Category Archives: Social Justice

Carolina Quakers (A Few, at Least) Speak On HB2

As a Quaker Christian community, we at Spring Friends Meeting remember Jesus’ first public words. In the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4), he said he was sent to preach good news to the poor, deliverance to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and liberty to those who are oppressed.

We also recall his declaration that those who welcomed the stranger were in fact welcoming him (Matthew 25). At Spring Friends Meeting, we feel called to this same mission, and seek to do our small best, as way opens. As part of that effort, we now express our deep distress at the recent passage by the North Carolina legislature of what is called HB2.

This legislation is much more extensive in scope and insidious in intent than the widely publicized restroom provision.

• House Bill 2 specifically omits sexual orientation from a status that can be protected from discrimination.
• It specifically bans municipalities and other local governments from enacting locally-approved legislation such as a higher minimum wage, anti-discrimination for persons who are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender, safe-havens for undocumented immigrants or any measure which the State deems contradictory to its arbitrary will.
• The law also removes the ability for persons to use state courts for pursuing redress for discrimination.

We acknowledge the sincere fear that has induced many to support the law solely on the basis of its bathroom provision, and likely without knowledge of the bill’s other clauses. We believe this fear has been used to promote a broad range of real injustices through this law.

We see this law in its entirety as meant to increase oppression, reject and stigmatize those, who some see as strangers, and increase hardship for the poor and rejected.

We are even more dismayed and saddened that this action is supported by some in the name of Christianity, and what they call “religious liberty.”

Looking Back at a Unique Woman Author — “Go Set a Watchman”: My Review

Surrounded by her former peers, the painfully uncomfortable Jean Louise is peppered with questions about her life in New York City, which to many of them might as well be on Mars: how can she stand it? All those people, including “Negroes,” on the loose. The noise, the constant hubbub, the rudeness and ugly accents. Not to mention the fact that she’s (still, at 26!) single there, and working.

Jean Louise speaks up tepidly for her urban existence, but thinks to herself more candidly about its pluses and minuses.

In truth, she often resents the patronizing attitudes of many New Yorkers toward other, benighted regions, especially the South. She bridles at how so many of them, with the smug assurance of big-city liberals that hasn’t changed much since Lee wrote in the 1950s, feel they know all the answers for problems there, even if their nostrums are no more than bien-pensant slogans, based on little or no knowledge or experience.

Yet she puts up with this annoyance because New York offers her a compensation she has to have, and can’t hope to find in her hometown: anonymity, and the space created by the indifference of the mass, in which to continue seeking her identity and destiny.
If that sounds pompous, the clumsiness of expression is mine, not Lee’s; but that’s what it was. Later, after the shattering confrontations with Atticus and ex-beau Henry, there seems no way forward for Jean Louise but to climb on the train and head back up north, alone. This reader was relieved that she had somewhere to go for refuge, someplace where she could at least breathe, and be herself, even as a stranger in a sea of strangers.

In Manhattan she could bask in being ignored, free of family and community expectations, no longer carry the stigma as the renegade runaway daughter who abandoned a “good family,” and get on with the long work of becoming a writer.