The Portland Press Herald in Maine has a great op-ed from State Representative Sherry Huber in response to a recent decision by the Portland School Committee allowing a local middle school’s health center to dispense birth control to sexually active students.

Huber notes that thirty-four years ago, faced with one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, the Maine legislature passed a bill making it possible for teens to access birth control without parental consent. She recounts the current situation in Maine:

Today, after more than 30 years of teen-friendly access to family planning, comprehensive sexuality education, and better birth control methods, Maine now has the fourth lowest teen pregnancy rate for girls under the age of 18 and the lowest rate for girls under the age of 14 in the nation.

And while Maine girls are no more sexually active than girls in other states, they continue to have the highest rate of oral contraceptive use — clearly making a healthy decision to avoid pregnancy.

Huber goes on to explain why forcing teens to talk to their parents before they can access birth control doesn’t make sense:

The good news is that three in five students do talk to their parents about their sexual health and birth control — typically because teenagers told them or their parents suggested it. But among those whose parents were unaware, 70 percent would stop coming to a clinic, and a quarter would continue to have sex but would either rely on withdrawal or not use any contraception. Only 1 percent of all teens would stop having sex.

Of course, she doesn’t believe that making family planning services available is a silver bullet when it comes to preventing teen pregnancy. Huber says students need medically accurate, age-appropriate sex education:

Comprehensive sexuality education is a vital component in this equation. The data are clear: When young people are provided full information, they make healthier decisions. Case in point: Maine’s abstinence rate among teens has significantly increased over the past decade.

Other communities are now grappling with the same issue. On Tuesday, a local taskforce in Denver, Colorado, recommended that school-based health centers begin offering condoms, birth control pills, and emergency contraception to students. Parents would need to sign a consent form before a school nurse could dispense contraception. Local health officials say that the current system of referring students to local clinics for contraceptives has not been successful.

Meanwhile, Pilgrim Park Middle School in Elmbrook, Wisconsin, is debating what 6th, 7th, and 8th graders should be taught when it comes to sex ed. Some parents raised concerns about defining oral sex to middle school students.

And The Plain Dealer reports that Ohio has joined Utah as the only two states to decide not to apply for a HIV education grant from the Centers for Disease Control. Under the program, which requires states to submit a five year plan for teen HIV prevention, Ohio could qualify for up to $1.25 million over five years. According to the article, Ohio participated in the CDC grant program up until 2000 “after some legislators were appalled by explicit language and promotion of condoms in a teacher-training program. At about the same time, the state legislature approved a law requiring that education programs stress abstinence as the only 100 percent effective protection against sexually transmitted diseases.” HIV advocates noted that the number of HIV infections have recently been on the rise in Cleveland.

In national news, last week the Senate passed the 2008 Labor-HHS-Education bill, but only after removing an amendment that would have prohibited federally funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs from using “medically inaccurate” information in their curricula. The bill, which is headed to conference committee to resolve funding discrepancies, contains increased funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.

USA Today has an op-ed from Abigail Jones and Marissa Miley, the authors of Restless Virgins: Love, Sex, and Survival at a New England Prep School. The authors, who spent two years interviewing teens for their book, say that “[a]bstinence-only education is not the panacea for teenage sex” and call for “more comprehensive national and local sex-ed programs are needed that include teaching students about birth control, diseases and safe sex. Sexual health is not just physical but emotional, too. Kids need to learn how to develop healthy sexual relationships, whether or not they are forever.”

And finally, Ruth Marcus has a column in The Washington Post criticizing Susan Orr, President Bush’s current choice for deputy secretary for population affairs at HHS, and says that Jenna Bush — who recently spoke out against her father’s domestic abstinence-only-until-marriage policy — may be a better choice. For someone in charge of population affairs, Orr has an interesting view of family planning:

In 2001, when the Bush administration proposed lifting the requirement that health insurers of federal employees provide coverage for contraceptives, Orr cheered. “We’re quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease,” she said. “It’s not a medical necessity that you have it.”…

The year before, Orr fought a D.C. Council bill requiring all employers to cover contraception … Orr’s opposition was disturbingly vitriolic. “The mask of choice is falling off,” she said. “It’s not about choice. It’s not about health care. It’s about making everyone collaborators with the culture of death.”

That’s all for this week. Happy Halloween.

Last night the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution to an inmate on Mississippi’s death row. According to The New York Times, by granting this stay, the court “gave a nearly indisputable indication that a majority intends to block all executions until the court decides a lethal injection case from Kentucky next spring.” Several news sources, including the AP, ABC News and Bloomberg.com, seem to agree.

A three-year study of the capital punishment system in eight states has strongly bolstered the view of the American Bar Association that the death penalty is profoundly flawed and a moratorium is necessary. The study confirmed the flaws that death penalty opponents have been proclaiming for years, including the racial disparities in the application of the death penalty and the poor quality of the lawyering received by capital defendants.

While the ABA does not call for the outright abolition of capital punishment, it has called for a moratorium until these major problems are studied.

The ABA is not the only organization making the call for a moratorium. A delegation of death penalty opponents will present the President of the United Nations General Assembly with a 5 million signature petition calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions on Friday, November 2, 2007. Almost 100 countries are co-sponsoring the moratorium resolution.

The Associated Press released an analysis on October 29 indicating that a number of high schools in the United States have become “dropout factories” - institutions in which “the senior class is made up of 60 percent or fewer of the kids who entered as freshmen.” The report notes that about 1,700 schools currently fit that label, reaffirming 2004 findings from researchers at Johns Hopkins University that, in as many as 1,000 schools around the country, students have a mere 50/50 chance of graduating.

That graduation has become a gamble for our children speaks to an intolerable failure of the current system. Arguably, the nationwide high school graduation rate should be 100 percent. Parents may expect as much when they entrust their students to the nation’s public schools. However, far from approaching such perfection or even mediocrity, our schools are failing outright.

The No Child Left Behind Act is partly responsible for this failure. Under pressure to raise standardized test scores as mandated by NCLB, schools have begun to divest from at-risk children. Principals have resorted to disproportionately harsh punitive measures to weed out underperforming students, while police have all but declared martial law in some schools. The ACLU’s 2007 report, “Criminalizing the Classroom,” shed some light on the problems created by increased police authority in schools, which recent news from New York and Pittsburgh, for example, suggest are growing.

Not surprisingly, children of color are frequently the victims of this shift in dynamic. As the Chicago Tribune reported last month, black students in 49 out of 50 states are suspended at rates significantly higher than would be expected from the proportion of blacks in student populations. Moreover, black students in some states are significantly more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled. Such aggressive school discipline increases the likelihood that students of color will end up in prisons, particularly when high schools are not graduating them.

According to a policy brief from the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University, “minority students are four times more likely to attend a high school with very low graduation rates and three times less likely to attend a high school with very high graduation rates than the nation’s nonminority students.” The brief also found that predominantly nonwhite schools are five times more likely than predominantly white schools to promote 50 percent or fewer freshmen to senior status on time.

Like the previous Johns Hopkins reports, the Associated Press’ analysis lends credence to notion that there is an arranged marriage between prison and public schools in which minority children are the dowry. In the absence of supportive educational environments, too many students of color are ushered into prison cells, rather than colleges. If we are to divorce the two, we must begin by holding schools accountable for the graduation of all of their students.

An unofficial moratorium on executions is in effect while the nation waits for the Supreme Court decision in Baze v. Rees. It’s a good time to re-examine just how ineffective, unfair and cruel the death penalty is, as ACLU Capitol Punishment Project Director John Holdridge points out in an op-ed in the Austin American-Statesmen:

Capital punishment is a failed government program and a colossal stain on our criminal justice system. The administration of capital punishment in this country is fraught with error. Since 1973, more than 123 innocent death-row inmates have been exonerated; in addition, eight men have been executed even though there is a very good chance they were innocent. Moreover, despite popular myths, DNA testing cannot ensure that only the guilty are executed because DNA evidence is available in only 10 percent of murder cases.

The decision in the Baze case will determine the constitutionality of the administration of the three-drug lethal injection cocktail, the preferred method of execution among 37 of the 38 death penalty states. Today, there’s a possibility that the Supreme Court will temporarily halt all executions using this method, effectively ending the constant stream of last-minute appeals by death row inmates scheduled to die before a Baze decision is reached.

On Saturday, the Tennessean published an op-ed by Chris Hill, the Capital Punishment Project’s States Strategies Coordinator. Chris wrote about Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen’s inadequate “fix” to the state’s flawed lethal injection protocol. A federal judge immediately found the new procedure unconstitutional in September. In the Tennessean, Chris writes:

Judge Aleta Trauger held that the new protocol would cause a “substantial risk of unnecessary pain.” Judge Trauger also included in her opinion a quote by Dr. Jay Chapman, the medical examiner who invented the three-drug cocktail used in state-sanctioned lethal injections. Dr. Chapman stated that “it never occurred to me when we set this up that we’d have complete idiots administering the drugs.”

The op-ed also includes a description of the death row warden’s less-than-stellar credentials for overseeing executions, and the role of poor lawyering in the state’s criminal justice system.

When Eliot Spitzer was inaugurated as Governor of New York in January, he vowed to transform the culture of Albany where, notoriously, state policy decisions are made by “three men in a room.”

Two men in a room.

The former Attorney General, who had earned a reputation for being willing to take on powerful white-collar criminals, dubbed himself “the Steamroller,” promising to do the right thing for New Yorkers even in the face of the worst political heat. Less than a year later, Spitzer has taken a position that reflects the worst kind of political cowardice, one that sells out the privacy rights of New Yorkers to appease the Bush Administration.

In a hastily scheduled press conference on Saturday morning, Spitzer stood side-by-side with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and announced that New York would comply with the federal Real ID Act, a 2005 law that would create the first true national ID card in the U.S., as well as a massive database of personal information on Americans, exposing us all to increased government tracking and identity theft. I’ve written about Real ID here before, so I won’t list all the problems with the Act (they are detailed on our website, Realnightmare.org). But over and above the dangers it poses to civil liberties and the massive cost - $23 billion nationwide according to the Department of Homeland Security - Spitzer’s endorsement of Real ID is a shocking example of poor governance and the very backdoor dealings he promised to root out of his home state.

First of all, the Real ID Act was passed attached to an emergency military spending and Tsunami relief bill. It received no hearings and no debate in the full Congress. The states, and the American people, were given no say in having to endure its burdensome requirements. Second, the Department of Homeland Security has failed repeatedly to issue guidelines for implementation of the Act. These final regulations were originally due in September, then October, now we hear they won’t be ready for two or three more months. So even if a state wanted to implement Real ID, no one knows how to do that yet. It doesn’t take a political scientist to tell you that jumping headlong into implementing a hugely expensive and complicated law without any formal regulations is a bad idea.

Finally, Spitzer is acting alone and against the wisdom of the majority of states and policymakers. The national mood toward this boondoggle of a law was reflected in not one, but two bipartisan votes in the U.S. Senate last summer against expanding and funding Real ID. Seventeen legislatures last year passed bills or resolutions opposing Real ID and calling on Congress to repeal the law. Seven of those states passed binding statutes to opt out of the program altogether. If the elected bodies across the country are so unified, what moved Spitzer to go the other way? Does he know something a majority of US. Senators don’t? As the Associated Press reported today, Spitzer’s decisions came after several “collegial conversations” with his “old friend” Chertoff. The three men in a room have shrunk to two.

Spitzer may now have temporarily resuscitated Real ID, which was crumbling under opposition from far braver public officials. When a supposedly independent, tough, Democratic Governor stands side-by-side with the head of the agency that brought us the federal government’s response to Katrina, and endorses a half-baked security proposal from the Administration that gave us the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, and torture, one has to wonder, who’s steamrolling whom?

Robert Owens Scott, Director of the Trinity Institute, an education program for clergy and laity, authored this post. Scott joined us at the federal district court hearing of AAR v. Chertoff, the ACLU’s case challenging the government’s exclusion of Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan. To learn more about the case, go to www.aclu.org/exclusion.

“Why don’t you invite somebody else?” That’s the question I’ve heard from several colleagues and friends in the months since Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan accepted an invitation to address Trinity Institute, a continuing theological education program of Trinity Wall Street. For nearly four decades the Institute has presented the world’s great theological voices wresting with pressing social and cultural issues. A year ago, in planning a January 2008 interfaith dialogue on religion and violence, we sought out speakers who were firmly embedded in their faith traditions and at the same time able to do the type of self-critique that can lead to transformation. Our aim was to get beyond the projection of violence as a problem of other people, acknowledge the violence in ourselves, and ask how to heal it. Being an Episcopal church, we turned for advice to the Anglican Communion’s spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, himself a noted scholar. He enthusiastically recommended Professor Ramadan, but warned that we would run into “the visa problem.”

Research confirmed that Ramadan would be ideal. His books and speeches envision an Islam that not only can co-exist peacefully with other religions and cultures, but also can contribute to and learn from them. Most significantly, his reforming instincts come not from a rejection of his tradition, but from his love of it. I believe Mark Lilla got it exactly right in a New York Times Magazine article last August (“The Politics of God”) when he named Ramadan and one other Muslim public intellectual and wrote, “By speaking from within the community of the faithful, they] give believers compelling theological reasons for accepting new ways as authentic reinterpretations of the faith.”

Yet Ramadan had been banned from entering the United States since 2004, when his visa had been revoked. The ACLU was suing to get it back. The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer graciously gave me a detailed rundown and explained that the case would likely make it to court in the fall, where there was a chance that the visa would be restored. Seeing hope as a theological virtue, we took the plunge and invited him.

Needless to say, I watched yesterday’s hearing filled with many thoughts and emotions. I won’t pretend to grasp the fine points of the law, but a lot seemed to turn on the government’s argument that it can exclude Ramadan (or any alien) with little proof or accountability. I can acknowledge that persons who aren’t U.S. citizens have no absolute right to come here, any more than I have an absolute right to be welcomed into any other country.

But that seems beside the point. I have a friend - a rabbi - who attended the hearing with me. He said to me, “As a rabbi I don’t think of it as a right to talk with people like that. I’d say it our responsibility…. But that’s not the law.”

It’s true that, if Tariq Ramadan can’t attend our conference, we’ll be able to broadcast his remarks by video. We’ll make sure our audience has access to his ideas and viewpoint. Lost, however, will be the opportunity for us and others to develop real relationships with Tariq Ramadan. Technology cannot replace presence. And in today’s world, developing such relationships may be our deepest responsibility.

Newsweek reported Wednesday that the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council has run out of money defending one client: Brian Nichols. The capital case, which carries the potential for a death sentence, has ground to a halt while the state can get together more money to pay Nichols’ lawyers, who have been working for free since the money ran out.

It’s an issue that’s cropping up across the country. Judges in different states have intervened in death-penalty cases because many states have refused to underwrite the cost of a constitutionally adequate defense, according to John Holdridge, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project. “The problem is that politically it’s a very unpopular cause - the defense of people accused of crimes,” Holdridge says. “Politicians are constantly clamoring that they believe in the death penalty, but they refuse to pay for a fair system.” The states that are quickest to shepherd convicts into the execution chamber are also among those with the lowest-paid public defenders, Holdridge maintains. “Lawyers in most death-penalty states would be lucky to get a third of $165 [an hour],” he says, citing the standard pay for defense lawyers working in federal court (which is at the top end of the public-defense pay scale). “You get the defense you pay for.”

The Georgia State Public Defender’s Office was in the news last month when its director, Christopher Adams, quit because the office wasn’t able to properly represent death row defendants with its limited budget. Under-funding is especially prevalent in “death belt” states like Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama.

And just Thursday, the New Mexico Supreme Court suspended the prosecution of a death penalty case until more funds were made available to pay the defendants’ attorneys a reasonable hourly wage. In his opinion in State of New Mexico v. Young and Lopez, Judge Edward Chavez found the defense team’s compensation insufficient, “violating the defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel.”

This isn’t the last you’ll hear of the “no more money” problem.

Together, ACLU attorneys Ben Wizner and Steven Watt represent six plaintiffs in two cases against the CIA’s practice of extraordinary rendition. So they know a thing or two about the practice.

So when they read “5 Myths About Rendition (and That New Movie)” by Daniel Benjamin, an article that purports to debunk myths about rendition in The Washington Post, they found some of that debunking required debunking itself. Their letter to the editor was published today:

Mr. Benjamin conflated “rendition to justice” - the extrajudicial transfer of terrorism suspects to countries where they face prosecution - with “extraordinary rendition,” a program with precisely the opposite goal: the apprehension and transfer of terrorism suspects to secret overseas detention and interrogation facilities where, the administration maintains, the protections of U.S. and international law do not apply.

You can read the full letter here. To learn more about extraordinary rendition, and watch Ben interview Gavin Hood, the director of the film Rendition, go to www.aclu.org/rendition.