Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/the-law/page/17/)
Even as we take steps to protect children of different faiths, we should also be wary of imposing a single single standard of medicine on their parents. Religious freedom isn’t absolute, and never should be. But it’s still the best idea America has come up with so far.
Freedom arrived in the late 1980s, and its symbol was that singular image of “Tank Man” engaging in a brazen and courageous act of self-expression. Once unleashed, though, freedom created a ripple effect (more like a wave) that surged through the culture and threatened to wash away hundreds of years of social mores — the piety of Confucianism, the humiliation of Western imperialism, the righteousness of communism under Mao, all variants of a single unifying characteristic: shame.
It’s remarkable how President Obama, pressed heavily by activism and public commentary on the crisis of Guantanamo, can make a major speech offering the most minor and insufficient of actions toward remediation of one of the worst human rights outrages of the past decade. Thankfully the passionate outcry missing from Obama’s presentation was provided by Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the activist group Code Pink. For a decade now, activists of Code Pink have made every effort to be a loud, theatrically in-your-face voice for the conscience of the United States. For a decade now, their cri de coeur for the world has resounded in Congress, in front of the White House, nationwide and abroad.
However, whether such companies can save governments money is not the central issue. What’s at issue here is the corrupt, immoral dynamic that fuels such contracts: the concept of treating inmates as commodities that must be grown for profit.
President Obama has voiced his support for LGBT rights to be included in any comprehensive immigration bill. But Leahy’s amendment has been sharply criticized by members of the Gang of Eight, including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida. While some national organizations support the amendment publicly, he said, behind closed doors there’s pushback against it.
Put simply: Israel chooses to leave security to its professionals. And not to a gun-wielding citizenry. Which is why after a lone-gunman shooting, such as the one which happened yesterday, Israel’s response was not an NRA style call to “Arm the victims!” Rather, it was a call to get more guns off the streets. It’s a call America would do well to heed.
The cynic observer can’t help but wonder: If self immolation no longer works as an agent for change, then is it still worth the price?
At its most profound the act stands as the highest form of human compassion, a confirmation of life by giving up one’s own. At its most incoherent self-immolation becomes more expressive of the frustration of the powerless. The individual, enamored by death, possessed by anger, elicits neither horror nor pity but cynicism. After all, to burn with passion is very much different than to be consumed by rage.
The lesson that the history of MADD teaches is that it may take years to achieve the legislative goals that Moms Demand Action wants. It may take years to change the culture. But the good news is that a change for the better can and will come.
Part of what fascinates me about the civil rights struggles of the 1960s is that, through these upheavals, America changed. Compare that to today’s inertness: we can barely budge on gun control and the minimum wage (for examples), despite overwhelming support among Americans for change on those fronts. Yes, there are real questions about how much progress towards racial justice we’ve made. What’s clear is that a little over a year after the May 1963 “children’s crusade” in Birmingham, Alabama, we had the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And five months after the Selma to Montgomery march came the Voting Rights Act of ’65.
The Obama Administration claims they are on a hunger strike because they want better treatment or better food. But that is not true. They are on a hunger strike because they want justice. They want freedom. They want to go home to their families. And this time they will not quit. Prisoners want to go home to their families. They have been crying out for justice for 11 years. To hold someone for 11 years without trial, without charge, is a crime.