Category Archives: Freedom

The official observance of Memorial Day is Monday.

The core meaning of the day often gets lost among all the other things it has come to represent the beginning of summer, the end of the school year and the first weekend of make-it-or-break-it time for many local businesses.

Even people not tuned out of the original intent often miss the point. They thank veterans and active members of the armed services. Nothing is wrong with that, but its slightly off the mark.

Memorial Day is for honoring the dead. Its for remembering and honoring members of the armed forces killed, typically young, often as teenagers, during combat in service to the nation and those who died by other causes during times of war.

Those who survived deserve respect and thanks, but other days are set aside for that. Memorial Day is for the dead.

The number of those war dead is sobering. More than 1 million, counting all the dead in wars large and small since the revolution, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Thats not counting the missing and those killed in training, which are substantial numbers.

Every Memorial Day, we should reflect about what those million Americans bought with their lives.

And that seems especially important this year.

We send our troops to war with assurances they are defending all thats good about the nation democracy, freedom, justice, prosperity and to secure peace.

Americans have responded to the call to arms throughout our history for various reasons, including that they had no choice.

And while the assurances have been more true at some times in our history than at others, probably most of those who answered the call had some belief they were sacrificing in service to the high ideals that define the nation.

Because of the coronavirus, were in a period of government intrusion into our civil liberties. Whether the extent to which all levels of government have curtailed civil and commercial life is entirely necessary and appropriate remains to be seen.

Either way, this time, like every time, were obliged to watch carefully, question thoroughly and demand the government objectively justify every check on those rights and freedoms.

Its not a matter of left or right, Democrat or Republican. Its far more basic than that, and neither end of the ideological spectrum can claim to have never offered a government chit purporting to guarantee our safety in exchange for some of our rights and freedoms.

The Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson imposed draconian restrictions on civil liberties and attempted to turn us into nation of snitches, for our own good, of course, because agents of Kaiser might be under every bed.

On Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks killed 2,799 people, a good rough average of the daily COVID-19 death toll. In response, lawmakers in a mere 45 days used fear and national security to jam through the USA Patriot Act, the first of numerous laws making it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by monitoring phone and email communications, collecting bank and credit reporting records and by tracking the activity of innocent Americans on the internet.

That offense to the Constitution began under the Republican administration of George W. Bush, but both parties were solidly behind it in the House and Senate, as were the conservatives now in a tizzy over face coverings.

And some of those same conservatives, in their zeal to punish migrant workers, have argued seriously for ending birth-right citizenship, the foundation of every other right; without which every other right becomes a government-issued privilege for every one of us.

The fear of COVID-19 is real, as was the fear of terrorism, although both fears are out of proportion to actual threat.

Even if both were greater threats, and even if the offers of greater safety were genuine, the rights and freedoms at issue are not ours to trade away. They belong to a million Americans who paid for them with their lives.

Michael A. Smith

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On Monday, we should reflect on the price of freedom - Galveston County Daily News

On May 6, Anand Giridharadas set off a bit of a firestorm in a Morning Joe previewof his Seat at the Table monologue:

There is a primordial American tradition going back to the Founders of being freedom-obsessed, even though we are a country founded on slavery and genocide, being freedom-obsessed to the point that were always so afraid of the government coming for us that were blind to other types of threats, whether its a virus, whether its bank malfeasance, climate change, what have you.

He went on to note howRonald Reaganhad intensified the fear of government, howneoliberal Democratsafter him had distanced themselves from government, and howDonald Trump has epitomized the logicof Government doesnt work elect me and Ill prove it thats now the icing on the cake. But it was that initial formulation that really grabbed peoples attention.

Fox Newsran a story about this, as did the conservative siteTownhall. Giridharadastweeted his thanksfor their amplification of his ideas, to whichI added:

Not just obsessed with the idea of freedom, but with strangely perverted versions of it, defined by slaveholders at nations birth, defined by settlers claiming others land before & after, defined as market freedom by neoliberal theorists, the list goes on & on. Free for me!

The right is always appalled that anyone would ever say anything remotely critical about freedom, because conservatives have spent decades trying to brand the word and the concept as their private property. Efficient branding is pretty much the opposite of critical understanding. Yes, liberals may care about equality, right-wingers may acknowledge, but in doing so they trample on freedom! This is why, for example, Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act, and why Sen. Rand Paulstruggled incoherentlywhen Rachel Maddow asked him how he felt about it half a century later, andnever owned upto where he stood. The ghost of slaveholder freedom is not easily laid to rest.

Of course progressivesdobelieve in freedom, of a very different sort: The freedom sought by slaves and their descendants, most starkly, echoed in freedom songs and an explosion of liberation movements in the 1960s. Now, in the age of coronavirus, what could be more pressing than to be free of the virus not just individually, not just nationally, but globally, as a species?

Its not government tyranny thats keeping us from living normal lives. Its the virus thats doing that. Those who are demanding their freedom to spread the virus are just prolonging its tyranny over the rest of us. They are furthering our oppression, and endangering our lives.

Two models of freedom

There are many ways you can slice this, but perhaps the simplest comes from George Lakoff in Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over Americas Most Important Idea. He explains that abstract notions of freedom all derive from physical, bodily ones. The physical experience of being able to move freely is the foundation of all ideas of freedom.

Liberals and conservatives may have different ways of shaping their concepts of freedom, based on different worldviews, but this is what they have in common making freedom an essentially contested concept, as first described in anessay by W.B. Gallie. Its vital to understand what these two concepts of freedom have in common, as well as what they do not, and the reasons for both. Otherwise conservatives will continue to wield freedom as a sword, blinding us to whats actually going onas they imperil the freedom of all.

The central thesis of this book is simple, Lakoff writes. There are two very different views of freedom in America today, arising from two very different moral and political worldviews dividing the country. The traditional idea of freedom is progressive. One can see traditional values most clearly in the direction of change that has been demanded and applauded over two centuries.

He provides a wealth of examples, starting with the expansion of voting rights and citizen participation, from white male property owners to all white men, then to formerly enslaved men, then women, then younger voters. Lakoff goes on to cite the expansion of economic opportunity, working conditions and workers rights, public education and the expansion of knowledge, public health and life expectancy, consumer protection and so on.

These popular examples might not immediately seem like instances offreedom, at least partly because progressives havent used that term nearly as much as conservatives have even when talking about the black freedom struggle. Indeed, conservatives have used the term far more often to invoke rolling back those expansions of freedom.

But if freedom is at least partially about having the capacity to realize your dreams, then everything Lakoff lists above surely belongs in that realm of freedom as progressives could and should claim, if they used that language more robustly. As we struggle to free ourselves from this pandemic, thats exactly what we should be doing.

Progressive freedom is dynamic freedom. Freedom is realized not just in stasis, or at a single moment in history, but in its expansion over a long time, Lakoff writes. You cannot look only at the Founding Fathers and stop there. If you do, it sounds as if they were hypocrites: They talked liberty but permitted slavery; they talked democracy but allowed only white male property owners to vote. But from a dynamic progressive perspective, the great ideas were expandable freedoms.

The opposite is true of conservatives, he concludes:

What makes them conservatives is not that they want to conserve the achievements of those who fought to deepen American democracy. Its the reverse: They want to go back to before these progressive freedoms were established. That is why they harp so much on narrow so-called originalist readings of the Constitution on its letter, not its spirit on activist judges rather than an inherently activist population.

A common core and contested views

Despite these deep differences in how freedom is viewed, there is a common core meaning and logic involved.

Freedom is being able to do what you want to do, Lakoff writes, that is, being able to choose a goal, have access to that goal, pursue that goal without anyone purposely preventing you. It is having the capacity or power to achieve the goal and being able to exercise your free will to choose and achieve the goal. In addition, Political freedom is about the state and how well a state can maximize freedom for all its citizens.

This represents the uncontested core of what simple freedom and political freedom are all about. And the underlying physical foundation is straightforward:

We all had the experience as children of wanting to do something and being held down or held back, so that we were not free to do what we wanted. These bodily experiences form the basis of our everyday idea of simple freedom for reasoning about freedom as well as for talking about freedom.

Freedom is being able to achieve purposes, Lakoff summarizes, which in turn is understood metaphorically in three fundamental ways of functioning with ones body. First, Reaching a desired destination (by moving through space). Second, Getting some desired object (by moving ones limbs). Third, Performing a desired action (by moving ones body).

He goes on to make two important points. The first is about freedom asa visceral concept,tied, fundamentally via metaphor, to our ability to move and to interference with moving. There is little that is more infuriating than interference with our everyday bodily movements.

The second is about its cultural significance in America:

Part of being an American, culturally, goes beyond achieving isolated purposes to having a purposeful life. Thus, life itself becomes structured in terms of space goals you want to reach (where you want to be in life), things you want to get (rewards, awards, things that symbolize success), and things you want to do or achieve. Dreams are seen as lifetime purposes. The American Dream is based on this metaphor.

All the above applies to the uncontested core meaning of freedom, Lakoff explains. But liberals and conservatives differ sharply on how that uncontested core is fleshed out. Conservativetalka great deal more about freedom, he notes:

The radical right is in the process of redefining the very idea. To lose freedom is a terrible thing; to lose the idea of freedom is even worse.

The constant repetition of the words liberty and freedom by the right-wing message machine is one of the mechanisms of the idea theft in progress. When the words are used by the right, their meaning shifts gradually, almost imperceptibly, but it shifts.

What distinguishes the progressive from the conservative version of freedom is the underlying worldviewthat in both cases fill in the contested areas in metaphorical logic.Lakoff first characterized these competing views in Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (my reviewhere) as metaphorically structured by two distinct parentingstyles, first distinguished byDiane Baumrind: that of the nurturant parent (authoritative in Baumrinds typology) vs. the strict father family (authoritarian), as Lakoff calls them.

Lakoffs terms underscore their differences, while Baumrinds capture something critical about their more nuanced relationship.Authoritarianparenting is often justified by the false assumption that the only alternative is indulgent, permissive parenting, a third alternative that Baumrind described. (A fourth alternative, neglectful parenting, was added later.) Butauthoritativeparents combine permissive parents nurturing, responsive approach with the authoritarian parents willingness to set high standards albeit sometimes quite different ones.

As Lakoff notes, authoritative parents are more successful in raising children to be the autonomous moral agents, capable of acting freely and responsibly,that authoritarian parenting is supposed to produce. So theres a valid argumentthat progressives have a better grasp of freedom than conservatives do.

Threats to freedom and the role of security

One part of Lakoffs discussion involvesinterference with freedom, specifically in the form of harm, coercion, or limitations on property each of which is also a contested concept. These lay the foundations for understanding the fundamental role that security plays in protecting (and thus advancing) freedom. There is, in short, a common logic, which gets filled in differently by progressive and conservative worldviews.

Metaphorical harm such as economic harm can be trickier. What counts as harm? As Lakoff notes: Many conservatives believe that social programs harm people because they make them dependent on the government, while progressives tend to believe that they help people.

This is a direct consequence of Lakoffs characterization of progressive and conservative worldviews: that of nurturant parenting vs. the strict-father family. Its also an empirically testable question:Only atiny fractionof social spending goes to people who could even conceivably fit the conservative stereotype of the welfare cheat people who could work but do not, for whatever reason.

In contrast, recall thatGiridharadasspoke about other types of threats, and mentioned the pandemic, financial mismanagementand climate change. These are all forms of harm that can limit our freedom. As Lakoff explains, such limits must come from human actions someone breaking your leg, not having a tree fall on you. But if government fails to protect you when it should as happened with Hurricane Katrina, for example that malign neglect certainly qualifies as interfering with your freedom.

Coercion is being forced to act against your will, which has a straightforward physical foundation: One of our major metaphors for the freedom to engage in purposeful action is the freedom to move to a desired destination, Lakoff explains. Coerced action is, metaphorically, forced motion to an undesired location. Whats more, Further metaphors map physical coercion onto economic coercion, social coercion, and religious coercion.

Property is linked to freedom in two ways. As Lakoff puts it, the freedom to achieve ones purposes is, metaphorically, the lack of any interference in getting and keeping desired objects. Second is the literal fact thatwealth can buy many kinds of freedom. So property means freedom, literally as well as metaphorically. But as Lakoff cautions, [I]t is often contested whether certain property is properly yours.

In a nation built on land dispossessed from its native inhabitants, whose vast wealth was in large part created by slave labor, this is a touchy subject. Lakoff takes a less confrontational approach:

Take the issue of taxes. Conservatives say, Its your money. The government wants to take it away. But almost everyone gains part of his or her income through the use of a government-supplied infrastructure (highways, the Internet, the banking system, the courts). Is there a moral debt to pay to maintain that system?

Thomas Paine certainly thought so. Here he is, from Agrarian Justice:

Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a mans own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

While theTea Party movement, funded by the Koch brothers, tried to give its anti-taxation agenda a patriotic Boston Tea Party gloss, Americas anti-tax tradition actually stems from the Southern slaveholding economy, as Robin Einhorn explained inAmerican Taxation, American Slavery.

What I found is that in early American history, slaveholders in particular were terrified of majorities deciding how to tax them, Einhorn told me in an interview. So they came up with strategies of how to stop that. There is a long tradition of denying majorities the right to decide how to tax wealth in this country. You can call that tradition anything you want, but its strange to insist that its quintessentially about freedom.

Finally, Lakoff discusses the crucial role of security:

If harm, coercion, and limitations on property interfere with freedom, then security is a guarantee that such freedom will be preserved. Just as physical harm and physical coercion are the prototypical forms of harm and coercion what we first think when we think of harm and coercion so physical security is the prototypical form of security. Physical security of oneself and ones property is central to the concept of freedom.

Security is central to the Anglo-American idea of freedom in another way. It lies at the very foundation of John Lockes legitimation of government inSection 123of his Second Treatise on Government. Rights are God-given, enjoyed without limit in a state of nature, Locke argues. Butthe enjoyment of the property a person has in this state is very unsafe, very unsecure, he argues. This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers, so governments are formed voluntarily, surrendering absolute claims to all rights in order to secure what is most fundamental. Lockes thinking was echoed as well in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, with its declared purpose to promote the general Welfare, andsecurethe Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

The role of security is thus fundamental to any conception of freedom in modern liberal democracies. It is the very reason why we form such political orders in the first place, and it is also why Donald Trump and his fellow authoritarians, from Vladimir Putin to Jair Bolsonaro to Viktor Orbn and so on,revel in making us all so existentially insecure.

When Giridharadasspoke about other types of threats, including the virus, bank malfeasance and climate change, those arethreats to our freedomin a fundamental sense, because they undermine the social foundations on which all our freedoms rest. Not the abstract, theoretical foundation of God-given rights, but the pragmatic, real-world foundations that secure them for us in the here and now.

Final points

Ive only scratched the surface of Lakoffs book,tracing a few consequences of the simple core message: Freedom is an essentially contested conceptrooted in physical experience, and its liberal and conservative versions derive from very different worldviews. Three more points Lakoff touches on are worth noting.

First, political conservatives often want to live in nurturant communities too. As Lakoff observes, Fundamentalist communities can be nurturant and loving toward members who fit in. Theres an underlying sense in which liberal values grounded in nurturance and empathy are universally recognized, although conservatives perceive them as conditional, only for those who are deemed worthy.

For example, theres significant conservative support for large government programs like Social Security and Medicare, and Donald Trump made a point in 2016 of pretending he would defend them, while accurately noting that other Republicans would not. Now, with the coronavirus pandemic having claimed nearly 100,000 American lives, Trumps lack of empathy and abdication of nurturant leadership are painfully clear.

Second, Lakoff notes a difference in understanding causation in moral and political disputes, where the progressives argue on the basis of systemic causation (within a social, ecological, or economic system) and the conservatives argue on the basis of direct causation (by a single individual).

This helps explain why progressives see moral harm in environmentally destructive practices like mountaintop removal mining, for example, while conservatives tend to argue that your coal mine would not directly cause any known particular deaths or illnesses, and so you and others should be free to mine your coal. If the government preventsyou from maximizing potential profits, that specific, individual restriction of freedomis the only one they claim to see.

Thats similar to how the reopen demonstrators seem to think. They dont recognize the systemic risk posed by the virus, and claim not to believe that their activities make it easier for the virus to spread. They only see government action which they mistakenly blame for shutting down the economy as an act of tyranny or spiteful malevolence.

Third, Lakoff argues that political freedom has a common, uncontested core:

Political freedom begins with the idea of self-government: Tyrants and dictators can be avoided if we choose those who govern us and make sure that none of them has overriding power. The attendant concepts to simple political freedom are self-government and its democratic institutions within the national government: Congress, the administration, and an independent judiciary, with a balance of powers and similar structures at lower levels; within civil society: free elections and political parties, a civilian-controlled military, a free market, free press/media, and free religious institutions.

At this level of oversimplification, all of this is uncontested. The details are, however, thoroughly contested.

At least thats how things stood in 2006, when Whose Freedom? was published. Thats no longer the case 14 years later, with severe democratic backsliding underway in America. If Donald Trump is leading the way, hes by no means alone. The contested details of the past have prepared the way for our current crisis, and theres considerable continuity over the decades, as Ive discussed in previous articlesabout constitutional hardball, for example. But it is clear that Trump has utter disregard for any balance of powers that would curb his own, and were now in a qualitatively different place than before the 2016 election. Its no longer the case that progressives and conservatives both believe in the uncontested core of political freedom. The American right appears to have turned its back on that shared assumption once and for all.

Whose Freedom? is not the only guidebook to our current situation, but it helps delineate major aspects of the task before us: First, not to let conservatives claim to be the only ones who care about freedom, as if it had a simple, uncontested meaning. Second, to articulate a more robust progressive model of freedom, and make clear how it applies in the current moment. Third, to prioritize combating the most grave and substantial threats to freedom threats like the coronavirus that is killing thousands of us every day, and like the climate catastrophe that may devastate our world for centuries to come.

If we can preserve ourselves and our freedoms from these threats, we will have time and opportunity for legitimate debate on the contested aspects of the idea of freedom. In other words, we will have the freedom to shape a better future for everyone.

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Conservatives think they control the concept of freedom. But progressives have a deeper, richer tradition - AlterNet

Immediately after Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination, composer Evelyn LaRue Pittman converted her rage into a song Freedom, Freedom.But her creativity didnt subside with her anger. Soon the musical Freedom Child took shape.

Pittman was born in January 1910 in McAlester. When her father died, her family moved to Oklahoma City. Her music interest began early when she composed songs in the first grade. While attending high school in Detroit, she became the first black to sing in the schools well-known choir.

She studied professionally with renowned violinist Kemper Harreld at Spelman College; Robert Ward at Julliard, where she was the first black Oklahoman to study there; Harrison Terry at the University of Oklahoma; and famed composer Nadia Boulanger in Paris. While taking an Atlanta University summer course, she learned about the many valuable contributions African Americans made, and the omissions by white historians in reporting these achievements. She became committed to telling the black history story through music.

After returning to Oklahoma, she taught music in Oklahoma City schools, organized a 30-piece orchestra and 40-voice chorus, had a weekly radio program with the school system, founded the Evelyn Pittman choir, published Rich Heritage,and wrote a newspaper column, Lady Evelyn Speaks, for an Oklahoma City newspaper, The Black Dispatch, where she corresponded with World War II soldiers to build morale.

The Evelyn Pittman Choir performed for 12 years in Oklahoma City and made local radio broadcasts. For six months the programsalsowere aired on NBC radio. In 1938, the choir represented Oklahoma and Texas at the Chicago Worlds Fair.

After writing a song about Frederick Douglass for her sisters class which they loved she wrote 21 songs about famous black Americans over the next six months. In 1944, she published Rich Heritage,a childrens book filled with biographical sketches and songs. There were stories about Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Bill Bojangles Robinson, Paul Robeson, and Marian Anderson.

When the racial bars were lifted at white universities, she attended the University of Oklahoma, where she wrote her folk opera Cousin Esther,fashioned after the Biblical story, for an all-black cast. The first scene was used as a thesis for her 1954 masters degree. While studying with Boulanger, the opera was performed in Paris in 1957, receiving outstanding reviews.

Frustrated by Dr. Kings death in 1968, she wrote Freedom Child,a musical drama about his life. The songs represented all types of music that Kings mother Alberta said he enjoyed. Freedom for Every Mothers Child,the original musicals title, was performed by Pittmans New York high school students at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Easter Sunday 1971. They also toured in 11 countries and performed at the Kennedy Center.

After retiring from teaching in 1976, Pittman returned to Oklahoma because this is home.She was inducted into the Oklahoma Womens Hall of Fame in 1986. After a glorious and productive life, Pittman died in December 1992 at age 82.

Dr. Edwyna Synar is a writer and lecturer documenting the Women's Rights Movement in America. Her Suffrage presentations help educate young girls about the fore-mothers who came before them.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

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Remember the Ladies: The road to 'Freedom' - Muskogee Daily Phoenix

In defiance of orders from their respective governors, a significant number of houses of worship will open for services beginning tomorrow. As John Dale Davidson of The Federalist notes, most of them will be doing so while maintaining social distancing measures that are at least as thorough as those at Wal-Mart, Home Depot, hair salons, or the Department of Motor Vehicles. They will nonetheless be engaged in civil disobedience.

Where do you stand on this issue? Is civil disobedience ever justified? Does it constitute official discrimination against the practice of religion when government declares that liquor stores and abortion clinics are essential services that can stay open while it deems your spiritual health non-essential and orders your church, synagogue, or mosque shut? Does it bother you that if a house of worship performed abortions or served alcohol, it would stand a better chance of earning the states blessing?

I concede there may be room for differing views on these matters among people of good will. But if you are in the camp that categorically opposes even non-violent civil disobediencefor any purpose, against any stupidity or oppressionI have a few more questions for you:

This is a country born in civil defiance of a monarchy 3,000 miles away. If you could go back in time and walk the streets of Boston in the early 1770s, could you have urged the citizens, Pay that Stamp Tax, let those troops quarter in your home, stop criticizing the King!?

Harriet Tubman and tens of thousands of others defied the law to escape slavery. Could you have looked any one of them in the eyes and exhorted, Go back, youre breaking the law!? If an escaped slave showed up on your front porch, would you have turned him in or helped him out? If you say you would have helped him out, then you too would be a lawbreaker.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama, she was engaged in civil disobedience. If you were the bus driver, could you have told her, Get in the back or get off!?

Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans without due process. No court ever heard evidence and convicted any of them of anything. They were incarcerated because they had names like Toshio instead of Bob. Could you have addressed them through a loudspeaker with words like, You havent harmed anybody but just in case you might, we have to put you away for a few years? If one of them escaped, would you have reported him?

History is full of stories of people who practiced peaceful resistance in defense of sound principles in the face of official stupidity and oppression. Sometimes it has been the best way, if not the only one, to get bad policies changed.

One hundred and seventy years ago, a famous American figure wrote,

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign hisconscienceto the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

That figure was Henry David Thoreau. Born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, he was an eminent philosopher, poet and essayist. His best-known works are his book Walden: Life in the Woods and his essay, Civil Disobedience. The latter proved influential far beyond his time and place, shaping the thoughts and actions of eminent dissidents the world over. As we ponder the civil disobedience rising in reaction to coronavirus policies, now is a perfect time to give Thoreaus essay another look. Toward that end, I offer some excerpts below.

One last thing before I do that: I want readers to know that, speaking strictly for myself, I endorse the re-opening of houses of worship (and many other things, for that matter), whether the government officially allows it or not. If that perspective makes life a little uncomfortable for the power-hungry at this time, so be it. The additional articles listed below reflect my reasoning.

Now, to Henry David Thoreau:

Thanks for listening. See you in church.

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Is Civil Disobedience Justified in Defense of the Freedom to Worship? | Lawrence W. Reed - Foundation for Economic Education

Liberty. Freedom. Choice.

A lot of people are playing fast and loose with terms like these nowadays and, at first glance, it seems baffling why that might be.

On the surface, its simple. You go about your business, doing your thing, slapping whatever bad decision bumper sticker on your car that you want, and Ill do the same. One of us can laugh at the other on Nov. 4, if we so choose.

Thats what freedom is all about, right? Not necessarily.

As much as many of us might agree on what symbolizes American freedom the flag and the bald eagle, for example the exactness of what these icons represent is nuanced. And nuance is everything.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of American high schoolers write essays about what freedom means to them. Entire university courses are designed around ferreting out the specifics of freedom, and political parties have been built around particular interpretations of the idea formed by folks in smoky back rooms.

Its been a while since I revisited what some of the great minds have had to say about freedom, but it was good to remember that not only do many of us have differing definitions of the notion, but we share a planet with experts who have devoted their lives to thoroughly understanding the concept and trying to help the rest of us have a better idea of what were talking about.

And, boy oh boy, do we love to talk about it.

Our currently trending debate on the shades and gradations of freedom centers around whether we are compelled to wear masks in public to protect ourselves and others from the spread of COVID-19.

As a glasses-wearing claustrophobe, I can attest to the discomfort of wearing a mask for extended periods of time. I dont like discomfort, hence my sensible shoes and refusal to glue someone elses lashes to my eyelids, so I am not a good candidate for wearing masks without some degree of whining.

Luckily, my mother taught me that I am not the sun.

In fact, I am reminded of my small place in the universe every day when my husband drives two hours to work as an ER doc in a rural area of South Carolina. Ive seen the get-up he wears to protect himself and his patients from the deadly virus that has, during its first wave, been confirmed to have infected 8,816 South Carolinians as of May 18, and lets just say he looks like something between a welder and a stormtrooper, whether his patients have a busted toe or symptoms of the plague. Every day he works, for 12 hours a day, he wears this gear, discomfort or not.

The drone of my whining sounds pretty petty then.

When you think about it, wearing a protective mask during a global pandemic is a pretty small acquiescence to the social contract we agree to when we agree to share public spaces, and its hard to understand how liberty is any more compromised by this act than it is by common courtesies like yielding to a passer-by on the sidewalk.

No one forces us to say, God bless you, when a person in our shared space sneezes, but bless them we do.

And how is asking a friend or neighbor to take responsibility for their own germs different from asking them to keep other bodily expulsions to themselves? What about their phlegm or snot? What about their flatulence?

Is flushing the toilet after use suddenly something only sissies do?

Granted, it is difficult to assess the relationship between freedom and respect for our neighbors, and whether to wear a mask to protect them, when the men in our executive offices, the ones we should be able to count on to model humanitys best behavior, refuse to wear masks themselves while requiring the public servants around them to do that very thing.

I also find it strange that so many of the people whose liberty is threatened by the expectation that they wear masks are the first ones to tell me and my daughters what to do with our reproductive organs. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe the best way to meet in the middle on this issue is to embrace the few things about freedom and liberty that we can almost all agree upon. Lets make some masks with Uncle Sam smiling at us and the simple words, I Want YOU to do the right thing!

Cindi Boiter is a writer, editor and arts advocate. She is the founding editor ofJaspermagazine and theFall Linesliterary journal and the executive director of The Jasper Project.

Cindi Boiter is a writer, editor and arts advocate. She is the founding editor of Jasper magazine and the Fall Lines literary journal and the executive director of The Jasper Project.

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Further Consideration: Courtesy clashes with freedom in the debate over COVID-19 masks - Charleston Post Courier

The line between race and class is one of the most potent fault lines in left politics today. Theres a sense that a contradiction exists between fighting class inequality and fighting racial inequality. Among liberals, this has become almost an article of faith. Even among leftists, theres a sense that these are dangerous waters, and that special theoretical acumen is necessary to navigate them successfully.

It wasnt always like this. In fact, the split between race and class can be traced to a specific moment in American history, when the causes of racial and class equality were sundered. That moment was the Red Scare in the middle of the twentieth century.

Before the Red Scare, there was a potent movement for black equality that included the Left, most centrally the Communist Party. Based in the new industrial unions, this movement fought for black equality in housing, employment, and at the ballot box, and linked that fight to the broader struggle against capitalist domination. The anticommunist campaign of the late 1940s, however, beginning under the Truman administration, crippled this movement, delaying the fall of Jim Crow by a decade or more and narrowing the movements focus to legal equality, leaving its larger ambitions unfulfilled.

In the 1940s, the movement for black equality made its biggest strides since Reconstruction. In 1941, prodded by socialist A. Philip Randolphs March on Washington Movement, Franklin Roosevelt issued executive order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industry and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee. It was the first substantive federal commitment to civil rights since the 1870s. In the courts, the NAACPs legal team won rulings against the white primary system and against racially restrictive housing covenants. In just six years, the NAACP went from 50,000 members to 450,000. One result of this ferment was a narrowing of the black-white wage gap at a speed not approached since.

At the heart of all of this activity was the militancy of the black working class. Two processes had come together to enable this militancy. First, technological change in Southern agriculture had pushed black Americans out of the cotton fields and into the cities, creating a black proletariat on a scale never seen before. Second, the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) created a union movement that broke, however incompletely, with American labors historic embrace of white supremacy.

Black Americans streamed into the CIO unions, whether in Detroit in the United Autoworkers, Alabama in the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, Chicago in the United Packinghouse Workers, or at sea in the National Maritime Union. While most CIO unions were to the left of the more conservative American Federation of Labor when it came to race, the leftmost were the unions in which Communist Party (CP) members played a leading role. Known as the left-led unions, these organizations were ferocious in their assault on racial inequality, whether on the factory floor or in the community more broadly.

In North Carolina, Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO (FTA) was emblematic of this kind of unionism. When Local 22 won its first contract from RJ Reynolds in 1944, it created a network of black shop stewards who became leaders in the fight to democratize Jim Crow North Carolina. Local 22 activists fought against police abuse of black Americans, conducted voter registration drives, and even revitalized the local NAACP, turning it into the largest in North Carolina. Led by CP cadres who were committed to training worker militants, the local even maintained its own library of black and working class history. As one black worker remembered, at that little [city] library you couldnt find any books on Negro history They didnt have books by [Herbert] Aptheker, [W.E.B.] Du Bois, or Frederick Douglass. But we had them at our library.

At the same time, in New York City, the United Public Workers of America (UPWA), another left-led union, fought for the rights of black public-sector workers. Though black public workers were subject to discrimination and segregation, institutions like the Post Office and the Internal Revenue Service were nonetheless engines of class mobility, allowing black workers to access levels of job security and compensation that were unheard of in the private sector.

In New York in the 1940s, they were led by black militants like Ewart Guinier, who ran for Manhattan Borough President on the American Labor Party ticket, and Eleanor Goding, who headed the local for Department of Welfare workers, and was the first black woman to head a union local in New York City. The union fought discrimination in government hiring, and was a key force in pushing for the FEPC. It also had an internationalist vision, organizing workers on the Panama Canal and fighting against the discriminatory wage system the US government used.

The UPWA wasnt alone in linking the fight for civil rights with international solidarity. Inspired by antifascist mobilization and anticolonial revolt, black organizations and intellectuals advanced a critique of white imperialism that identified colonialism with the power of capital. Figures like George Padmore and Henry Lee Moon sought to link black organizations in the United States with unions of black workers in the colonial world. Activists around the Communist Party founded the Council on African Affairs to promote African independence. The Council especially prioritized the struggle of black workers in South Africa, acting as the vanguard for an internationalist black political consciousness that extended well beyond the Marxist left.

In the years immediately following the end of World War II, organizers had good reason to think that Jim Crow and the larger American caste system were on their last legs. A movement that spanned from liberal organizations like the NAACP to the Communist Party, and based on the militancy of black workers, was mounting a challenge to racial inequality that recognized the need to completely remake American society. Pillars of white supremacy, like the white primary, were falling, and the federal government was dragged, inch-by-inch, into open opposition to Jim Crow. Within a few years, however, many of the organizations leading this charge would be destroyed, their activists scattered and demoralized, while the surviving elements of the struggle adopted a far more cautious stance.

Though anticommunism in the United States stretches back to at least the American response to the Paris Commune, a distinct wave gathered strength in the years following World War II. The United States and the Soviet Union had been allies in the fight against fascism, putting a temporary cooler on red-hunting passions. But after 1945, as the Cold War set in, attacks on American supporters (or even insufficiently hostile opponents) of the USSR came into fashion.

Moreover, the end of the war witnessed a massive strike wave by workers whose demands had been suppressed during the war years. 1946 saw the largest strike wave in American history, with more than five million workers involved. Employers were eager to regain the upper hand, and anticommunism was a key part of their arsenal.

The anticommunist push began in earnest in 1947, when Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9835, establishing a loyalty oath program for federal employees. It subjected all two million federal workers to investigation into their political beliefs, in order to determine whether they were members of, or even sympathetic to, subversive organizations, which were determined by the Attorney Generals List of Subversive Organizations, and included the National Negro Congress and the Council on African Affairs.

Trumans anticommunist initiatives gave the signal that red-hunting was now an official American pastime. In the House of Representatives, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which had existed since the late 1930s, turned its attention to Hollywood, seeking to root out subversive influences in the film industry. FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who had been hunting communists since his days as a young operative in the War Emergency Divisions Alien Enemy Bureau during World War I, designed and carried out Trumans loyalty oath program, used the program to double the size of the FBI, and routinely passed information from his investigations to HUAC. Joe McCarthy, the man who would give this moment its name, was actually a late-comer to the party, getting involved only in 1950.

The black left was a major target for this anticommunist network, composed heavily of Southerners for whom segregation was part of the American way of life. The CAA and the Civil Rights Congress (the successor to the National Negro Congress) were both the targets of investigation, and ultimately collapsed under the weight of repression. W.E.B. Du Bois himself, in his eighties, was arrested and appeared in court in chains for his activism in the global peace movement.

Yet the investigations launched by the anticommunist network went far beyond defiant radicals like Du Bois. Because the Communist Party and its fellow travelers had been so central to the movement for racial equality in these years, there were few black activists who had not rubbed shoulders with communists in the course of their work. This was all the pretext needed for the FBI or HUAC to launch an investigation. Even black liberals who couldnt possibly have been construed as communists, like friend of the Roosevelts Mary MacLeod Bethune or congressman Adam Clayton Powell, were subject to investigation.

This wide net of repression had a chilling effect on black activism. Liberal organizations like the NAACP raced to distance themselves from anyone tainted by communism, which in local branches often meant expelling some of the most dedicated activists. Though liberal black intellectuals and activists had been a vital part of the anticolonial push before and during World War II, they now retreated from anything that could be construed as opposing American geopolitical aims. While the CAA fought to bring attention to the United Kingdoms brutal counterinsurgency in Kenya, the NAACP confined itself to opposing the far less geopolitically explosive efforts of Italy to hold on to its African colonies.

Even more destructive, however, was the Cold War in the union movement. HUAC and Hoover, of course, paid special attention to the left-led unions. They were joined in this effort by Congress, which in 1947 passed the Taft Hartley act, requiring, among other things, that union officers sign affidavits swearing that they were not supporters of the CP and had no relations with organizations advocating the overthrow of the government.

Inside the union movement, the liberal labor bureaucracy was also moving against Communists. The CIO leadership had always had an ambivalent relationship with communists in the unions, recognizing that they were often the most talented and committed organizers, while also fearing them as a political challenge. During World War II, the CP had endeared itself to the union leadership with its militant defense of the no strike pledge as necessary for the defeat of fascism. After the war, however, as the USSRs geopolitical interests diverged from the United States, the CIO leaders who had tied their fate to the Democratic Party viewed the CP as at best a liability, and at worst as traitors.

In the CIO, these tensions were sharpest between the left-led unions, whose leadership supported the CP, and the liberal union leaders. In 1948, the CIO leadership got its chance to take decisive action when the left-led unions endorsed Henry Wallaces left-wing third party run for president. Over the next two years, eleven unions were forced out of the CIO, representing about a quarter of a million workers, or a fifth of its total membership. Over the next few years, these unions would be subject to thousands of raids by CIO unions intent on destroying them.

The left-led unions were the ones most committed to civil-rights unionism. Isolated from the CIO and the rest of American liberalism, they were an easy target for the investigators. Ferdinand Smith, a Caribbean-born leader in the National Maritime Union in New York, was deported back to Jamaica in 1951 after the NMU purged its communists. After the UPWA was expelled from the CIO, New York City refused to recognize the contracts it had won protecting black workers, and Eleanor Goding was fired from her job with the Department of Welfare.

In North Carolina, Local 22 went on strike against RJ Reynolds in 1947, but was crippled by anticommunism. Its leaders refused to sign the Taft Hartley affidavits, disqualifying the union from NLRB protection. At the same time, CIO unions began raiding Local 22s members, fanning the anticommunist flames on which RJ Reynolds was already pouring gasoline. By 1950, Local 22 had been destroyed, and its militant black leaders blacklisted.

This story was repeated across the country. In unions that remained in the CIO, like the UAW, black militants were marginalized and pushed out of leadership. In the expelled unions, organizers tried to maintain the movement they had built over the previous decade, but, caught between state repression and the opportunistic offensive by the liberal unions, were quickly overwhelmed. Most of the left-led unions either disappeared or merged back into other CIO unions over the next decade.

Under the anticommunist assault from the reactionary right and liberal Democrats alike, the black left buckled. A generation of activists, intellectuals, and shop-floor militants was politically dismembered. Investigated, jailed, fired, blacklisted, and deported, the people who made up that movement for racial equality that had cohered in the first half of the 1940s were isolated from one another. The progress towards dismantling the American system of racial domination that had seemed so dramatic just a few years earlier ground to an abrupt halt.

When civil rights insurgency broke out once more, most dramatically in the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, the politics animating it were different from those of the earlier wave. Old Left veterans were everywhere in the Civil Rights Movement, from Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organizer E.D. Nixon in Montgomery, to the Southern Christian Leadership Conferences Jack ODell, who came out of the CP. But their old commitment to remaking the American political economy was no longer a defining characteristic of the movement.

The nature of racial oppression itself had been redefined at the height of the Cold War. While even many liberals in the 1930s and 40s had agreed that racial inequality was intimately bound up with the structure of economic power in American life, the anticommunist crusade had made these sorts of critiques politically radioactive. Instead, liberal intellectuals like Gunnar Myrdal and Harry S. Ashmore redefined racial inequality as a kind of ugly atavism, an exception to the American creed that only held the country back from its mission of global leadership.

For much of the classic phase of the Civil Rights Movement (195565), this was the understanding of racism that most directly informed the movements political vision. The fight against discrimination became severed from the fight for a more equal country overall.

To be sure, there were those who tried to resist this separation. At the grassroots, organizers like Ella Baker or Bayard Rustin came out of the Old Left, and knew full well that legal equality without redistribution would be a hollow victory. The 1963 March on Washington was built with crucial assistance from the United Autoworkers, and the marchs full title was The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The policy objectives of this tendency in the movement were summed up in the Freedom Budget, a proposal that attempted to translate the Civil Rights Movement into a campaign for full employment and public works.

Yet it is precisely here that the destruction of the first civil-rights movement was felt most acutely. While the Freedom Budget put forward an ambitious agenda, it was markedly different from the kind of transformation sought by the organizers of the 1940s. Its ideological vision was constrained from the start, as its authors described its ambitions as, No doles. No skimping on national defense. No tampering with private supply and demand. Just an enlightened self-interest, using what we have in the best possible way. For these exponents of racial liberalism, egalitarianism required no major political conflict, and became a technocratic project of social modernization.

Moreover, the strategy for achieving the Freedom Budget was one forged in intimate alliance with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Whereas figures like Du Bois or Padmore understood that militant struggle would be necessary to force reform, the proponents of the Freedom Budget convinced themselves that their stature within the Democratic Party would be sufficient to win their agenda. They were mistaken.

In the second half of the 1960s, as the movement searched for a way forward after the consummation of its victory over Jim Crow, some wings began moving towards the kind of politics that had animated the movements first wave. Martin Luther King, Jr was a key figure who pursued more and more radical confrontations with the American power structure. In doing so, however, he was largely isolated and alone, without comrades.

Instead, the increasing militancy of the movement more often led away from class politics. Figures like Roy Innis and Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Inequality embraced a cultural radicalism before signing on to Richard Nixons black capitalism. At the other end of the spectrum, many movement activists turned to municipal politics, electing black mayors and city councillors. This strategy reached its nadir in the early 1970s, as the urban fiscal crisis led the new black city governments to be the agents of austerity against black public workers. Some of the more serious New Left formations, like the Black Panthers or various New Communist Movement groupings, attempted to provide an alternative, but their efforts were insufficient to replace the movement destroyed by anticommunism.

Racial equality and class equality had been divorced as political visions. The repression of class radicalism during McCarthyism created a void that has defined American politics since. This repression combined with the limits of racial liberalism to create a predictable dynamic in American politics, whereby dissatisfaction with the anemic vision of racial liberalism gave rise to movements of rebellion. However, those movements, detached from class politics and the kinds of social forces that could give them weight, either dissipated into the ether of marginal militancy, or were reabsorbed into a renewed racial liberalism.

The anticommunist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s dealt a hammer blow to the movement for racial equality. The growing strength of a movement that linked remaking the countrys racial order with remaking its economic order was a direct threat to plans for the American century. Though the Left as a whole suffered grievously in these years, much of the fiercest repression was reserved for black leftists.

In recent years, however, much of the emphasis in American historiography has suggested precisely the opposite. This interpretation, articulated most directly in legal historian Mary Dudziaks book Cold War Civil Rights, has argued that the Cold War actually benefited the movement. Because the United States was competing with the USSR for the allegiance of the decolonizing world, movement organizers were able to portray racism as an obstacle to American hegemony, and secure the states support in the project of demolishing Jim Crow. The Justice Departments amicus curiae brief in Brown v. Board of Education arguing segregation had an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries exemplifies the way the Cold War allowed the movement to turn up the heat on the American state.

Yet as the above history should indicate, such a narrative succeeds only by retrospectively treating what the movement did actually achieve as all it ever sought to achieve. In the 1940s, it is plain that the movement had a more far-reaching vision for equality. This vision was precisely what the onset of the Cold War made impossible. Similarly, even the etiolated vision of the Freedom Budget, so carefully constructed to remain within the bounds of Cold War liberalism, never came to fruition, despite the best efforts of its backers like King and Rustin. If the Cold War enabled a certain kind of civil rights agenda, it only did so by greatly curtailing that agendas ambitions.

The ambition of civil-rights unionism is precisely what is needed to give substance to antiracist politics today. For all the lip service paid to intersectionality in contemporary discourse, too many visions of black advance are all too happy to see that advance occur within a society whose fundamental structure remains unchanged. Often, it seems that antiracism is defined simply as the equal distribution of inequality. An earlier generation of civil rights struggle saw things differently. They, and their opponents, understood that black equality required a fundamental transformation of American society.

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How McCarthyism and the Red Scare Hurt the Black Freedom Struggle - Jacobin magazine

May 20, 2020by Elliot Sperber

Freedom From the Great Disease

Nobody knows what Socrates firstWord was, though,If we can trust Plato,His last one was Asclepius The prototype of Jesus, whoWas sitting on my kitchen floorLast night in the blue lightThat shines in from the air shaftStroking the catBefore I could scream I was tranquilizedHis eyes, his stareHes sitting thereAnd says: I know you need to liquefy His words, not mine so, goAnd when you return Ill apprise youOf why I surprised youOh Jesus, I said, after washing my handsAnd he made his demandsOK, I will do as you say, soHe wants us to knowAll the people of the globe, firstThat theres a creature the kangabatA bat got it on, in a zoo,With a female kangarooAnd now guess who is bounding into flightFlapping and gliding through townAll night on her dragon-like wingsEating rats and things like thatThe kangabat, he saidAs he leaned against the fridge,Is especially fond of the Brooklyn BridgeBut dont go make a pilgrimageDont freak out.The second thing is this:An intercontinental communityCollege system must be developedAll will be students of the great mysteryThe one absolute, the teachers tooAnd will live, for free, in student housingAnd grow our own foodNot for exchange value, but for useBecause, as Marx maintained,Freedom from the great diseaseRequires not the state, you see,But the communeIm not quite sure how the kangabatFits into all thatBut he implied that hed be backTo talk some moreAbout the absoluteThe foundation of doubtThat leads to the truth

Elliot Sperber is a writer, attorney, and adjunct professor. He lives in New York City and can be reached atelliot.sperber@gmail.com and on twitter @elliot_sperber

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Freedom From the Great Disease - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch

The All Saints Episcopal Church in Bentonville recently hosted the inaugural Harriet Tubman Memorial Tribute and Trailblazer Awards. A local organization called The Shame of Bentonville organized the event, as part of its informal, nonpartisan efforts to advocate for the relocation of the Confederal Monument in the Bentonville Square to a more suitable location where it can be studied in proper historical context.

The honorees included Maddison Booker, a student at Northwest Arkansas Community College and founder and President of the NWACC Young Democrats; Rohan Collins, a Freshman at Bentonville West High School who aspires to be a civil rights lawyer someday; Alice Gachuzo, the founder of the Springdale, Arkansas Martin Luther King Day program and 2019 recipient of the Friends of Springdale Schools Award; and me.

Harriet Tubman was, and remains, an American hero. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required that slaves who escaped to northern, free states had to be returned to their masters. It also required that officials and citizens of free states cooperate with such efforts. Tubman fought against that unjust law, via the underground railroad, and did so at great risk. To have been caught helping fugitive slaves likely would have meant her death, as well as the re-enslavement (if not death) of those she sought to free. She did this not just for herself and her family, but for strangers caught in the maelstrom of slavery in a country awash in racism, sexism, unfairness, cruelty and injustice. She once famously said: Dont ever stop! Keep going! If you want a taste of freedom, keep going!

That is exactly what she did. That is exactly what we, as a community, must do now. We face challenges today that have confronted this land since 1619. They seem more intense lately, and more nationwide in scope than at any other time since the Civil War. I believe that is because we are now finally talking about our shared history with everyone having a voice. Far from erasing history, we continue to uncover it, and to shed the light of truth upon it.

Often, we do not like what we see. Some of our history turns out to have been different than we thought. We have come to realize, more and more, that the noble principle espoused by our founding fathers that all men are created equal really meant all men like us.Up until recently, I thought most people understood the outcome of the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement a century later, rendered that like us qualification invalid.

Then came August 2017, and the death of Heather Heyer (May 29, 1985 August 12, 2017), in Charlottesville, Va. Protests there began following a dispute over the possible removal of public statues honoring Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas Stonewall Jackson. What I saw on the television during those protests were the like us folks. They personified the insidious evil of the Lost Cause myth, and the false narrative of white supremacy. They wrapped these ideas in sentimental veils of nostalgia and heritage coopted from the Civil War. Similar protests occurred around the country, especially in southern states. They showed clearly that many people in our communities felt that not all men are created equal.

This caused me to reevaluate the Bentonville Confederate Monument. I had always considered it to be a benign observance honoring locals like my grandfathers who fought for the Confederacy. However, I learned the Civil War memorials had been placed on the battlefields and in cemeteries during the 1870s and 1880s. The Bentonville statue had been placed decades later, in 1908, as part of a coordinated effort by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to re-establish white supremacy in the Jim Crow era (ca. 1890 1920). Ours was one of many statues, all similar in appearance, placed in Arkansas and across the south during that separate but equal time period.

Unlike the earlier battlefield and funerial memorials, these statues were placed in close proximity to governmental institutions and community hubs like courthouse lawns and public squares. Such strategic placement fostered the impression that the local power structure officially supported the Confederates and their lost cause. A popular myth, recently debunked by his own great-grandson, suggested that the Bentonville statue was of James Berry, who lived in Bentonville when elected governor of Arkansas in 1882. Berry helped pay for the statue, and locals placed a small plaque upon it in his honor following his death in 1913, but it is not a statue of him. Another popular myth, also debunked, is that the UDC or some descendent group owns the statue, and thus controls its destiny. Public records confirm that Benton County owns the statue, so if the UDC or some other private entity claims ownership of it, they owe Benton County more than a centurys worth of property taxes.

These realizations made me question the location of the Bentonville Confederate Monument, and whether it should remain in the center of our community. It will always be part of our heritage and history, but mainly as a cautionary tale of how history if not handled carefully can be twisted and used as a weapon of hatred and oppression, instead of as a catalyst for learning.

It saddened me to think of Arthur Rabbit Dickerson (1896 1978), who I had the privilege of meeting when I was a young boy and who is honored with his own plaque just off the square in Bentonville for his highly respected career as a local businessman, having to walk by that statue most of his life. It is difficult to imagine what feelings he and his family (some of whom had been slaves) experienced as that statue gazed down upon them. They knew they might still be enslaved property if the Confederates being honored had prevailed. I did not want anyone to ever feel again what Mr. Dickerson and his family and all people of color must have felt, and still feel, under the shadow of that statue.

Our public spaces should be welcoming and inclusive to everyone. Wrongs, when realized, should be put right. That is why the statue should be moved elsewhere, in my opinion. The Pea Ridge National Military Park does not want it since it is a Jim Crow statue. Ideally, it needs to be in a museum space, dedicated to the study of the Jim Crow era and how it affected all races in Benton County.

My Harriet Tubman Trailblazer Award came to me, as I understand it, because I took to social media and gave speeches regarding the statue and its historical context and my view that it should be moved but not destroyed or hidden. This resulted in positive and negative comments directed toward me personally, and toward the subject matter generally. At one point a friend asked me why I wanted to fight this particular battle, since I am not black. In recounting this story to those assembled at the awards ceremony, I spoke directly to young Rohan Collins, the Bentonville West High School freshmen who wants to be a civil rights lawyer, and said: Rohan, the most important fight some of us will ever have will be for others.

Those willing to fight for others, like our imperfect founding fathers and like Harriet Tubman herself, embody what the true principles of this country really mean. All men and women are created equal, and should be treated justly, with fairness and respect.

That is freedom. I will keep fighting for that freedom; I wont ever stop. If you want a taste of that freedom for you and your children, and for all of us and all of our children then dont ever stop. Keep going!

Editors note: Jason Hendren is an attorney with Wright Lindsey & Jennings. The opinions expressed are those of the author.

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Never stop in the push for freedom - talkbusiness.net

Christ has liberated us to be free. Stand firm then and dont submit again to a yoke of slavery (Gal. 5:1).

Most Christians know that Christ has freed them somehow. What does freedom in Christ mean? In one sense, freedom is defined by what we are freed from. We can also consider what we are free to do. Galatians chapter five helps us see the borders of freedom.

Much of Galatians is devoted to describing the Christians relationship to the law of Moses. Paul makes it clear we no longer relate to God through keeping commandments and observing rituals. We are righteous because of Christs death, not because of our behavior. We live for God, not by our own willpower, but by faith in the Son of God who now lives within (Gal. 2:19-20).

When Paul says Christ has liberated us to be free, he is talking about our freedom from the law. Our life isnt about following rules. Christ is our life. Ephesians 2:14-15 says it this way: In His flesh, He made of no effect the law consisting of commands and expressed in regulations...

For some Christians, freedom in Christ means little more than freedom from rules. But Galatians goes on to show us the deeper significance of freedom: For you were called to be free, brothers; only dont use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love. For the entire law is fulfilled in one statement: Love your neighbor as yourself (Gal. 5:13-14). In other words, Im not given freedom so I can lavish it on myself; freedom is given to me for others.

Some would say the very definition of freedom is following every desire and living without restraint. This is part of freedom freedom from the law. But when our flesh is unrestrained we are not free from ourselves. Jesus accomplished this on the cross as well: Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires (Gal. 5:24).

My flesh, along with all its self-centered desires, is dead and gone. As Paul says in Galatians 2:20, I no longer live but Christ lives in me. The life of Jesus internally restrains selfishness. His life needs no law because he is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness and self-control. Against such things there is no law (Gal. 5:22-23).

Jesus has brought us into complete freedom. His life needs no rules because it moves lawfully and unselfishly of its own volition. Its love, not law. The more we live by faith in this Son of God the Son of God within the more freedom we will experience.

Teague McKamey lives in Ellensburg with his wife and two children. He is an Elder at Thorp Community Church and blogs at thevoiceofone.org.

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Messages of Faith: What complete freedom means | Religion - Daily Record-News

Utah news organizations are fighting to maintain the freedom of the press during COVID-19, and theyre doing it from remote newsrooms.

The Salt Lake Tribune began working remotely on March 13. Other newsrooms, including the Deseret News, KUER and the Daily Universe followed. Jennifer Napier-Pearce, editor of the Tribune, said her reporters are learning that they can successfully work remotely. I suspect more of the team will (work remotely in the future), Napier-Pearce said. I dont think the all-remote newsroom will be the new normal.

Savannah Hopkinson is an opinion editor for the Deseret News. Her team now meets with sources and each other via virtual meetings. Its a different dynamic, Hopkinson said.

In trying to keep social distancing mandates, reporters are also changing how they speak with their sources. Chuck Wing, director of photography for KSL-TV and the Deseret News, said speaking to people virtually could take a toll on reporters storytelling ability. The interpersonal connection is just not the same, Wing said.

The sentiment is the same within the Salt Lake Tribune. My reporters and photographers say they miss in-person interaction, Napier-Pearce said.

A far more pressing issue, according to Napier-Pearce and Wing, has been a decrease in transparency from sources. Weve had to call out officials, Napier-Pearce said.

The Deseret News recently had to deal with a lack of transparency from the University of Utah when drive-up COVID-19 testing became available. The university tried to stop the publication of a photo of an actual patient being tested from their car. Instead, the university offered a staged photo for publication.

In the end, the Deseret News chose to publish photos of real patients. Were not going to publish fake photos, Wing said.

In April, HB 3009 was presented to the Utah House of Representatives. It outlined a situation dealing with additional extraordinary circumstances that allow a local governmental entity to delay responding to a records requests. This would mean that governments could delay reporters access to public information.

Jeffery Hunt is a lawyer who practices First Amendment media law. He represented the Utah Media Coalition to object to the provision. According to Hunt, government employees should find a way to provide this service remotely. Just because there is a public health emergency doesnt mean that transparency goes out the window, Hunt said. I would argue that just the opposite should be occurring.

The bill ultimately did not pass. Its absolutely critical that we have advocates for the press, he said.

When it comes to attacks on the press, Wing said hes grateful there are coalitions of news organizations that have banded together. Theres strength in numbers, he said. There are an awful lot of people out there who crave the information.

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Utah newsrooms protect freedom of the press during pandemic - Universe.byu.edu