Tales from the 'liberal judiciary'

Note: That the American new media is grossly liberal (that's left wing for you non-American readers) is one of those canards that most people accept unquestioningly. American conservatives have a much better understanding than does the American left of the importance of language and how it's used to frame debate. As a result, they repeat ad nauseaum that the mainstream media is liberal and assiduously pushes an unabashed liberal agenda. The average person, perhaps too busy to put these claims in perspective, assumes that it must be true simply because he or she hears it so often.

Conservatives do the exact same thing by equally portraying most judges as liberal; except they don't even say 'most,' they just say 'liberal judges' so often that the two become synonymous in many people's minds.

I've started at this blog an occassional series entitled 'Tales from the "liberal" media' to point out the many examples of the corporate media acting in a distinctly conservative fashion. This isn't intend to prove anything, only to offer a counterbalance to otherwise unchallenged conventional wisdom. I now introduce a new series on the 'liberal' judiciary.

I was visting the website of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to find out more about that state's gubernatorial races. It was the closest governor's race in American history, with the Democrat winning by a mere 129 votes out of 2.8 million cost. At least that's according to the apparently definitive hand recount; the Republican had narrowly won the original count and even more narrowly won the machine recount.

Anyways, I noticed another article that recalls something out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel or Taliban-style Puritanism rather than 21st century America.

A Spokane woman trying to divorce her estranged husband two years after he was jailed for beating her has been told by a judge she can't get out of the marriage while she is pregnant, according to the paper. Further complicating things, Shawn Hughes said her husband is not the child's father.

If this isn't amazing enough, the judge still refused the divorce despite the fact that Hughes' husband, Carlos, was convicted in 2002 of beating her. She separated from him after the attack and filed for divorce last April. She later became pregnant by another man and is due in March.

"There's a lot of case law that says it is important in this state that children not be illegitimized," Superior Court Judge Paul Basting.

I'm absolutely dumbfounded as to how a judge could conceivably determine it in the child's best interest for its mother to be forced to remain married to a man convicted of domestic violence.