to not give them to a same-sex spouse. Some Catholics said the city had forced the charity’s hand; others were outraged to see basic benefits eliminated in tough economic times.
These local fights are microcosms of a broader, national issue: How to reconcile civil rights (the rights of same-sex couples) with those of religious liberty (the rights of religious conservatives to discriminate on the basis of their religious beliefs). While federal law and many local laws explicitly exempt religious groups from bans on religiously-based employment discrimination, how that applies to programs that receive public dollars is still a matter of huge dispute.
A [UK] court ruling has found that Christians who want to provide foster care for needy children must promote homosexuality to them and that there is only a "qualified" right to exercise their Christian beliefs.
A ruling from Britain's high court found that a Pentecostal Christian couple's belief that homosexuality is morally wrong could be used as a factor in deciding whether they can care for foster children.
Eunice and Owen Johns, aged 62 and 65 respectively, couldn't convince judges at London's Royal Courts of Justice that a British city discriminated against them after they expressed their views on homosexuality, the Guardian newspaper of London reported Monday.
The case stems from the Johns telling a Derby city social worker in 2007 that they couldn't tell a child that a "homosexual lifestyle" was acceptable, the Guardian reported. The couple had cared for foster children in the past and wanted to take in children aged 5 to 10.
In their ruling, Lord Justice Munby and Justice Beatson noted they weren't striking down the Johns' beliefs but ruled instead on the discrimination stemming from those beliefs, the Guardian reported.
. . . Eunice lives according to the instruction she finds in the Bible – and one of those instructions is that sex should be confined to marriage. For that reason, she and her equally beaming, gentle husband, Owen, have not been allowed to foster children.
The sticking point was their answer to the question: “Would you tell a child it was OK to be homosexual?” The Johns replied that they would not. They would love a child regardless, but not endorse that lifestyle.
The problem? Their views, they learnt, had disbarred them from caring for other people’s children under the 2007 Equalities and Sexual Orientation regulations. As interpreted by Derbyshire social workers, and now the law courts, this means that they have to endorse homosexuality. “I worked with homosexuals as a nurse and it was never a problem,” says Eunice. “The issue never arose with any of the children who came to stay with us. If it were to, I would ask social services for a professional to deal with it.”
She might have done better to fudge the issue when asked a direct question. “But,” she protests, “our Christianity isn’t something we can just take on and off. It is our lifestyle.” Her husband adds that this ruling represents “the first stage of persecution”.
In the courtroom battle, Christianity has lost to equality rights.
According to the Christian Legal Centre . . . "There now appears to be nothing to stop the increasing bar on Christians who wish to adopt or foster children but who are not willing to compromise their beliefs by promoting the practice of homosexuality to small children."
The judges, however, said it was the couples' view on homosexuality, not their biblically based beliefs about homosexuality, that created the problem. And the judges went further, declaring that Christianity has no role in the concept of justice in the UK.
According to the opinion authored by Lord Justice Munby and Mr. Justice Beatson, "the laws and usages of the realm do not include Christianity, in whatever form." They said, "the aphorism that 'Christianity is part of the common law of England' is mere rhetoric; at least since the decision of the House of Lords in Bowman v Secular Society Limited … it has been impossible to contend that it is law."
"It is important to realize that reliance upon religious belief, however conscientious the belief and however ancient and respectable the religion, can never of itself immunize the believer from the reach of the secular law. And invocation of religious belief does not necessarily provide a defense to what is otherwise a valid claim," they wrote.
Owen and Eunice Johns of Derby, England, deemed unacceptable parents for disapproving of homosexuality, await final judgment from Great Britain's High Court.
Gay rights campaigners said the couple’s views were out of date and that councils should protect the rights of a child before the “prejudices” of parents.
Roman Catholic adoption agencies have closed because they cannot reconcile the requirements under the new laws with their belief that children should not be placed with gay couples.
Mr and Mrs Johns, who have fostered almost 20 children over several years, applied in 2007 to become foster carers, providing respite care for children between the ages of five and 10.
“One of the issues before the Court is whether Christian couples, who have traditional views on sexual ethics, are ‘fit and proper persons’ to foster - and, by implication, adopt.
. . . Great Britain passed the Sexual Orientation Regulations and the Equality Act . . .
Mrs. Johns told London's Daily Mail, "The council said, 'Do you know, you would have to tell them that it's OK to be homosexual?'"
"But I said I couldn't do that," Johns continued, "because my Christian beliefs won't let me. Morally, I couldn't do that. Spiritually I couldn't do that."
A Department of Human Services caseworker pressured a pregnant Mayfair [Pennsylvania] teenager to undergo a late-term abortion by threatening to take away either her toddler or her unborn baby if she had the child, according to the teen's foster mother.
The alleged strong-arm tactic happened one day after DHS learned of the pregnancy, when the girl was about 22 weeks pregnant, according to her foster mother and the girl's social worker, Marisol Rivera.
The foster mother did not want to be identified in order to protect the girl's identity.
The Daily News also learned that:
* DHS got a Family Court judge's order allowing it to take the girl for an abortion, after the girl's birth mother refused to approve the procedure.
* By the time DHS arranged for the abortion - in March - the girl was 24 weeks pregnant. She had to undergo the procedure in New Jersey because abortions in Pennsylvania are illegal at 24 weeks.
* Although it is DHS policy that a DHS worker accompany any minor who has a court-ordered medical procedure, this did not happen on the girl's first attempt to have the abortion. That attempt failed when the clinic wouldn't accept her Medicaid card and wanted cash, according to the foster mother. A DHS worker did accompany the girl on a later, successful, attempt.
* Rivera, the girl's social worker, said that she was fired by Concilio, which subcontracted with DHS to provide care, after she initially refused to accompany the teen for the abortion.
"They hired me to work in child protection, not to kill children," Rivera told the Daily News.
The [Roman Catholic] Archdiocese of Washington's decision to drop its foster care program is the first casualty of the District of Columbia's pending same-sex marriage law that will obligate all outside contractors dealing with the city to recognize gay couples.
"We regret that our efforts to avoid this outcome were not successful," Catholic Charities Chief Executive Officer Ed Orzechowski said in a statement. "Foster care has been an important ministry for us for many decades. We worked very hard to be able to continue to provide these services in the District."
The transfer of services also means Catholic Charities will discontinue offering public adoption services. The agency processed 12 such adoptions throughout 2009 and including into this year.
"It was a very high-quality program, so this was really hard," archdiocesan spokeswoman Susan Gibbs said of the foster care/adoption service. "We said last fall that we could not continue this program if the bill was passed as written. Well, this has come to pass."
The Vatican has long opposed any church role in aiding homosexuals to adopt. In 2003, it said that placing children into same-sex households was "gravely immoral."
But with more states legalizing same-sex unions, the Washington Archdiocese is the third diocese in the country to leave the adoption/foster care business. The archdioceses of San Francisco and Boston, which had contracts with California and Massachusetts, respectively, ceased their programs in 2006 after each state legalized gay marriages and made it clear that the local Catholic Charities affiliate would have to work with homosexual couples. (California has since repealed its law allowing same-sex marriage.)
The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. has ended its 80-year tenure as a public foster care provider because of a same-sex marriage bill in the nation’s capital that allows children to be adopted by homosexual couples.
On Feb. 17, Catholic Charities transferred its foster care and public adoption programs in D.C. to the National Center for Children Families (NCCF), a private, non-profit organization that has been serving the less fortunate for 95 years.
The move by Catholic Charities and Archbishop Donald Wuerl came in the wake of the D.C. Council approving a same-sex marriage bill on Dec. 16 by an 11-to-2 vote. The bill, among other things, would require foster care groups under contract with the District to allow and facilitate adoption of foster-care children by homosexual couples.
This policy violates the moral teaching of the Catholic Church, which says that only a man and a woman can be united in marriage and that together with their children they form a family. (See Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2201-2203.)
While the bill is expected to become law, congressional Republicans and some conservative Democrats have indicated they will try annul the legislation by getting Congress or a court to block it.
A counselor is suing the [California] Orangewood Children's Home for religious discrimination after she was suspended for six weeks without pay because a group of teens she was supervising overheard Christian music at the Huntington Beach Pier, the lawsuit says.
Maureen Loya, 45 [and 20-year counselor], filed suit against the children's home Feb. 13, alleging she was discriminated against because of her religious beliefs.
"The youth of Orangewood are allowed to practice whatever religion they want to practice," [Terry Fisher, Orangewood spokeswoman], said. "It would never be appropriate for any employee to impose their specific religious beliefs on any child in the system."
In June 2006, Loya took four teens to the Anaheim 5K, but after the girls started complaining that the music was too loud, she opted to take them to the Huntington Beach Pier for pizza, she said in the suit.
The annual Surfrider Foundation Celebrity Surf Jam was taking place at the pier with live entertainment, including Incubus and Switchfoot, an alternative band with roots in contemporary Christian music.
The girls spent some time near the pier, played in the ocean and visited various arts and crafts booths at Pier Plaza, some of which were selling Christian items, the suit says.
The teens did not complain or ask to leave at any time, Loya said in the suit.
A proposal aimed at effectively banning gays and lesbians from becoming foster or adoptive parents was cleared Monday to appear on this fall's ballot in Arkansas.
The measure would prohibit unmarried couples living together from fostering or adopting children.
The Family Council campaign is a response to a 2006 Arkansas Supreme Court decision striking down a state policy that specifically banned gays and lesbians from becoming foster parents.
The measure faces the threat of a lawsuit from groups who say that it unfairly discriminates against unmarried couples and limits the number of foster and adoptive homes available for children.
Cox said the Family Council will rely on support from the same network of churches that helped it pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in 2004.
Derby city council blocked an application from Eunice and Owen Johns to provide respite care for under-10s after they admitted they could never tell a child that being homosexual was acceptable.
However, the authority has backed down after the Johns, both devout Christians, threatened to seek a judicial review.
The couple, who have four grown-up children of their own, were celebrating on Sunday after learning by letter that they can resume the application process.
