Powerful Christian leaders in Liberia, a West African nation hard-hit by Ebola, are blaming gays and lesbians for the epidemic from the pulpit. The Liberian Council of Churches announced that the outbreak was a punishment for “immoral acts” including gay sex; and the Archbishop of the Catholic Church of Liberia said that homosexuality was one of the major transgressions for which God was punishing Liberia with Ebola.

Their denunciations have marked LGBT people for violent reprisals.

“Since church ministers declared Ebola was a plague sent by God to punish sodomy in Liberia, the violence toward gays has escalated. They’re even asking for the death penalty. We’re living in fear,” [LGBT activist Leroy] Ponpon told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone from Monrovia. [Reuters]

Ponpon and his allies want the government to step forward and defend the human rights of LGBT people against the bigotry of these religious leaders, the neglect of the police, and threats they face in their communities. 

[Photo credit: Liberian Flag, Nicholas Raymond, Creative Commons.]

A pregnant Queens woman has been rehired at the Bronx potato-packing plant that fired her in August for declining to work overtime on the advice of her doctor.

Rachel L. Swarns of the New York Times published Angelica Valencia’s story on Oct 19 and the next day she got her job back. Score one for crusading journalism! 

[Photo credit: Glenn, Creative Commons.]

The Best of the Week’s News

• Amazon.com is the marquee monopoly of our Gilded Age, and it must be stopped, says Franklin Foer.

• Ebola is spreading in West Africa because of weak–but fixable–health systems, not because it’s an unstoppable super-bug, says humanitarian and infectious disease expert Paul Farmer.

• Charles Gilbert was a self-described “angry white man” who joined a militia to hunt “illegals,” but what he saw on the border made him question his mission.

• Airport workers paid $9 an hour to face “baptisms” in raw sewage went on strike to demand better protective equipment and higher pay.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Steve Day, a 35-year veteran of the underground coal mines of West Virginia, had the worst case of black lung anyone had ever seen. But the doctor handpicked by the coal company to assess Steve’s black lung disability claim refused to acknowledge the obvious. He claimed that the huge scarred-out areas of Steve’s lungs were caused by a tuberculosis, or a fungal infection, or anything but the coal dust that Steve had been breathing every day for over three decades. So, Steve got no compensation for his crippling shortness of breath. 

Steve had to die before doctors could cut open his lungs and prove once and for all that coal dust choked him to death.

Chris Hamby, who started his Black Lung coverage at the Center for Public Integrity, continues his coverage as a staffer for Buzzfeed. The same doctor who misdagnosed Steve has been a consultant for countless other miners who have been denied black lung disability. Perhaps this story will help unseat the doctor as an expert in future cases. 

[Photo credit: gentlepurespace, Creative Commons. Image from a children’s book about coal mining.]