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The COVID-19 pandemic has been extraordinarily hard on people everywhere, creating personal, social, and economic hardships and leaving an almost unimaginable death toll. It has been particularly devastating in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and other kinds of congregate housing. Thus it is not surprising that inmates in American prisons and jails would be among the hardest hit segments of the population.

The COVID Prison Project reports that People who live in correctional settings are at a high risk of exposure to COVID-19. In fact, a majority of the largest, single-site outbreaks since the beginning of the pandemic have been in jails and prisons. As of January 18, 2022, there were 494,528 cases among people in prison and 2,748 inmates have died from the virus. In addition, 159,984 prison staff have contracted COVID-19, and 259 have died from it.

The severity of COVID-19 outbreaks does not follow the usual blue state/red state breakdown. California and Texas each lead the nation in COVID-19 cases among the incarcerated. Together they have had more than 100,000 cases in their prisons.

The everyday uncertainty and terror of trying to live with and through a pandemic is compounded many times over behind bars. Overcrowded conditions make social distancing impossible; health care in prisons is notoriously inadequate even when COVID-19 is not raging. Prison medical personnel invest little time and energy in keeping up with the latest in COVID-19 protections.

All of these things may be the predictable consequences of life behind bars during a pandemic.

But this weeks news that officials in Arkansass Washington County Detention Center have been administering to COVID-positive patients drugs that are not approved to fight the disease, and not getting consent from the inmates for those drugs, is shocking. CBS News reported that medical staff gave them the anti-parasite drug ivermectin last year, without their consent, to treatCOVID-19, while telling them the pills were vitamins.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit on behalf of four of those inmates who say that had they been informed that the drugs they were given included the dewormer ivermectin and informed of its nature and potential side-effects, they would have refused to take it.

The news about the lawsuit and the possible violations of the prisoners rights serves as a reminder of the profound vulnerability of all inmates to the skill, judgment, and concern of medical personnel who are assigned to care for them.

That COVID-19 culture wars and unreliable information are now influencing medical decisions in prisons means that legislatures and courts must be especially vigilant in ensuring that prison doctors recognize and respect the right of inmates to informed consent to any medical treatment provided to them.

Ivermectin was developed forty years ago as a drug for livestock and quickly became a big moneymaker for pharmaceutical giant Merck. Ivermectin has been recognized to have limited human uses. It has been approved only to treat diseases like river blindness, intestinal problems caused by roundworms, head lice, and rosacea.

A National Public Radio report on its use as a treatment for COVID-19 notes that in June 2020, a group of Australian researchers published a papershowing that large quantities of ivermectin could stop the coronavirus from replicating in cell cultures. But, as the NPR report notes, The amount of ivermectin a person would need to take to achieve that effect isup to 100 timesthe dose approved for humans.

As a result, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved its use as a COVID-19 treatment and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned against using the drug for that purpose.

The FDA went as far as tweeting out a reminderlast year on August 21: You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, yall. Stop it.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the FDA and CDC position, ivermectin has come to play an important role in COVID-19 culture wars. Anti-vaxxers and mask skeptics have embraced it and claimed it is a miracle cure for COVID-19.

Acolytes of former President Trump like Texas Congressman Louis Gomert and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson have ivermectin as an important part of the effort to defeat COVID-19. Fox News personalities, including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, have also promoted the drug.

Perhaps this is why the Washington County Detention Centers Dr. Robert Karas started doling out ivermectin to inmates with COVID-19. Karas has been a vocal advocate for using the drug during the pandemic. On January 15 he boasted about its use at the prison.

Inmates arent dumb, he said, and I suspect in the future other inmates around the country will be suing their facilities requesting the same treatment were using at WCDCincluding the Ivermectin.

It is of course one thing for an inmate to request a particular treatment, but quite another for Dr. Karas or any other doctor to give it to them without their consent.

Courts have long recognized that physicians and other medical personnel must obtain informed consent before treating patients.

As a New York appellate court put it in a 1914 decision, Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body, and a surgeon who performs an operation without his patients consent, commits an assault, for which he is liable in damages.

And what applies beyond prison walls also applies on the inside as well.

The National Commission on Correctional Healthcare notes that Any procedure requiring writtenconsentin the community also requires a signedconsentfrom aninmatein a correctional setting.

And some state correctional departments have codified that right in regulations and policy directives. For example, the Michigan Department of Corrections states that Informed consent shall be obtained when consent is required under prevailing medical community standards before medical care is provided, unless the medical treatment or procedure is authorized by state or federal law or Department policy (e.g., blood sample for mandatory DNA or HIV testing or, body cavity search), including situations set forth in this policy.

The American Medical Association calls for respecting the autonomy and obtaining informed consentfrom the incarcerated patient[A] physician must be able to conclude, in good conscience and to the best of his or her professional judgment, that to the extent possible the patient voluntarily gave his or her informed consent, recognizing that an element of coercion is inevitably present.

The AMA is right to recognize the coercive environment in which inmates live. But recognizing that fact means that medical personnel must make special efforts to be sure that treatment is as voluntary as it can be.

Dr. Karas and his Arkansas colleagues seem to have ignored that obligation in their COVID culture war zeal. In a letter to the Arkansas Medical Board, Karas made the stunning admission that inmates had not been given necessary information about ivermectin. Only after the media got wind of the situation, Karas acknowledged, were steps taken to assuage any concern that any detainees were being misled or coerced into taking the medications.

Writing a decade ago about severe inadequacies in medical care provided in California prisons, former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy rightly observed that the Constitution recognizes that Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons. Using them as guinea pigs in COVID-19 culture wars is surely incompatible with that constitutional command.

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Prisoners Should Not Be Used as Human Guinea Pigs in COVID-19 Cultural Wars - Justia Verdict

Its called the Great Quit and refers to the mass exodus of American workers deciding that their long-standing jobs and careers just werent for them anymore. It has happened in every sector of the economy: manufacturing, construction, aviation, medicine, government, and now it seems, in a big way, teaching.

Teachers throughout our region, ones strongly tied to their calling, are leaving the profession. This isnt just the standard attrition rate or some demographic blip its a record-breaking departure of some of our best teachers.

Some teachers are retiring earlier than planned, while others have left mid-career to pursue new endeavors. And some young teachers are just opting out to take another path. Our local school systems cant hire new teachers at nearly the rate they need. Vacancies for full-time teachers and substitutes are going begging. The situation is desperate. There doesnt seem to be an end in sight.

Already the quality of teaching in our region is suffering. Substitutes and theyre not enough of them either are being hired full-time to cover classes that no longer have regular teachers. Alas, not all of these subs have the training necessary to teach full-time in the subject theyve been assigned.

At the same time, regular teachers are being asked to teach extra classes. Some, with no breaks in a days schedule, are being assigned up to seven classes. Thats an overwhelming workload. Theyre still being asked to carry out other teacher assignments, such as lunchroom duty, bus duty and whatever extracurricular activities they sponsor. This situation is already unsustainable. Indeed, if the workload and the stress continue unabated, its likely more teachers may reevaluate their careers.

So, just what do we do about it, and what are some of the underlying causes for the great quit among teachers? For years, the commitment on the part of educators was such that even when offered high-paying jobs elsewhere, they stayed. This was particularly true of math and technical instructors. That commitment has begun to fray, and local school systems dont seem to be doing enough about it.

One problem is the now highly politically charged environment of public education. While school board meetings have turned into right versus left debates over critical race theory or this or that book in the library, teachers are often the ones caught in the middle. They just want to teach not get involved in the nations mindless culture wars.

Then there is pay. Some say this doesnt matter that we pay the teachers enough as it is already, and besides, no one became a teacher to get rich but the fact remains, they are leaving and were not able to hire new ones. The counter to that is if you pay people enough, they will be more inclined to stay. Its basic economics.

Last months annualized inflation rate was 6.9%. If that keeps up it will erase most of the benefits of pay increases enacted during the past year. Like it or not, local boards of supervisors and school boards are probably going to have to raise pay to stem the exodus.

In the meantime, everything possible should be done to improve morale in the workforce. Lack of communication has been a frequent complaint. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when it came to policy changes, schedule changes and just an open back-and-forth between school administrators and instructional staff, it seemed that sometimes the teachers were the last ones to get the word.

There is also the concern that no one is listening to teachers concerns about working conditions. Remote instruction was grueling and because many teachers must teach both in person and in-class at the same time, it still is. Another frequent complaint is lack of support from school administrators in dealing with discipline problems or difficult parents.

In the end its about morale, which comes down to paying attention to working conditions, pay, support and communication. Some of the teacher exodus is a function of a societal trend. However, a little more focus on retaining teachers could go a long way to at least mitigating what is already an educational crisis.

David Kerr is an adjunct professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and has worked on Capitol Hill and for various federal agencies for many years.

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Kerr: How to solve the 'great quit' in education - Inside NoVA

Published: 1/21/2022 7:01:31 AM

Modified: 1/21/2022 7:00:25 AM

Critical Race Theory is an academic concept that began as a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s. As an educator of over 28 years, I first heard of CRT the way most people did: a couple of years ago, via the news.

Recently, CRT has become a hot-button issue in the ongoing culture wars. And because of this, it has been wrongly conflated with many other concepts, such as culturally-relevant teaching. For example, if I ask myself, have I thought about all of my students, their various cultures, races, ethnicities, backgrounds, experiences, and made a space for them in my classroom so that they can be successful? then I am not practicing Critical Race Theory, Im just being a good teacher.

Not only is CRT not being taught in NH primary and secondary schools, CRT also does not say what some people think it says. It does not, for example, teach that all white people are racist or that all people of color are oppressed. Its central tenets are that race is a social construct, and that racism is not only a product of our inherent biases but also something that may be found in our legal system.

An example of this would be the redlining of neighborhoods in the 1930s, which resulted in banks refusing to issue loans to Black citizens. This example is a historic fact, not an opinion.

As a music educator, Im about to begin teaching my second semester drumming class. Over the course of this class, students will learn many styles of drumming from around the globe. My first unit will be an African drumming unit.

Over the course of this unit, my students will learn how to play a variety of African percussion instruments, learn how African rhythms have greatly influenced the popular music they listen to today, and yes, we will delve a bit into the geography of West Africa and answer questions like, why do all these West African nations speak various European languages, as well as their own dialects?

Mentioning the diaspora and its effects on the arc of American music is not Critical Race Theory. And that is my right as an educator in the Live Free or Die state, a state that has only had that motto for the last 77 years. Prior to that, it was Scenic New Hampshire.

(Dan Williams lives in Concord.)

Excerpt from:
My Turn: Conversation on concepts - Concord Monitor

As anti-vaccine activists from across the country prepare to gather on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, they are hoping their rally will mark a once-fringe movements arrival as a lasting force in American society.

That hope, some public health experts fear, is justified.

Almost two years into the coronavirus pandemic, the movement to challenge vaccines' safety - and reject vaccine mandates - has never been stronger. An ideology whose most notable adherents were once religious fundamentalists and minor celebrities is now firmly entrenched among tens of millions of Americans.

Baseless fears of vaccines have been a driving force among the approximately 20 percent of U.S. adults who have refused some of the most effective medicines in human history: the mRNA vaccines developed against the coronavirus by Pfizer, with German partner BioNTech, and Moderna. The nation that produced Jonas Salk has exported anti-vaccine propaganda around the globe, wreaking havoc on public health campaigns in places such as Germany and Kenya.

That propaganda has also found its way into many reaches of American life. It has invaded people's offices and shaped the daily decisions of school principals. It has riven families and boosted political campaigns. What was once an overwhelming public consensus on vaccine safety is now a new front in the nation's culture wars. It is no accident that some in the anti-vaccine movement are describing Sunday's rally as their first equivalent of the March for Life, the annual antiabortion rally taking place in Washington on Friday.

"Our worst worries have been manifested," said Joe Smyser, chief executive of the Public Good Projects, a nonprofit group that tracks and seeks to combat vaccine misinformation. "These fringe ideas are no longer fringe ideas."

Despite signs from the earliest days of the pandemic that the anti-vaccine movement was advancing its cause by preying on the uncertainty and social division that accompanied the virus, the U.S. public health establishment never mounted a true counteroffensive, Smyser said - a view shared by other public health experts and epidemiologists.

"I think we were really naive," he said. "This movement was allowed to get stronger and stronger with almost no pushback."

The 153 most influential anti-vaccine social media accounts and groups have accumulated 2.9 million net new followers since January 2020, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an advocacy organization focused on fighting vaccine misinformation. Imran Ahmed, the center's chief executive, said those gains are especially remarkable in light of social media platforms' renewed efforts to crack down on vaccine misinformation.

Vaccine skeptics notched another victory just last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court blocked President Biden's vaccination requirement for large employers. (A smaller mandate for workers at health-care facilities that get federal funding was left intact.)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who will speak at Sunday's march, said the widening distrust of vaccines is an organic outgrowth of people's firsthand experiences with negative side effects from the coronavirus vaccines. He pointed to the large number of reports of reactions to those vaccines now on file in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 750,000 such reports have been filed from the United States and its territories. But claims of bad reactions in VAERS have not been independently verified, and anyone can make them. Controlled studies of the coronavirus vaccines offer a more accurate picture of how they work, and those studies have repeatedly shown the medicines cause no serious side effects for the overwhelming majority of people who receive them.

Kennedy said the growing number of infections among the vaccinated from the omicron variant of the coronavirus has also eroded public confidence in a key selling point for vaccine mandates - that they stop the spread of the virus to vulnerable populations.

Although the vaccines are markedly less effective at stopping infection by the new variant, early evidence suggests they still confer protection against hospitalization or death.

"I think there's a lot more skepticism," Kennedy said. "You have a product that simply does not work as advertised."

What remains to be seen is whether the movement's success in sowing fear of the coronavirus vaccines can be translated to a broader public rejection of other forms of inoculation, chiefly the immunization of children against diseases such as measles and diphtheria. Casting doubt on such vaccines and erasing school mandates requiring them were the anti-vaccine movement's long-standing goals before the emergence of the coronavirus.

Tara C. Smith, a professor of epidemiology at the Kent State University College of Public Health, said it is far too early for the movement to declare victory on those fronts. Arguments that have proved effective against the mRNA vaccines, like questioning their relative novelty and the possibility of long-term side effects, could be less convincing when it comes to established vaccines that many American adults received decades ago without being harmed.

"What will we see when things are somewhat back to normal, and covid doesn't dominate everything every day? Is this going to bleed over into other things, like childhood vaccinations? I really don't know," Smith said. "And that's the fear."

Several pediatricians interviewed by The Washington Post said they are not yet seeing an increase in the number of parents refusing vaccines for their children, but there are worrisome signs.

Deborah Greenhouse, a pediatrician in Columbia, S.C., said she has fielded eyebrow-raising questions from parents. Some, repeating a conspiracy theory that has circulated since early in the pandemic, ask whether the coronavirus vaccine injections will implant microchips in their children's bodies. Others accuse her and other pediatricians of promoting the vaccines for personal profit. One father worried that a coronavirus test swab would give his child cancer.

"This has been the most frustrating time period in my entire career," said Greenhouse, who has been a pediatrician for nearly 30 years.

Greenhouse said she has not seen an uptick of similar concerns about other vaccines among her patients, but worries it could just be a matter of time.

"It's truly frightening for the future," she said.

The scientific case for the full range of vaccines recommended by public health authorities in the United States remains as solid as ever. Research has shown those vaccines - which have all but eliminated diseases that once sickened, debilitated or killed millions every year - to be safe for the vast majority of those who receive them. The 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that claimed a link between a common childhood vaccine and autism, launching the modern anti-vaccination movement, was exposed as fraudulent.

The mRNA coronavirus vaccines have proved to be some of the best ever added to physicians' arsenal. As of October, according to the most recent estimates from the CDC, those who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines and a booster were 40 times less likely to die of the virus than the unvaccinated. There is not yet sufficient evidence to judge the vaccines' exact level of protection against severe outcomes from the omicron variant, but early research in the United Kingdom and South Africa has been promising.

Nevertheless, national surveys show about 1 in 5 U.S. adults remain unvaccinated. Among children ages 5 to 11, who became eligible for the shots in November, fewer than 20 percent are vaccinated.

A November poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found majorities of unvaccinated adults saying they will "definitely not" get a vaccine and are not confident in the vaccines' safety.

Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to reject the vaccines - another ominous sign for public health officials, who worry that resistance to inoculation could become a permanent trapping of political identity.

Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, said the enthusiasm ahead of Sunday's rally is a dispiriting reminder of how little has been done to combat the anti-vaccine movement's rise over the past two years.

Topol said he has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, urged federal health officials to do more to counter rampant falsehoods about vaccines.

"Misinformation spreads far quicker and more broadly than truth," Topol said. "The administration does nothing to call them out, and that has left them to continue to grow like a metastasis. They just get bigger and more toxic, and they hoodwink and bamboozle more people who might have been neutral."

Sunday's rally in D.C. could be a case study in the amplification of anti-vaccine views by media sources that threaten to drown out more conventional, evidence-based voices. Organizer Matt Tune said the march's website saw a "huge spike" in traffic after Robert Malone, a physician who has become a prominent skeptic of the coronavirus vaccines, mentioned it on Joe Rogan's popular podcast. (Malone's appearance provoked a condemnatory letter to Spotify, which hosts the podcast, from hundreds of doctors and public health experts.)

Organizers estimate that 20,000 people will attend the rally, marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, according to a permit issued by the National Park Service. D.C. police will be fully activated from Friday, during the annual March for Life, through Sunday, the anti-vaccine mandate rally, spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said.

The march is billed as a protest of vaccine mandates, such as those recently enacted in D.C. and other cities, rather than the medicines themselves. But similar rhetoric - emphasizing individual autonomy rather than untenable scientific ideas - has long characterized the broader anti-vaccine movement, and the march's speakers include movement veterans such as Kennedy and Del Bigtree, founder of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network.

Other speakers include Malone and former CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, who in a November appearance on Fox News compared White House chief medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Public employee associations that have formed to protest their employers' vaccine mandates, such as Feds for Medical Freedom and D.C. Firefighters Bodily Autonomy Affirmation Group, are also participating.

"The goal is to show a unified front of bringing people together - vaccinated, unvaccinated, Democrats, Republicans, all together in solidarity," said Tune, an unvaccinated 48-year-old from Chicago. He said he wants the event "to help change the current narrative . . . which is basically saying that we're a bunch of weirdos and freaks who don't care about humanity. And that's not true at all."

About 12,000 people have joined a Facebook group for the rally, with many saying they will stay overnight and eat in Northern Virginia to avoid the District's vaccine mandate. Some commenters on the group's page have compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust and urged people not to get tested for the virus. One commenter wrote: "This is an intentional permanent tyrannical dictatorship if they are not stopped by FORCE!!!!!!"

Facebook did not respond to questions about whether the page violates the platform's policies on covid-19 and vaccine misinformation, which prohibit "content calling to action, advocating, or promoting that others not get the COVID-19 vaccine."

- - -

The Washington Posts Dan Keating and Scott Clement contributed to this report.

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Anti-vaccine activists, reveling in their pandemic successes, will rally in D.C. against mandates - The Philadelphia Inquirer

When Anna von Hausswolff, an acclaimed Swedish songwriter and organist, first heard that a conservative Roman Catholic website was calling her a satanist and demanding a concert boycott, she and her team laughed it off.

We thought it was hilarious, von Hausswolff, 35, recalled in a recent interview. The whole day we were laughing,

The site, Riposte Catholique, was firing its readers up ahead of a concert of von Hausswolffs epic pipe organ music at a church in Nantes, a city in the west of France. Some of her fans were goths, the site said, and her songs were more a black Mass than music for a church. A music blogger had called her the high priestess of satanic harmonies, the site noted, and conservative Roman Catholic groups noticed that, on the track Pills, she sings, I made love with the devil.

We said, This is such a great P.R. campaign, Von Hausswolff said. I mean, the High Priestess of satanic art. Wow!

But as soon as she arrived at the church in Nantes, the joking stopped. Outside were about 30 young men, most wearing black jackets and hoodies, protesting the show, Von Hausswolff said. The concerts promoter told her that some men had just broken into the venue, trying to find her.

Soon, there were 100 people blocking the churchs entrance. Von Hausswolff sat in the richly painted church, staring up at the organ that shed hoped to play, listening to protesters chanting and banging on the doors outside as her fans shouted back at them.

There was a primal part of me that told me I was not safe, she said. I wanted to get out. She canceled the show.

In recent years, disagreements between conservatives and liberals over issues like gay marriage and abortion have become increasingly heated in parts of Europe. Von Hausswolffs experience is an example of another tension point in the continents culture wars: In some countries, a small minority of Roman Catholics regularly protests art it considers blasphemous.

Cline Braud, an academic who studies the sociology of catholicism in France, said in a telephone interview that extremists had staged protests against artworks and plays in the country for the past 20 years. It comes from a well organized minority whore very good at getting attention in the media, Braud said.

One of their regular targets is Hellfest, a rock music festival held every year close to Nantes. In 2015, a group of protesters broke into the site and set fire to some of the festivals stage sets. Since then, protesters have regularly doused the festival sites fields with holy water. Hellfests communications manager, Eric Perrin, said in an email that staff members recently found 50 gold pendants depicting the Virgin Mary scattered around the site.

Since playing a real pipe organ in concert almost always means playing in church, von Hausswolffs tour problems didnt end when she left Nantes even though some French bishops had issued statements of support. In Paris, she was scheduled to play the grand organ at St.-Eustache, a church widely considered a jewel of the French Renaissance, but after its priest was deluged with complaints, she instead performed a secret show at a Protestant church near the Arc de Triomphe.

Later, in Brussels, about 100 people protested outside her show at a Dominican church, taking a more peaceful approach than their French counterparts and moving away from its doors when asked by police. At Nijmegen, the Netherlands, just two protesters appeared, standing quietly outside while holding signs with the message Satan is not welcome.

Von Hausswolff is not someone you would expect to cause such a stir. She grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden, and said her childhood was very creative. (Her father, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, is a composer and performance artist.)

As a teenager, she sang in a church choir, and dreamed of becoming a musician, but ended up training as an architect. Her music career only took off in 2009 when, age 23, she released a demo of piano songs called Singing from the Grave that quickly found a fan base in Sweden thanks to her soaring vocals. She was frequently compared to the English pop star Kate Bush.

After an organ builder told her she could make beautiful pipe organ music, she gave it a go, she recalled, trying out the organ in Gothenburgs vast Annedal Church. When I reached the lowest note, I couldnt believe my ears, Von Hausswolff said. I felt it through my whole body.

Shes since explored what the instrument can do across five albums, sometimes pairing it with a rock band and at other times performing solo. Her most recent, released this month, is a live album recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

Hans Davidsson, an organist who helps von Hausswolff probe the instruments capabilities, said that she explores the organ with open ears, eyes and senses, and had developed her own musical language. Her music was inspiring to many classical organists like him, he added. Its fortunate for us that she chose the organ, he said.

In the interview, von Hausswolff, who was wearing Christmas leggings covered in cartoon reindeer in Santa hats, denied she was a satanist. Von Hausswolff declined to say what her 2009 track Pills in which she sings of satanic lovemaking was about, since songs should be left open to interpretation, she said. But, she added, If youre asking me if I literally had sex with the devil, the answer is, No.

As much as she was happy to joke about the accusations, the incidents last month had left a mark. She still felt scared by the French and Belgian protests, she said, and was also worried that churches might think twice about letting her play their organs, so as to avoid complaints.

Im not a good Christian and never will be, said von Hausswolff, adding that she saw herself as agnostic. But Im there to present my pipe organ art, so that it hopefully can invoke deeper thought in people.

She was already planning more church tours, she said. As long as she was welcome, she added, I will go there, and I will play my music.

Originally posted here:
A High Priestess of Satanic Art? This Organist Can Only Laugh. - The New York Times