Tag Archives: Justice

Virginia gets a Valentine

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U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen begins her opinion striking down the Marshall-Newman amendment by quoting Mildred Loving:

We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn’t that what marriage is? . . . I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry. Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. . . . I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

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A Bare Minimum

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The minimum hourly wage

The minimum hourly wage

We are against slavery.

So, how little in wages may we pay so that we are not some latter day variant of the old South’s peculiar institution?

Are we going to pay so paltry an hourly wage that someone has to force an employer to do the right thing – to pay a decent wage?

The answer is yes – that’s exactly what we’ve had to do, and now the established “minimum” is itself too little.

This nation has an unflattering history of employers taking advantage of workers unfairly.

Children were forced to work in sweat shops under such harsh conditions that we had to outlaw this child abuse.

Workers were in harness for so many hours, they’d drop, and we had to establish legislative standards limiting how long an employer could force one to work.

There have also always been employers who paid too little for an hour of work.

We talk about compassion, but too many employers scrimp on what they pay a worker, take advantage of their desperation, increase their profits at the expense of a worker’s misery, by denying him a decent wage. 

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Yom Kippur 2013

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The Reverend Don Prange from St James UCC forwarded Rabbi Arthur O. Waskow’s 2013 Yom Kippur prayer.

Yom Kippur 2013

Isaiah breaks into the official liturgy of Yom Kippur
https://theshalomcenter.org/content/isaiah-breaks-official-liturgy-yom-k…

The Prophetic Reading for the Fast of Yom Kippur, Isaiah 57:14-58:14
[Slightly midrashic translation by Rabbi Arthur O. Waskow, with interruptions in red]

And God said:
Open up, open up, Clear a path!
Clear away all obstacles
From the path of My People!
For so says the One
Who high aloft forever dwells,
Whose Name is Holy:

I dwell on high, in holiness,
And therefore with the lowly and humiliated,
To breathe new breath into the humble,
To give new heart to the broken-hearted.

For your sin of greed
Through My Hurricane of Breath YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh
I smashed you.
Worse: I hid My face, withheld My Breath.

–The richest 300 Persons on earth (about 1/3 from the U.S.) together have more wealth than the bottom 3 billion people on earth, an INEQUALITY by a factor of 10 million.
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The Promised Land

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Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Reverend Martin Luther King compared himself to Moses who led his people out of slavery, saw the Promised Land, but never got there himself.

In April of 1968, Martin Luther King was in Memphis, Tennessee supporting a garbage workers’ strike.

On the evening of April 3rd, King told the congregation, “I don’t know what will happen now.”  He said he’d “been to the mountain top”   and “seen the Promised Land” but “I may not get there with you.”

His promise, however, was that “we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

Toward evening, that next day, April 4th, King stepped out on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.

A rifleman shot a .30-06 caliber bullet that broke Dr. King’s jaw, cut through his neck and spinal cord, and the slug lay spent in his shoulder blade.  King died.

Robert Kennedy said in Indianapolis to a crowd that had not yet heard of King’s death that we must “tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.”

King couldn’t have agreed more and his prescription to reach the Promised Land was to challenge “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.”

We know today that the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott, deciding that a man was property, was wrong.

But we don’t’ seem to appreciate that a Supreme Court that compromises voting rights is also wrong. Continue reading →