Washington D.C., Mar 31, 2021 / 08:23 am (CNA).- Arkansas is set to ban gender-transitioning procedures for children, including the use of cross-sex hormones, surgeries, and puberty-blocking drugs.
The Arkansas Senate voted 28-7 on Monday to pass House Bill 1570, known as the “To Create The Arkansas Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act.” The bill has not yet been signed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R), but he is expected to sign it into law.
The bill states that “A physician or other healthcare professional shall not provide gender transition procedures to any individual under eighteen (18) years of age,” and that “A physician, or other healthcare professional shall not refer any individual under eighteen (18) years of age to any healthcare professional for gender transition procedures.”
The SAFE Act describes gender transition procedures as cross-sex hormonal treatments, surgeries including mastectomies and vaginoplasties, and drugs that are prescribed with the intent of stopping or delaying puberty in a pre-pubescent child.
Further, the bill also bans the use of public funding of gender transition procedures of children under the age of 18. Insurance companies in Arkansas will not be required to cover gender transition procedures, nor will they be allowed to cover the gender transition of a minor.
Chase Strangio, who is the deputy director for transgender justice for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), referred to the SAFE Act as “the single most extreme anti-trans law to ever pass through a state legislature” and said that this legislation and similar bills are “potentially genocidal” for trans-identified people.
On its Twitter account, the ACLU claimed on Monday that “Arkansas has become the first state to ban health care for trans youth,” and that “our rights and lives are under attack.” While the legislation banned gender-transitioning for children, it did not apply to general health care procedures for youth identifying as transgender.
“This is one domino we cannot let fall,” the ACLU tweeted on Tuesday evening.
Last week, Arkansas became the second state to ban biological males who identify as female from competing on sports teams for women and girls.
“This law simply says that female athletes should not have to compete in a sport against a student of the male sex when the sport is designed for women’s competition,” Hutchinson said in a statement after signing the bill. “As I have stated previously, I agree with the intention of this law. This will help promote and maintain fairness in women’s sporting events.”
On Wednesday, President Biden tweeted on the International Transgender Day of Visibility, saying that “Transgender rights are human rights — and I’m calling on every American to join me in uplifting the worth and dignity of transgender Americans. Together, we can stamp out discrimination and deliver on our nation’s promise of freedom and equality for all.”
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This photo of Father Allan Travers was featured in the local newspaper after his pitching “performance” for the Detroit Tigers against the Philadelphia A’s on May 18, 1912. The photo featured the caption “strikebreaker,” which worried Travers’ mother, since there was a street trolley strike in Philadelphia earlier in the month, and she didn’t want her son caught in the confusion. / Photo credit: Public domain
Detroit, Mich., Jul 23, 2023 / 08:00 am (CNA).
The worst pitcher ever to take the mound for the Detroit Tigers became a Catholic priest.
Granted, Allan Travers was already on the path to the priesthood before suiting up for Detroit on May 18, 1912. But his story — and place in baseball history — is the prime example of being in the right place at the right time (or the wrong place at the wrong time).
Travers played in only one game, but one was enough to show that God had plans for him that didn’t involve the big leagues.
The story begins, as most stories of Tigers lore do, with Ty Cobb.
The Tigers were in New York on May 15 to play the Highlanders (the precursor to the Yankees). Cobb was playing in the outfield when he was verbally abused by a New York fan who was using profanity and racial slurs to describe Cobb’s play.
Cobb — never known for keeping his cool — stormed into the stands and unleashed a volley of punches on the fan. Tigers players rushed to the scene of the chaos, yelling at Cobb to lay off the man, who was missing one hand and three fingers on his other hand after suffering an industrial accident.
Cobb didn’t care and continued the barrage.
Ban Johnson, president of the American League, happened to be at the game, checking on the family-friendly excitement of what was turning into America’s pastime.
Having one of the league’s star players beat up a disabled spectator didn’t jibe well with Johnson’s vision for baseball, so Cobb was suspended indefinitely.
The Tigers felt Cobb’s punishment was unfair, so the players voted to strike until Cobb was reinstated for the club’s next game in three days against the two-time defending World Series champion Philadelphia Athletics.
Detroit Tigers legend Ty Cobb is pictured in 1911. Not one to keep his cool, Cobb launched himself into the stands to attack a fan who insulted him in 1912, resulting in a league suspension and sparking his teammates to strike in protest. Credit: Public domain
Johnson called the Tigers’ bluff, informing then Tigers owner Frank Navin the team would face a $5,000 fine for every game Detroit forfeited.
Navin needed to field a team, and quick, so he and Tigers manager Hughie Jennings collaborated with Athletics owner/manager Connie Mack to field a team of players to take the field.
This was well before the age of expansive minor league rosters — or commercial airlines, for that matter — so it wasn’t as though the Tigers could call up the farm team in Toledo and get them to Philadelphia in time to play the A’s. Instead, scouting was done the old-fashioned way, spreading word throughout town, asking who wanted to play baseball.
And this is where Aloysius Joseph “Allan” Travers, the student manager on the St. Joseph’s College baseball team, comes into the story.
Jennings worked with a friend of his, Joe Nolan, a sportswriter for The Philadelphia Bulletin,to field a team. Nolan knew Travers, a junior at St. Joseph’s who lived in Philadelphia, from the time the A’s fielded a second-stringer team to play St. Joseph’s College.
Nolan asked Travers to find 10-12 amateur players in the area who could suit up for the Tigers in case the Tiger players followed through on their strike threats. The idea was that the amateurs would never actually take the field; rather, it was just a tactic to get Jennings’ “real” players on the field.
Father Allan Travers, SJ, was a priest who taught at St. Joseph’s College (now St. Joseph’s University) in Philadelphia. But in 1913, while a student at St. Joseph, he was the improbable pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, where he secured a bizarre spot in baseball history. Credit: Public domain
Travers rounded up eight players who were free that day and enticed by the $25 Navin offered to each player.
Jennings had his team of strike-breakers, as requested by Navin.
When the umpire called “play ball,” the Tiger regulars took the field, but when the umpire spotted Cobb and told him to take a seat, the rest of the team walked out and took off their uniforms.
The strike-breakers would have to play after all. They were ushered into the locker room and donned the Tigers’ gray uniforms (this was in the days before names were on the back of uniforms). Two bench coaches joined the group to offer the squad some big league experience.
The question was, who would pitch?
There were no takers at first, so Navin offered an extra $25. Travers volunteered; $50 was good money for a college kid in 1912. There was one small problem — Travers had never played organized ball.
He was the assistant manager on the college baseball team, tasked with keeping stats and writing game summaries.
But there he was, the college student with plans to join the seminary after graduation, pitching before 20,000 fans at Shibe Park against the two-time defending World Series champions. A modern David versus Goliath, a plucky underdog story.
This time Goliath won.
Travers did as well as one would expect the assistant manager of a college baseball team to do against professionals. He pitched a complete game, surrendering 24 runs on 26 hits (both American League records), walking seven and striking out one. He got an MLB strikeout — they can’t take that away from him.
But the 15.75 ERA leaves a mark. He also batted 0-for-3 at the plate.
Travers’ time in the major leagues was abrupt. After the 24-2 shellacking the A’s put on the strikebreaking Tigers, Cobb persuaded his teammates to end the strike before the team’s upcoming series against the Washington Senators.
Travers’ calling was the priesthood, not pitching.
After graduating from St. Joseph’s College in 1913, he joined the Society of Jesus, studying at St. Andrew on the Hudson in New York and Woodstock College in Maryland. He was ordained a priest in 1926, making him the only priest ever to play in a Major League game.
His ministry took him to teaching positions at St. Francis Xavier High School in Manhattan and St. Joseph’s Prep and St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia.
Father Travers didn’t speak about his baseball exploits, but he did give an interview about his bizarre start for the Tigers.
“About noon when Nolan told me about the strike of Detroit, he told me the club would be fined and might lose its franchise if 12 players didn’t show up,” Travers told sportswriter Red Smith. “He told me to round up as many fellows as I could. We never thought we’d play a game.”
The replacement Detroit Tigers are pictured in the dugout against the Philadelphia A’s on May 18, 1912. Photo credit: Public domain
The priest said Jennings told him to avoid throwing fastballs to “avoid getting killed out there,” but the A’s didn’t hold back, even resorting to bunting when they found out the third baseman had never played baseball before.
“I fed ‘em nothing but slow stuff after Frank Baker almost hit one out of the park on me, which fortunately went foul,” Travers said. “I was doing fine until they started bunting. The guy playing third base had never played baseball before. I just didn’t get any support. I threw a beautiful slow ball and the A’s were just hitting easy flies. Trouble was, no one could catch them.”
Curious enough, the only “fame” Travers got from his start was his picture in the newspaper with the word “Strikebreaker” printed above. There was a trolley strike in Philadelphia that month, and Travers’ mother was worried for her son’s safety because people might suspect he was a scab.
Travers didn’t like talking about his baseball “career” with his students, and his story is not well known, save for a few baseball history blogs.
He did sign a ball from that fateful day that wound up in the collection of Ada, Michigan, resident Steve Nagengast, who claims to have the largest collection of Tigers autographs. Nagengast was featured in the Detroit News, and the anecdote about Travers piqued Detroit Catholic’s interest.
Travers didn’t have the greatest impact on Tigers history. But the $5,000-per-game fine the Tigers faced for each game the club forfeited would have been devastating, especially in an era when professional teams folded and changed towns all the time.
So who knows.
Father Travers’ one-game career might have just saved the Tigers.
Washington D.C., Nov 27, 2018 / 05:21 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A Chinese scientist’s claim to have created a gene-edited baby has been met with an outpouring of condemnation, with critics voicing alarm at what they described as a disregard for biomedical ethics.
Approximately 120 scientists released a letter condemning the research, Reuters reported. The Chinese-language letter called the gene manipulation a “Pandora’s box,” warning, “The biomedical ethics review for this so-called research exists in name only. Conducting direct human experiments can only be described as crazy.”
Earlier this week, Chinese researcher He Jiankui claimed that he had altered embryos for seven couples, resulting in one twin pregnancy so far. There is no independent confirmation of this claim, the Associated Press noted.
He says his goal was to edit embryos to give them the ability to resist HIV infection, by disabling the CCR5 gene, which allows HIV to enter a cell.
Shenzhen’s Southern University of Science and Technology of China, where He is an associate professor, said in a statement that the researcher had not made the school aware of the gene editing he was doing.
According to Business Insider, the university said He had been on unpaid leave since this February and was not expected to return until January 2021. It is not clear why he had been placed on unpaid leave.
The university said that the use of genetic editing technology in human embryo research constitutes a serious violation of academic ethics. It announced that it would be conducting an investigation into He’s work.
He says he used a technology known as CRISPR to edit sections of the human genome, performing the procedure on embryonic humans. The technology, which selectively “snips” and trims areas of the genome and replaces it with strands of desired DNA, has previously been used on adult humans and other species. CRISPR technology has only recently been used to treat deadly diseases in adults, and limited experiments have been performed on animals.
Catholic bioethics experts have warned that while gene editing may sometimes be morally acceptable, it poses numerous ethical challenges that must be addressed in order to ensure its legitimacy.
Chinese officials and scientific organizations also issued harsh condemnations of the reported gene editing.
The Chinese Society for Stem Cell Research and China’s Genetics Society released a joint statement saying He’s experimentation posed “tremendous safety risks for the research subjects” and violated “the consensus reached by the international science community,” Reuters reported.
Xinhua’s official news agency also rejected the experimentation, stressing that ethical standards must not be ignored in scientific research.
The Shenzhen government medical ethics committee is reportedly investigating the matter.
Bravo to Arkansas for protecting children. Until one is an ADULT, NO physical surgeries should be permitted to transgender. Children have no idea of what they are saying 90% of the time. They want to be astronauts and unicorns and it is beyond irresponsible to sexually mutilate them when they cant possibly know what they want. The fact that there is a roughly 50% suicide rate among trans people should tell you something. Kindly put, they are either confused or ill. Society should NOT be encouraging surgical “solutions ” to this issue for children. Arkansas, thanks for showing us common sense in action. Lets hope it spreads to the rest of the country.
Bravo to Arkansas for protecting children. Until one is an ADULT, NO physical surgeries should be permitted to transgender. Children have no idea of what they are saying 90% of the time. They want to be astronauts and unicorns and it is beyond irresponsible to sexually mutilate them when they cant possibly know what they want. The fact that there is a roughly 50% suicide rate among trans people should tell you something. Kindly put, they are either confused or ill. Society should NOT be encouraging surgical “solutions ” to this issue for children. Arkansas, thanks for showing us common sense in action. Lets hope it spreads to the rest of the country.