Saturday, October 16, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
4 Bullied Teens From 1 Ohio School Committ Suicide
MENTOR, Ohio — Sladjana Vidovic's body lay in an open casket, dressed in the sparkly pink dress she had planned to wear to the prom. Days earlier, she had tied one end of a rope around her neck and the other around a bed post before jumping out her bedroom window.
The 16-year-old's last words, scribbled in English and her native Croatian, told of her daily torment at Mentor High School, where students mocked her accent, taunted her with insults like "Slutty Jana" and threw food at her.
It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died at his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.
Now two families — including the Vidovics — are suing the school district, claiming their children were bullied to death and the school did nothing to stop it. The lawsuits come after a national spate of high-profile suicides by gay teens and others, and during a time of national soul-searching about what can be done to stop it.
If there has been soul-searching among the bullies in Mentor — a pleasant beachfront community that was voted one of the "100 Best Places to Live" by CNN and Money magazine this year — Sladjana's family saw too little of it at her wake in October 2008.
Suzana Vidovic found her sister's body hanging over the front lawn. The family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the casket — and laughed.
"They were laughing at the way she looked," Suzana says, crying. "Even though she died."
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Sladjana Vidovic, whose family had moved to northeast Ohio from Bosnia when she was a little girl, was pretty, vivacious and charming. She loved to dance. She would turn on the stereo and drag her father out of his chair, dance him in circles around the living room.
"Nonstop smile. Nonstop music," says her father, Dragan, who speaks only a little English.
At school, life was very different. She was ridiculed for her thick accent. Classmates tossed insults like "Slutty Jana" or "Slut-Jana-Vagina." A boy pushed her down the stairs. A girl smacked her in the face with a water bottle.
Phone callers in the dead of night would tell her to go back to Croatia, that she'd be dead in the morning, that they'd find her after school, says Suzana Vidovic.
"Sladjana did stand up for herself, but toward the end she just kind of stopped," says her best friend, Jelena Jandric. "Because she couldn't handle it. She didn't have enough strength."
Vidovic's parents say they begged the school to intervene many times. They say the school promised to take care of her.
She had already withdrawn from Mentor and enrolled in an online school about a week before she killed herself.
When the family tried to retrieve records about their reports of bullying, school officials told them the records were destroyed during a switch to computers. The family sued in August.
Two years after her death, Dragan Vidovic waves his hand over the family living room, where a vase of pink flowers stands next to a photograph of Sladjana.
"Today, no music," he says sadly. "No smile."
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Eric Mohat was flamboyant and loud and preferred to wear pink most of the time. When he didn't get the lead soprano part in the choir his freshman year, he was indignant, his mother says.
He wore a stuffed animal strapped to his arm, a lemur named Georges that was given its own seat in class.
"It was a gag," says Mohat's father, Bill. "And all the girls would come up to pet his monkey. And in his Spanish class they would write stories about Georges."
Mohat's family and friends say he wasn't gay, but people thought he was.
"They called him fag, homo, queer," says his mother, Jan. "He told us that."
Bullies once knocked a pile of books out of his hands on the stairs, saying, "'Pick up your books, faggot,'" says Dan Hughes, a friend of Eric's.
Kids would flick him in the head or call him names, says 20-year-old Drew Juratovac, a former student. One time, a boy called Mohat a "homo," and Juratovac told him to leave Mohat alone.
"I got up and said, 'Listen, you better leave this kid alone. Just walk away,'" he says. "And I just hit him in the face. And I got suspended for it."
Eric Mohat shot himself on March 29, 2007, two weeks before a choir trip to Hawaii.
His parents asked the coroner to call it "bullicide." At Eric's funeral and after his death, other kids told the Mohats that they had seen the teen relentlessly bullied in math class. The Mohats demanded that police investigate, but no criminal activity was found.
Two years later, in April 2009, the Mohats sued the school district, the principal, the superintendent and Eric's math teacher. The federal lawsuit is on hold while the Ohio Supreme Court considers a question of state law regarding the case.
"Did we raise him to be too polite?" Bill Mohat wonders. "Did we leave him defenseless in this school?"
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Meredith Rezak, 16, shot herself in the head three weeks after the death of Mohat, a good friend of hers. Her cell phone, found next to her body, contained a photograph of Mohat with the caption "R.I.P. Eric a.k.a. Twiggy."
Rezak was bright, outgoing and a well-liked player on the volleyball team. Shortly before her suicide, she had joined the school's Gay-Straight Alliance and told friends and family she thought she might be gay.
Juratovac says Rezak endured her own share of bullying — "name-calling, just stupid trivial stuff" — but nobody ever knew it was getting to her.
"Meredith ended up coming out that she was a lesbian," he says. "I think much of that sparked a lot of the bullying from a lot of the other girls in school, 'cause she didn't fit in."
Her best friend, Kevin Simon, doesn't believe that bullying played a role in Rezak's death. She had serious issues at home that were unrelated to school, he says.
After Mohat's death, people saw Rezak crying at school, and friends heard her talk of suicide herself.
A year after Rezak's death, the older of her two brothers, 22-year-old Justin, also shot and killed himself. His death certificate mentioned "chronic depressive reaction."
This March, her only other sibling, Matthew, died of a drug overdose at age 21.
Their mother, Nancy Merritt, lives in Colorado now. She doesn't think Meredith was bullied to death but doesn't really know what happened. On the phone, her voice drifts off, sounding disconnected, confused.
"So all three of mine are gone," she says. "I have to keep breathing."
___
Most mornings before school, Jennifer Eyring would take Pepto-Bismol to calm her stomach and plead with her mother to let her stay home.
"She used to sob to me in the morning that she did not want to go," says her mother, Janet. "And this is going to bring tears to my eyes. Because I made her go to school."
Eyring, 16, was an accomplished equestrian who had a learning disability. She was developmentally delayed and had a hearing problem, so she received tutoring during the school day. For that, her mother says, she was bullied constantly.
By the end of her sophomore year in 2006, Eyring's mother had decided to pull her out of Mentor High School and enroll her in an online school the following autumn. But one night that summer, Jennifer walked into her parents' bedroom and told them she had taken some of her mother's antidepressant pills to make herself feel better. Hours later, she died of an overdose.
The Eyrings do not hold Mentor High accountable, but they believe she would be alive today had she not been bullied. Her parents are speaking out in hopes of preventing more tragedies.
"It's too late for my daughter," Janet Eyring says, "but it may not be too late for someone else."
___
No official from Mentor public schools would comment for this story. The school also refused to provide details on its anti-bullying program.
Some students say the problem is the culture of conformity in this city of about 50,000 people: If you're not an athlete or cheerleader, you're not cool. And if you're not cool, you're a prime target for the bullies.
But that's not so different from most high schools. Senior Matt Super, who's 17, says the suicides unfairly paint his school in a bad light.
"Not everybody's a good person," he says. "And in a group of 3,000 people, there are going to be bad people."
StopCyberbulling.org founder Parry Aftab says this is the first time she's heard of two sets of parents suing a school at the same time for two independent cases of bullying or cyberbullying. No one has been accused of bullying more than one of the teens who died.
Barbara Coloroso, a national anti-bullying expert, says the school is allowing a "culture of mean" to thrive, and school officials should be held responsible for the suicides — along with the bullies.
"Bullying doesn't start as criminal. They need to be held accountable the very first time they call somebody a gross term," Coloroso says. "That is the beginning of dehumanization."
72,000 stimulus payments went to dead people
WASHINGTON – A government investigator says 89,000 stimulus payments of $250 each went to people who were either dead or in prison.
The Social Security Administration's inspector general said in a report Thursday that $18 million went to 72,000 people who were dead. The report estimates that a little more than half the payments were returned.
The report said $4.3 million went to a little more than 17,000 prison inmates.
The payments were part of the government's massive economic recovery package enacted in February 2009. Under the law, the $250 payments were sent to about 52 million Social Security recipients and federal retirees.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Woman Tears Down "Jesus Porn" In Colorado Museum
A controversial piece of art in a Loveland, CO museum depicting Jesus in a porn pose is no more. That’s because a women stormed into the exhibit, broke the glass casing around the piece with a crow bar, and tore the artwork to shreds.
Kathleen Folden, 56, of Kalispell, Mont., was arrested shortly after the 4 p.m. incident Wednesday and charged with felony criminal mischief, the Loveland Reporter-Herlad says.
“She was saying, ‘How can you desecrate my Lord?’” said Mark Michels, a strange who helped subdue Folen. “She wanted to wreck the print, and that was it. After that, she was totally passive.”
The depiction of Jesus divided members of the quaint Colorado town, drawing protests against the piece and also “protesters protesting the protests,” according to one museum official:
Radio Flyer Wagon CAR Turns Heads
Link to Article
Fred Keller and Judy Foster worked on the car for 11 months, and finished in August of this year, and their ride has been turning heads.
The base of the wagon is a 1976 Mazda pickup truck that Foster inherited from her dad.
The vehicle turns heads everywhere they go.
"I think the words I hear the most often is 'awesome' or 'cool' or people go by and give us a 'hi' sign," Foster said.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Firefighters Let House Burn In Tennessee Over An Unpaid $75 Dollar Fee
JMC Ministries Response
written by: Miranda Caverley
Do you think that if this $75.00 fee was in place in New York City on the day Sept. 11th happened that all those firefighters would have been told NOT To go and try and save as many lives as possible if the owners of the Twin Towers had accidentally forgotten to pay the 75 dollars? And be forced to just stand and watch thousands more die than what did that day? I don't think so.
The man offered to pay the fee. But he still got no help. So he watched as 3 dogs and 1 cat burned alive in this fire along with all his belongings. What if those pets would have been people do you think they would have helped then to save a life. It really makes me wonder especially how cold they were to even the news reporters and even calling on their radios for police back up to have news/media escorted away from this mans burning home.
What is the point of even having firefighters and paying taxes to them if they will just do nothing. Must be great to just stand around and get paid thousands of dollars a year to watch peoples homes burn. Even when the people offer to pay the 75 dollar yearly fee that they accidentally for got to pay.
Sadly my family was affected by something similar to this many years ago. My Great Aunt And Uncles home caught fire. They lived in a rural area in Ohio and when they called 911 they were told that the fire station was not in their jurisdiction and that they would not come put the fire out. Yes they let my aunt and uncles home burn down to the ground because they didn't have a fire station in their jurisdiction where they would come and help them.
Then I watch MSNBC Keith Olberman interview this man who lost his home today and the first words out of Keiths mouth to set up his interview was and I quote "A look now into the America envisioned by the Tea Party" Ok How in the world can you say that! I am not a tea party member but I do keep up on what the tea party is wanting to do to change America and it most definitely does not include letting fellow American's homes to burn and no body even care.
How is the tea party even involved with this town allowing this man's home to burn? I would say this is not a vision of the tea party but a vision of the twisted evil mayor and local officials of this town in Tennessee. It is most clear that the mayor by the interview that he does not even care about the people of his town if they forget or don't comply with this $75.oo fee. To see a publicly elected official to show no sympathy or empathy for this family is just disgusting even after knowing the family was willing to still pay the yearly fee and comply with their twisted rules. How can you be a mayor of a town if you don't show compassion towards the people that elected you?
All I can say is that election time is coming and I don't see this man staying in office for very long.
We pray for this family and for the others in this area who have also lost homes because of this fee. How can you put a price on peoples lives when they are already paying taxes? May God inspire people donate to this family and help them get back on their feet and supply what the insurance company doesn't. It is a sad day America when we see fellow citizens stand by and not help their fellow man. What have we become?
Marriage Poll: No Longer Just About Man or Woman Now Shows Bestiality As Category
9:15 pm Eastern
click to read original story from World Net Daily
A new WND/Wenzel Poll indicates that an overwhelming 70 percent of Americans want marriage limited to one man and one woman, but a subset, tiny though it may be, already is endorsing polygamy and bestiality.
The prospect that relationships abhorred both biblically and traditionally will be sanctioned already has been forecast by one of the California Supreme Court justices in 2008 who dissented from the majority opinion that "found" in the state constitution a provision for same-sex "marriage."
The decision later was rejected by voters through Proposition 8, which enshrined traditional marriage in the state constitution. The ballot measure was ruled unconstitutional in August, however, by homosexual Judge Vaughn Walker, who decided that the age in which gender mattered to marriage was over.
The new results come in a WND/Wenzel Poll conducted Sept. 13-14 with an automated technology calling a random sampling of listed telephone numbers nationwide. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.65 percentage points.
Fritz Wenzel, chief of Wenzel Strategies which conducts the WND poll, said there is a huge disparity between the political parties on how people feel about the question of marriage.
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"While 92 percent of Republicans believe only in a one man-one woman marriage, just 52 percent of Democrats agreed," he reported. "Among Democrats, 44 percent said they believed a marriage could be any two people, regardless of gender.
"Independents were about halfway in-between Republicans and Democrats on the question, as 66 percent said they felt marriage should be just between one man and one woman," he said.
It was among those categories that the polygamous or polyamorous relationships – even bestiality – started appearing.
Among Democrats, 2.2 percent said "marriage" should be "many people-any gender." One-half of one percent of independents agreed. And a definition of marriage that would be "not limited to humans alone" was supported by 0.2 percent of Democrats and the same percentage of Independents.
The poll revealed that men and women felt about the same on the definition of marriage, with 71 percent of men and 69 percent of women saying marriage should be between just one man and one woman.
"However, younger respondents were much more likely to accept the idea of same-sex marriages – 45 percent said they believed in a one man-one woman union, but 39 percent said they felt same-sex marriages were acceptable. Interestingly, 16 percent of those under age 30 said they think marriage as an institution should be scrapped altogether," the Wenzel analysis of poll results said.
"Mirroring Wenzel Strategies polling conducted for WorldNetDaily.com last month, just 35 percent said they thought the federal judge's decision to vacate the California state constitutional amendment – which was passed by voters – was a courageous stroke of judicial magic. Another 34 percent said they believed it was the height of judicial arrogance, with the other third either somewhere in-between or undecided on the question," the Wenzel analysis said.
"On the question of whether respondents believed the nation would eventually come to accept same-sex marriage, two-thirds, or 63 percent said they did not believe it would ever be accepted. Another 14 percent said they thought same-sex marriages would be accepted, but that it would take a long time, perhaps decades, to occur. Twenty-one percent said they did believe that same-sex marriage would be accepted, and probably in the short-term," the analysis said.
The Alliance Defense Fund has noted some of Judge Walker's far-reaching conclusions in his court decision, now on appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals:
- "Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians."
- "Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed."
- "The gender of a child's parent is not a factor in a child's adjustment."
- "The evidence shows beyond any doubt that parents' genders are irrelevant to children’s developmental outcomes."
- "Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals."
- "Many of the purported interests identified by proponents are nothing more than a fear or unarticulated dislike of same-sex couples."
Liberty Counsel has called the ruling "outrageous."
"This is a classic example of radical individualism and judicial activism. Judge Walker obviously has not learned the lesson of 2008, when the California Supreme Court refused to stay its decision on marriage. That decision was reversed in short order, but it caused a huge disruption," said chief Mathew Staver.
The American Family Association has launched an action alert to its several million supporters calling for the impeachment of Walker.
The alert asks supporters to contact their members of Congress and demand his removal.
"What you have here is a federal judge using the power of his position to legitimize what is sexually aberrant behavior," Bryan Fischer, an analyst for the organization, told WND. "He's trampling on the will of 7 million voters in California. It's just a gross breach of his judicial responsibility.
"We think of it as an expression of judicial tyranny, judicial activism on steroids," he said.
Tea Partiers Say America Is A Christian Nation
click to read original story from CNN
Members of the Tea Party movement tend to be Christian conservatives, not libertarians, and are more likely than even white evangelical Christians to say the United States is a Christian nation, a detailed new study has found.
More than half of self-identified Tea Party members say America is a Christian nation, while just over four out of 10 white evangelicals believe that - the same as the proportion of the general population that says so.
"We found actually that among the Tea Party, rather than being libertarians, at least on the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage, they're actually social conservatives," the survey's lead author, Robert Jones, said Tuesday.
Despite the headlines the Tea Party movement has generated with their candidates upsetting mainstream Republican candidates in primary races from Delaware to Nevada, it is only half the size of the Christian conservative movement, Jones said.
"We found that the Tea Party movement makes up a significant number. One in 10 Americans consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, that's not insignificant," he said. "But it is half the size of those who consider themselves part of the Christian conservative movement or the religious right," he said.
The details come from the American Values Survey, released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute.
Read an analysis of the results by the institute's CEO and research director
Some findings from the telephone survey of more than 3,000 Americans confirm the conventional wisdom.
Tea Party members are big fans of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and not so hot on President Barack Obama.
They're much more likely than the general population to trust Fox News most - almost six out of 10 say it's their most trusted source of news, more than twice as many who say that among Americans as a whole.
A former speechwriter for George W. Bush said the emergence of the Tea Party movement reflects the latest development in a long-running conflict.
"We used to have culture wars on abortion and the nature of family," said Michael Gerson, who is now a Washington Post columnist.
"I think we're in the middle of a culture war, just as vicious, on the role and size of government and I think these results are consistent with that," he told a packed house at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where the report was unveiled Tuesday.
The Tea Party is not simply a movement of white evangelicals, the survey found by digging deeper into the specific beliefs of both groups.
The religious beliefs of Tea Partiers tend to be more traditional than those of the general population, but less so than white evangelicals'.
Pollster Robert P. Jones releases the results of a new study at the Brookings Institution.
Nearly half of Tea Partiers believe the Bible is the literal word of God, for example. One in three Americans overall believes that, while nearly two in three white evangelicals do.
Tea Partiers are much more likely than white evangelicals or Americans in general to think that minorities get too much attention from the government.
Almost six in 10 Tea Partiers believe that, while fewer than four in 10 white evangelicals say so. Figures for white evangelicals and Americans in general on that question are statistically identical.
But Tea Party opinions of immigrants line up with those of white evangelicals, with just under two out of three in each group saying immigrants are a burden on the U.S. "because they take jobs, housing and health care."
Just under half of the population as a whole says that.
The head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary said he was not surprised that there's both agreement and disagreement between the Tea Party and white evangelicals.
"Opposition movements tend to draw very broadly. When it gets to the specifics of governance there's going to be some big contrast," Albert Mohler Jr. told CNN.
"I think those areas of natural overlap are understandable but the issues of contrast are going to be unavoidable," he said.
Libertarians - who oppose government intervention in people's personal lives - will not see eye to eye with evangelicals on abortion or same-sex marriage, he said.
"Very few evangelicals would say the government has no role in these issues," he said.
The Public Religion Research Institute report, "Religion and the Tea Party in the 2010 Election: An Analysis of the Third Biennial American Values Survey," is based on telephone polling of a national random survey of 3,013 adults between September 1 and 14.
CNN's Richard Allen Greene contributed to this report.
South Sudan Is Below Third World Status
click to read full story from ChristianPost.com
Mon, Sep. 20, 2010
The standard of life in South Sudan is so far behind modern society that it dreams to one day reach Third World status, says the head of a missions group that works in the region.
So if South Sudan voted to secede from the North in the January referendum, it would need “a lot of external help,” warns Bill Deans, president of Mustard Seed International.
“For the past three generations they’ve been in war. Every family is touched by that,” reports Deans, whose organization ministers to the "least of these."
“There is a great number of orphans, the infrastructure in the South is non-existent, there are no pave roads, thus the ability for the South to sustain itself is not there,” he adds.
Deans also emphasizes how there are no education or medical infrastructures in the region.
“It is going to take a lot of external help for that to happen over a period of time,” Deans says. “They have been so isolated for the past 25 years.”
Sudan is just four months away from a critical referendum in which the South can vote to break away from the North.
For more than 21 years, the predominantly Muslim North and the animist and Christian South fought in a bloody civil war that left some 2 million civilians dead and more than 4 million people displaced. The war also destroyed an estimated 500 churches in Southern Sudan.
In 2005, however, the two sides signed the Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the war. The CPA called for a government of national unity to be formed for a transitional period of six years. After this time, the South could vote to be autonomous. Many analysts expect the south to vote for independence on January 9, 2011.
It is amid the desperate need for medical care after years of war that Mustard Seed International established the Akot Medical Mission in 2006. The clinic is literally in the middle of the brush – where there is not even a grocery store nearby – and provides the only medical care in the area.
“For us to build this facility was nothing short of a miracle,” says Deans, who noted the only building material on the site was the dirt. Every other material – from cement to nails – for the clinic was trucked or flown in from Kenya or Uganda.
“It is just a miracle that a facility like that can exist in the bush of South Sudan,” he remarks. “The people say it is the best facility in the whole country. But we have nothing to gauge that on because we have not been all over the country.”
In South Sudan, there is an average of one doctor per 100,000 people.
According to a report published by UNICEF in 2004, the infant mortality rate in South Sudan is 15 percent while the child mortality rate is 25 percent. About one in nine mothers die during pregnancy or childbirth and only five percent of births are attended by trained health care workers. The malnutrition rate, meanwhile, stands at 48 percent and severe malnutrition is over 21 percent. A U.N. official recently called South Sudan the hungriest place on earth.
Every year, the Akot Medical Mission provides direct medical attention to more than 30,000 people.
But Deans notes how very expensive it is to operate the clinic because of the transportation costs. He says it costs $10,000 to fly in $10,000-worth of medicine. MSI’s total budget for the South Sudan operation, however, is only $300,000. And for the past two years, the MSI board decided to shift funds to help the clinic stay open despite shortfall.
“We are a small organization,” says Deans, who became Mustard Seed International’s president in 2002 on the condition that all the staff work as volunteers. “We get it done. We don’t have the big publicity budget.”
Despite the constant financial struggle to keep the operation in “off-the-radar” South Sudan going, Deans says he finds his job “rewarding” and “good.”
“I’m working harder than I ever worked in my life running businesses,” he jokes.
Michelle A. Vu
Christian Post Reporter