(NAME-MCE) Barriers to High School Graduation

Wed Jan 13 14:46:24 CST 2010

What a WONDERFUL article about helping Latinas succeed in school!

Thanks for sharing! 

Best,
Katherine 

Katherine C. Aguirre
Counselor 
Office of Multicultural Affairs 
Suffolk County Community College 
121 Speonk-Riverhead Road - Peconic 221
Riverhead, NY 11901 
aguirrk at sunysuffolk.edu 
P. 631-548-2635 

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Today's Topics:

   1.  Pope: Same-Sex Marriage Threat to Creation
      (Blumenfeld, Warren [C I])
   2.  Helping Latinas Succeed in School: How Schools Can	Address
      Barriers to High School Graduation (Anselmo Villanueva)
   3.  Editorial Reply to Powe Benedict XVI (Blumenfeld, Warren [C I])

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:24:04 -0600
From: "Blumenfeld, Warren [C I]" <wblumen at iastate.edu>
Subject: (NAME-MCE) Pope: Same-Sex Marriage Threat to Creation
To: <wblumen at iastate.edu>
Message-ID:

<DE1896F17579C0428957BBD81ED583060188506A at exchs015.ats.iastate.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"

Reuters <http://www.reuters.com/> 

Pope says gay marriage threat to creation

Photo
Mon, Jan 11 2010

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict on Tuesday linked the Church's
opposition to gay marriage to concern about the environment, suggesting
that laws undermining "the differences between the sexes" were threats
to creation.

The pope made his comments in an address to diplomats in his yearly
assessment of world events. The main theme of the address was the
environment and the protection of creation.

"To carry our reflection further, we must remember that the problem of
the environment is complex; one might compare it to a multifaceted
prism," he said.

"Creatures differ from one another and can be protected, or endangered,
in different ways, as we know from daily experience. One such attack
comes from laws or proposals which, in the name of fighting
discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between
the sexes," he said.

"I am thinking, for example, of certain countries in Europe or North and
South America," he said.

This was a clear reference to legislation either enacted or proposed in
several part of the world.

Last month, Mexico City became the first capital in Catholic Latin
America to allow same-sex marriage.

In California, the U.S. state's ban on gay marriage goes to trial on
Monday in a federal case that plaintiffs hope to take all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court and overturn bans throughout the nation.

Gay marriage is legal is several U.S. states and some European
countries.

"Yet freedom cannot be absolute, since man is not God, but the image of
God, God's creation. For man, the path to be taken cannot be determined
by caprice or willfulness, but must rather correspond to the structure
willed by the Creator," he said.

In his speech to diplomats from more than 170 countries, the pope
repeated the themes of his message for the Church's World Day of Peace
on January 1, which said industrialized nations must recognize their
responsibility for the environmental crisis, shed their consumerism and
embrace more sober lifestyles.

CLIMATE CHANGE

He told the diplomats that he was concerned about the failure to reach
agreement on climate change at the Copenhagen summit last month.

"I share the growing concern caused by economic and political resistance
to combating the degradation of the environment," he said, adding that
he hoped "it will be possible to reach an agreement for effectively
dealing with this question" at follow-up conferences in Bonn and Mexico
City this year.

"The issue is all the more important in that the very future of some
nations is at stake, particularly some island states," he said.

In other parts of his French-language speech, Benedict repeated calls
for "appropriate management" of natural resources, particularly in
economically disadvantaged nations.

He said enormous resources were going to military spending "and the cost
of maintaining and developing nuclear arsenals" instead of being
diverted to help the poor.

Benedict decried what he called "indifference, amounting practically to
resignation of public opinion worldwide" of conflicts such as those in
Darfur, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

(Editing by Jon Boyle)

? Thomson Reuters 2009. All rights reserved. Users may download and
print extracts of content from this website for their own personal and
non-commercial use only. Republication or redistribution of Thomson
Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly
prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. Thomson
Reuters and its logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of the
Thomson Reuters group of companies around the world.

Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to an Editorial Handbook which
requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests.

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:16:07 -0800
From: Anselmo Villanueva <anselmo.villanueva at gmail.com>
Subject: (NAME-MCE) Helping Latinas Succeed in School: How Schools Can
	Address Barriers to High School Graduation
To: name-mce at nameorg.org
Message-ID:
	<88024d6b1001121316n79f9c929ic6a2b59fda6922b3 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252

Helping Latinas Succeed in School: How Schools Can Address Barriers to
High School Graduation

Information:

http://www.nwlc.org/details.cfm?id=3631&section=education

http://www.nwlc.org/pdf/FactSheetforSchools.pdf

Listening to Latinas: Barriers to High School Graduation  To help keep
girls in school and on track for success, the National Women?s Law
Center and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund went
straight to the
source: Latina students and the adults who work with them every day. Our
new report, Listening to Latinas: Barriers to High School Graduation,
explores the causes of the dropout crisis for Latinas and identifies the
actions needed to improve their graduation rates and get them ready for
college.

Latinas are dropping out of school in alarming numbers. Forty-one
percent of Latina students do not graduate with their class in four
years?if they graduate at all. Many Latina students face challenges
related to poverty, immigration status, limited English proficiency, and
damaging gender and ethnic stereotypes. And the high teen pregnancy rate
for Latinas ? the highest of any ethnic group ? reflects and reinforces
the barriers they face.

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:58:47 -0600
From: "Blumenfeld, Warren [C I]" <wblumen at iastate.edu>
Subject: (NAME-MCE) Editorial Reply to Powe Benedict XVI
To: <wblumen at iastate.edu>
Message-ID:

<DE1896F17579C0428957BBD81ED583060188506B at exchs015.ats.iastate.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"

Popes and An Unflattering History

A Commentary by Warren J. Blumenfeld 

Pope Benedict XVI this week further connected the Catholic Church's
opposition of same-sex unions to issues of environmental degradation by
implying that laws protecting same-sex partners undermines "the
differences between the sexes" and were, therefore, threats to creation.
He made his comments to a group of diplomats at his annual appraisal of
world events. He asserted, "Creatures differ from one another and can be
protected, or endangered, in different ways, as we know from daily
experience. One such attack comes from laws or proposals which, in the
name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the
difference between the sexes." 

These statements were a reiteration of similar concerns the Pope
announced in 2008 during his end-of-the-year Vatican address, when he
implied that homosexuality is as great a threat to humankind as climate
change. He argued that saving humanity from homosexual behavior is as
important as saving the rainforest from destruction. Humanity, he
asserted, needs to "listen to the language of creation" to realize the
intended roles of man and woman. He warned of the "blurring" of the
natural distinctions between males and females, and called for humanity
to protect itself from self-destruction. The Pope compared behavior
beyond traditional heterosexual relations as "a destruction of God's
work."

The Pope's warnings last year came only two years after another of his
controversial Christmastime addresses in which he quoted a 14th century
Christian emperor who asserted that the Islamic Prophet Muhammad imposed
on the world only "evil and inhuman" conditions.

Pope Benedict XVI, by invoking his interpretation of Christian
scripture, follows a long history of Popes who, throughout the ages,
have employed these texts to justify and rationalize the
marginalization, harassment, denial of rights, persecution, and
oppression of entire groups of people based on their social identities. 

At various historical moments, Popes have applied these texts, sometimes
taken in tandem, and at other times used selectively, to establish and
maintain hierarchical positions of power, domination, and privilege over
individuals and groups targeted by these texts. 

On Slavery: Quoting a number of Biblical passages, Pope Nicholas V, in
1452, composed his Dum Diversas, which granted to the kings of Spain and
Portugal the right to reduce any "Saracens [Muslims] and pagans and any
other unbelievers" to perpetual slavery. Then in 1548, Pope Paul III,
reasserted that any free person may buy, sell, and own slaves, and that
runaway slaves were to be returned to their owners for punishment. Pope
Gregory I in 595 sent a priest to Britain to purchase Pagan boys to work
as slaves on church estates. Around the year 600, Pope Gregory I wrote,
in Pastoral Rule: "Slaves should be told...not [to] despise their
masters and recognize that they are only slaves." And between 1629-1661,
Popes Urban VII, Innocent X, and Alexander VII, purchased Muslim slaves.

On the Jews: In 1239, using Biblical passages as his rationale, Pope
Gregory IX ordered all copies of the Jewish holy book, the Talmud,
confiscated, and in 1322, Pope John XXII ordered all copies of the
Talmud burned on the eve of the Jewish Passover. Pope Paul IV, in his
Papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, segregated Jews within a walled ghetto
with locked gates at night to keep them separated from the Christian
majority, and to emphasize their inferior legal and social status. Pope
Pius IX, in 1858, kidnapped a young boy, Edgardo Mortara, from his
Jewish parents in Bologna, Italy, and raised him in Rome as a Catholic
against his parents' wishes on the justification that a Catholic
maidservant had secretly baptized the boy earlier when he was gravely
ill. Pope Pius IX also referred to the Jews of Rome as "dogs." 

The Church has since admitted regret for many of the actions and words
of former Popes. The Rev. Angelo Roncalli, who later became Pope John
XXIII, was honored by Jewish leaders around the world for his work in
saving large numbers of Jews during the German Holocaust. As Pope, he
convened the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which authorized the
declaration Nostra Aetate and approved in 1965 under Pope Paul VI. An
article in the document, while certainly not going far enough, stated:
"True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed
for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be
blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the
Jews of today." Moreover, the Church "deplores the hatred, persecutions
and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and
from any source."

Coming back to the Church's positions on same-sex identities and lives,
I wonder how long it will take the Church to apologize for its
longstanding marginalization and persecution 

of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Time will only tell. 

Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011-3192
Office Phone: (515) 294-5931
Office Fax:     (515) 294-6206
Home Phone: (515) 232-8230

------------------------------

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