Dear friends,
As anticipated, President Biden formally announced his bid for reelection. I’m surprised at my own enthusiasm. I appreciate his experience, his growth on important issues, including reproductive rights and abortion, a word which he has learned to pronounce.
The word abortion is never going to trip off Biden’s tongue easily. A friend and I have been discussing Biden’s capacity to put his religious beliefs aside to promote policies that he knows to be just. This is a measure of his humanity and decency.
If he had changed one word in his roll-out video, it would have signaled to me a firmer defense of trans rights: Biden criticized those who are “dictating what health care decisions [people] can make.” But I think he is committed, in his grandpa way.
This is not an insult. My own mom, who has Alzheimers, has understandably failed to manage her nonbinary grandchild’s pronouns. A few years ago, in a moment of considerable clarity, she remarked:
I have to try because I love them.
I detect Biden’s commitment. He doesn’t have to fully understand. He has to promote policies that are just. My springling has a US passport with an X on it.
We know that action moves policy.
Six thousand Catholic nuns from more than 25 organizations expressed their support this month for the Church’s position of “full inclusion of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive individuals.” They expressed their wholehearted belief that God loves everyone and acknowledged that they must do more to fight against “harm and erasure” of trans and nonbinary people.
Biden could have highlighted climate policy, on which he has been better than most, while still being an unreliable ally.
On Friday, Biden created the new Office of Environmental Justice and promised that
“Environmental justice will be the mission of the entire government, woven directly into how we work with state, local, tribal and territorial governments.”
He has handed us a tool with which to push him in the right direction. And we will.
Comment on the EPA’s proposed rule to strengthen air pollution standards. This quick action is from Moms Clean Air Force.
Please visit Moms Clean Air Force for additional opportunities to comment on proposed rules.
In North Carolina, a new bill has been introduced to protect the Rights of Nature. If it passes, it would be the first state law to elevate the status of nature
from “property” to a rights-bearing entity, like a person, and recognize the rights of ecosystems — and the human and natural communities that depend on them —as having legally enforceable rights to exist, regenerate, flourish and be free from pollution.
Learn more about The Rights of the Haw River Ecosystem Act, H.B. 795 and sign the petition if you’re in NC. Otherwise, send it to a friend there.
Actions large and small are the good news. As right wing leaders are targeting LGBTQ+ students, library books, and the teaching of history, voices of reason are winning school board elections.
Student walkouts in Florida are challenging the expansion of the state’s dangerous policies. A new group, called Walkout2learn, organized hundreds of actions on Friday throughout Florida in opposition to censorship.
Two weeks ago, Michigan’s Clean Slate reforms took effect, with hundreds of thousands of state residents seeing at least one conviction automatically wiped from their record. The law includes a defined waiting period, after which records are erased.
Support Clean Slate legislation in NYS by contacting your legislators! This quick action is from Clean Slate NY.
Criminal justice reform is part of the original mission of this publication, because mass incarceration is a waste of human potential.
Here’s an action you can take in Vermont to prioritize care over cages, courtesy of Lena Greenberg.
Last week, Lamar Johnson made a trip to see Ginny Schrappen, a woman who corresponded with him for decades while he was imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. He was exonerated earlier this year, thanks to the Midwest Innocence Project.
The US Supreme Court has finally agreed to allow another man convicted of murder, Rodney Reed, to demand DNA testing of crime scene evidence in order to identify the murderer in the case for which he is on death row.
Learn more about Rodney Reed’s case and support the Innocence Project.
Harry Belafonte died today. He was a beautiful and talented man, and he used his popularity, influence, and wealth to fight for justice throughout his career.
Just before the 2016 election, the New York Times published an essay by Belafonte. He opened with lines from a Langston Hughes poem that I love and have taught many times:
“O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!”
— Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”
Belafonte’s next sentence — What old men know is that everything can change. — was not about Trump, whom he called “permanently feckless and immature.” He was talking about himself, and the changes he had witnessed and worked to bring about.
Belafonte rejected the unspecific and simplistic messages of Trump’s candidacy and he recognized what was at stake by putting a person with a “simple, mean boy’s heart” in a position to destroy what we have worked to build — a flawed society, but one where we struggle to raise the “standards of humanity, hope and decency.”
Biden is an old man, and he knows that everything can change. He continues to talk about what America will be. In spite of his campaign rhetoric, he will not finish the job. Neither will we. We just have to keep raising the standards.
with love,
L