From: (Anonymous)	Date: September 1st, 2006 03:48 pm (UTC)		(Link)

!!!

I'd been thinking of moving to Wisconsin....perhaps now might be a good time.

~E

	From: ladyerin	Date: September 1st, 2006 03:51 pm (UTC)		(Link)

....hate it when LJ logs me out and doesn't bother to let me know..

	From: wyrdone	Date: September 1st, 2006 04:08 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I would "as a aggreived citizen" like to place all legislators who voted for this bill to be automatically placed on said list. ;)

	From: lovingboth	Date: September 1st, 2006 04:16 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Quite.

And that Supreme Court judge who declined to answer the perfectly reasonable - according to his judgements, anyway - question about whether or not he sodomised his wife. I mean, what's the guy hiding?

	From: giza	Date: September 1st, 2006 06:24 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Why stop there?

I'll be happy to write a script that automates submissions to that list, if there is a web interface. And if someone wants to import an entire city phonebook full of names...

	From: antonia_tiger	Date: September 1st, 2006 05:35 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I'd have to read up on the detail of how the Ohio legislature works, but I do wonder how much gets debated/opposed at this particular stage of the process.

Still, even if this panel is a rubber-stamp operation, it's not doing a proper job. Such registers get abused in all sorts of ways, even when somebody has to be convicted of something, and not even attempting due process is so blatantly wrong.

	From: elfs	Date: September 1st, 2006 05:48 pm (UTC)		(Link)

What I especially sneer at in this article is the statement that the Catholic Church put this proposal forward themselves; the alternative was the threat that lawsuits against priests would tie up courts for years and years. Their solution was to destroy the Sixth Amendment!?

	From: aprivatefox	Date: September 1st, 2006 06:45 pm (UTC)		(Link)

One of the commenters over on Brayton's blog linked to the text of the law: http://www.legislature.state.oh.us/bills.cfm?ID=126_SB_17

One of the other bits of the law seems a bit bizarre to me, though utterly tangential to the primary idiocy at hand:

Sec. 2151.421. (4)(c) outlines three conditions which, when met, anull the privilege of the cleric-penitent relationship (the privilege which waives the requirement that the cleric report abuse). (So, when the privilege is anulled, the cleric is compelled under law to report on what the penitent said.)

The three conditions, which must all be met, are:
(i) The penitent is under 18 (or under 21 and mentally or physically disabled)
(ii) The cleric knows or believes the penitent has been abused/neglected or is likely to be abused/neglected
(iii) The abuse or neglect does not arise from the penitent's attempt to have an abortion performed on a child under 18 (or under 21 and disabled) without parental notification

What the hell is condition iii about? The language is very slippery, but as best I can pin it down, it appears to be intended to apply to children confessing abuse as a result of attempting to get an abortion without telling their parents. Why are those children exempted from the abuse-reporting mandate? If the aim of this law is to protect children, then why are they explicitly defining a class of children and denying them protection?

This whole law smells - even the fairly innocuous provisions have strange riders...

	From: hlmt	Date: September 2nd, 2006 01:59 am (UTC)		(Link)

OMG. I'm -SO- glad I'm no longer teaching at Kent State. Horrifyingly scary.

From: (Anonymous)	Date: September 11th, 2006 08:04 am (UTC)		(Link)

Might be worth someone checking to see if this is a violation of human rights, because it sounds damn like it to me.