Dear friends,
Sometimes, I feel sad for people on the other side of the political divide. This happens when they expose the smallness of their vision, and of the circle that they draw around themselves.
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte got an appeal from his adult child, David, who is a nonbinary trans person. David, who had avoided public discussion of their gender identity, chose to speak out about anti-trans legislation.
Gianforte met with David in March to discuss SB 458 — which defines sex as binary — and SB 99, the bill to ban gender-affirming care that led to the vitriol directed at Representative Zooey Zephyr.
David had no illusions about the impact of their appeal. Greg offered some empty language about compassion and empathy. The governor’s response to David’s appeal came down to his standing in the Republican Party and his concerns for his career.
Poor Greg. He demonstrated to David and all the world that the bonds of care and affection for his own child and the many other trans people in his state — two of whom serve in the 100-member Montana House — are no match for his narrow ambition.
Kevin McCarthy — another figure defined by narrow ambition rather than principle — rallied Republicans behind a bill to raise the debt ceiling while cutting expenditures on health and climate, “imposing work requirements on social programs, and expanding mining and fossil fuel production.”
Heather Cox Richardson offered this analysis:
McCarthy was pleased to have passed his measure with not a single vote to spare, but it appears he got the vote because everyone knew it was dead on arrival at the Senate.
Is there a smaller man? Sadly, yes.
When the US Supreme Court finally agreed to allow 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 in Texas, Justice Clarence Thomas was among those who dissented in Reed’s case.
Thomas was alone in insisting that
[t]he pending civil rights suit “is no barrier to the prompt execution of Reed’s lawful sentence,” he wrote. He suggested that Texas should move forward.
Imagine arguing for the death penalty in a 30-year-old case for which the state has likely already punished the wrong man. And yes, while this is beyond awful, I find myself sad for Clarence Thomas. I don’t know anyone that small and mean.
Thomas’s remarks may not be grounds for impeachment, but they are a sharp reminder that justice is the wrong title for Thomas.
Senator Ed Markey called this week for Clarence Thomas to step down, remarking that
Thomas “cannot judge right from wrong, so why should he be judging the countries most important cases on the highest court.”
Sign the petition to Congress to impeach Clarence Thomas. This quick action is from Move On.
I am feeling sad about our governor. I have worked to move her administration in the right direction on a range of issues. Her own narrowness caused her to sacrifice almost all of her agenda to rewrite the bail reforms of 2019.
Earlier this month, Assemblymember Latrice Walker said,
“It is cruel to say, ‘I will give you housing, but only in jail. I will treat your mental health, but only in jail. I will feed you, but only in jail.’ Pretrial incarceration is not the answer. I want public safety, but not at the expense of our civil rights.”
Walker has been on a hunger strike to resist rollbacks to bail reform, which will give judges wide latitude to lock people up.
Along similar lines, Alabamans are standing up to protest the construction of a new prison in Elmore County. The site appears to have sinkholes, which means that funds to build it will literally go down a hole in the ground.
Some of the funding being used for the construction is supposed to be directed to community colleges. To follow Latrice Walker’s observation, Alabama will invest in education, but only for people who are locked up.
Sign this petition to stop construction of a prison using education funding. This quick action is from Alabama Students Against Prisons.
For her part, Governor Hochul set aside her commitment to affordable housing to ‘win’ on the question of bail reform. Her smallness stands in contrast to Walker’s moral courage.
When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.
I am sad for all of us that Gianforte the elder, McCarthy, Thomas, and Hochul did not get enough light. I am sorry that all they can think of is protecting their phony-baloney jobs instead of doing them well.
It’s Friday and it’s Arbor Day. Walk among the trees and appreciate them, as they are. This helps with the sadness.
Plant trees to fight habitat loss so that birds don’t need cages in order to have homes.
Earlier this week, Garrett Bucks posted another beautiful piece. In it, he recalled a story about his time as a camp counselor
One week, my best friend Andy took a kid under his wing— a big middle-school-aged guy who had a tough home-life and who channeled his rage into walloping the hell out of other kids. Andy and our large angry camper had a bunch of after-school-special style hearts-to-hearts together (if after-school specials were directed by Noam Chomsky and bell hooks) and by the end of the week, the kid had a new mantra he was repeating: “Fight crap, not other people.”
We will fight more crap next week.
with love,
L