It's O.K. to change your sex and police abuses once again

A number of different issues today.

I. There is a woman who was born a man playing basketball for a small woman's college basketball team. A talk show host asked rhetorically, did she have the right to have this operation to go from a man to a woman. Well, it's her body. The host's stated this was changing the way that a deity made her. No, we as human beings have the perfect right to determine our own self determation. I wish social conservatives would get out of the lives of other people, especially what they do in their bedrooms.

II. Police engaged in a raid in Portland, Oregon for anarchist material (according to a search warrant) including literature, pamphlets and flags. This is supposedly in regards to an act of vandalism of a courtroom but I am not sure how having literature of any kind is a crime. We enjoy freedom of speech and the ability to read other points of view, even if they are considered extreme.

III. In Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, Irving Espinosa-Rodrigue, was arrested for secretly recording police. Until just recently, police in Massachusetts arrested and prosecutors prosecuted people for openly recording police. Police throughout the U.S. still illegally arrest people for recording them, but they usually make up a supposed crime, such as obstruction of justice or disorderly conduct.

Of course, we have a Constitutional right to record the police or other government officials. If not, how do journalists and the public expose government corruption and abuses? After all, everyone is on their best behavior when they know they are being recorded.

IV. Finally here in Milwaukee there is a loitering ordiance that prohibits supposed gang members from staying in an area a police chief designates. The problem with the loitering law is that one doens't have to be convicted or even arrested for a crime to be marked as a gang member. Yes, some gang members do loiter to commit crimes or to control a market but with laws that don't require any real evidence, it is open to the innocent having their right to assemble or be outside peacefully, violated.