Category Archives: Justice and peace

More on shoes

Update on yesterday’s post:

Today the BBC reports: “An Iraqi official was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the journalist was being interrogated to determine whether anybody paid him to throw his shoes at President Bush.” Given the stated policies of the current U.S. administration, the word “interrogated” could mean what the rest of the world would call torture.

The BBC also reports that the man’s name is Muntadar al-Zaidi, and they give an English translation of what he shouted at Bush: “This is a farewell kiss, you dog… This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq.”

Special take-home quiz: Who is on the moral high ground here, George Bush or Muntadar al-Zaidi, and why? Ten bonus points for citing verses from both the Koran and the New Testament.

Update: Leona’s selling T-shirts (see comments).

Another take on Harvey Milk

Blogger Tallturtle was living in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco when Harvey Milk was assassinated thirty years ago, and he’s written a short memoir of his impressions of the incident, from his perspective as an ordinary San Franciscan of that day.

Tallturtle has a couple of observations that I hadn’t heard before:– First, that Dan White, the guy who murdered Milk and George Moscone, was fairly clueless when it came to politics, and possibly even too honest in a peculiar sense of the word:

This next part is merely my speculation. White was a political amateur. He didn’t understand how politics was played in San Francisco. He didn’t realize that as a conservative Supervisor, he was valuable to the commercial and financial elites of the city. He didn’t know there were many perfectly legal ways that rich people could reward their friends. Heck, he may not have known that these people considered him his friend….

And second, that San Franscisco of that day was not a coherent city, but rather a collection of many smaller communities that didn’t really communicate with one another. This last point leads to the moral of the story for Tallturtle — but rather than spoil the moral for you here, you should just go and read the post yourself.

“Str8 against H8”

Leona, Amy, and I went up to Boston’s City Hall today so we could join in the “Join the Impact” demonstration against California’s Proposition 8. There were dark clouds, and it looked like rain. As we walked from the Park Street subway station over to city hall, we wondered aloud about how many people might be there. “They’ve got 3,000 on their Facebook page who’ve signed up to be there today,” said Leona. “Yeah, but with the rain I’ll bet it’s half that,” I said, “although there will be people there who forget to sign up, so what, maybe 2,000?” Leona still thought it would be more.

There were a lot of people at City Hall Plaza, more than I expected; and more streaming in every few minutes. Early on, one of the speakers said there were 5,000 people there — but I suspect there were more than that at the peak of attendance. We wound up standing up at the top of the amphitheatre, pretty far from the stage.

Miraculously, the rain held off. Down on the stage, a woman shouted, “Who’s here from Boston?” and all the Bostonians shouted back. She listed off various regions of Massachusetts, and the people who were from those regions shouted back at her. But of course she didn’t mention the south coast (people in Boston don’t even know that we exist), so when she was done and there was a little lull, I shouted, “We’re from New Bedford!” and since I have a really big voice a bunch of people laughed, including the woman on the stage.

About two minutes later, someone touches my arm, and I turn around, and there’s Donald, an old friend. “I thought that loudmouth who shouted had to be you,” he said, grinning. I haven’t seen Donald for years, so we chatted a little bit. He pointed out some of the home-made signs people were holding up: “Don’t Forget Us, Obama!” and “Mormon Families Support Gay Families” and “Str8 against H8” and some others. We both noticed the sign that read, “Hey California, WTF!?”

They had a lot of speakers. Some of them were pretty good. State representative Byron Rushing quoted Frederick Douglass to great effect. Niki Tsongas, congresswoman representing Lawrence and Lowell, was short and to the point. Congressman Ed Markey got the crowd all revved up. The speakers went on for over two hours — maybe a couple too many speakers, and a little bit of live music would have been nice.

But it felt like time well spent. There were events like ours in every state. 5,000 of us turned out in Boston to demonstrate our dismay that California would take away rights that used to be granted under their state constitution. Maybe 6,000 people turned out in Seattle, more than 10,000 turned out in San Diego (those are the only cities the news outlets are reporting right now). With only six days’ notice, thousands of people showed up in front of City Halls nationwide — let’s hope that makes the politicians sit up and take notice.

Rally

About sixty workers and their supporters turned out this evening to attend the meeting of the New Bedford city council. The city councillors were planning to vote on a resolution urging the Eagle manufacturing plant to keep jobs in New Bedford, for as the New Bedford Standard-Times reported yesterday, “The labor union organizing a union drive at Eagle Industries says it has changed tactics and is now trying to keep the South End military apparel plant from potentially leaving New Bedford and taking with it 330 jobs.” Eagle is the company that took over for Michael Bianco, which was the company that hired illegal immigrants to work in sweatshop conditions, and that was shut down by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March, 2007, in a raid that made national headlines.

Anyway, there we all were tonight, standing around in the chilly dampness in front of City Hall. Zach Lutz, the UNITE HERE! union organizer said a few words, Cynthia Rodrigues from the Central Labor Council named all the unions that were represented — UNITE HERE, Carpenters, SEIU Local 1199, AFT, UWUA, etc. — and I gave the invocation. But the important speakers, the ones we came to hear, were some of the people who work at Eagle Industries. One woman gave specifics of which parts of the factory have been shut down. Another woman told how she had been fired because she was considered disruptive, because she was helping organize the workers. A couple of them spoke in Spanish, while one of their co-workers translated into English. Everyone cheered them after they spoke, and you could see them stand up a little straighter at that — although I suspect those momentary cheers will be small comfort tomorrow when they’re back at work.

The mayor of New Bedford came out of City Hall, and told the crowd that he has contacted both U.S. senators from our state, and our U.S. representative, and they are all committed to making sure all 330 jobs at the Eagle plant stay in the city; then he left quickly for another event. Suddenly someone noticed that one of the supervisors from Eagle, a woman named Dana, was sitting in a parked car watching the rally, keeping an eye on which workers were in attendance. Someone from one of the other local unions (I think he was from the Carpenter’s Union) started chanting, Shame on Dana! and everyone took up the chant for a moment. A guy beside me muttered disgustedly, That’s where our tax dollars go — what he meant was: The only work that the plant gets is from the Department of Defense and they’re using tax dollars from government defense contracts to pay their managers to spy on their workers.

By then it was time to troop upstairs to the Council Chambers. Those who could squeezed in on the main floor, and the rest of us milled around outside the door or slipped upstairs to the balcony. I had to leave early for an event at the church — when I left, everyone was sitting there waiting for the Council meeting to begin, waiting for the city council to resolve to keep jobs in New Bedford, hoping that our city wouldn’t lose another 330 jobs just because the absentee owners of Eagle Industries decide they can get cheaper, more compliant workers at their plant in Puerto Rico.

Public support of same sex marriage

Join the Impact is organizing a nationwide protest against Proposition 8, the silly ballot question that banned same-sex marriage in California, in reaction to the legalization of marriage in that state. Join the Impact has organized gatherings in cities in every state this Saturday, November 15th, to express our opposition to Prop 8 — check their Web site for locations — including one in Boston at 1:30 p.m.

I’ll be going to the gathering in Boston. The organizers are working on permits for City Hall/Government Plaza, but it’s not finalized yet The organizers have confirmed that City Hall will be the location. Check their blog, or their Facebook event page for latest news.

As the organizers put it: “This is not just a California issue! This is an issue of equality for all Americans!” Even though same sex marriage is legal here in Massachusetts, it would be very good if we could get a large turnout of people across the country to show support for same-sex marriage.

If you can’t go yourself, let all your progressive friends know about this event! (And thanks to Erin for letting me know.)

The ineffectiveness of racism as a political strategy

So at Folk Choir rehearsal tonight, I heard about an incident that happened here in southeastern Massachusetts, which happened roughly like this:– white woman with two black children in tow walks into a store, a couple of young white men ask her if she’s going to vote for Obama, she says yes, they say they hope Obama doesn’t get into the White House because then it would be the “black house,” the N-word was thrown around, and that was the end of that. Well, that was the end of that except for going home and taking a long hot shower to wash the slime off, and then calling some friends to tell them about it, one of whom was a member of our choir.

Oh yes indeedy, there are people like that here in liberal, blue-state Massachusetts. But you know what? The effectiveness of racism as a political strategy is finally waning. Obama is going to win this state and all twelve of its electoral college votes no matter what those two young white men said. And I think most of us would agree that throwing the N-word at a couple of little kids in order to support your own political candidate is only going to make your candidate look bad. So we have made progress, since back when I was a kid, thirty or forty years ago (all right, forty years ago), veiled racial slurs were still an effective political weapon. No matter who wins tomorrow (and at the moment the polls are leaning towards giving Obama the electoral college vote), this is the year we discovered that racism, no matter how veiled, just doesn’t work very well as a political strategy any more.

On the other hand, it looks like calling someone a Muslim has become a pretty effective political weapon. No wonder I hate politics.

Hooray for Connecticut.

From the BBC Web site today, a story about “US state legalises gay marriage“:

“Connecticut’s Supreme Court has overturned a ban on same-sex marriages, making it the third US state to legalise such unions….

“The governor of Connecticut, Jodi Rell, a Republican, said she did not agree with the ruling but would uphold it…. The governor said she believed any attempt to contest the decision, either legislatively or by amending the state constitution, would fail.”

Hooray for Connecticut.

Phillip Pullman on banning books, and religion

What with all the allegations that Sarah Palin wants to ban books (not true, by the way, according to Librarian.net), it’s worth hearing what Phillip Pullman has to say about book banning in a recent opinion piece in the U.K. Guardian:

“…They never learn. The inevitable result of trying to ban something — book, film, play, pop song, whatever — is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone. Why don’t the censors realise this?”

Pullman’s book The Golden Compass a.k.a. Northern Lights was one of the top five books in the American Library Association’s most-challenged books of 2007 — and his experience has been that when people want to ban his books, his book sales go up.

Interestingly, Pullman points out that the American Library Association reports that people challenged or banned his books for religious reasons. Pullman goes on to say this about religion in general:

“Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed…. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.”

I think Pullman goes too far in the direction of calling for religious quietism — after all, quietist religion too often gets co-opted by authoritarian regimes which then use it to keep the masses in line. I’d put it this way:– religion should promote intellectual freedom in part by staying in a critical, adversarial relationship with civil government and civil authority. For example, from my religious point of view that adversarial relationship might well include actively promoting books that politicians might prefer went away. You know, actively promoting books like the Bible which actively challenges U.S. government policies in Iraq, because the Bible tells us to be peacemakers, which means we should not be at war in Iraq. Stuff like that.

Thanks to.

Same sex marriage news

Yesterday, the Marriage Equality Coalition of Massachusetts reported:

“By a vote of 118 to 35, Massachusetts House passed legislation this afternoon repealing the 1913 law, which prevents out-of-state same-sex couples from marrying here if they could not marry in their home state. The legislation was passed by the Senate earlier this month and is expected to be signed by Governor Patrick in short order…. Once the bill is signed, we’ll be in touch with more information about what this means for same-sex couples in other states — including when the law goes into effect.”

Ultimately, this might mean that any same sex couple who wished could get legally married here in Massachusetts. Of course, it would remain an open question whether other states or the federal government would recognize all legal rights that should be accorded to such marriages, and we should probably expect the resultant litigation to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

But when the new law does go into effect, I hereby offer to officiate at weddings for any out-of-state same-sex couple for free.