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Contents © 2006
by Jim Holman.
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NEWS
February 2006

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CALIFORNIA BISHOPS SPOKE OUT against the death penalty in the days leading up to Christmas. On November 30, the day the state supreme court rejected a plea by lawyers to halt the December 13 execution of Stanley Tookie Williams, Stockton's bishop, Stephen Blaire, president of the California Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement saying that while California's Catholic bishops "recognize the profound pain of those who have lost loved ones to violence and offer them our prayers and our consolation ... nothing can undo what was done -- even taking the life of the convicted killer. The infliction of the death penalty does not make for a more just society." While the bishops, wrote Blaire, "recognize that human beings can and do commit grievous crimes," they "reject the use of the death penalty -- especially when we can protect society with an alternate penalty of life imprisonment." Further, said the bishop, "of particular concern to us is the fact that the application of the death penalty is deeply flawed -- with those who are poor or from racial minorities most often its subjects. The three pending executions are illustrative of these facts." Williams, the founder of the gang, the Crips, and convicted of four shotgun murders, was black. The state scheduled two other executions in January and February. Bishop Blaire said the bishops "are convinced" that the death penalty does not serve the common good.

The California bishops' conference call echoed a November document issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, "A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death," which voiced "our common conviction that it is time for our nation to abandon the illusion that we can protect life by taking life."

BISHOP ALLEN VIGNERON of Oakland issued his own call to end the death penalty in the December 12 Catholic Voice, the diocesan newspaper. "While the state has a duty to protect the community from further violence and punish the offender," said Vigneron, the California bishops "believe the death penalty contributes to a culture of death, and further violates human life and dignity." Bishop Vigneron noted that "in California, the sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole provides a just alternative to the death penalty."

Bishop Vigneron quoted Pope John Paul II, who in a 1999 speech in St. Louis called for clemency in U.S. death penalty cases. "The new evangelization," said the late pontiff, "calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will proclaim, celebrate, and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil ... I renew the appeal I made ... for a consensus to end the death penalty which is cruel and unnecessary."

On "the Advent feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas, mother of mercy and reconciliation," said Vigneron, "we pray for the over 635 people on death row in California; we commend all victims of violence to the love and compassion of God; and we ask God to deepen within us a respect for life which will bear fruit in forgiveness, justice, and an end to all violence."

"A MORATORIUM IS NEEDED to evaluate whether the death penalty serves the common good and safeguards the dignity of human life. We are convinced that it does not," wrote Bishop John Wester, apostolic administrator of the San Francisco archdiocese, in a December 13 statement following the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams at San Quentin.

A bill calling for a moratorium on the death penalty has been introduced into the state legislature by five Democrats, the Los Angeles Times reported on December 14. An assembly committee was scheduled to consider the legislation, Assembly Bill 1121, on January 10. The bill follows suggestions made by the California Commission on the Fair Ad ministration of Justice, created by the senate in 2004 to study the extent of wrongful convictions in the state court system. In particular, the commission has been looking at how frequently police suppress exonerating evidence and how often witnesses and prison informants give false testimony. According to John Streeter, a San Francisco lawyer who chairs the commission, "there's a half a dozen issues that are recurring in exoneration cases. We see them time and time again. They tend to arise in death penalty cases, where the problems can be the most serious."

California, which has 647 inmates on death row, has executed 12 people since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978. According to death penalty opponents, since 1981, six death row inmates have had their convictions overturned; in one case, Oscar Lee Morris was freed in 2000 after his accuser admitted that he had made up his evidence in return for a plea bargain. But death penalty proponents, such as Senator Chuck Poochigian (R-Fresno), say that the overturning of cases is evidence that the system has sufficient legal safeguards to protect the wrongly convicted. "Every one of the death penalty cases that reaches conclusion has been the subject of exhaustive judicial review, typically with appeals to the highest courts," said Poochigian, a candidate for state attorney general.

In 2005, the Santa Clara Law Review published a study that said those who murdered whites during the 1990s were far more likely to get the death sentence than those who killed blacks or Latinos.

SOPHOMORIC OR SINISTER? At least eighteen officers of the San Francisco police department were suspended December 8 over homemade videos that police and city officials have called racist, sexist, and homophobic, the December 9 New York Times reported. The videos, made for a Christmas party, featured the police officers in skits that mocked the homeless, women, blacks, and homosexuals. One skit reportedly has a black woman screaming after being hit by a police car. One of the officers, Andrew Cohen, 39, taped and edited the videos and placed them on his personal web site. Van Jones, founder of the Bay Area Police Watch, called this video "terrifying. The running over a homeless black woman. That's funny?" she said. "It shows the contempt for people of color and women. That is the kind of frat-boy mentality encouraged in the Police Department." Police chief Heather Fong called the videos "egregious, shameful and despicable," and Mayor Gavin New som said he would convene a "blue ribbon" panel and "make surethat [the problem] ends, it ends im mediately." Most of the officers involved worked at the Bayview Hunters Point station, a largely black, poor, and high crime-rate district.

Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, apologized for the videos but defended the officers involved. "We are absolutely certain that none of the officers involved participated in the making of these comic parodies with the intent to disparage any individual or group," said Delagnes. "These were meant as comic relief, parodies of police work."

THE BIBLE IS NOT BARRED from juror deliberations of court penalties, the U.S. ninth circuit court of appeals in San Francisco ruled December 8. In 1979, a Los Angeles jury resolved on the death penalty for Stevie Lamar Fields, who was convicted of committing three kidnappings, three rapes, four robberies, and a murder only two weeks after he had been released from prison for another homicide. According to the December 9 Sacramento Bee, the jury had seriously considered life imprisonment for Fields until the jury foreman distributed scriptural quotes, such as "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." In 2000, U.S. district court judge Dickran Tevrizian granted Fields a new penalty trial, saying that it had been "well settled" by circuit courts that "religion may not play a role in the sentencing process." But the ninth circuit court of appeals in December reinstated Fields' death sentence. Writing for the three-judge panel, Judge Pamela Ryder of Pasadena agreed that a prosecutor is barred from appealing to religious sentiments in seeking a sentence, but that "what may be improper or prejudicial when said by a prosecutor may not be so when said by a juror," ruled Ryder. Bible verses, said the justice, constitute "common knowledge" that jurors may access in forming their moral judgments.

Fields' attorney, David Olson, said he will file further appeals.

"NO MATTER HOW HARD they shake the piggy bank, nothing is falling out," said the November 10 New York Times of the California institute authorized to funnel money for embryonic stem cell research. This is because, despite the 2004 approval by voters of Proposition 71, which gave $3 billion toward embryonic stem cell research, the institute has been tied up in lawsuits filed by groups opposing stem cell research and by others that criticize how the institute is governed. A $3 million loan from the state and a $5 million gift from Ray Dolby, which have kept the institute going, are set to run out in May, said the Times; and it is uncertain whether any other monies will be forthcoming.

Another disappointment has been news that royalties to the state from stem-cell research may not be as great as originally predicted. During the 2004 election, proponents of the institute said that state could expect $537 to $1.1 billion in royalties over the next 35 years. But in August, a state commission said these projections were "based on unrealistic assumptions about the potential economic impact" of the program.

STATE SENATOR DEBORAH ORTIZ (D-Sacramento) said she would reintroduce legislation that would require the Proposition 71 stem cell institute to submit to open meeting and conflict of interest rules, the January 2 LifeSiteNews.com reported. Ortiz said she would, as well, introduce another measure to protect the rights of women who donate their ova for medical research. Though a supporter of embryonic stem-cell research, Ortiz last year sponsored in the legislature a bill that would have protected women who make egg donations -- requiring doctors to inform them of the risks associated with the procedure, obtain donors' consent, and disclose what part the doctors themselves play in research using the donated eggs. Ortiz's measure would also have prohibited payments to women beyond reimbursements of their expenses.

The measure passed the assembly and senate but was vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger because it required an audit of the stem-cell committee. This provision, said the governor, would have violated Proposition 71, which mandates that no changes be made to the program in its first three years. But Schwarzenegger said he agreed with the bill's egg-donation provisions. Ortiz's new measure removes the audit portion of the old bill.

POLITICAL AFFILIATION WAS NOT the key factor determining how people in many parts of California voted on Proposition 73, the parental notification initiative on last November's ballot, said the December 18 Sacramento Bee. The measure, against which 60 percent of Sacramento citizens voted, found majority support in suburban areas of the capital, such as Fair Oaks and Orangevale. "The main demographics for those areas are families and households with married couples," said Albin Rhomberg, spokesman for the Proposition 73 campaign. "People from urban areas generally move to the suburbs to raise families." According to Rhomberg, concern for family overshadowed political party affiliation areas throughout the state. For, though the Sacramento suburbs tend to be Republican, the mostly Democratic Imperial County voted 68 percent in favor of 73 because, said Rhomberg, Imperial has a high Latino population who work on farms and are family-oriented.

IS IT A "PRO-LIFE SHIFT"? A federal study released December 19 said more American women were bringing unwanted pregnancies to term in 2002 than in 1995, Associated Press reported on December 20. The National Center for Health Statistics surveyed 7,643 U.S. women between the ages of 15 and 44 in 2002 and early 2003. If those interviewed answered "no" to the question, "right before you became pregnant, did you yourself want to have a baby at any time in the future?" researchers called the pregnancy "unwanted." If the women said they became pregnant sooner than they had expected, researchers said their pregnancies were "mistimed." Of the women interviewed in 2002, 14 percent had recent births in the "unwanted" category; a similar survey in 1995 found that only 9 percent of births were "unwanted" at the time of conception. The proportion of unwanted births was highest for women under 18 (25.4 percent) and lowest for women ages 30 to 44 (10.4 percent). Black women had the highest proportion of unwanted births (26.2 percent), followed by Latinas (16.8 percent), and then white women (10.7 percent). The results are consistent, said Associated Press, with the falling rates of abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 1995, 26 out of every 100 pregnancies ended in abortion in contrast to 2002, when the rate was 24 out of every 100 pregnancies.

According to Guttmacher's Lawrence Finer, the federal and Guttmacher statistics "together suggest -- but don't confirm -- that a greater percentage of unintended pregnancies resulted in births rather than abortions." But others disagree, some pro-life advocates saying that the studies confirm that more women are rejecting abortion. But pro-abortion advocates say the decrease in abortions results from decreased access to abortion nationwide.

Along with the abortion statistics, the federal study found that about 42 percent of women in 2002 said they never married, up from 38 percent in 1995. The number of women living with men not their husbands in 2002 was 50 percent; in 1995, it was 41 percent.

VITALE BACK AT IT. Franciscan priest Father Louis Vitale, 72, formerly pastor of St. Boniface church in San Francisco, was arrested November 20 during a prayer vigil and demonstration at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in Fort Benning, Georgia, the Catholic Voice reported. Critics charge that the institute, formerly the School of the Americas, trains military and police from Latin America in methods that violate human rights and use torture; many Latin American graduates of the school have been implicated in murders, including those of six Jesuits and their two coworkers in 1989. The institute has continually denied the charges of complicity in human rights abuses. Vitale and a lay parishioner of Our Lady of Lourdes parish in Oakland, David Sylvester, 54, were taken into custody after they passed a fence and entered the institute's grounds. About 100 other Bay Area Catholics were present at the protest. Both Sylvester and Vitale pleaded not guilty; but while Sylvester was released on a $1,000 bond, Vitale decided to remain in custody until their January trial date.

This was not Father Vitale's first arrest. In December 2002, he spent three months in prison at Fort Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada for a Fort Benning protest. In March 2003, he joined the late Father Bill O'Donnell, a priest at St. Joseph the Worker in Oakland, and others in stopping traffic in front of San Francisco's Pacific Stock Exchange in protest of the impending Iraq War, and was arrested; three days later he was again arrested with about 40 other protestors for blocking the entrance to the British consulate in San Francisco. Vitale retired as pastor of St. Boniface last September, saying, however, that he had not finished with work for justice and peace. "This isn't the end of my work for God," he said. "I will still be working for peace and justice, I just don't know where. This sort of dedication never ends."

WAL-MART, INC. MUST PAY damages to about 116,000 of its current and former employees because it deprived them of their lunch and dinner breaks, an Alameda County jury said on December 22. Plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the retail giant claimed that between 2001 and 2005, Wal-Mart violated a 2001 California law that guarantees employees a 30-minute lunch or dinner break for every six hours of work; some employees claimed that the company pulled them from their breaks to make up for staff shortages. Neal Manne, an attorney representing Wal-Mart, however said the lawsuit focused on "some compliance problems at Wal-Mart from a number of years ago. The undisputed evidence is that those problems have long since been solved. There's 100 percent compliance now."

Wal-Mart claimed that employees "did take substantially all of their meal periods," and those who did not receive breaks were given an extra hour's pay. The jury, however, awarded plaintiffs $57 million in compensatory damages and $155 million in punitive damages, according to the December 23 San Francisco Chronicle. "In a workplace like Wal-Mart, where it's nonunion, state law is the only protection that a lot of workers have for basic rights, like meal breaks and getting their breaks on time," said a juror. Wal-Mart said it would appeal the decision.

The decision is the largest class-action judgment against Wal-Mart ever. The company faces other class-action suits, including one in Marin County in which plaintiffs claim that Wal-Mart and an import company knowingly sold defective bicycle parts that injured children.

ARNOLD'S WAGE HIKE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling for an increase in the minimum wage to one dollar above its current rate over the next 18 months, the December 31 Los Angeles Times re ported. Currently the state minimum wage stands at $6.75 an hour, earning workers about $14,000 a year; the governor wants the legislature to raise the wage 50 cents by September and another 50 cents in July 2007, bringing the yearly wage of minimum wage workers to about $16,000 a year. California now has the eighth highest minimum wage in the country while being one of the most expensive places to live. Schwarzenegger's wage hike would place California' s minimum wage above those of Oregon and Washington, which pay $7.50 and $7.63 an hour respectively. The federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.

Schwarzenegger has vetoed other wage hikes in the past because they would automatically raise the wage level in accord with increases in inflation. In rejecting a minimum wage hike in September 2005, the governor said, "minimum-wage increases must not be put on autopilot or examined in a vacuum but reviewed in conjunction with other wage and hour issues that impact workers and businesses."

But labor leaders and assembly Democrats have criticized the governor's plan, calling it an election-year ploy to portray himself as a moderate. Business leaders have said, however, that they would support the plan. "Let face it, it's very difficult to argue against an increase in the minimum wage for someone who is making such a small amount of money," said Rusty Hammer, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. "You want to argue something reasonable and rational, which is what this is." Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Association, agreed. "I think a minimum wage increase is inevitable," he said. "The governor has come up with the best compromise the business community can get."

This is especially so, since two ballot initiatives for 2006 call for a more drastic raise in the minimum wage. One would raise the state minimum wage to $8.75 by 2009, with automatic, permanent increases based on inflation every year thereafter. The other would raise the minimum wage to $7.75 an hour by the beginning of 2008, after which it would linked to inflation.

A SACRAMENTO NURSE, Jennifer Le, is suing the California Nurses Association in federal court because, she says, the union refused to accommodate her religious beliefs. Le is Cath olic. According to a January 4 news release from the Pacific Justice Institute, which represents her, Le objected to paying dues to the nurses association because it backs abortion, sex education, and homosexual partnerships. The union said Le could divert her donations to charity but offered only five options (among them Planned Parent hood and the AIDS Foundation), all of which Le said she could not conscientiously support. Nurses who do not belong to the union find it difficult to find jobs in the Sacramento area.

For two years, Le and the Pacific Justice Institute tried to resolve the dispute with the nurses association before going to court.

SAN JOSE DIOCESE RECEIVED its first "minister of parish life" when Bishop Patrick McGrath appointed Elizabeth Lilly of Los Altos to that post at Sacred Heart church in Saratoga, the December 20 Valley Catholic, the diocesan newspaper, reported. Bishop McGrath made the announcement at Sacred Heart November 12 and 13 at all Masses. Though McGrath appointed Father Gary Thomas as canonical pastor of the parish (canon law says only a priest can serve as pastor), Lilly will serve as "central parish leader -- in lieu of an ordained priest pastor -- and has overall administrative and pastoral responsibility for the parish," according to the Valley Catholic. "She collaborates with Sacred Heart's leadership groups and staff to assure pastoral, spiritual, and organizational leadership for the parish." A "priest minister" will serve with Lilly under her direction and will have the "responsibility for those rites and celebrations that require ordination." Ministers of parish life also are given a "mentor pastor" and are to meet regularly with a spiritual advisor.

Lilly, who will serve Sacred Heart through June 30, 2006, said, "I must carry forward the vision of the diocesan pastoral plan along with the parish's strategic plan. I think the basic mission and vision of a parish is to be the home where people find their life journey with Jesus." Lilly said she sees herself as a "convener, an empowerer of the discipleship of community. That is the great responsibility that I can fulfill because this is a grace that is shared by the whole community. The Church defines a parish as its people, and I see my role as fostering the life of the people in faith and community and in acts of justice and charity. The parish is home for multiple generations and we must come together as one family, in charity, in all that we do."

THE CITY OF SAN JOSE violated state law when it granted marital benefits to the partners of homosexual employees who had been married elsewhere, including San Francisco, which for a month recognized same-sex marriages, according to a Pacific Justice Institute news release and the December 21 San Francisco Chronicle. A city resolution awarded benefits, including health and dental insurance, not only to "spouses" of homosexual employees, but to the children of domestic partners. In response to a lawsuit filed against San Jose, Santa Clara County superior court judge Mary Jo Levinger ruled that in granting such benefits, the city violated a state law ratified by voters as Proposition 22, which said, "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

However, a spokesman for San Jose mayor Ron Gonzales said Levinger's decision will remove no benefits from same-sex couples, since in 2004 the city granted marital and family benefits to domestic partners, regardless of marital status.

ONE OF TWO COMPETING INITIATIVES to ban homosexual marriage in California will probably not make the ballot in 2006, the December 21 San Francisco Chronicle reported. The initiative, which reads, "a marriage between a man and a woman is the only legal union that shall be valid or recognized by the state," has been proposed by a coalition, ProtectMarriage.com, led by Gail Knight, whose husband, the late Senator Pete Knight, wrote Proposition 22. Unlike Proposition 22, which a San Francisco court has ruled in violation of the state constitution, this "Protect Marriage" initiative would alter the state constitution to protect marriage. But, by the December 27 deadline to file signatures, the initiative's backers had gathered only about half of the required 598,105 valid signatures needed to qualify the measure for the June ballot, said the December 28 Los Angeles Times. The state allowed backers to recirculate the measure for the November ballot, but it is uncertain that the effort will be successful.

Likewise, the competing measure, the Voters' Right to Protect Marriage initiative, will not appear on the June 2005 ballot. A December 26 news release from VoteYesMarriage.com, which is backing the initiative, said the initiative campaign "is moving steadily forward with confidence and momentum." Backers, said the news release, hope to place the initiative "on a future California ballot" -- though whether that would be the November ballot is unclear from the release. Assemblyman Larry Bowler, a supporter of the measure, said, "we aren't making the mistake of initiating a short, 150-day effort to gather 1,000,000 signatures before raising sufficient funds to ensure we will successfully qualify for the ballot. People need to realize that a successful signature drive in California requires gathering an average of 50,000 signatures per week for 20 straight weeks."

The Voters' Right to Marriage Protection initiative reads, "only marriage between one man and one woman is valid or recognized in California, whether contracted in this state or elsewhere. Neither the Legislature nor any court, government institution, government agency, initiative statute, local government or government official shall abolish the civil institution of marriage between one man and one woman, or bestow statutory rights or incidents of marriage on unmarried persons, or require private entities to offer or provide rights or incidents of marriage to unmarried persons. Any public act, record, or judicial proceeding, from within this state or another jurisdiction, that violates this section is void and unenforceable."

The threat of the two initiatives mobilized proponents and supporters of homosexual marriage, including the NAACP and the United Farm Workers. Geoffrey Kos, executive director of Equality California, said he isn't too sure that the initiatives are dead for 2006; he told the Times that the pullback might be a ruse to stir up conservative backers.

ANOTHER JUDGE HAS RULED that alleged victims of molestation by priests can go after parish and school assets as well as other diocesan owned property in seeking settlements. The Wall Street Journal reported that, on December 30, a federal bankruptcy judge in Portland, Oregon, Elizabeth Perris, denied the archdiocese of Portland's claim that creditors could not force the sale of parishes, schools, and other such assets, since the diocese held these in trust for the parishes as beneficiaries. Such assets in the Portland archdiocese are valued at from $400 to $600 million, whereas diocesan properties not held in trust are valued at only $19 million. Perris denied the archdiocese's argument that the status of these properties should be determined by canon law; "who owns the property is, quite simply, not a theological or doctrinal matter," she said. The archdiocese argued, as well, that since Portland's 390,000 Catholics were named a separate defendant, civil law would not allow the archdiocese to sell their property against their wishes. Judge Perris, however, said, "under civil law, the parishes and high schools are not separate civil legal entities." The archdiocese indicated it would appeal Perris' decision.

Last August, a similar decision was reached by a bankruptcy court in Spokane, Washington. Judge Patricia Williams ruled that churches, parochial schools, and such assets as cemeteries belong to the Spokane diocese, not to parishes. Though only binding in their jurisdictions, both the Portland and Spokane decisions may have repercussions in clergy abuse cases throughout the United States.

TOO MUCH LOVE FOR MAM MA. In December 2004, while San Francisco superior court judge Richard Kramer was hearing testimony in a case in which he ultimately declared California's Proposition 22 unconstitutional, Glen Levy, representing the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, which fought for the marriage law, said that "the primary purpose of marriage is procreation, and that is the reason the state recognizes marriage." But, "if it's 'We want to make people happy,' then you couldn't exclude incest; you couldn't exclude polygamy." Proponents of homosexual marriage, however, have argued that such warnings are scare tactics. "What homosexuals are asking for is the right to marry, not anybody they love, but somebody they love, which is not at all the same thing," a Brookings Institution scholar, Jonathan Rauch, has written, according to the December 11 Washington Times.

But, a pro-polygamy grouped based in Maine "has been watching the battle over homosexual 'marriage rights with keen interest," said the Times. Mark Henkel, the founder of the group, said, "we're coming. We are next. There's no doubt about it, we are next." Oddly, unlike the homosexual marriage rights movement, Henkel's group, www.TruthBearer.org, claims to be Christian. But Henkel and others claim polygamy is biblical and makes sense. "Momma," a woman who lives in a polygamous relationship in the Pacific Northwest, told the Times, "biblically, it stands that marriage has always been more than one wife. It says right in the Scriptures that you've got men throughout the ages who have always taken care of more than one wife." She and her husband of 37 years, "Poppa," invited another woman, the 37-year-old "Mom," a single mother, into the relationship five years ago. The "family" now has six children, and all the adults share in caring for them and in the household duties. "Poppa," said "Momma," has "always had more love than I could absorb." Such men "are not trying to create a collection [of wives]. They're trying to make sure this [single] woman has a support mechanism for her and her children." "Polygamy is family," said "Poppa." "It's us. It's a unity and identity of a family group.... It is the ultrafamily."

The threat of polygamy may not be a mere bogey man. Canada, which has legalized same-sex marriage, has "launched a study to look at the ramifications of polygamy," said South Dakota state representative Elizabeth Kraus. "Once you open the marriage door to anyone other than one man or one woman, you haven't begun to slide down the slippery slope. You've already hit rock bottom." Two out of three members of a New Jersey appellate court agreed. In 2005, New Jersey appellate justices Stephen Skillman and Anthony Parillo, in rejecting same-sex "marriage," wrote, "the same form of constitutional attack that plaintiffs mount against statutes limiting the institution of marriage to members of the opposite sex also could be made against statutes prohibiting polygamy."

ABORTION TRAUMA LASTS LONGER. A study conducted by the University of Oslo, Sweden, concluded that while both women who miscarry and those who have had abortions often suffer trauma after the event, women who have aborted undergo trauma for far longer, the BBC News reported in December. Researchers compared 40 women who have miscarried with 80 women who have had abortions and found that after ten days, 47.5 percent of the miscarriage group suffered from some mental illness as opposed to 30 percent of the abortion group. However, six months after a miscarriage, only 22 percent of women suffered distress, and only 2.6 percent after two to five years, while among the abortion group, 25.7 percent of women suffered distress after six months and 20 percent after five years. Women who have aborted their children, said the researchers, also strive not to think about their abortions. The abortion group, as well, had more complex responses to the event than did those in the miscarriage group.

A SAINT FOR SACRAMENTO? Bishop William Weigand of Sacramento has opened the diocesan portion of the beatification cause for the late Bishop Alphonse Gallegos, who served as an auxiliary in the Sacramento diocese in the late '80s and early '90s, the December 10 Catholic Herald, the diocesan newspaper, reported. The process was initiated at the request of the late bishop's order, the Augustinian Recollects. Bishop Gallegos, a native of Los Angeles, suffered from a severe congenital myopic problem that rendered him nearly blind; but determined to become a priest, he underwent eye surgery before entering seminary at the Tagaste Monastery in Suffern, New York. After serving as novice master for his order in Kansas City, Kansas, Gallegos was appointed pastor of San Miguel parish in the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1972. From 1979, Father Gallegos served as the first director of the California Catholic Conference's division of Hispanic affairs until he was ordained an auxiliary bishop to Sacramento's Bishop Francis Quinn in 1981.

According to Augustinian Recollect Father James McGuire, now pastor of a parish in Montebello, who taught Gallegos in the seminary, Bishop Gallegos spent summers living with migrant farm workers in the Central Valley. "He was always concerned about migrants and other people who needed help and didn't have an advocacy group in their favor" and "cared especially about the poor, the marginalized, and unchurched youth. All these groups had a special place in his pastoral ministry," McGuire told the Herald. Bishop Gallegos died in an automobile accident near Yuba City on October 6, 1991.

THE SACRAMENTO DIOCESE will wait to conduct an investigation of a weeping statute of Mary, the November 29 Sacramento Bee reported. In early November, red streaks appeared on the face of the statue at Vietnamese Catholic Martyrs church in Sacramento. Though the statue has attracted visitors, many of whom think it is miraculous, the diocese is taking and wait and see attitude. The diocese and Bishop Weigand are "letting it sit for now," said Father James Murphy, rector of Sacramento's Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament. To test for miracles, the Church will need field investigators and lab experts; but they will not be coming any time soon. "There's no rush," Murphy said. "The church thinks in terms of centuries, not tomorrow's news."

The Sacramento statue is the not California's first weeping Virgin. In 1983, a weeping statute of Mary at Thornton in the San Joaquin Valley attracted some attention, but the diocese of Stockton determined that it was probably a fraud.

"WE CAN SOLVE HOMELESSNESS. We must solve homelessness," San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom told a crowd of 150 in his second annual State of Homelessness address on December 20. "There is no greater issue in the city and county of San Francisco." According to the December 21 San Francisco Chronicle, Newsom told the crowd that his Care Not Cash plan is working; the city welfare roles have shrunk by 84 percent over the last 18 months and, predicted the mayor, by May 2006 there should be no homeless at all on the welfare rolls. Before Care Not Cash went into effect in May 2004, 2,497 homeless received up to $410 a month from the city. New som's voter-approved plan cut payments to $59 a month and, in lieu of the remainder, offered housing or shelter. As of December 2005, only 391 homeless remained on the welfare rolls.

In his speech Newsom admitted that the city has received complaints that $59 a month is not enough to live on. But, he said, he hopes the city will make up for the shortfall by offering food stamps, job training, and mental counseling. Newsom announced other breakthroughs in his speech. Since 2004, he said, the city has created 1,855 units of housing for the homeless, with another 632 expected to be completed by April 2006; in its 10-year plan to end homelessness, the city's target was 3,000 units of housing. Half of the 300 women and more than half of the aged in emergency shelters are now in supportive housing. The Homeward Bound program, in which the city offers one-way bus tickets out of San Francisco if someone in their home county or city offers to take them, has decreased the number of city homeless by 887.

According to a one-night count done in January 2005, the homeless population of San Francisco, at 6,248 people, is down 28 percent.

TAKING THEIR LEAD FROM SAN FRANCISCO and other cities, officials of Sacramento city and county on December 6 endorsed a ten-year plan that features a "housing first" approach to end chronic homelessness, the December 7 Sacramento Bee reported. The plan is to provide housing for the chronically homeless -- those who have been on the streets for more than a year or at least four times over a three-year period -- which, it is claimed, will make them more willing to use programs to make them more self-sufficient. The county has an estimated 1,600 chronically homeless people among a population of an estimated 16,000 street dwellers overall. The ten-year plan calls for the creation of about 500 units of permanent housing over the next five years. The costs of the program, it is hoped, will be better known in the spring of 2006. The costs, it is hoped, will be less than the current costs of putting the homeless in jail or the hospital. The homeless can also be costly to businesses, said Ryan Loofbourrow, who co-chairs the Sacramento County and Cities Board on Homelessness. The presence of the homeless, he said, "forces [business owners] to clean up their shops and increases the cost of security."

The same day as the vote on the ten-year plan, the Sacramento County board of supervisors voted to ban shopping carts on the American River Parkway to discourage the homeless from dumping and camping there. Many homeless camp on the parkway because of the lack of shelters. In response to this vote, Paula Lomazzi, a former homeless woman who works for the Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee, said, "I worry about it being unenforceable. Giving people more tickets and jailing them.... I think we should stick to the 10-year homelessness plan."

THE NUMBER OF HOMELESS NATIONWIDE has gone up, but slightly less than usual, a report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors said. Released December 19, the "Hunger and Homelessness Survey" said that demand for emergency food rose 12 percent and demand for shelter, six percent, between November 1, 2004 and October 31, 2005. But though the numbers are less than usual, Mayor Gavin Newsom, who co-chaired the conference, said, "the statistics continue to get worse and worse despite our herculean efforts." The report noted that 54 percent of those seeking emergency food were families, that 40 percent of adults asking for food had employment, and that typically individuals remain homeless for seven months. Since, however, the U.S. Conference of Mayors only includes cities with 30,000 or more people, it did not include statistics from smaller cities and towns. The homeless population in the United States has been estimated at 2.5 million.

"DYKE" AIN'T DEROGATORY. The San Francisco Women's Motorcyle Contingent may use "Dykes on Bikes" as their official designation, the United States Patent Office said on December 8. The group filed an application for the name with the patent office in 2003 but were refused because, the office said, the term "dyke" is offensive and derogatory. But not so, the Dykes argued. Though used by others to disparage lesbians, dyke has been co-opted by lesbians as a term of pride, much as "queer" has been by homosexuals overall. The Dykes appealed the original ruling, drawing support from the National Center for Lesbian Rights in San Francisco as well as the San Francisco board of supervisors. Though rejecting the name a second time, the patent office came around when a lawyer representing the Dykes submitted hundreds of pages of documentation showing that the name does not disparage lesbians.

"The word dyke has been used to put us down, and we have taken that name and reclaimed it as a source of pride," Vick Germany, president of Dykes on Bikes, said. Brooke Oliver, the San Francisco attorney who represented the group, said the patent officereversal "feels like a major change in the recognition of people's rights to be out and proud and call themselves what they want to."

FOCUS ON THE FAMILY has closed all its accounts with the San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank because of a $50,000 donation the bank made to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on December 6. Tom Minnery, who directs public policy for Focus on the Family, said of the pull-out, "we don't expect corporate America to do our bidding on the issues, but when they use the proceeds from our business and give them to others who clobber us over the head, we say enough is enough." Chris Hammond, spokesman for Wells Fargo, which contributes about $2 million a year to homosexual groups, said, "we absolutely made a $50,000 grant to GLAAD, and we're absolutely proud of our support for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community." In 2000, a fundraising appeal for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, featuring the organization's logo side by side with Wells Fargo's, said the bank would match dollar for dollar any donation made to the alliance. Hammond, however, said the advertisement's claim was untrue and that Wells Fargo never allowed the organization to use the $50,000 donation in a fundraising campaign.

While Focus on the Family has not called for a boycott of Wells Fargo, the bank, San Francisco-based Levi Strauss, and the Bank of America faced a boycott 13 years ago when they stopped donating to the Boy Scouts of America because of its policy against allowing homosexual members. Wells Fargo currently allows its individual banks to donate to the Boy Scouts on a case-by-case basis.

A FEDERAL JUDGE for the Northern District of California on December 22 said a California law that requires parental consent for the sale of violent video games to children under 18 violates the First Amendment, Agence France-Presse reported on December 23. The law, signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, was to go into effect January 1. But upon request of the entertainment software industry, Judge Ronald Whyte ordered an injunction. Not only did the law violate the Constitution, said Whyte, but the entertainment industry would likely prevail in a court contest. "We are extremely pleased" with the ruling, said Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association. "We believe a combination of parental choice and parental control is the legal, sensible, and most importantly, effective way to help parents keep inappropriate video games from children." Backers of the bill said they would appeal Judge Whyte's decision.

Judge Whyte is an instructor at the Catholic Santa Clara University.

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