Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/the-law/page/11/)
Young people in Los Angeles held a fast during the fourth week of July to call attention to the welfare of Central American children crossing into the United States. They are asking the Obama administration to take executive action to treat the children as refugees.
A luxury condominium complex in New York City’s Upper West Side plans to contain a door for use by wealthy residents only, and a separate door for lower-income tenants. What we are witnessing is a postmodern version of the high-walled city center of Medieval times protecting the nobility from peasants and marauding bands, and the 20th-century gated communities meant to keep out thieves and bandits. These hermetically-sealed containers, nonetheless, eventually imprison us all.
If the polls are correct and the Senate goes Republican this November, the House of Representatives will make impeaching the president its first order of business. And it will pass the Republican House overwhelmingly. On what grounds, one might ask. The reason the President will be impeached is because he is African-American.
I believe now is the time — actually, it has been the time for decades now — to consider new forms of leadership, not only in the Middle East, but around the world. We need to get away from the leaders who demonize the other, who use fear and threat and engagement of war as tools for their own maintenance of power.
“God’s way up is down” – Which is why God says, “Go to hell.” Follow the One who was numbered with the transgressors to sit among the condemned, the written-off, the outcast. And while you are there, listen. Because Jesus didn’t go to hell to stay there.
In Murrieta, California protesters have taken to the streets spewing hateful words and bigotry in protest of the arrival of migrants from Central America. We sometimes speak as if the mere passage of time has elevated us above the bigotry of previous generations. It hasn’t.
New In the wake of the foul Supreme Court decision Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, we may need to start worrying about how thoroughly religion dictates human rights and which religion(s) shares disproportionate power.
When patriarchal social and family structures converge with patriarchal religious systems, which reinforce strictly defined gender hierarchies of male domination, women and girl’s oppression and oppression of those who transgress sexuality- and gender-based boundaries became inevitable.
It has been said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Well, that journey need not seem impossible. There can be unity and peace, and even happiness in the world, in spite of all the diversity. But, to achieve it—we each must find a way (through meditation, prayer, daily attitude, selfless service, or a combination of these things) to be inwardly joyful and also loving and kind in our interpersonal relationships.
Mass incarceration is a domestic crisis that touches every community in America. Because it does, the struggle against this racial justice must begin in local communities.