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Thursday, December 8, 2016

AG: Berks man appeared with minor in live sex video

1:57 AM Bilal Muazin No comments

Pennsylvania investigators allege that a Berks County man was caught on a live-sex website masturbating with a 7-year-old child sitting on his lap.

The state attorney generalâ€™s office filed sex assault charges against Ryan S. Peifer in connection with the alleged July 2015 incident. District Judge Wayne Maura arraigned the 30-year-old Tuesday night, setting bail at $50,000.

In July 2015, a resident in Arlington, Virginia, reported to the Arlington County Police Department that he had seen a man engaging in a sex act with who appeared to be a minor. The incident was seen on a live-streaming website that allows people to watch others perform live sex acts, according to court records.

The witness, who described the act to investigators, provided authorities with screen shots and the screen name of â€œTetraHC.â€ Investigators in Virginia identified the man in the video as Peifer and learned that he had access to a child. The incident was referred to the Berks County district attorneyâ€™s office, which in turn referred the case to the AGâ€™s child predator section.

Itâ€™s unclear why Peifer was arraigned in Lehigh County, but court records list an Allentown address as to where the crime was alleged to have occurred.

Investigators learned that the website strictly regulates its users. Authorities said Peifer validated his age and identity by taking a photo of himself with his driverâ€™s license on his forehead, according to records.

The investigating agent reviewed the still shots provided by the witness, verifying that it appears Peifer masturbated with the child sitting on his lap. Court records indicate Peifer and the child remained fully clothed.

Investigators arranged to interview Peifer at his motherâ€™s Reading home on Tuesday afternoon. The agent said he immediately recognized Peifer from the photos.

He initially agreed to be interviewed, acknowledging that the website account under the name â€œTetraHCâ€ was his, according to records. But Peifer asked to end the interview because he wanted to have an attorney present.

Authorities detained Peifer after he ended the interview and charged him with unlawful contact with a minor, statutory sexual assault, criminal use of a communication device, corruption of minors and disseminating images of a child sex act. He failed to post bail and was sent to Lehigh County Jail to await a preliminary hearing tentatively scheduled for Dec. 13.

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Saturday, December 10, 2016

Why Arkansas same-sex parents won't be listed on a child's birth certificate

5:00 PM Bilal Muazin No comments

Arkansas same-sex parents will not be listed on their childrenâ€™s birth certificates, the stateâ€™s highest court ruled on Thursday. The decision has raised questions about equal protection, and the state may still change its approach.

The ruling by a four-member majority of the Arkansas Supreme Court determined that only biological parents can be listed on a childâ€™s birth certificate. It overturns last yearâ€™s decision by a lower court that married same-sex couples could automatically have both spouses listed as parents.Â

For the state Supreme Court, itâ€™s simply a question of biology. At the same time, marriage allows different-sex couples to be listed as parents, and the US Supreme Courtâ€™s ruling on gay marriage may mean that now applies to same-sex couples too. And the debate is complicated by state laws that require parentage to be tracked.

â€œIt is clear that including both married spousesâ€™ names â€" regardless of whether they are same-sex or opposite sex â€" on a childâ€™s birth certificate is exactly the kind of benefit of marriage that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled should be extended to same-sex couples,â€ Kate Oakley, senior legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a press release.

That was the approach taken by Little Rock Circuit Judge Tim Fox in December 2015. Three same-sex couples brought a case arguing that the legalization of same-sex marriage gave same-sex parents the same rights to be identified as parents on their childrenâ€™s birth certificates that different-sex parents already enjoyed.Â

For parents, being named on a childâ€™s birth certificate is important for all kinds of reasons, as LGBT news source The Advocate described. Without this legitimization, parents may struggle to put children on their health insurance or even pick them up from school.

When they won their suit, the three couples were granted the right to list the names of both partners on the birth certificates. But the state appealed the decision on the grounds that it was causing legal and logistical problems. Several days after the initial ruling, the Arkansas Supreme Court stayed the decision, preventing it from being extended to other couples.

One possible reason for the issues: birth certificates are woven into legislation and Health Board protocol in the state of Arkansas. Identifying biological parents is an â€œimportant governmental objective,â€ wrote Arkansas Supreme Court Associate Justice Josephine Linker Hart in the majority opinion, explaining that knowing who parents are allows the state to track public health trends and give children genetic information that they might need for medical reasons later on.

But different-sex Arkansas parents arenâ€™t required to prove that they are the biological parents of the child, perhaps limiting the value of state tracking â€" and raising questions about unequal treatment of same-sex parents.

"There's no requirement that DNA be given or that there be a biological relationship to a child to get on a birth certificate for a father, for the non-birth parent," said Cheryl Maples, who sued on behalf of the three couples, the Associated Press reported.

â€œThe inclusion of a parent's name on a child's birth certificate is a benefit associated with and flowing from marriage," wrote Arkansas Associate Justice Paul Danielson in the dissenting opinion.

The decision may have provided an impetus for the state to make some changes to the law.

â€œIt is time to heed the callâ€ to make changes heralded by decisions like Obergefell v. Hodges, which established the right to same-sex marriage, said Arkansas Chief Justice Howard Brill, according to NBC.

And though some state officials pronounced the state â€œgratifiedâ€ that the court had chosen to uphold state law, they suggested that lawmakers might be willing to consider changes. Arkansas has so far been reluctant to amend its laws.

â€œIf any changes are appropriate, it is the job of legislators to do so, not the circuit court,â€ said Judd Deere, a spokesman for Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, AP reported.

As it stands, the ruling would require same-sex parents to obtain a court order if they want both spouses to be listed on a childâ€™s birth certificate. Ms. Maples told AP that she has not yet decided whether to appeal to the US Supreme Court.

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Bad Sex in Fiction Awards ceremony celebrates 24th year

5:00 PM Bilal Muazin No comments

â€œItâ€™s terribly British, isnâ€™t it,â€ said the man next to me at last nightâ€™s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards ceremony at the (appropriately named) In and Out Club in St Jamesâ€™s. He was referring, of course, to the yearly bash â€" now in its 24th year â€" in which the Literary Review magazine nominates half a dozen passages from contemporary fiction seen to represent sex at its most cringeworthy, reads them out to champagne-infused guffaws, and then awards a prize to the author of the worst.

It is a terribly British event, but it also provides a snarky satisfaction that transcends nationality. Because for anyone with the sneaking suspicion that the sexual act is better done or seen than artistically described â€" that its complex idiosyncrasy is one of the few things that lie outside the remit of the otherwise resourceful English language â€" the Bad Sex Awards hits its mark.

Yet as the entrants this year make clear, writing about sex with flagrant abominableness is still cheerily far from going out of fashion. Hearty examples were a passage from Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellisâ€™s The Butcherâ€™s Hook:

When his hand goes to my breasts, my feet are envious. I slide my hands down his back, all along his spine, rutted with bone like mud ridges in a dry field, to the audacious swell below.

â€œAudacious swellâ€? Quite.

Then there was the American Gayle Formanâ€™s entry, from Leave Me:

They were in that room, Jason had slammed the door and devoured her with his mouth, his hands, which were everywhere. As if he were ravenous. And she remembered standing in front of him, her dress a puddle on the floor, and how sheâ€™d started to shake, her knees knocking together, like she was a virgin, like this was the first time.

Erri de Luca.
Claudio Onorati/EPA

But the gong went to the Italian poet and translator Erri De Luca for The Day Before Happiness (de Luca understandably wasnâ€™t present). â€œMy prick was a plank stuck to her stomach,â€ the Neapolitan was justly rebuked for writing:

With a swerve of her hips, she turned me over and I was on top of her â€¦ I was her plaything, which she moved around. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.

Not everyone felt this deserved the award â€" as an American woman nearby remarked to me, this could clearly be read as satire, plain and simple. Perhaps, but satire doesnâ€™t necessarily get you home dry, especially when itâ€™s ambiguous. After all, the book, a coming of age story, is not particularly comic in the way that, for instance, the early sex-mad tomes of Philip Roth and Martin Amis were.

In fact, the awards were conceived not to discourage writing about sex, but to discourage writing about sex badly. The wording of the original mission statement in 1993 by Auberon Waugh, then editor of the Literary Review, is revealing: the bash was to â€œdraw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fictionâ€.

It would be helpful to have some guidance on what non-redundant, good sex writing looks like, since itâ€™s not entirely clear whether it can exist in a literary form at all. After all, the most sexually charged novels of the last 100 or so years use the rule of thumb that the act is unmentionable, boring, or best only suggested.

The novels of Dickens, Eliot and Trollope are full of sexual yearning, and their emotional and erotic pull are none the worse for the veiled references to kissing and love. Even in 20th century novels with subject matter devoted to romantic entanglements, the sexual act is not necessarily spelled out or even mentioned â€" Iris Murdoch doesnâ€™t go further than â€œmaking loveâ€ as an account of the nocturnal activities of her highly sexually charged couple Dora and Paul in The Bell (1958).

And while Margaret Drabbleâ€™s super-sexy characters Clara and Gabriel get pretty steamy in Jerusalem the Golden, nothing beyond the fact is spelled out. Itâ€™s a blessed relief which does nothing to diminish the profoundly saucy atmosphere of the book.

The awards are also a humorous reminder not just of the imaginative power but also of the literary value of discipline and restraint in matters of bonking. A recent book about prime minster Herbert Asquithâ€™s passionate attachment to Venetia Stanley tells of his thousands of letters to her, all passionately headed with variants of â€œmy own darlingâ€ and â€œdarlingestâ€.

Asquithâ€™s desperate fixation with Stanley pours out from every page, but had he indulged in anything more sexually explicit than the desire to â€œgo for a little drive, or will you come to Downing St & have a talkâ€, it would hardly have helped, and probably only hindered, the accumulated intensity of his fixation. Voluble lusters: take note.

Zoe Strimpel, PhD Candidate, University of Sussex

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