Personal Faith, Public Policy
Author: Harry R Jackson
Is there a set of public policies and personal choices we can make that will ensure another four hundred years of God's blessing upon America? Today we stand at a crossroads. In Personal Faith, Public Policy, Harry Jackson and Tony Perkins take a fresh, balanced look at the core issues we are facing today, laying out a comprehensive strategy that can bring evangelicals together across racial and denominational lines to: 1 Preserve and Protect Life by continuing our fight for the unborn; addressing issues such as child abuse, stem cell research, elder care and euthanasia, and capital punishment; and standing firm against those who would take innocent life through acts of terrorism, 2 Reform Immigration Policy by improving our legal immigration process while dealing with our rampant illegal immigration problem, 3 Alleviate Domestic Poverty and Ensure Justice at home by reforming health care and reasserting our mission to help the working poor, orphans, widows, and the destitute to find personal, spiritual, and financial refuge, 4 Cultivate Racial Harmony and Diversity by developing partnerships across racial lines and raising up minority leaders in key politically active ministries, 5 Protect Religious Freedom by learning the truth about the separation of church and state, the current religious liberties battleground, and what the Bible says about the freedom of religion, 6 Defend Marriage and Family by supporting promarriage policies and divorce reform at both the national and state levels, 7 Protect the Environment by properly caring for God's creation and making changes in America's energy policies. America's future can be as bright as the promises of God. To realize these promises,we must take action on these seven critical steps in our private lives, in our churches, and collectively in our public policy.
Interesting book: Data and Computer Communications or Word 2003 Bible
The State Boys Rebellion
Author: Michael DAntonio
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist tells the amazing story of how a group of imprisoned boys won their freedom, found justice, and survived one of the darkest and least-known episodes of American history.
In the early twentieth century, United States health officials used IQ tests to single out "feebleminded" children and force them into institutions where they were denied education, sterilized, drugged, and abused. Under programs that ran into the 1970s, more than 250,000 children were separated from their families, although many of them were merely unwanted orphans, truants, or delinquents.
The State Boys Rebellion conveys the shocking truth about America's eugenic era through the experiences of a group of boys held at the Fernald State School in Massachusetts starting in the late 1940s. In the tradition of Erin Brockovich, it recounts the boys' dramatic struggle to demand their rights and secure their freedom. It also covers their horrifying discovery many years later that they had been fed radioactive oatmeal in Cold War experiments -- and the subsequent legal battle that ultimately won them a multimillion-dollar settlement.
Meticulously researched through school archives, previously sealed papers, and interviews with the surviving State Boys, this deft exposé is a powerful reminder of the terrifying consequences of unchecked power as well as an inspiring testament to the strength of the human spirit.
The Washington Post - E. Anthony Rotundo
D'Antonio's book is both engaging and valuable. His State Boys are fascinating people who maintained their humanity and pride against the daily assaults of institutional life. He renders them as vivid individuals, and the warmth of his plainspoken prose makes their stories irresistible.
The New York Times - Anthony Walton
D'Antonio's narrative strikes an admirable balance between the larger social context and scientific theories -- ''most troubling . . . is that it all began with a grand desire to do good'' -- and the children's lived experience … The rebellion of the state boys was less an isolated act -- though D'Antonio narrates the residents' climactic takeover of one building and the fateful consequences for those involved -- than a way of being. Despite the inhumane conditions in which they lived, the state boys, through countless small acts of self-assertion, and through the enduring friendships they formed with one another, refused to accept the state's categorization of them as anything less than fully human.
Publishers Weekly
The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment shockingly demonstrated that the world's most powerful narcotic might well be unlimited power over the powerless. Emancipation movements the world over have also taught us that even the most abjectly powerless will, given enough time, fight for their freedom and dignity. These two precepts are at the heart of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist D'Antonio's startling account of the wholesale incarceration of the mentally retarded during the middle decades of the last century. The bastard child of progressivism and eugenics, the institutionalization by the 1930s of needy children with below-average IQs was a well-established part of the legal system. The effect of this was to consign many children to overcrowded and underfunded medical prisons where physical, emotional and sexual abuse was rampant-and quite literally without end. D'Antonio wisely chooses one institution, the Walter E. Fernald School for the Feebleminded, in Massachusetts, where a group of boys, utterly (and correctly) convinced of their lack of abnormal status, after nearly two decades of confinement, in 1957 instigated a violent uprising in Ward 22, the prisonlike facility where misbehaving inmates were periodically sent. Thanks to their indomitable conviction that their institutionalization was unjust and the growing awareness on the part of certain sympathetic outsiders over several decades, these young men were finally able to help put an end to this ghastly system. D'Antonio (Atomic Harvest, etc.) deftly combines detailed archival research and extensive personal interviews to paint a richly nuanced picture of a horrifying and shamefully underexposed part of our country's recent history. Agent, David McCormick. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
This disturbing account covers both a specific incident that occurred in 1957 at Fernald, a Massachusetts school for mentally impaired youth, and the many other associated acts of defiance that the young male students undertook to reclaim their dignity in a degrading environment. D'Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author/journalist (Atomic Harvest: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of America's Nuclear Arsenal), shows how the eugenics movement and IQ testing led officials to found schools to house "morons," unfortunate children often mislabeled as feeble-minded. D'Antonio describes daily institutional life at Fernald, including pervasive abuse, basing his account on case notes, records, government reports, and interviews with former inmates who lived there in the late 1940s and 1950s. The impact of deinstitutionalization 20 years later is also examined through its effects on the young men, who have been compelled to develop various coping mechanisms to deal with their pasts. The final resolution of their stirring saga was a lawsuit against the school challenging its right to allow radiation experimentation without informed consent. Though not as artfully written as Alex Beam's Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital, which focused on a more obviously significant institution, this is still a worthwhile contribution to the literature that illuminates the darker side of American social history. Recommended for special collections on the history of mental retardation and for large public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/03.] Antoinette Brinkman, Evansville, IN Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A dip into the appalling archives of an American movement to institutionalize the "feeble-minded" that persisted well into the 1970s. Pulitzer-winner D'Antonio (Atomic Harvest, 1993, etc.) efficiently takes readers unfamiliar with eugenics as an outgrowth of the Progressive political movement through some hair-raising background. Beginning around 1900, scientists posited that intelligence levels and mental defects were 100% genetically transferable (i.e., inherited), a contention that resulted in a mass scare. If allowed to roam society unsterilized and reproduce, Americans concluded, "substandards" would eventually reduce us literally to a nation of babbling idiots. The eventual result, D'Antonio reminds (as hard as it is to believe), was that nascent Nazi movement in Germany actually looked to the US as a model for control of the genetically unfit, later adding its own unique ethnic perspectives. The author then zeroes in on Fred Boyce, a kid in Massachusetts shuttled from one foster home to another and finally, in 1949, committed to the state's Walter E. Fernald School for the Feebleminded along with many other "typical morons" who today would be recognized as completely normal kids whose speech, learning, and/or physical disabilities set them apart. But in the mid-20th century, D'Antonio notes, "Across the nation, 84 institutions housed a total of 150,000 children and 26 more state schools were under construction." Boyce's years of ordeal are documented along with the parallel struggles of several close buddies as they fought to overcome abuse, neglect, and eternal ennui to break free of the Fernald pigeonhole and reenter society as husbands and fathers. As a crowning indignity, itwas revealed only a decade ago, Fred and other members of Fernald's Science Club were at one time administered doses of irradiated calcium (in breakfast oatmeal) without their knowledge or consent as part of an "outside experiment."Gross injustice wrought by pseudo-science seen intimately from the inside. Agent: David McCormick
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