Anthropolitik

letterstomycountry:

A 61-year-old man was shot to death by police while his wife was handcuffed in another room during a drug raid on the wrong house.  Police admitted their mistake, saying faulty information from a drug informant contributed to the death of John Adams Wednesday night.

Bad information from a drug informant?  Why, that never happens!

Good thing this innocent man’s murder and the incalculable suffering of his now-widow (no one wants to be handcuffed by armed assailants while their 61 year old husband is murdered in cold blood in the other room, amirite?) will have ZERO effect on the insanity of drug raids and “drug informants” (remember Fuzzy Dunlop!).

It’s interesting to note that while the murder of innocents can in fact have a demonstrable impact on lessening the freedoms and overall personal security of us as individuals, it only seems to work in one direction the overwhelming majority of the time.

Wonder how much the police department’s “Ooopsy Daisy!” is going to comfort the innocent woman whose innocent husband was murdered in cold blood.

Pretty simple, actually. What has been the standby for homosexual couples in states that don’t consider them fully human? Power Of Attorney. Say it with me now, Power. Of. Attorney. It gives the partner the legal ability to both access sensitive and legal documentation on behalf of his/her partner, as well as make important legal and medical decisions on their behalf.

It’s about the best one can do to try and create a legitimate legal framework within which one’s relationship can reside. So this couple did this…and then the hospital refuses to even look it up when the partner began to have difficulty. I wonder what the potential legal ramifications are, since I know that denying a prisoner or a person under medical care access to their legal representation is still (in theory) frowned upon in this country, and while clearly the guy in the hospital’s family had a problem with his partner being there…I thought that was the whole point of power-of-attorney. To say, explicitly and legally, who you put your faith in, so the members of your gene pool aren’t just automatically granted that right.

Then again, Missouri may have just helped galvanize an already steam-rolling marriage equality movement. This is literally exactly the scenario people are always putting forth, that even with all the “it’s close but not quite” measures, the simple act of visiting a loved one in a hospital can be totally upended by people with cold hearts and similar genomes to the ill individual.