offensiveness continues...
Military chaplain: Soldier’s rape ‘must have been God’s will’
WASHINGTON – A lawsuit targeting the Pentagon contains an astonishing anecdote about a retired Sergeant's experience after being sexually assaulted by a colleague during a deployment to Afghanistan.
The lawsuit, available here (PDF), was filed by 17 military women against Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Donald Rumsfeld in Virginia. It assails "the military's repeated failures to take action in rape cases created a culture where violence against women was tolerated, violating the plaintiffs' Constitutional rights."
Sergeant Rebekah Havrilla alleges in the complaint that in 2006, after her military supervisor repeatedly sexually harassed her, she was raped by a colleague she was working with at the time.
"He pulled her into his bed, held her down, and raped her. He also photographed the rape," it reads. Havrilla reported the incident within a month.
In February 2009, she reported for active duty training and, upon seeing her rapist, went into shock.
"She immediately sought the assistance of the military chaplain," the lawsuit reads. "When SGT Havrilla met with the military chaplain, he told her that 'it must have been God's will for her to be raped' and recommended that she attend church more frequently."
The complains adds that "SGT Havrilla suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic depression."
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/18/military-chaplain-soldiers-rape-must-have-been-gods-will/
In an Alberta town, parents fight for a secular education
It wasn’t until her seven-year-old son asked her if he’d burn in hell that Marjorie Kirsop became concerned.
A Catholic education is the only local option for the Kirsop family and everyone else in Morinville, Alta., a community of 8,100 northwest of Edmonton. It’s a unique situation, rooted in the town’s origins as an outpost of French-Canadian Catholicism in the late 1800s. But this fall, when five-year-old Sarah Kirsop declared she had converted to Catholicism, her mother joined a group of local families who are challenging the status quo.
Their campaign for religion-free public education has met resistance from the local public school board – the Greater St. Albert Catholic Regional Division – and drawn little more than a polite hearing from local politicians and Alberta’s Ministry of Education.
The dissident families, who number between five and 15 depending on who is counting, say they want what other Canadians have: freedom of religion, or, in this case, freedom from religion.
The Alberta School Act allows children to be excused from religious or patriotic exercises or instruction. “But in a Catholic school, the entire curriculum is permeated with the Catholic theology, hence the problem,” said Frank Peters, an expert in school governance and a professor of education at the University of Alberta.
The parents see their predicament more personally.
“When every other public school division, not just in Alberta, in the country is non-denominational, how can our public school division tell all of our children, ‘It’s Catholic education, you’re the problem and you should leave?’” said Donna Hunter, a Morinville mother and member of the group.
The school district says it has tried to accommodate the Morinville parents, even offering to pay to have their children bused to another district. District superintendent David Keohane said that the students’ commute wouldn’t be much longer than it already is, less than 20 minutes.
The parents filed an appeal with Alberta Education in January and are waiting to hear back. But Mr. Keohane has come to believe the Morinville parents will settle for nothing less than a secular school in their town, and his district isn’t willing to hand one over one of the four schools that it administers in Morinville.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...ion/article1931158/singlepage/#articlecontent
