The League of Iowa
Human & Civil Rights Agencies

Crimes distort reality of schizophrenia

By Tony Leys, Des Moines Register

March 7, 2010

Cedar Rapids, Ia. - A newspaper lying in Steve Miller's kitchen blared the latest front-page news about a person with schizophrenia. The big black headline announced: "Becker guilty." The paper showed a picture of a stone-faced Mark Becker, the ...

A Guthrie Center teacher this week received a five-day unpaid suspension for insubordination for not allowing a student to build a Wiccan altar in his shop class - discipline he said he still doesn't agree with. Dale Halferty, who has taught industrial arts at Guthrie Center High School for three years, said he was asked to meet with the school district superintendent and high school principal when he returns to work Tuesday. Halferty said Wednesday he still doesn't understand why school offi...

DES MOINES – Governor Chet Culver announced today that affordable housing initiatives in Council Bluffs, Des Moines and Dubuque will receive a total of more than $2.8 million to preserve 117 affordable housing units. The awards are made through the Affordable Housing Program, a part of the Culver/Judge Administration’s I-JOBS initiative. The Iowa Finance Authority administers the program.  “These awards will help provide safe and decent living conditions for some of Iow...

The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote: "The world is ugly and the people are sad." Stevens was an insurance executive as well as a poet and he spent his commercial life poring over actuarial tables. He saw how fragile luck really is and how our dreams of beauty and health are shortened by accidents, genetics, war and much else. A flap arose not long ago when the Fox cartoon series "Family Guy" featured a character with Down syndrome. The character Ellen was presented as the episodic love intere...

Fairfield, Ia. - It's almost easy to lose Julie Harvey, Fairfield's new police chief, in the big chair behind her desk. Easy, that is, until she breaks into a wide grin and laughs. Harvey, who spent six years in the Army and 16 years with the Fairfield Police Department before becoming chief, is not the kind of officer who feels the need to meet every visitor with a stone face.

News of the ending of refugee resettlement by both the Iowa Bureau of Refugee Services and the nonprofit Lutheran Services in Iowa is like a death. It is a death that affects opportunities for refugees who will no longer have Iowa as a destination of hope. It is a death for refugees here, who have experienced hope fulfilled. It is a death for dedicated staff who have felt both fatigue and joy as they worked with refugees to find a home here.

In any public conversation, that which defines us is the manner in which we debate. Do we do so with integrity and civility, or not? The Jan. 24 guest essay in the Register by Bryan English argued that Iowans have a right to vote to allow or to ban same-sex marriage. However, English's article distorted important facts. Regardless of the religious right's attempts to rewrite history, marriage has always been an organic, ever-changing institution. Even Biblical literalists must acknowledge tha...

Iowa City, Ia. - A University of Iowa faculty member is alleging that racial and ethnic bias played a part in a poor internal review of graduate programs in his department. W. South Coblin, a professor of Chinese, sent a widely circulated e-mail this week to faculty members and others because "administrative bodies" at the university were perpetuating shameful messages in "semi-secret documents" and venues, which should be concern for the state as a whole, he wrote.

An internal review obtained by The Associated Press is calling for changes to Iowa's system of training new workers after finding the program is the most expensive in the nation. The review by the Department of Economic Development found that Iowa spent $62 million on the Industrial New Jobs Training Program in 2007. That's $10 million more than was spent by second-ranked California. "Iowa paid on average $13,000 for each new worker's training costs, national average was $525 per worker," the...