Freedom for – and from - religion

Bill Knight column for 9-5, 6 or 7, 2019

Six years ago this month, I read a piece in the Catholic magazine America about ecumenism, and though it focused on Christian unity, its recollection of the New Testament line from John’s reporting of Jesus’ comment – “My prayer is not for [my followers] alone. I pray also for those who will believe through their message, that all of them may be one” – struck me as pertaining to everyone.

Three years ago, I attended an interfaith meeting at Peoria’s Islamic Foundation, where an evangelical pastor, a Presbyterian minister and elected officials all spoke on Americans’ freedom to worship, and apart from all of their insightful words, the turnout was inspiring: About 1,000 people shared love, respect and joy at recognizing the many ways to worship.

The audience ranged from Millennials with tattoos, Mormon missionaries and a U.S. Attorney, to veterans, a judge and seniors. It seemed like how I envision crowds at the Pearly Gates: “All are welcome,” as we’ve sung at Mass.

It brought me to tears more than once to see everyday people appreciating commonalities amid differences.

Now, however, some are increasingly trying to exploit differences to divide us under the guise of “religious liberty” statutes and lawsuits, where individuals’ or businesses’ purported beliefs take precedence over basic rights and existing federal, state and local laws.

At the least, the reactionary drift makes personal preferences more important than society’s; at the most it subverts the idea and ideal of regular people’s civil rights in a free nation.

Vice President Mike Pence has claimed the need to defend “traditional Christian beliefs,” but it’s really part of a troubling trend of government using its power to exalt some faiths and denigrate others. For instance, the Conscience and Religious Freedom Unit was set up last year within the Department of Health and Human Services, led by anti-gay attorney Roger Severino (from the Right-wing Heritage Foundation and the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society).

“When Pence advocates for ‘traditional Christian beliefs,’ it’s important to ask whose tradition,” says Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Interfaith Alliance. “He, like all of us, has the right to his biblical interpretation and faith. But what he’s doing is conflating disagreement with infringement and rights, and also ignoring the rich diversity of faith in this country.”

Indeed, our Constitution’s First Amendment for centuries has let many faiths thrive. The United States has never had a “state religion,” no “correct” way to worship.

But laws can be warped to favor the powerful or a majority. This backward movement might be traced to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, approved in 1993 during the Clinton administration to protect Native American sacraments. But in the last decade, that well-intentioned effort has been perverted to permit businesses and individuals to use it as a pretext to discriminate. The best-known examples are the Colorado baker who was eventually allowed to refuse service to a gay couple, and the Hobby Lobby corporation that persuaded the Supreme Court that their faith allowed them to deny some health benefits to workers.

Similar court rulings and laws exist in dozens of states. In 2016, six such laws were passed, and there have been more than 60 since, including one approved in June by the Texas legislature that prevents the enforcement of laws that supposedly impede people’s or companies’ moral convictions.

Authoritarian regimes require an illusion of exceptionalism that in turn means scapegoating others: minorities, the poor, people seeking asylum, LGBTQ citizens, Muslims…

A free people must recognize that differences can coexist, even celebrated, and that packaging bigotry in the trappings of faith is perilous to all.

“Objections to Pence’s views on LGBTQ people or other rights are not an infringement on his or anyone else’s religious freedom,” Moline says. “Suggesting that they are, or that evangelical Christians are ‘under attack,’ is not only wrong, it is dangerous.”

Making space for the free exercise of religion isn’t the same as imposing a preferred set of morals. When that happens, discrimination is normalized; everyone loses.

“What the vice president and many like him are describing is not an infringement of their rights or persecution, but theological disagreement and different beliefs that are as protected as their own,” adds Moline. “Pence’s assertion that his rights are being infringed upon ignores the historical understanding of the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. The First Amendment protects my Judaism just as it protects another’s Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or atheism.”

Sometimes, I see bias cloaked in holy writ, and my eyes once more water.

For the wrong reasons.

Trump adds insult to injuries with Scalia nomination

Bill Knight column for 9-2, 3 or 4, 2019

Days before Labor Day, President Trump on Tuesday (Aug. 27) confirmed that July rumors about his nomination for Labor Secretary were accurate, as he officially nominated Eugene Scalia to be the next Secretary of Labor.

Unions and pro-worker groups and politicians will forcefully oppose the move, but Scalia’s confirmation by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the GOP-majority Senate is likely – continuing the most anti-worker administration in U.S. history.

Scalia, a Washington corporate attorney and member of the Right-wing Federalist Society, is the 56-year-old son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The nomination hasn’t shocked labor leaders.

“It’s no surprise that Eugene Scalia has a long record of representing Big Business at the expense of working people,” said Chris Shelton, president of the Communications Workers of America. “He’s spent his whole career helping Big Business clients shirk their responsibility to treat their workers with respect and dignity.”

As a private-practice partner with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Scalia has represented Chevron, Kraft, Dole, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Viacom, Walmart, and Saudi Arabian oil interests. The nomination fits a pattern of Trump choosing employer minions, unionists say. The billionaire President’s first selection, in 2016, was Andy Puzder, a fast-food executive and critic of raising the minimum wage. After Puzder withdrew following his domestic-violence record, Trump pegged former bank chairman Alex Acosta, who had the position for two years until resigning due to his role as prosecutor in a plea deal for billionaire sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The Labor Department is supposed to safeguard workers and enforce laws enacted for workers’ benefits.

“The ability of everyday people to organize and collectively bargain with employers and others who have power over their economic sustainability is fundamental to a healthy democracy,” said Erica Smiley, Executive Director of the labor coalition Jobs with Justice (JwJ). “The Department of Labor is tasked with upholding this critical practice in a way that allows working people and executives to come to the table and negotiate on equal footing. This includes policies such as insisting employers provide ‘just cause’ when terminating someone to prevent retaliation, taking responsibility for the conditions of employees at all levels of contracting, and supporting workers’ ability to form unions. Any effort to disproportionately favor corporations at the Department of Labor inevitably undermines and erodes our democracy,”

The Senate didn’t confirm Eugene Scalia when George W. Bush nominated him to a Labor Department post in 2001, when the AFL-CIO blasted his “extreme views on key worker protections.” But Bush installed him anyway n a recess appointment. Now, the labor federation says, “He has threatened to destroy workers’ retirement savings [and] challenged the expansion of health care. The Secretary of Labor needs to be a true advocate for working people. Scalia’s views are dangerously outside the mainstream.”

Other labor-rights advocates agree.

David Madland from the Center for American Progress said, “His appointment is part of a larger pattern where Trump clearly goes after workers.”

For example, in 2000 Scalia fought the Occupational Safety and Health Administration when it tried to impose a rule on employers to identify and take responsibility for hazards contributing to repetitive stress injuries, arguing that the science behind prevention was “quackery.” Congress overturned the rule the next year.

In 2006, on behalf of Walmart, Scalia helped the corporate giant beat back a Maryland law requiring the company to spend 8 percent of their payroll costs on health care or pay into Medicaid.

And in 2010, he won a case for the Business Roundtable, a corporate lobby, against the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, which sought financial oversight after 2008’s economic meltdown.

Continuing to seek ways to eliminate regulations and worker protections, the Trump administration already has stacked the National Labor Relations Board with corporate voices, rolled back overtime rules for some workers, and continues to oppose raising the minimum wage. And the anti-worker agenda has Republican support.

“I’m confident he’ll be a champion for working Americans against red tape and burdensome regulation,” said U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

Still, some remember what the cabinet position is supposed to do.

“The Secretary of Labor has the crucial responsibility of ensuring that employers provide working Americans in the United States with a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, safe and equitable working conditions, and other workplace rights,” added Jessica Felix Romero, JwJ’s Director of Communications. “Working people deserve no less than a champion and an advocate at the Department of Labor.”

Short takes on new Americana music

Bill Knight column for 8-29, 30 or 31, 2019

Capsule reviews can be like speed dating in a bouncy house. They risk insulting artists who spent substantial investments of inspiration, energy and time, but such glimpses also are a way to acknowledge their efforts.

(Likewise, excuse the name-dropping comparisons, but they’re efficient, too.)

Anyway, much of the 4th of July was spent listening to American music – not the John Philip Sousa/Kate Smith variety, but the red-white-and-blue roots music from small-label outfits offering that hardscrabble heart, charm and creativity traced to Appalachia and Texas and a heritage of rank-and-file roadhouse/barn dance expressions.

However, there were few fireworks and not enough hooks – those unforgettable melodies that stay with listeners like summer memories – in these four CDS. An exception is Van Dyke Brown (the alter ego of 40-year-old Scott Hone), whose debut CD “Holy Libel” has an acoustic-oriented sound, but with a pedal steel guitar and a pleasant pop feeling, like CSN&Y when they got along or Paul Simon if he were less pretentious.

“The Fair” launches this ride with a narrative becoming a novella (appropriate since Honea is an author as well as a filmmaker and photojournalist). His word play itself tells stories: “The night I dropped acid and went to the fair/ I spent 36 dollars throwing darts through the air/ for a Motley Crue mirror that would soon need repair / and I laid there knowing I'd never leave there.”

“Sycamore” is a memory of visiting a cemetery close to a family home, seeing June bugs and feeling gravel between the toes and reflecting, “You come and you go, you love and you leave.” “Five Miles” has a more indie/country feel, and “Gary” is a sheer thrill, a track of “Magical Mystery Tour” psychedelia that Honea calls “cosmic folk.”

The rest:

* Chuck Hawthorne’s “Fire Out of Stone,” his second record, is a collection of songs about surviving and healing. His vocals aren’t unlike Bob Dylan in his pre-electric period or maybe Roger Whittaker during the height of his ubiquitous TV commercials in the ’70s and ’80s, and “Such is Life” and “Broken Good” stand out, but a strong theme can unfortunately also result in a thread of sameness.

* Meghan Hayes’ “Seen Enough Leavers” CD photos indicate she went for a forlorn waif-with-an-edge look, but despite that choice, her voice is reminiscent of tender Judy Collins, easygoing Linda Ronstadt or rollicking Alison Krauss. Pointed and pouty on “Burley” and “Potholes,” two other cuts are delightfully incongruous and appealing: “A Birthday in the Pawnshop” is as entertaining as Joni Mitchell jamming with Jimmy Page, and “Second to Last,” though somewhat overproduced, has an organ wash like a Springsteen anthem from the ’80s.

* Rod Picott singing on “Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil” sounds like an accessible Tom Waits, less gruff than gravelly. Recovering from health issues, Picott recorded 12 tunes at home alone, so the sound and sense are as private and casual as time in a confessional. Emotionally charged, but not exactly powerful and certainly draining, the gentle, bleak songs range from whispering asides to poetic images. “A 38 Special & A Hermes Purse” describes “another lost soul waiting to be found” and himself as “a train wreck turning Beaujolais into p**s,” “A Guilty Man” features a provocative simile: “Guilt as strong as gasoline.”

Throughout this batch, there’s a repeated tendency for the poignant slipping to somber to abject anger and outright depression: something like what a wrongfully convicted inmate might feel in prison.

Honea escaped such bondage and celebrates freedom.