Ohio voters approve creation of controversial livestock care standards board News
Ohio voters approve creation of controversial livestock care standards board

[JURIST] Ohio voters on Tuesday approved [results] a ballot measure [text] to create the Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board, commonly referred to as Issue 2. The purpose of the board will be to maintain food safety, encourage locally grown and raised food, and protect Ohio farms and families. The measure will amend the Ohio Constitution and prevent groups from putting livestock care issues on future ballots through a citizen-initiated voter referendum. Ohio Department of Agriculture [official website] Director Robert Boggs [official profile] said [op-ed, PDF]:

Issue 2 is critical to Ohio for several reasons. It will mean ensuring the continued viability and success of our livestock and poultry farmers. It will mean that we can maintain the excellent care of livestock and poultry in our state. It will mean that we can protect Ohio family farms. It will mean that we can sustain the availability of safe, locally-grown food. This initiative is not a question of policy; it is a process for improvement.

Issue 2 was controversial because animal rights groups alleged the amendment was proposed by Ohio's farming industry to prevent certain animal care reforms proposed by the Humane Society of the United States [advocacy website] (HSUS) that some view as a threat to the agriculture industry. President and CEO of HSUS Wayne Pacelle [official profile] said [statement]:

By packaging Issue 2 as pro-animal welfare and pro-food safety, the architects of the ballot measure went a long way to assure its passage. We have not viewed Issue 2 as a poisonous package, but rather an empty one. The Ohio Farm Bureau and other agribusiness lobby groups cooked it up in an effort to block real reform. Now that the Issue 2 campaign is over, we can get on with such real reform – a measure to phase out the extreme confinement of animals in veal crates, gestation crates, and battery cages, where they cannot even turn around and stretch their limbs.

According to HSUS, seven states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, and Oregon — have banned the use of inhumane confinement devices for farm animals, largely through voter-initiated referenda. HSUS said the approval of Issue 2 ensures "that Ohio lags behind other states and public opinion when it comes to the treatment of farm animals and movement away from the worst factory farming practices."

THIS DAY @ LAW

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.

Former communist countries admitted for EU accession

On April 16, 2003, the 2003 Treaty of Accession was signed by 10 countries, admitting them for European Union (EU) ascension. After Malta and Cyprus, eight of the ten new EU nations (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) were former communist countries. The signing of the treaty in Athens marked the first time that former members of the Soviet Bloc joined the EU.

Learn more about EU expansion from the organization's website.

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