Author: Alan Bean

Why Billy Graham is down with a Mormon president

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Romney and the Grahams work things out

By Alan Bean

Evangelist Billy Graham has tacitly endorsed Mitt Romney’s presidential bid and his website no longer characterizes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) as a cult.  This is just another sign that a major realignment is underway in American religion.

Evangelicals defined themselves in opposition to Roman Catholicism until the late 1970s when activist-preachers like Francis Schaeffer and Jerry Falwell built a new evangelical coalition around an unreconstructed version of Catholic pro-life theology.  This informal evangelical-Catholic coalition was driven by a fear of liberalism in both its secular and religious expressions.

Throughout the 1970s few evangelicals gave much thought to the abortion issue.  In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention essentially endorsed Roe v. Wade at its annual conventions as late as 1976.  A decade later, a thoroughgoing pro-life position had become a litmus test among American evangelicals. (more…)

Presidential Debate: Top 10 Questions That Weren’t Asked

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By Alan Bean

The folks at New American Media put their heads together and came up with ten questions you didn’t hear at the first two presidential debates and aren’t likely to encounter at debate number three.  Debates are extended pandering sessions in which the candidates compete to see who can appeal most effectively to the enthusiasms, bias and fears of the American middle class.  The candidates’ indebtedness to corporate funding is generally ignored and, as these questions suggest, the plight of the poor is hardly ever mentioned.  Thus far, Governor Romney has made a few references to poverty (usually suggesting that the president’s policies are creating more of it) while Obama has studiously avoided the subject (so he won’t feed the impression that he is indebted to the welfare-addicted 47%).  What questions would you ask the presidential candidates if you got the chance?

Presidential Debate: Top 10 Questions That Weren’t Asked

As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney squared off in the second presidential debate last night, New America Media editors posed 10 questions that have largely gone unasked — and unanswered – in their campaigns.

1. U.S.-Mexico Border
Mitt Romney has pledged to finish the wall on the border with Mexico. What will that mean for U.S. relations with the country that gave his grandfather sanctuary as a polygamist?

2. Drugs
Our prisons are overcrowded with people who were arrested on non-violent drug offenses. Street violence in American inner cities is largely a result of an illegal drug economy. Meanwhile, abuse of prescription drugs is a growing crisis. What would you change about current drug policy to alleviate these problems?  (more…)

The Penalty is Exile

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By Alan Bean

The criminalization of immigration, or “crimmigration” as it is sometimes known, is a recent development.  Michelle Fei lays out the basic problem,

The issue that immigrants face is that, now there is this increasing collaboration between the criminal justice system and the deportation system.  So, for basically, all kinds of immigrants, including green-card holders, undocumented immigrants, people with visas.  This means that once you enter the criminal justice system, often times you are on a fast-track to deportation, usually with no chance of ever coming back to the United States.

There is more crimmigration information packed into this radio program than I have previously discovered in any single source.

The Penalty is Exile: How Immigration and Criminalization Collide

Written by Cory Fischer-Hoffman

Under President Obama more than 1 million people have been deported from the United States. We’re told many of those people are criminals who’ve broken more than just immigration law. On this edition, producer Cory Fischer-Hoffman takes a closer look at how immigration and the criminal justice system work together, to detain and deport hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Transcript:

Cory Fischer-Hoffman: Have you ever traveled on Greyhound Bus Before?  Do you know the feeling of standing in the station, looking around to see if your bus will be full and hoping that after a smooth and uneventful journey, you will safely arrive to your destination?

In January of 2010, Alex Alvarez boarded a greyhound bus in Lawrence, Kansas and then got off his bus in Orlando to transfer to Immokalee, Florida,  but he never arrived to his final destination.

Alex:, I was entering the bus station, and I entered calmly but there was someone who detained me and asked, “where are you going?” I said “to Florida, to work.” and then they asked me for my papers.  I didn’t present any documentation and so, they immediately handcuffed me and they took me to a room, and they said, “sorry you can’t travel because you don’t have papers from here.” In this bus station, it was two of us who were detained, because we were the only ones who were immigrants. But, we didn’t commit any crime, absolutely none

Cory Fischer-Hoffman: Alex Alvarez is from Guatemala, and like so many others he left his country in search of way to provide for his family back home.  Alex worked in a bakery in Florida for four years and then traveled to Kansas.  Since he was unable to find reliable work, he decided to return to Florida and see if he could get his old job back.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement stopped him, solely based on “looking like an immigrant,” Alex said.  They handcuffed and arrested him and then took him to an immigrant detention center.

Alex: I was in an immigrant detention center.  They asked me a lot of questions, “what’s your name, what is this, what is that?” as you were a criminal, even though, I didn’t do anything.  Then they took me to another detention center, where there were more people, and throughout the whole time we were handcuffed.  It enrages me to think about how they treat people, I am not a criminal that they should treat me like that, with chains ties around my wrists, ankles and waist. (more…)

Yard signs, hurt feelings and hope

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By Alan Bean

Driving through a prestigious neighborhood a few days ago, I was accosted by dozens of political yard signs.  I use the word “accosted” because the signs were all for candidates I won’t be voting for. If the signs were celebrating my people, I would have felt reassured and motivated.

Surprised by my strong visceral reaction, I got to the root of the matter: the signs hurt my feelings.

I thought of the yard sign I planted on my own front lawn a couple of weeks ago.  The intention was to encourage my neighbors to vote for the good guys, but how do people who don’t share my political outlook feel when they drive past my home?  Am I hurting their feelings? (more…)

How the US government used a Mexican drug lord to convict an innocent man

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Ramsey Muniz runs for Texas governor in 1970

By Alan Bean

Ramsey (Ramiro) Muniz is a man of seventy who hobbles on a bad hip, but his spirit grows stronger with each passing day.  Ramsey has now spent two full decades in federal prisons (including three years in solitary confinement) for participating in an alleged narcotics conspiracy.  Supporters feel that a septuagenarian with a broken body and a vibrant heart is a sterling candidate for a presidential commutation.  I agree.  But first we must face a troubling question.  Somebody entered into a conspiracy with a Mexican drug lord, but was it Ramsey Muniz or was it the federal government?

Eager for a big media splash and an easy conviction, the Houston office of the DEA treated their counterparts in Dallas to a series of carefully staged events while intentionally obscuring the truth.  Those who testified at trial had no idea what was going on; those who knew the truth did not testify.  The DEA got a big media win, a drug lord got a plane ticket back to Mexico, and Ramsey Muniz got a life sentence.  (more…)

Declaration of Interdependence

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Posted by Pierre Berastain

I recently came across this Call to Action video by Let it Ripple.  Given that my work centers around restorative justice, I found the clip particularly compelling.  What would it be to feel interconnected?  What change would it create in our communities?  The implications of interdependence and interconnectedness are powerful: it is a call to  LGBQ/T rights, children rights, a more humane immigration reform in our country.  To read the Declaration of Interdependence, please click here.

Harlem activist gets justice

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By Alan Bean

Joseph “Jazz” Heyden, a Harlem activist accused of carrying a dangerous weapon (a miniature, souvenir Yankees bat) in his vehicle, got some very good news yesterday.  Jazz has been a vital part of a movement working to end the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy which is largely reserved for young men of color.  I should note that the attorney representing Mr. Heyden, Sarah Kunstler, is (a) the proud daughter of the famous civil rights attorney William Moses Kunstler, and (b) the co-producer (with her sister Emily) of an excellent documentary that became the foundation of the fight for justice in Tulia, Texas.

Jazz Heyden and his supporters have argued that the defendant’s car was pulled over by officers who had previously been filmed by Mr. Heyden out of a desire for retribution.  Although the DA’s office argues for the record that these claims are not supported by the facts, that should be interpreted as a face-saving gesture rather than a serious argument.

Weapons Charges Reduced for a Monitor of the Police

By KIA GREGORY

Prosecutors in Manhattan have agreed to reduce weapons charges against a Harlem community activist who was arrested after a traffic stop in his former neighborhood last year.

Around 9 p.m. on Dec. 2, the community activist, Joseph Hayden, was pulled over by the police near Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 132nd Street for a broken taillight. According to the criminal complaint, the officers searched his vehicle and found a wooden club and a switchblade.

Mr. Hayden, 71, known for filming videos of police interactions with the Harlem community, said the officers had stopped him in retaliation. Months before his arrest, he said, he had filmed and questioned the same officers as they conducted a vehicle search in the area.

Molly Brottmiller, an assistant district attorney, said in an appearance in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday that the office found “no merit to these claims” and had concluded through an investigation that the stop was lawful.

But prosecutors said that there were issues with the weapons. (more…)

Honoring the real Fannie Lou Hamer

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fannie-lou-hamer-statue

By Alan Bean

A statue has been erected in the Ruleville, Mississippi home of civil rights legend Fannie Lou Hamer.  I have read several stories related to this event, and thus far not one of them mentions the ugly fact that Ms. Hamer, along with several companions, were beaten half to death in the Montgomery County Jail in June of 1963.

It is inspiring to learn that Fannie Lou Hamer’s gospel singing inspired a beleaguered handful of black sharecroppers to enter a courthouse in Indianola.  But the shameful side of the story is often passed over without comment.  It is shameful that courthouse personnel refused to allow Hamer and friends to register, as is the fact that she was summarily fired when she returned to her Sunflower County plantation, as is the fact that, later that night, someone fired a shotgun at the home in which Fannie Lou took refuge.

It is inspiring to imagine an intrepid Fannie Lou Hamer telling Hubert Humphrey that the Freedom Democrats of Mississippi didn’t come all the way to the Atlantic City Democratic Convention in 1964 “for no two votes”.  It is shameful that Lyndon Johnson, the civil rights president, called a press conference for the sole purpose of deflecting media attention away from Ms. Hamer’s testimony before the credentials committee.

But Fannie Lou got the best of the world’s most powerful man, a man who dismissed her as “that ignorant woman”.  Johnson feared, with good reason, that if the Mississippi Freedom Democrats were accepted as delegates in good standing, he would lose the support of Dixiecrat Senator James Eastland and white votes across the South.  Hamer’s testimony was so gripping that all three major networks featured her entire presentation on the evening news.  America was treated to a blow-by-blow account of the indignities Fannie Lou Hamer and her friends experienced at the courthouse in Indianola and the horrors she encountered in Montgomery County, Mississippi.  She left nothing to the imagination.

America was never the same.

I was pleased to see that the daughter of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers was present for unveiling of Fannie Lou’s statue.  The article failed to mention that Evers was assassinated while Hamer and her companions were being assaulted in Montgomery County.  Fannie Lou Hamer was an untutored woman with a courageous heart, a powerful singing voice, and a genius for grassroots organizing.  The price for changing America was steep, but Fannie Lou paid it in full.  God rest her soul.

Please click on the video and listen to the words that changed America.

Affirmative action and the traumatized twentieth

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By Alan Bean

As this excellent article in Colorlines suggests, simple racial inequality has no bearing on the affirmative action debate, and for one simple reason:

 In order to argue that affirmative action is necessary to remedy past discrimination, schools would have to present evidence showing that they’ve previously discriminated against the groups they’re now going to great lengths to admit. Doing so would open them up to litigation from students of color who’d been denied.

With equity off the table, universities have only one legally acceptable argument: affirmative action creates a diverse student body and diversity is intrinsically beneficial to students. This argument makes sense to white administrators who would feel uncomfortable presiding over a homogeneous student body.  According to Colorlines: (more…)

Are we losing our religion?

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By Alan Bean

“About 19.6 percent of Americans say they are ‘nothing in particular,’ agnostic or atheist, up from about 8 percent in 1990.” That statistic is from a report released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.  Most of the folks in the broad “None” category (68%) believe in a God of some kind; it’s just that they have no use for organized religion and don’t relate to any of the traditional religious labels.

And then there’s the surprising fact that the Unitarian Universalists grew nationwide by 15.8% in the past decade.  Who knew?

Meanwhile, Southern Baptists have been experiencing five straight years of membership decline and have now fallen below the magic 16 million figure they worked so hard to attain.

Overall, evangelical churches are still growing (albeit with less vigor than formerly) while old mainline Protestant denominations like the United Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians continue a half-century plunge in membership and cultural influence. In other words, we are seeing growth among those who define God and the godly life in explicit terms and among those who don’t want to nail anything down.

How do we account for the significant growth on the liberal end of the religious spectrum?  According to the WP acticle, the “none of the above” people

are strongly liberal on social issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage, but no different from the public overall and the religiously affiliated on their preference for a smaller government providing fewer services.  If they have an issue, it’s that they don’t believe religion and politics should mix.

The “Nones” celebrate the separation of church and state because the Religious Right has become such a dominant force within the Republican Party. Back in 1972, Dean Kelley argued that conservative churches are growing because they place strong doctrinal and behavioral demands on their members.  The liberal mainline was in decline because their “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” piety gave congregants little for the heart or the head to feed on. (more…)