Daily Archives: June 9, 2021

Lets be clear: freedom rallies protesting against COVID-19 restrictions dont challenge laws. In fact, these rallies attempts to make provocative statements, shock and change people which in reality is spreading lies and conspiracies often fail.

The spaces these rally attendees go to protest are contagious, but it isnt just the transmission of COVID-19 we should fear.

These rallies spread and transmit insidious lies and conspiracies. Festering and incubating denial and deceit, rally attendees then spew misinformation out into communities that are doing their best to follow government public health orders.

If this imagery is alarming, it should be: denial and deception can be harmful weapons with lethal consequences. Heres why neither logic or law is on the side of freedom rallies.

A recent large gathering in Saskatoon, planned to protest COVID-19 measures, included a childrens festival promising entertainment and games. In an attempt to promote the freedom rally, children were used as pawns to further an agenda that spews conspiracies, falsehoods and denies death and suffering caused by the pandemic.

For a group of people that believes wearing a mask, staying socially distant and getting a vaccine are losses of liberty, you would think rally attendees would harbour concern for the loss of liberties of those not attending rallies or that this concern would be extended to the rest of their communities they go home to once the rally is over. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

It is quite something that children and minors under the care of adults (the latter consenting to put themselves in harms way by attending these rallies and potentially spreading the virus) are put into situations that are inherently dangerous. These rallies have the potential to become superspreader events, elongating and exacerbating the pandemic as a result.

In short, freedom rallies lead to the spread of the virus, which leads to further lockdowns, which lead to less freedom, and so on. Rally attendees want to blame governments for restricting their rights, but they themselves continue this unfortunate cycle.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is based upon what a reasonable person would or should do under given circumstances. Historically, we see courts try to balance individual rights against the common good of the community for example, in how we have stricter gun laws in Canada than in the United States.

Canadian courts often side with the protection of the community, like rejecting the notion that Canadians have a right to possess firearms. This comes into play as judges weigh the scientific and legal evidence alongside the need for the charter to uphold values like dignity and equality for all citizens.

Individual liberties are respected under the charter. While rally attendees believe they are promoting their charter rights, this is an individualistic understanding of the charter that doesnt align with longstanding Canadian law and social culture.

Empathy is essential here: just because we may not witness the harm done to our communities doesnt mean it is not happening.

As Canadians, we each have an individual responsibility to protect our health and safety, but the charter (and scientific evidence) demonstrates that collective, community responsibility to one anothers health and safety will keep our communities healthy and safe overall.

Not only do we owe ourselves the chance to get vaccinated, but we owe our neighbours, friends and other community members (whether we know them or not) to get vaccinated too. Overwhelming evidence suggests that COVID-19 preventative measures work and complicit ignorance of scientific evidence does not. Rally attendees must face this truth.

The latest freedom rallies held in Saskatchewan were attended by Maxime Bernier, the leader of the Peoples Party of Canada. These rallies have also taken place in Winnipeg, Toronto and other cities across the country.

Politicians, police and community leaders need to condemn these freedom rallies and the lies rallies spread. If they dont, rally attendees and their motivations to deny facts will continue to put people in harms way.

We must continue to question how certain groups of society have become so content in ignoring compelling evidence.

Whether a decline in empirical or media literacy, denial and deceit provides contented solace to lockdown and vaccine naysayers. We cant allow this to continue. Just because you can have a rally doesnt mean you should.

We cant let the actions of the selfish few compromise the hard work and sacrifices of the selfless many. These freedom rallies are unreasonable and will always do more harm than any good proposed.

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COVID-19 freedom rallies actually undermine liberty heres why - The Conversation CA

The Wilkes County commissioners received a proposal for establishing a display of full-scale replicas of the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence at a public site here during their June 1 meeting.

Ron Lewis and David Streeter from Foundation Forward Charters of Freedom explained plans for the display (setting) and requested county government support.

Founded in 2014 by Vance and Mary Jo Patterson of Burke County, Charters of Freedom has dedicated dozens of Charters of Freedom settings across the nation and has more in the works.

According to the June 1 presentation, the Vances were inspired to set up Foundation Forward when they first saw the original U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Streeter said Foundation Forward is an apolitical, areligious, nonprofit educational organization.

Eddie Settle, chairman of the commissioners, told Lewis he was preaching to the choir and asked what was needed from Wilkes County government.

Lewis said that if the commissioners will approve a resolution saying they would like to have a Charters of Freedom setting, he will provide a memo of understanding for them to approve. Settle said he would get the resolution on the agenda for a meeting in August.

Lewis said the cost is about $75,000. According to news articles on the Charters of Freedom settings established elsewhere, each project is covered by donations of materials, labor and money from citizens and no direct tax dollars are used.

Lewis said the location in Wilkes is up to the commissioners, but Foundation Forward will provide input. He said he already had seen a half dozen potential locations, all within a rock throwing distance from the Wilkes County Office Building in Wilkesboro.

The full-scale replicas of the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence are engraved on bronze tablets, placed in decorative reinforced concrete and brick settings and covered with shatterproof glass.

Wilkes County Commissioner Casey Joe Johnson, an elementary school social studies teacher, said he is excited about the information Lewis and Streeter shared. It should be a good way to teach students to respect their country. Johnson said the Wilkes Heritage Museum, which hosts many Wilkes school field trips, seemed like a good location.

Streeter asked Johnson to help arrange for him to meet with Wilkes school principals and the superintendent (Mark Byrd) to help them understand what Foundation Forward Charters of Freedom is about.

A Charters of Freedom display beside the Caldwell County Courthouse in downtown Lenoir was dedicated on July 3, 2019.

According to the City of Lenoir website, this project was led and funded by Foundation Forward Inc. and completed with the help of Caldwell County Public Schools and the City of Lenoir Public Works Department. Students from the masonry programs at Hibriten High School, South Caldwell High School, and West Caldwell High School bricked the setting.

Lewis said a Charters of Freedom setting is being completed now in the 25th North Carolina county and work will start soon on one in Alaska.

Streeter said the settings arent called monuments because theyre not erected to pay homage to a person, event or other things no longer with us. He said the Charters of Freedom arent dead.

These three documents give us many things that we enjoy each day as far as our liberties and freedoms, all the way from the lowest courts that deal with traffic issues all the way up to the Supreme Court, said Streeter.

We may not always agree with everything that comes from the courts, but we all live under those. And thats one of the reasons we live in the great land that we do.

Lewis said Foundation Forward is excited about being in Wilkes County. COVID is calming down now and were raring to go. He said there are people who live in Wilkes who are anxious to see it get started.

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Charter of Freedom setting proposed in Wilkes | News | journalpatriot.com - Wilkes Journal Patriot

Jun 7th 2021

WESTERNERS TEND to regard freedom of speech as a universal good. However, a forthcoming report by Justitia, a Danish think-tank, demonstrates that public support for freedom of expression varies widely among countries, just as legal restraints on speech do. In many countries, particularly authoritarian regimes, people say they want fewer controls. But perhaps surprisingly, in a handful of places poll respondents suggest they want less freedom than they currently have.

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The report is based on a survey conducted in February of 50,000 people in 33 countries. The researchers asked respondents whether they believed that a wide range of controversial statements, such as insulting the national flag or making offensive comments about minority groups or religious beliefs, should be permitted. They combined the average responses to each of these questions into an index of support for free speech. They then compared these scores with an index of freedom of expression compiled by V-Dem, another think-tank, which measures how much liberty people in each country enjoy in practice.

In general, the more freedom respondents in a given country said they wanted, the more that country tended to provide. One inescapable weakness in the reports approach is that people in places with tight restrictions on speech may not feel comfortable telling pollsters how they really feel. However, large shares of respondents in many authoritarian countries, including Egypt, Turkey and Russia, were nonetheless willing to say that they approved of liberties that their governments do not protect. This was particularly true in countries that started to limit freedom of expression only recently, such as Hungary and Venezuela. Perhaps people who once enjoyed freer speech than they do now are more likely to support it than are those who have always lived under stricter rules.

However, just as respondents in many countries said they did not have enough freedom of expression, people in others tended to say they were actually given too much liberty. This pattern was most pronounced in Kenya, Tunisia, and Nigeria. These countries grant rights similar to those found in Japan or Israel, but their citizens tend to disapprove of freedom of speech just as much as people do in Egypt or Turkeythe two countries with the toughest restrictions on expression among the 33 surveyed by Justitia.

Although not enough data is available to explain this phenomenon fully, faith and sectarianism may play a role. In general, respondents in Muslim-majority countries were far less supportive of free speechparticularly when it comes to offensive comments about religionthan those elsewhere. Within the Muslim world, this pattern tends to hold regardless of a countrys form of government: respondents were barely more enthusiastic about freedom of expression in democratic Indonesia than they were in authoritarian Egypt. In both Tunisia and Nigeria, Islamist movements have gained ground over the past decade. They may have shifted public opinion against free speech faster than those countries governments could change laws.

Another possible explanation is sectarian conflict. Kenya and Nigeria have been riven by fighting between ethnic groups at various points during the past two decades, and citizens of those countries may fear that hostile speech presages violence. Kenyas low overall score on support for freedom of expression was driven largely by the 82% of respondents there who said that the government should be able to prevent people from making statements that are offensive to minority groups, which was by far the highest share in the survey. In both rich countries and poor ones, people are often willing to sacrifice civil liberties if they think their safety is at risk.

Read more here:

In some countries, people think they have too much freedom of speech - The Economist

GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Nearly 60 years ago, Rev. Dick Gleason was cursed at, spit on, kicked and hit.

The assault was only an exercise, but one meant to teach him to maintain a nonviolent response, even in the face of what might await him in Jackson, Mississippi.

Gleason was one of more than 328 people who participated in the Freedom Rides of 1961, a diverse group of people who actively challenged the continued racist policies of the South after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional the segregation of interstate bus and rail lines and the terminal waiting rooms serving them.

The Freedom Riders challenged illegal segregation by bussing in to the South and sitting in interracial pairs, having Black people sit up front, disobeying terminal waiting rooms for whites and non-whites and more.

Im often referred to as being a civil rights activist, and I am simply a Christian doing what the scripture tells me to do, what the Lord would have me to do: to love my neighbor as myself, Gleason, now 84, said. In the scriptures it speaks about: learn to do right, seek justice and justify it and defend the oppressed, so that was my motivation.

The Freedom Rides began in May 1961 and were met with violence. Early on, a bus was burned, with the riders nearly burning to death because a mob held the doors closed. Ku Klux Klan members were at times given brief free reign by local police to do whatever they wanted to the anti-segregationist riders.

We talk about the good old lets Make America Great Again, this is the America of 1961; it wasnt the Andy Griffith Show either, Gleason said, pointing to other instances of racial violence.

Gleason says while issues of racial justice are more out in the open and talked about today than 60 years ago, infringement of voting rights for minorities and providing equal opportunity from birth remain a battle.

The 84-year-old fears the country has become too polarized, with people listening only to what they want to believe, paving a way to a possible dictatorship.

At the time of the Freedom Rides, Gleason was living in an impoverished and redlined neighborhood on Chicagos South Side and working with troubled Black youth, many of whom were in rival gangs, to give them hope the government never afforded them.

He did so through seven-days-a-week programming at the local YMCA which included sports, tutoring, a non-traditional Sunday service and more. It was a long way from where he grew up in the small town of Lyons, Ohio.

Hopelessness and despair blurted out from their homes, their schools, the streets, Gleason said. I saw behind their facades of being the coolest and the boldest, a sense of the hopelessness and despair of a frightened little kid, striking out at others and themselves for respect, to be respected, to be somebody and live a good life.

Gleason knew no one in the civil rights movement. But after hearing about the violence, he phoned Martin Luther King Jr.s office to join the Freedom Riders.

Gleason arrived at Kings office in Atlanta with six others on May 31, 1961. The group participated in a nonviolence workshop training them to not respond equally to the violence they were likely to face for violating segregationist policies.

Two days later, on June 2, Gleason and several others boarded a bus at Montgomery, Alabama, bound for Jackson. Gleasons tie was partially cut at the back of the neck, in case someone intended to choke him with it.

At the stop in Selma, Georgia, one of the Freedom Riders, Ralph Fertig, was forcefully taken off the bus by notorious Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark for having asked a white woman to share her adjacent seat with a Black woman.

Fertig was jailed and later allowed to be beaten by inmates for his participation in the Freedom Rides. Fertig said the inmates broke every rib in his body.

Gleason, and the other remaining Freedom Riders whose cover wasnt blown, still had five long hours ahead of them to Jackson. The remainder of the ride was without incident.

Finally, they arrived at the terminal in Jackson.

I was determined to get to the colored waiting room no matter what, and I did, Gleason recounted. I was arrested, interrogated for a number of hours, accused of being a communist. There were a lot of billboards in the South at that time claiming Dr. King was a communist. The movement, we were vilified just like things are happening today.

Gleason spent two days in jail and paid a $200 fine for what authorities called breach of peace.

After five months, the signs were taken down -- the colored only, white only -- signs were taken down, he said of the Freedom Rides. We ended segregation; 328 people.

When his plane landed back in Chicago, policemen were waiting for him. Not to arrest him, as he initially feared, but to protect him.

For his participation, however, his childhood church ostracized him.

Because I went on the Freedom Ride, the church that I depended so much on as a kid disfellowshipped me, Gleason said.

Gleason continued his youth work in Chicago and later marched with King several times after the Freedom Rides, including the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights for Black Americans.

When King was assassinated in 1968, Gleason attended his private funeral and later public funeral procession.

Growing up bullied and with pain in his home, Gleason credits a youth pastor for igniting him in the drive that would guide his lifes journey.

I want you to know that God loves you. He has a plan for your life, and if you dream big enough and work hard enough you can be anything you want to be, Gleason recounted the pastor saying to him. I said, Lord, if you make me strong enough I will serve you the rest of my life.

While issues of racial justice are more out in the open and talked about than 60 years ago, Gleason said there is still work to be done in a country becoming more and more polarized and validated by the echo chambers people choose to put themselves in.

Gleason said one of the biggest ongoing justice issues is that of new voter laws being introduced and enacted in areas of the country with the intention, he said, of limiting minority votes.

Just like segregation, issues of racial justice and equal opportunity arent political to Gleason, theyre spiritual.

All the hundreds of voting restrictions that are trying to be placed is to eliminate Black people and minorities from voting, and Christians are silent, Gleason said. Oh, thats in the political bucket. The pastor has to keep spiritual. Im sorry, Jesus said love your neighbors yourself. The Bible speaks numerous times about justice.

He called on white leaders of faith to stop taking a narrow view of what is a spiritual issue, like abortion, and broaden that into areas deemed political, such as equal opportunity, racial justice and helping a baby survive after theyre born.

Whites need to be allies, Gleason said. We need to stand up and speak up and stand by our Black brothers and sisters. Our pastors need to speak up and stand by the movement for justice and put it out of their pail of socialism and put that whole message of justice in the spiritual bucket, for heavens sake.

Gleason now resides in Covenant Living of the Great Lakes, a retirement community in Grand Rapids, and helps people with Alzheimers disease, as well as creates Christian programming for the communitys TV station.

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Anti-segregationist Freedom Rider from Grand Rapids motivated to defend the oppressed - MLive.com

Mark Kinsler, Correspondent Published 4:21 a.m. ET June 7, 2021

Josef Stalin began to build a Communist empire from the ashes of the second World War and the world-wide economic depression that preceded it. Unfortunately, the US overreacted, beginning 44 long years of a Cold War which benefitted nobody.

This appeared in the June 1, 1949 issue of the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette.(Photo: File photo)

Here, from the June 1, 1949 issue of the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, is one of the earliest propaganda efforts of that war. The aim was to show the weary people of France, Hungary, Indonesia, and Germany the advantages of capitalism over Communism.

The 2021 semi-post-pandemic recession seems to be further separating our haves and have-nots, and many of us would be delighted to enjoy some of these listed luxuries: too many workers lack effective health care, are afraid to unionize, and cannot afford to own a house.

This appeared in the June 1, 1949 issue of the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette.(Photo: File photo)

But we were and still are on the right side.The real gifts of freedom are not the material ones shown in these photographs. We have spiritual, intellectual, and physical security, were protected by the rule of strictly and uniformly enforced law, and our expectation is that government will remain largely uninterested in what we may think, say, or believe. These are difficult to show in photograph captions, but theyre real and worth defending.

Read or Share this story: https://www.lancastereaglegazette.com/story/news/2021/06/07/remember-when-gifts-freedom/7540895002/

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Remember When: The gifts of freedom - Lancaster Eagle Gazette

I just asked my husband to turn off the TV. Its all the same. Whether it be San Jose or anywhere else in our country, the story is the same: multiple people killed, outraged officials, perfunctory measures considered, nothing ultimately done.

What is the purpose of our elected officials but to serve us, the people? We are electing individuals who abet murderers. Pure and simple. No other developed country in the world has this problem. No other developed country permits its citizens to murder each other relentlessly to appease Second Amendment apologists. We are a disgrace.

President Franklin Roosevelt famously defined the Four Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear). FDR should have included one more: Freedom to exist.

Barbara ConroyPortland

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Letter to the Editor: Gun violence takes away our freedom - pressherald.com

YoloArts in collaboration with Women in Leadership, Davis (WiLD), will host a Celebration of Freedom and closing reception of the Art. In. Action exhibit on June 19, 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Gibson House grounds in Woodland.

This celebration offers the last chance to view the powerful exhibit honoring African American women heroes, civil rights leaders and victims of police brutality through artwork.

Music by DJ Vallas, refreshments and art activities including Juneteenth sidewalk chalk drawing and collage creations will be offered. The outdoor gathering will also include a short program with WiLD co-founder Dzokerayi Minya; WiLD member, Sarah Zimmerman; and spoken word presentations by WiLD members and mentees.

WiLD is a group supporting women leaders, African American women and other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). It was founded out of the desire to bring opportunities to BIPOC young women and aims to break the double glass ceiling that exists for brown girls.

The Art. In. Action exhibition artwork can also be viewed online at https://yoloarts.org/online-galleries/#current.

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YoloArts Juneteenth Celebration of Freedom planned to honor African American women heroes - Woodland Daily Democrat