The Poor People’s Campaign and its high-profile and charismatic leader, Bishop William J. Barber II, will lead a “Selma-to-Montgomery style” march in Texas this month to protest Republican-led efforts to limit voting rights in the state and around the nation….
Critical Race Theory, voter suppression and historical negation: The irony of it all
In his Key into the Language of America (1643), the earliest Native American/English grammar, Roger Williams, that colonial disquieter of the religio-political peace, described his experiences with the Narragansets and other Northeastern native tribes: They were hospitable to everybody, whomsoever…
Religious coalition files suit to stop Georgia’s new voter law
Bishop Carl McRae remembers growing up in the Jim Crow South as a native Georgian. What he sees happening in Georgia with new restrictive voting laws feels even worse than that, he said. “I’ve never seen anything so bold. And…
Voting rights and the ninth commandment
It shouldn’t feel so hard to write about voting rights in a way that will not offend partisan sensibilities. It didn’t used to be this way. In 2006, Congress reauthorized the 1965 Voting Rights Act with a unanimous vote in…
Texas takes the spotlight as statehouses across the nation seek to restrict trans teens and voter access
Some Texas legislators want to outdo Georgia and Arkansas with a combination of bills restricting transgender teens and voting access for poor and minority citizens. The Texas bills — four concerning transgender health care, six concerning transgender athletes and two…
It’s up to the Senate now to fix our democracy
Everywhere I go, I meet people of all ages and backgrounds who wonder whether their votes count, whether they can really make a difference. Many of them, sadly but understandably, believe our government no longer works for them. I get…
Holy Week 2021: Justice, gospel and cups of cold water
On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Ala., for leading an “unlawful” protest in the city. That same day, a group of eight clergymen including five bishops (Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist), a Presbyterian, a…
A vote is ‘a kind of prayer,’ Warnock says in first Senate speech
A vote is “a kind of prayer,” Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock said in his first speech on the Senate floor as a newly elected legislator. The March 17 speech was a blistering call to protect voting rights and a critique…
Voting rights and the people who died for them: Jonathan Daniels et al.
A March 11 article in the Washington Post began with these two paragraphs: “The GOP’s national push to enact hundreds of new election restrictions could strain every available method of voting for tens of millions of Americans, potentially amounting to…