This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birth day of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great … Continue reading Frederick Douglass on the Fourth of July
So let’s consider a few of those cases that are now in deeper peril.
At the top of my non-lawyer’s list is Obergefell v. Hodges, the 5-4 decision legalizing same sex marriage. Kennedy wrote that decision, which came down three years ago this week. Now the door is open for a 5-4 reversal.
This year it was wedding cakes. Next time: the whole shebang. And as for trans rights?
Debates over “civility” are nothing new for Quakers.
The last time I was thrown out of a retail establishment, it was a screen printing shop in Fayetteville NC, near Fort Bragg. I came in on a warm day in 2007, wanting some tee shirts made for a conference being planned by Quaker House. The shirts were to be black, and the wording something like this:
I handed over a CD with the image on it, and the guy at the desk put down his cigarette & slid it into a computer. I couldn’t see the screen when the image came up; but his widened eyes told me when it appeared.
He stood up as the CD slid back out of the slot. “Hey, Sarge,” he called, and carried it into a back room.
“Sarge” was out in a couple moments; likely retired Army. He didn’t throw the CD at me, but dropped it on the counter as he made clear in a loud voice that anybody at Guantanamo or what we were just learning to call “black sites” was a goddam terrorist who deserved whatever they got, and that he was not about to print such treason as this on any of his shirts.
I didn’t quibble. But I called the next shop on my list before I went in, to see if they too had any objection. The shirts got done. And I didn’t think til later about how the issue of who was being uncivil here could be fitted into the “It’s Complicated” category:
A good friend works the late shift in a 24-hour diner near here. During the slow hours, the diner is a stopping place for homeless people. For the last couple of nights, one particular homeless man has come in. Last night he handed over a grimy five dollar bill and ordered some eggs & bacon.
Halfway through eating it he stood and asked for a take-out box. When handed it, he walked around the nearly-empty diner, scooped into it all the scraps and leftovers from plates that hadn’t been cleared, then left.
Such scavenging is strictly against the house rules; but my friend studiously ignored it. She’s become particularly permissive since she got acquainted with two young women camping out behind the dumpster in the back parking lot.
She met them during the recent dry weeks. Then the rains came for several days, often pelting and blowing, and the young women are gone. We’re in the third week of another dry spell, and newcomers are here, crouched behind a different dumpster by the gas station up the block. They sweat through the mid-nineties days and scrounge for food that’s enroute to becoming trash.
Which brings me to Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the UN, who just threw a fit because that body’s poverty investigator (aka special rapporteur) after making an extensive study trip cross the nation, dared to call for examining poverty in America.
Wouldn’t somebody in that batsh*t crazy crowd around the White House have realized –ahead of time– that this plan would blow up on them? That it would produce thousands of heart-rending images of kids under threat? That it could even upset some evangelicals?
Evidently not. In fact, their anti-immigrant inside guru, Stephen Miller bragged to the Atlantic just the other day that this plan was a guaranteed political winner.
Maybe he knows something I don’t know. After all, Miller’s in the White (supremacy) House, and I’m just a geezer in — well, I AM in North Carolina.