Depending on what study and what definitional criteria one wants to use the number of LGTB citizens is between 4% and 20%. It does not matter at all to me what this number is as I have had gay and lesbian family members, close (best) friends and acquaintances all my life. They were never “my lesbian friend” or “my gay cousin” they were just the people in my life and that they were family or a good friend has always been a hell of a lot more important than who they liked to frolic under the sheets with.

Still the fact of their sexuality was always an issue. Even if I didn’t care, the rest of the world seemed to and this made them have to lead their lives differently for fear of being attacked or just legally discriminated against. It still breaks my heart on a daily basis to see good people who just want to live their lives like every other citizen having to hide or downplay what and who they are because of the irrational prejudice against them.

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When I was 11 or 12 I went on a long road trip with my Dad. It was on this trip that I learned about the law. Not the laws or the practice or the procedure of court cases, but the reason behind having laws. The law is an attempt at balance. Just that, an attempt at finding balance between the harm done, by people, by businesses or by governments and those who are harmed.

The attempt part is important because finding balance between multiple competing claims of harm is difficult at best and Sisyphean at worst. When looking at crimes against a person or property, the remedy is often clearest. If someone takes your car, you want it back and you want to be relatively sure they will not do it again.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

When one person assaults another balance is a little harder to find. We don’t find that having the assailant beat up to be an appropriate form of balance. This leads us to rely on confinement and monetary punishment for putting the scales closer to even. This kind of penalty is an approximation of balance if not directly balancing.

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A new report documenting the torture of more than two-dozen former prisoners held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2008 comes several months after a bipartisan Congressional committee linked the murder of two detainees held at the same prison facility to policies enacted by George W. Bush and ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The April report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee on the treatment of prisoners held in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded that a combination of various torture techniques coupled with a series of brutal beatings administered by military interrogators caused the deaths of the two prisoners in December 2002.

One of the detainees, identified in the report as Dilawar, was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side."

According to the Armed Services Committee report, another detainee identified as Habibullah was killed two days after Rumsfeld authorized the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques against prisoners in Afghanistan. Dilawar was murdered six days after Habibullah was killed. The report labeled their deaths homicides.

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