Monthly Archives: February 2022

These are excerpts from The Salt Lake Tribunes free Mormon Land newsletter, a weekly highlight reel of developments in and about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Want this newsletter with additional items in your inbox? Subscribe here. You also can support Mormon Land with a donation at Patreon.com/mormonland, where you can access transcripts of our Mormon Land podcasts.

Prospective new hires at Brigham Young University or any church school, seminary or institute whether seeking work as a teacher, coach, cook, counselor or custodian can expect a question that would be unexpected in virtually any other job interview:

Do you have a temple recommend?

The Church Educational System has announced that all of its new Latter-day Saint employees will be required to hold and be worthy to hold such a recommend, a card attesting to their devotion to certain principles and practices, including the payment of tithing and adherence to the faiths Word of Wisdom health code.

The CES institutions are unique among educational institutions. Central to the effort of CES is our mission to develop disciples of Jesus Christ who are leaders in their homes, in the Church of Jesus Christ and in their communities, general authority Seventy Clark G. Gilbert, the faiths commissioner of education, said in a news release. No institutional decision is more important to us than the selection of employees, including faculty, as it has the greatest potential to impact our students.

Current employees and nonmembers need not have a recommend, but they must continue to meet existing employment and ecclesiastical standards.

A By Common Consent guest blogger, identified as John S., is not thrilled with the new rule.

The process of getting a temple recommend, and going to the temple, should be part of a pastoral relationship between a minister and a congregant, the writer states. It was never designed to be an employment evaluation.

(U.S. Census Bureau)Family reading a census record, circa 1950.

Theres a new genealogical mountain to climb, and members are being asked to help reach the summit.

FamilySearch International, the faiths genealogical arm, is inviting volunteers to help make the soon-to-be-released 1950 U.S. census searchable online.

The 1950 census includes the records of 40 million people born during this era of baby boomers, a news release notes, a time that ushered in the civil rights movement, rock n roll, suburban living and a wave of innovations.

Digital images of some 150 million records are set to be released April 1. To volunteer and stay up to date on this massive undertaking, subscribe to FamilySearch.org/1950census.

(Courtesy) Kristine Haglund's new book about the work of Latter-day Saint essayist Eugene England.

Eugene England, a popular BYU professor who died 20 years ago, probably is best known as the founder of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

In her new book, Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal, author Kristine Haglund explores the scholars work and thought as one of the most influential intellectuals in the modern church.

On this weeks show, Haglund examines Englands important contributions to Mormonism, how he was both liberal and conservative, his embrace of church founder Joseph Smith and successor Brigham Young, his friendships and fights with Latter-day Saint apostles, his political views, his theological musings and more.

Listen here.

(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)Robin Scott Jensen, co-editor of a new volume of the Joseph Smith Papers that focuses on the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon, holds a page from the original manuscript in the Church History Library on Jan. 19, 2022.

You could call it saving the best for last as the final volume in the Revelations and Translations series of the groundbreaking Joseph Smith Papers project delivers a real gem: photographs of the 232 pages left from the original Book of Mormon manuscript.

Its exciting to thumb through the manuscript to see how carefully it is written and how few corrections there are, Latter-day Saint historian Grant Hardy says, and to be that close to the core revelation of Mormonism.

Read the story.

Latinas, who do much of the day-to-day service, are vital to the faiths future.

So says anthropologist Brittany Romanello, who has pored over membership data and conducted scores on interviews about this overlooked and underappreciated group of Latter-day Saints.

Read the story.

I will shew thee my faith by my works, proclaims James in the New Testament.

Thats precisely what these Latter-day Saints have done, turning their ideas into idealism as they battle hunger, disease, racism, environmental abuses and more around the globe.

Read the story.

Kris Irvin was a quirky queer Latter-day Saint with an incomparable Twitter presence, a member who challenged the faith to be more accepting and showed up at church every Sunday wearing a bowtie in the colors of the transgender flag and a lapel covered with rainbow pins.

Im there to show queer LDS kids that its possible to be trans and be LDS, said Irvin, who died Jan. 23 at age 35. Even when things are hard and even when people are transphobic or negative or judgmental, this is one reason why Im still there.

(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Kris Irvin, shown in 2019, died last month at age 35.

Read the story.

Religion News Service columnist Jana Riess explores the positives and negatives that come from a study of interactions between LGBTQ Latter-day Saints and their local lay leaders.

Read the column.

(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)Rendering of the Lindon Utah Temple.

A by-invitation-only groundbreaking will be held April 23 for the Lindon Temple, the church announced this week.

The double-spired, three-story, 81,000-square-foot structure is one of 28 existing or planned temples in Utah (seven of them in Utah County).

A week later, on April 30, a groundbreaking will launch work on the Farmington Temple.

The single-spired, single-story, 25,000-square-foot edifice will be New Mexicos second temple.

The Oz-like Washington, D.C., Temple which has been undergoing major renovations since March 2018 now will be rededicated Aug.14, the governing First Presidency announced last week.

The date has been pushed back so that the public open house, which begins April 28, can be extended beyond June 4 as needed.

Demand for viewing inside the revamped 160,000-square-foot edifice, which many say reminds them of the Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz, has proved extremely popular.

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Latest from Mormon Land: BYU's new hires face a new hurdle, and why we're talking about 1950 - Salt Lake Tribune

Fish Island Community Alliance forms to fight development

I am a City of St Augustine resident, a homeowner on Anastasia Island since 2011. My husband is a 40-year resident of North Florida, and a 20-year resident of the island. We have always lived in older homes. I am writing to say I am deeply disturbed by the overdevelopment of this area. I learned recently that the City of St Augustine is 90% built-out. We are seeing destruction of native trees, unique habitatand irreplaceable natural treasures at an alarming rate.

Of recent concern is the proposed development of Fish Island Road, a 33-acre tract of city-owned land north east of the 312 bridge teeming with wildlife that has nowhere else to live.

At what point do the concerns oflocals those of us who live, work, vote, sit in traffic, and pay taxes here matter? And what of the welfare of the other locals: the plants, animals, trees, and birds some on the federally endangered list who share this island community with us?

To provide a forum to discuss these concerns, I have formed theFish Island Community Alliance, becauseall locals matter. Inspired and supported by our friends at Save Fish Island, we are willing to do whatever it takes to preserve the land at Fish Island Road as a passive park. For the community. For the natural world. For the animals who live there. For thelocals.I invite you to share your concerns about development, traffic, loss of habitat, the effects of tourism, and other quality of life issues with our leaders in city and county government.

And please look for theFish Island Community Allianceon Facebook. Join our group, and share in our passion to preserve what we love about St Augustine before its too late.

Elizabeth Smith, St. Augustine

For over 50 years I have had to contend with being a homosexual in a hypocritical patriarchal society.

It went from "It's a sin to be gay" in the '70s, to "Nobody cares, get over it" in the present.

Most of these comments have come from heterosexual men.

Of course it matters if someone is gay, for being gay changes the entire trajectory of one's life.

Best to remain quiet about homosexuality if you are a straight man.

Liberal or conservative, please stop defining my life experience.

And if your name is Bill Maher, please stop making jokes about how Biden should marry Obama so they can be the first gay couple to occupy the White House.

Not funny, especially if you realize through your own life experience that gay marriage becoming legal has helped to divide the country as well as many families and many churches.

I was never for gay marriage, I was for civil unions between gays.

Why?

Because people are often crazy and vindictive with their ideologies, thus change is best if it comes slowly.

Samuel McIlrath, St. Augustine

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Letters to the editor - St. Augustine Record

Patrick R. Miller is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas.

Conservative politicians across America are promoting state-level legislation aimed at preventing new wind farms from being built in their states.

In Kansas, a conservative legislator from urban Johnson County has proposed three bills that would make it difficult to impossible to expand the Kansas wind industry.

The Kansas Association of Counties labeled one of those proposals an assault on local control. That legislation places an unfunded mandate on Kansas counties, forcing them to change zoning policies and expand regulation of building projects.

That zoning change would also restrict property rights of Kansas landowners, who would no longer have the freedom to contract their land for wind development without the approval of their neighbors and possibly voters in an election.

This kind of big government conservatism that sacrifices local control and property rights plays well with ideological conservative activists, but it poses economic risks for Kansas.

Brian Grimmett atKMUWin Wichita recently documented some essential facts about wind energy in Kansas, compiling data from the United States Geological Survey Wind Turbine Database, the 2021 Land-Based Wind Market Report, and the Annual Economic Impacts of Kansas Wind Energy 2020 report.

Kansas ranks second nationally for the proportion of energy produced in the state coming from windover 40 percent of all electricity produced in Kansas in 2020.

Kansas wind turbines can create over 7,000 megawatts, the 4th highest in the country and enough to power about 1.6 million homes, per Grimmetts report.

Kansas has about 3,500 turbines, which generate about $48 million annually in lease payments to Kansas landowners and almost $660 million in lifetime payments to local governments for existing projects. These dollars flow primarily to Kansass rural counties, many of which are struggling economically.

In the last two decades, Kansas wind farms have generated about 8,600 construction jobs and 560 jobs related to on-going maintenance and operation. Per the U.S. Department of Energy, those projects have also indirectly generated almost 13,000 jobs, ranging from component manufacturing to the service industry.

Since Kansas has such immense capacity to develop wind, how does anti-wind politics make sense? Lets ignore the conspiracy theorists who claim that turbines cause cancer, and focus on the three main flavors of anti-wind politics.

Fossil fuel producers see wind as a competitor threatening profits and the roughly $21 billion they receive annually in direct government subsidies, per the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Rather than seeking coexistence with wind, fossil fuel interests pump huge money into politics to oppose it.

Many conservative activists muster various anti-wind arguments, but also see wind as identity politics. For them, wind is a liberal symbolsomething to defeat for a cultural win rather than economically exploit.

Some individual wind projects also have local opponents representing the unique backyard politics of their communities.

Whatever the flavor of opposition, you dont have to be an environmentalist to see that wind means jobs and dollars for Kansas. If Topeka conservatives successfully squash the Kansas wind industry, that economic impact will hit our rural counties hardest.

The politics industry makes money on divisiveness and turning issues that could generate large consensuslike windinto hyper-divisive fault lines that feed media clicks, donations, and attention. Its profitable for politics to turn wind into just another culture war symbol, but that politicization will cost the Kansas economy.

Patrick R. Miller is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas.

The rest is here:

INSIGHT KANSAS: Anti-wind politics could cost the Kansas economy - Hays Post

What makes Amnesty Internationals new report determining that Israel practices the crime of apartheid against Palestinians any different from those that came before it?

Certainly, Israels hysterical reaction (in the words of one Haaretz headline) to the Amnesty study is notably different from its relatively understated response to similar reports recently issued by BTselem, a human rights group in Israel, and the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Palestinian human rights groups like Al-Haq, Adalah and Al Mezan have been advancing an apartheid framework for far longer and the reports from the above-mentioned Israeli and international groups build on their work.

Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and BTselem examined Israels system of control throughout historic Palestine that privileges Israeli Jews and marginalizes Palestinians and violates their rights by varying degrees, largely depending on where they live.

And in contrast to the analyses published by Palestinian groups, those three reports, welcomed as groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting, fall short of placing Israels system of apartheid in the context of settler-colonialism. (A keyword search of Amnestys report yields three results for the terms colonialism and colonial found in the titles of works cited in the footnotes.)

Amnesty repeatedly stresses Israels intent to maintain this system of oppression and domination without making the explicit point that apartheid is a means towards the end of settler colonization: removing Palestinians from the land so that they may be replaced with foreign settlers.

The rights group does state that since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis while minimizing the number of Palestinians and restricting their rights and obstructing their ability to challenge this dispossession.

Credit where credits due: Amnesty blasts away Israels foundational mythology, acknowledging that it was racist from the beginning a departure from the typical liberal attitude that Israel strayed from its ideals somewhere along the way.

Amnesty even points out that many elements of Israels repressive military system in the OPT [West Bank and Gaza] originate in Israels 18-year-long military rule over Palestinian citizens of Israel, beginning in 1948, and that the dispossession of Palestinians in Israel continues today.

Amnesty also acknowledges that in 1948, Jewish individuals and institutions owned around 6.5 percent of Mandate Palestine, while Palestinians owned about 90 percent of the privately owned land there, referring to all of historic Palestine prior to the establishment of the state of Israel.

Within just over 70 years the situation has been reversed, the group adds.

And that is Israels aim the system of oppression and domination stressed by Amnesty is the means by which it has usurped Palestinian land for the benefit of foreign settlers.

After all, Zionist settlers didnt come to Palestine from Europe for the purpose of dominating and oppressing Palestinians; they came with the intent of colonizing their land.

As the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, a Palestinian group, states, any recognition of Israel as an apartheid state should be situated within the context of its settler-colonial regime.

Amnesty also refrains from examining and discussing Zionism, Israels racist state ideology around which its settler-colonialism project is organized.

As Adalah Justice Project, an advocacy group based in the US, asked Amnesty on Wednesday, Is it possible to end apartheid without ending the Zionist settler colonial project?

Despite these critical shortcomings, Amnestys study lays a solid groundwork for holding Israel accountable within the flawed framework of international law and makes forceful recommendations towards that end.

Amnesty joins Palestinian groups urging the International Criminal Court to investigate the commission of the crime of apartheid and for its prosecutor to consider the applicability of the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current formal investigation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Given that the ICC doesnt have territorial jurisdiction in Israel, Amnesty calls on the UN Security Council to either refer the entire situation to the ICC or establish an international tribunal to try alleged perpetrators of the crime against humanity of apartheid.

Amnesty adds that the Security Council must also impose targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes, against Israeli officials most implicated and a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel.

Reiterating its longstanding call on states to suspend all forms of military assistance and weapons sales to Israel, Amnesty also calls on Palestinian authorities to ensure that any type of dealings with Israel, primarily through security coordination, do not contribute to maintaining the system of apartheid against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Amnesty also states that Israel must recognize Palestinian refugees right of return and provide Palestinian victims full reparations, including restitution for all properties acquired on a racial basis.

These demands by Amnesty, which claims to be the worlds largest human rights organization, go much further than those made by Human Rights Watch and BTselem.

This goes some way toward explaining why Israel and its proxies and apologists attempted to pressure Amnesty to pull its report ahead of publication and, having failed to achieve that, are now resorting to the usual baseless accusations of anti-Semitism.

Yair Lapid, Israels foreign minister, attempted to discredit Amnestys report by saying it echoes propaganda and the same lies shared by terrorist organizations, referring to prominent Palestinian groups recently declared illegal by Israel.

If Israel wasnt a Jewish state, no one at Amnesty would dare make such a claim against it, Lapid added.

In its report, Amnesty observes that Palestinian organizations and human rights defenders who have been leading anti-apartheid advocacy and campaigning efforts have faced Israeli repression for years as punishment for their work.

While Israel brands Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations, it subjects Israeli organizations denouncing apartheid to smears and delegitimization campaigns, Amnesty adds.

Israel may find that such tactics when employed against the worlds largest human rights organization may not convince anyone beyond its choir.

Its attempt to get ahead of the story, reportedly spearheaded by Naftali Bennett, Israels prime minister, along with Lapid, by preemptively attacking the Amnesty report has only served to reinforce the association of Israel with apartheid.

It also ensured that the report got a lot more exposure than it would otherwise receive, as one Haaretz columnist observes.

There is another key difference between the Amnesty report on apartheid and those that came before it.

Amnesty International is a campaigning organization with millions of members and supporters who, the group says, strengthen our calls for justice.

Amnesty has supplemented its report with a 90-minute online course titled Deconstructing Israels apartheid against Palestinians.

It also produced a 15-minute mini-documentary available on YouTube that breaks down the question of whether Israel practices apartheid for a mass audience:

So far Amnestys action items only include sending a polite letter to Naftali Bennett, Israels prime minister, opposing home demolitions and expulsions hardly inspiring stuff.

Amnestys US chapter meanwhile has made bizarre disclaimers distancing itself from the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and even stated that the organization doesnt take a stance on the occupation itself, instead focusing on Israels obligations, as the occupying power, under international law.

Meanwhile, its chapter in Germany has distanced itself from the report and stated that the Germany section of Amnesty will not plan or carry out any activities in relation to this report because of the legacy of the Holocaust and ongoing anti-Semitism in the country.

It is not the first time that Amnesty has limited its solidarity in ways that are enduringly shameful.

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are based in imperialist countries and were founded in the context of the Cold War, largely focusing on advocating for the rights of individuals in communist Eastern Europe.

Their narrow frameworks and founding ideologies have put them in opposition to anti-colonial liberation struggles and the violence those necessitate because, as Nelson Mandela put it, it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.

These fundamental contradictions mean that Western human rights groups will always take compromised, if not harmful, positions concerning Palestinian liberation, with Human Rights Watch recently suggesting a moral equivalence between the violence used by Israel against besieged Palestinians in Gaza and that of Palestinian resistance against it.

But Amnestys educational materials, including a lengthy Q & A, will help prepare grassroots campaigners to respond to Israels apologists who seek to deflect criticism of the states practices by attacking the messenger.

After all, as one astute observer put it on Twitter, that is the only arrow in the quiver of those committed to maintaining Israels apartheid rule and the situation of impunity.

Amnestys report is a strong indicator that an analysis beyond the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is becoming mainstream.

Meanwhile, Israel and its proxies and abettors in the US Congress and State Department trot out tired talking points while ignoring the substance of Amnestys findings.

(By contrast, a few members of Congress belonging to the Democratic Party are publicly supportive of Amnestys findings, with Cori Bush calling for an end to US taxpayer support for this violence.)

But like UN and EU officials forever droning on about their commitment to the nonexistent peace process towards a two-state solution, those parroting these Israel lobby talking points so detached from reality appear increasingly ridiculous.

While rejecting the term apartheid and attacking Amnesty, Israel and its proxies and supporters have their eyes on an even bigger threat to Israeli impunity.

According to an Israeli foreign ministry cable seen by the publication Axios, Israel has planned a campaign attempting to discredit a permanent UN commission of inquiry into Israels violations of Palestinian rights in all the territory under its control.

The UN Human Rights Council narrowly passed a resolution establishing that commission of inquiry last May following Israels 11-day attack on Gaza during which Palestinians rose up throughout their homeland.

Palestinian groups have long called on states to address the root causes of Israels settler colonialism and apartheid imposed over the Palestinian people as a whole, as Al-Haq said ahead of the vote.

The commission of inquiry undertaken by three independent human rights experts tapped by the Human Rights Council is expected to deliver its findings in June.

Axios reported last week that Israeli officials are highly concerned that the commissions report will refer to Israel as an apartheid state.

The publication adds that the Biden administration doesnt support the inquiry and played a central role in cutting its funding by 25 percent in UN budget negotiations.

A bipartisan grouping of 42 members of Congress has meanwhile called on the US secretary of state to lead an effort to end the outrageous and unjust permanent commission of inquiry.

But Israel apparently fears that this intervention may not be enough.

Haaretz reported this week that unnamed senior Israeli officials are concerned that the UN may soon accept the narrative that Israel is an apartheid state, issuing a serious blow to Israels status on the international stage.

A UN consensus around Israeli apartheid could lead to Israels exclusion from various international events, including sports competitions or cultural events, the paper adds.

In other words, Israeli officials are afraid that the state will be treated as a global pariah as South Africa was before the fall of apartheid in that country.

The steering committee of the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement inspired by the global campaign that helped bring apartheid to an end in South Africa argues that investigation of Israeli apartheid by the UN and its members are necessary steps for achieving freedom, justice and equality for the Palestinian people.

That committee urges formerly colonized states to reprise the leading role they assumed in the UN for the eradication of apartheid in Southern Africa.

Human Rights Watch has called for the appointment of a global UN envoy for the crimes of persecution and apartheid.

Amnesty states that the UN General Assembly should reestablish the Special Committee against Apartheid, which was originally established in November 1962, to focus on all situations where the serious human rights violation and crime against humanity of apartheid are being committed.

These moves would have implications beyond the Palestinian cause within the UN system, where bullying and political pressure have prevented the study and debate, let alone punishment, of Israeli apartheid, according to the BDS movement steering committee.

Ultimately, Amnestys study may not be fundamentally different from those that came before.

But the context in which it appears as international consensus coalesces around recognizing Israeli apartheid, an International Criminal Court investigation is underway and amid Israeli spyware blowback suggests that a new chapter in the global struggle for Palestinian freedom may have begun.

Cover Photograph:A Palestinian youth places a flag on Israels wall during a demonstration in the West Bank village of Bilin in February 2014. Oren ZivActiveStills.

Electronic Intifada

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Why Is Israel Fearful of Amnesty's Apartheid Report? - The Citizen

Isabelle (not her real name)is a single mother fromthe Bega Valley and, despite renting all her life, she has recently found herself without a place to call home.

The 42-year-old has spent more than six months applying for rentals across New South Wales, from places in Wollongong to the Victorian border and up into the Snowy Mountains.

However, like many in the far south coast area, she hasbeen unsuccessful in securing a place to live.

"It's humiliating telling people that we're homeless and it's terrifying," she said.

"Especially being a mother of a 12-year-old child who doesn't know when he's going to have a stable roof over his head."

Mission Australia has helped her family find some temporary accommodation on the far south coast.

Isabelle relies on her disability pension for income and she is now sleeping at a motel in Eden withher son and her brother.

She said while she was grateful for a roof over their heads, she was concerned about how long they couldcontinue to pay $600 a week for the two rooms.

"It's not something we can afford," she said.

"But there are no options, absolutely no options left, short of sleeping in the car."

Local serviceproviders across the South East of NSW said there simply was not enough housing stock to keep up with the "ever-increasing" demand.

Southern Cross Housing's chief operating officer Eric Coulter said it couldtake more than a decade for people on the list for social housing to get a property.

"In our areas, we're looking at a minimum wait time on a social housing waitlist of between fiveand 10 years," he said.

"For some properties, it's beyond 10 years."

However, Mr Coulter said to fix the issue there needed to be input from everybody.

"While we need to lead the way [to fix] homelessness and the ongoing crisis it's not just a government or not-for-profit solution," he said.

"It needs everybody to be involved in it."

Isabelle believesvoters need to think about the housing crisis during the upcoming Bega and Monaro by-electionson February 12.

She said it was time for the government to take urgent action and properlyaddress the issue.

"The people that we are voting for are the ones that have our lives literally in their hands and they need to step up," she said.

"That's what they're paid for."

Last week, the NSW government announced $30 million to address the housing crisis. Eligible councils can apply for $1.4 million each to fast-track the supply of shovel-ready land for homes.

Liberal candidate for the Bega by-election Fiona Kotvjos said the funding was just one of the many strategies needed to address the issue.

"This announcement is one announcement that will help address housing and there is a range of strategies that we need to take," she said.

"A lot of the real challenges that we face are a consequence of a lack of a really integrated approach and that's what we need to do."

Both major party candidates are yet torelease any specific policies that they would bring to government if elected but agreed more money and work was needed to address the issue.

Labor's Bega candidateMichael Hollandsaid government taxes could be better usedto address the shortages.

"They're raising lots of taxes through housing with stamp duty, land taxes, and the taxes that they raise through Airbnb," he said.

"That could be fed back into supporting housing."

Isabelle said, regardless of the by-election result, politicians needed to use their positions of power to make meaningful change for vulnerable Australians.

"I don't even know where I'm going next week, living pay chequeto pay cheque," she said.

"I'm having to ask for help from services and [politicians] couldn't even imagine the humiliation of that.

"You can build a house but let us make it a home."

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Housing crisis must be focus of Bega, Monaro by-elections, say people experiencing homelessness - ABC News

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On December 1st, the Supreme Court had its day of oral argument in a landmark abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, brought by the State of Mississippi. It was the first case that the Court had taken in thirty years in which the petitioners were explicitly asking the Justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, and its successor, Planned Parenthoodv. Casey, which affirmed that decision in 1992. If anyone needed a reminder that, whatever the Justices decide in Dobbs, it will not reconcile the American divide over abortion, the chaotic scene outside the Court made it clear. At the base of the marble steps, reproductive-rights supporters held a large rally in which they characterized abortion as a human rightand an act of health care. Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic U.S. representative from Washington State, described herself as one of the one in four women in America who have had an abortion, adding, Terminating my pregnancy was not an easy choice, but it was my choice. Jayapal could barely be heard, though, over the anti-abortion protesters who had also gathered, in even greater numbers. The day was sunny and mild, and though some of these demonstrators offered the usual angry admonishmentsGod is going to punish you, murderer! a man with a megaphone declaimedmost members of the anti-abortion contingent seemed buoyant. Busloads of students from Liberty University, an evangelical college in Lynchburg, Virginia, snapped selfies in their matching red-white-and-blue jackets. Penny Nance, the head of the conservative group Concerned Women for America, exclaimed, This is our moment! This is why weve marched all these years!

A major reason for Nances optimism was the presence on the bench of Amy Coney Barrett, the former Notre Dame law professor and federal-court judge whom President Donald Trump had picked to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on September 18, 2020. With the help of Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, Trump had accelerated Barretts nomination process, and the Senate confirmed her just a week before the 2020 Presidential election. As a candidate in the 2016 election, Trump had vowed to appoint Justices who would overturn Roe, and as President he had made it a priority to stock the judiciary with conservative judgesespecially younger ones. According to an analysis by the law professors David Fontana, of the George Washington University, and Micah Schwartzman, of the University of Virginia, Trumps nominees to the federal courts of appealsbodies that, like the Supreme Court, confer lifetime tenurewere the youngest of any Presidents since at least the beginning of the 20th century. Trump made three Supreme Court appointments, and Neil Gorsuch (forty-nine when confirmed) and Brett Kavanaugh (fifty-three) were the youngest of the nine Justices until Barrett was sworn in, at the age of forty-eight. Her arrival gave the conservative wing of the Court a 63 supermajorityan imbalance that wont be altered by the recent news that one of the three liberal Justices, Stephen Breyer, is retiring.

Barrett has a hard-to-rattle temperament. A fitness enthusiast seemingly blessed with superhuman energy, she is rearing seven children with her husband, Jesse Barrett, a former prosecutor now in private practice. At her confirmation hearings, she dressed with self-assurancea fitted magenta dress; a ladylike skirted suit in unexpected shades of purpleand projected an air of decorous, almost serene diligence. Despite her pro-forma circumspection, her answers on issues from guns to climate change left little doubt that she would feel at home on a Court that is more conservative than its been in decades. Yet she also represented a major shift. Daniel Bennett, a professor at John Brown University, a Christian college in Arkansas, who studies the intersection of faith and politics, told me that Barrett is more embedded in the conservative Christian legal movement than any Justice weve ever had. Outside the Court, Nance emphasized this kinship, referring to Barrett as Sister Amy, on the inside.

In recent years, conservatives have been intent on installing judges who will not disappoint by becoming more centrist over time. Sandra Day OConnor and Anthony Kennedy sided with liberal Justices in a few notable cases, including ones that allowed same-sex marriage and upheld Roe. David Souter, who had become a federal judge just months before President George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Court, in 1990, moved leftward enough that No More Souters became a conservative slogan. A decade ago, Chief Justice John Roberts committed the unpardonable sin of providing a critical vote to keep the Affordable Care Act in place. In 2020, the seemingly stalwart Gorsuch delivered a blow, writing the majority opinion in a case which held that civil-rights legislation protected gay and transgender workers from discrimination. On the Senate floor, Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican who later attempted to discredit the results of the 2020 Presidential election, declared that Gorsuchs opinion marked the end of the conservative legal project as we know itthe originalist jurisprudence, prominent since the nineteen-eighties, that claims to be guided by the textual intent of the Founding Fathers. It was time, Hawley said, for religious conservatives to take the lead. Four months later, that new era unofficially began, when Barrett joined the Court.

For decades, leading members of the Federalist Society and other conservative legal associations have vetted potential appellate judges and Justices and provided recommendations to Republican Presidents. The Federalist Society has traditionally showcased judges with records of high academic distinction, often at lite schools; service in Republican Administrations; originalist loyalties; and a record of decisions on the side of deregulation and corporations. Barrett hadnt served in an Administration, and, unlike the other current Justices, she hadnt attended an Ivy League law school. She went to Notre Dame, and returned there to teach. These divergences, though, ended up becoming points in her favorespecially at a time when religious activists were playing a more influential role in the conservative legal movement. Notre Dame, which is just outside South Bend, Indiana, is a Catholic institution in a deeply red state, and its one of the relatively few well-respected law schools where progressives do not abound. Barretts grounding in conservative Catholicism, and even her large family, began to seem like qualifications, too. Andrew Lewis, a University of Cincinnati political scientist who studies faith-based advocacy, told me that religious conservatives often used to feel looked down upon by some of the original Federalist Society members. But, he went on, they have increasingly gained power, and their concerns have become more central to the project.

To some of Barretts champions, her life story also offered a retort to the kind of liberal feminism they abhorred. When I asked Nance what she most admired about Barrett, she replied, in an e-mail, Amy Coney Barrett is a brilliant, accomplished jurist who also happens to be a mother of 7 serving on the highest court in the land. She decimates the argument that women cant do both, or that women need abortion to live their best lives. (Barrett declined my request for an interview.)

In public appearances before her nomination, Barrett was pleasant, non-ideological, and disciplined to the point of blandness. Yet her background and her demeanor suggested to social conservatives that, if placed on the Court, she would deliver what they wanted, expanding gun rights and religious liberties, and dumping Roe. In a recent memoir, Trumps former chief of staff Mark Meadows, a hard-line conservative, unflatteringly describes Brett Kavanaugh as an establishment-friendly nominee who had served in the George W. Bush White House. Meadows writes that Trump, who had almost nominated Barrett in 2018, was exasperated by Kavanaughs performance at his confirmation hearingsnot because he had to fend off sexual-assault accusations but because the sometimes tearful nominee had appeared weak. Picking a conventional Beltway guy had led to disappointment, and the President was determined not to make the same mistake twice. According to the memoir, Barrett didnt miss a beat during her first meeting with Trump, assuring him that she would follow the Constitution and that she could handle attacks from liberals. Meadows was struck by her commitment to her faith and to conservative ideals. When she made a pre-confirmation tour of Senate offices, he trusted her to do so without the aid of a sherpatypically a former senator who helps break the ice.

In the religious magazine First Things, Patrick Deneen, a colleague of Barretts at Notre Dame, wrote that she had developed a useful kind of cultural insulation, or armor. He extolled her upbringing in Louisiana (the state with the highest percentage of native-born residents) and her immersion in the Catholic community in and around South Bendsometimes known, he said, as Catholic Disneyland. There, a minivan full of siblings was just a regular family. With Barrett, the nation was getting the first justice to receive her law degree from a Catholic university, and someone who had spent almost her entire life in the flyover places of America where gentry liberalism is not the dominant fashion. Barrett might acclimate to the cosmopolitan secularism of Washington, D.C., Deneen said, but there is hope her entire life story to date will make her resistant to that fate.

In public, most conservatives deride the notion that a jurists cultural background might influence her decisions, let alone make her a better judge. At Sonia Sotomayors confirmation hearings, in 2009, Republican senators denounced her for having argued, in a speech, that a wise Latina might fruitfully draw on her life experiencein her case, as a Puerto Rican New Yorkerin her jurisprudence. But many conservatives were eager to spotlight Barretts identity, because it suggested an imperviousness to public-opinion polls and the disapproval of coastal lites. Nance told me that, on a Women for Amy bus tour that she had organized to generate enthusiasm for Barretts confirmation, older women in particular would come up to us with tears in their eyes saying that they have been waiting their whole lives for a conservative woman to be appointed to the court. (OConnor, Ronald Reagans appointee, who helped forge the compromise in Casey that preserved abortion rights, apparently didnt count.)

On the day of oral argument in Dobbsv. Jackson Womens Health, loudspeakers outside the Court broadcast the proceedings, and some people in the crowd surged closer to listen. (Because of pandemic restrictions, the courtroom was closed to the public.) Breyer, Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, the three liberal Justices, expressed concern that overturning the long-standing precedents of Roe and Casey could severely undermine the principle of stare decisisadherence to past rulings on which citizens have come to relyand make it look as though the Court were reversing course because thered been a change in personnel. Sotomayor was especially blunt: Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception, that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?

Veteran observers of the Court often remind the rest of us not to leap to conclusions on the basis of oral argumentsthe Justices might just be testing out ideas. But many journalists and legal academics saw this session as easier to parse than others. The conservative wingRoberts, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomasseemed inclined to uphold Mississippis ban on virtually all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, undoing Roes guarantee of legal abortion up to the point of fetal viability. (Doctors currently consider a fetus viable at about twenty-four weeks.) The remaining question was whether a majority of the conservatives would accept Mississippis request to throw out Roe and Casey altogether. Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch appeared ready to do so. Kavanaughwho had been less of a sure bet going inalso seemed to be on board, noting that previous Justices had overturned precedents after concluding that their predecessors had been wrong; he invoked Plessy v. Ferguson and other infamous decisions. Roberts seemed to be looking, as he often does, for a narrower rulinga way to find the Mississippi law constitutional without obliterating Roe.

When it was Barretts turn, she paid respect to the benefits of stare decisis, but also emphasized that its not an inexorable command, and that there are some circumstances in which overruling is possible. She then proposed that the Courts opinion in Casey had relied on a different conception of stare decisis insofar as it very explicitly took into account public reaction. The implication was that the Justices in 1992 had been too attuned to momentary political fluctuations. She wondered aloud if the Court, going forward, should minimize that factor. As Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and an expert on abortion law, told me later, Barrett didnt seem as obviously ready to get rid of Roe as some of the others.... But if you were betting, and oral argument was the evidence you had, it would sure look like they had the votes to overturn it.

Barrett devoted more of her time to a line of questioning that was not especially jurisprudentialand not one which any other Justice likely would have pursued. Speaking politely, in her youthful-sounding voice, she began asking about safe haven laws, which allow a person who has just given birth to leave the babyanonymously, with no questions askedat a fire station or some other designated spot. States began passing such legislation in 1999. (Some legislators found the idea appealing partly because it was about saving babies and partly becauseunlike programs that subsidize child care or help beleaguered parents in many other wayssafe havens generally cost little to set up.) Barrett seemed to be implying that such laws posed a feasible alternative to abortion. In a colloquy with Julie Rikelman, who represented Jackson Womens Health Organizationthe only abortion clinic in MississippiBarrett noted that safe-haven laws existed in all fifty states, adding, Both Roe and Casey emphasize the burdens of parenting, and, insofar as you... focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder womens access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, its also focussed on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy. Why dont the safe-haven laws take care of that problem? Pregnancy itself, Barrett went on, might impose a temporary burden on the mother, but if you could relinquish the baby you could avoid the burden of parenthood. And, in a peculiar sideswipe, she described pregnancy as an infringement on bodily autonomy... like vaccines, a comment that seemingly built on anti-vaxxers appropriation of pro-choice rhetoric to make a novel suggestion: that being required by your employer to get a shot against a deadly communicable disease is somehow equivalent to being forced to give birth.

Go here to read the rest:

Amy Coney Barretts Long Game - The New Yorker

news, national,

Voice of Real Australia is a regular newsletter from ACM, which has journalists in every state and territory. Sign up here to get it by email, or here to forward it to a friend. Today's was written by North West Star editor Derek Barry. The flooding that has closed the Stuart Highway and caused food shortages in the Northern Territory has prompted renewed calls for a rail link to Queensland. The Ghan rail line goes from Adelaide to Darwin and has been cut off by flood waters in northern South Australia. Freight has started to flow through the flooded section of Stuart Highway but the opening is a staged one under restricted conditions. Meanwhile there is also a rail link from Townsville to Mount Isa, known as the Inlander - though the passenger service on that line has been run down over the years and has also been suspended due to COVID. However there is a tantalising missing link between Mount Isa and Tennant Creek that could have linked the the two states and territories. The food shortage in Katherine has become so dire due to flooding in Central Australia local chamber of commerce manager Colin Abbott told the ABC this week he wanted to see a continuation of the line between Mount Isa and Territory. He is not the first person to suggest this though Mr Abbott mentioned Alice Springs as a possible terminus when Tennant Creek would be a more direct route to Mount Isa, such as that taken by the Barkly Hwy between Queensland and NT and the 620km-long Northern Gas Pipeline that links Northern Territory gas projects with the eastern seaboard. The Ghan has been around (at least from Adelaide to Alice Springs) since the 1880s while Mount Isa has been linked to the eastern seaboard by rail since 1929 though it has gone no further west since then. Indeed there was no road worthy of the name between Queensland and the Territory until the 1940s when Australian governments finally had to look seriously at the problem of getting soldiers, equipment and supplies to Darwin, with the threat of Japanese was all too real. It still needed the arrival of the United States into the war after Pearl Harbor to make the road a reality (though they may have not felt the gratitude with 70 Black American soldiers believed to have died of cyanide poisoning in Mount Isa after drinking a home brew made in disused mining cyanide drums). A railway was a transport option too far for the industrious Americans but it keeps coming up from time to time. Feasibilities studies after the 2015 Northern Australian White Paper found it was not economically viable unless funded by the mining industry just as the Townsville to Mount Isa railway was a century ago. Yet there remains appetite for rail extension such as the Ghan to Darwin in 2004 while the Inland Rail project between Melbourne and Brisbane seems to be still happening, although delayed to 2023. The Queensland-NT rail line missing link was one of the projects pushed by the Tennant Creek-Mount Isa Cross-Border Commission representing cross-border Councils but the Commission has been moribund since COVID. There was talk of another feasibility study in 2017 but the plan attracted criticism from Townsville business leaders who feared the line extension might negatively affect its economy. Ross Muir, an economic development specialist with Nexidel Consulting said at the time it was a nation building exercise that deserved support. "The connection would enable new mining and agricultural ventures, including potential mining of huge phosphate deposits in the Barkly region. It also would foster tourism links through northwestern Queensland," Mr Muir said. In 2020 there was an audacious plan for a so-called "Iron Boomerang" line, proposed to link Queensland's Bowen Basin coal resources with WA's Pilbara region and its store of iron ore by a whopping 3300km of rail across northern Australia. Though with a proposed price tag of $100 billion, it may not come to rescue the empty shelves of Katherine supermarkets any time soon. In case you are interested in filtering all the latest down to just one late afternoon read, why not sign up for The Informer newsletter?

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/Y5kUJ9Q7iPMNzBC9i5WqCU/5e0e2c62-7408-491b-a6bf-de6b31e76f02.jpg/r0_49_440_298_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

REAL AUSTRALIA

February 7 2022 - 12:30PM

Damage to the Ghan rail line has prompted renewed calls for a rail link between Northern Territory and Queensland.

The flooding that has closed the Stuart Highway and caused food shortages in the Northern Territory has prompted renewed calls for a rail link to Queensland.

However there is a tantalising missing link between Mount Isa and Tennant Creek that could have linked the the two states and territories.

The food shortage in Katherine has become so dire due to flooding in Central Australia local chamber of commerce manager Colin Abbott told the ABC this week he wanted to see a continuation of the line between Mount Isa and Territory.

He is not the first person to suggest this though Mr Abbott mentioned Alice Springs as a possible terminus when Tennant Creek would be a more direct route to Mount Isa, such as that taken by the Barkly Hwy between Queensland and NT and the 620km-long Northern Gas Pipeline that links Northern Territory gas projects with the eastern seaboard.

Indeed there was no road worthy of the name between Queensland and the Territory until the 1940s when Australian governments finally had to look seriously at the problem of getting soldiers, equipment and supplies to Darwin, with the threat of Japanese was all too real.

A railway was a transport option too far for the industrious Americans but it keeps coming up from time to time.

Feasibilities studies after the 2015 Northern Australian White Paper found it was not economically viable unless funded by the mining industry just as the Townsville to Mount Isa railway was a century ago.

Yet there remains appetite for rail extension such as the Ghan to Darwin in 2004 while the Inland Rail project between Melbourne and Brisbane seems to be still happening, although delayed to 2023.

There was talk of another feasibility study in 2017 but the plan attracted criticism from Townsville business leaders who feared the line extension might negatively affect its economy.

Ross Muir, an economic development specialist with Nexidel Consulting said at the time it was a nation building exercise that deserved support.

"The connection would enable new mining and agricultural ventures, including potential mining of huge phosphate deposits in the Barkly region. It also would foster tourism links through northwestern Queensland," Mr Muir said.

In 2020 there was an audacious plan for a so-called "Iron Boomerang" line, proposed to link Queensland's Bowen Basin coal resources with WA's Pilbara region and its store of iron ore by a whopping 3300km of rail across northern Australia.

Though with a proposed price tag of $100 billion, it may not come to rescue the empty shelves of Katherine supermarkets any time soon.

MORE STUFF HAPPENING AROUND AUSTRALIA:

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The trouble with rail when the wide brown land floods - Daily Liberal

All writers in Op Ed are here to inform and acknowledge issues of importance to our communities, however these writings represent the views and opinions of the authors and not necessarily of The Advertiser.

By Blaney Pridgen

Almost twenty years ago Lee Greenwood recorded a very popular song, ProudtoBeanAmerican. Some of you may remember that. I heard it not long ago and was unexpectedly moved as I am always moved by the young girl who sings the Star Spangled Banner late in the evening on Channel Twelve. And I always love AmericatheBeautiful and God Save Our Native Land.But I am very skeptical of the overt nationalism of populist politics and the dangerous attitudes it breeds and the fires of prejudice it fans; nonetheless, I am patriotic and proud to be an American, just not in that peculiar way. When I heard Greenwoods song, my heart ached for our native land and the sorry state in which we seem to be. Regardless of our opinions, I believe most of us feel that way.

Opinions and their expression in uncivil ways are a national problem. We have a right to our opinions. We can and should disagree in the ultimate working out of our opinions in a free and open democracy governed by law. This begins and ends with our Constitution and Bill of Rights, even with amendment and addition, ifneeds be as our founders had the good sense to allow. Of course, the rub comes with a thorough understanding of the wordsfree,open, andlaw. Nobody ever claimed this would be easy. Democracy is hard work and requiresboththe vigilance to conserveandthe courage to change. Inevitablycompromise is necessary and should not be a bad word. Anything less than this is uncivil, which is uncomfortably close to uncivilized and ultimately unamerican.

Forgetting the principles which unite us is a national problem. Ignoring these principles, even when we know them, is a worse problem. The worst problem is not knowing them at all and assuming that our opinions are our principles. Opinions are not our principles. We canhaveall kinds of opinions about hot button issues and special interestsdriving them and the politics surrounding them, but ultimatelythe rule of law, duly arrived upon and justly enforced, is a key principle. The checks and balances of the three branches of government (national, state, and local) is a principle which makes us a union with the common goals of a relatively free society. Free market enterprise with necessary safeguards and regulation is a principle. The Bill of Rights in specifics and the Declaration ofIndependence in general,are principles. Open elections, well governed and fair to all within the confines of the Constitution and the peaceable, civil transfer of power are principles. I could go on. We need to concentrate upon, continually study and debate these and many other principles and change or modify them as our democracycontinues to evolve. We need to remain united in our principles, while pursuing our opinions in a civil manner.

I can sit down with any fellow citizen, liberal or conservative, agree with them or disagree, vote my conscience along side them, and work together to come up with something that mostly works for the majority and ensures the common good, even if the particular outcome isnt exactly what I want or even believe. That is as long as they are civil, law-abiding, and patriotic lovers of the principles which unite us.

In conclusion, I might add this illustrativereflection: How do our principles address the filibuster,gerrymandering, campaign financing, executiveprivilege, and rampant extremismin the dark corners of both the left and the right? When I too sing Proud to Be an American, I pray that we will celebrate the humanism and reason at the foundations of our heritage and government and never forget that. What is right, what is practical, and what is possible and especially what is clearly for the common good of most if not all of usof these we can be duly proud.

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Proud to be an American The Edgefield Advertiser - Edgefieldadvertiser

Under a large white tent on a warm Sunday in early autumn, a group of residents in Montgomery County, Maryland, gathered at Welsh Park in the town of Rockville. A crescendo of gospel hymns hung above the crowd before falling gently over us like a warm bedsheet. A small group of children squealed from a playground in the distance. We were there to remember the lives of two Black men who had been lynched in the county more than a century ago. This is the county where I live. Before this event I did not know these mens names, but now I do.

Estimates vary widely, but according to the Equal Justice Initiative, from 1865 to 1950 nearly 6,500 Black Americans were lynched in the United States. Two of those men were Sidney Randolph and John Diggs-Dorsey.

Two local students shared the stories of Randolphs and Diggs-Dorseys murders. The audience listened attentively.

On May 25, 1896, Randolph was walking down the road between Gaithersburg and Hunting Hill when two white men, cousins Frank Ward and John Garrett, pulled up next to him and started asking questions about where he was going and what he had been doing. Randolph wasnt originally from the areahe said that he had been born and raised in Georgiabut he knew that two white men approaching you on horseback, unsolicited, was a recipe for trouble. An itinerant worker who had slept in a barn the night before, Randolph thought the men were attempting to arrest him for trespassing or vagrancy. So Randolph ran, and the two cousins followed. They looked so mad they scared me, Randolph said, according to The Baltimore Sun, and I tried to get away and they shot me and rode their horses over me. Randolph was struck in the hand, and the two men tied him up at gunpoint and brought him to the county jail.

The two men were part of a group of vigilantes who had been looking for a man who had assaulted a white family, the Buxtons, with the back of an ax in Gaithersburg. A neighbor said he had seen a Black man flee the home, and white residents began scouring the area for the alleged assailant. Randolph and another man, George Neale, were arrested. Initially, Richard Buxton, the patriarch of the assailed family and the recently elected town commissioner, wasnt sure that Randolph had committed the crime. But two weeks later, after Buxtons 7-year-old daughter died from the wounds, Buxton changed his story and said that Randolph definitely was the person whod assaulted his family and killed his daughter. Neale was cleared of all charges and released. Randolph was held. The sheriff, fearful that a mob might act before a grand-jury trial could begin, is said to have moved Randolph to a different location each night. But in the early morning of July 4, the mob found him.

From the November 2017 issue: Hanged, burned, shot, drowned, beaten

Two dozen or three dozen men, their faces hidden behind red handkerchiefs, overpowered the guards, pulled Randolph into the street, struck him in the head, and placed him in a wagon that took off down Darnestown Road. They came to a stop at a chestnut tree at the edge of a local farm and pulled Randolph out of the wagon. The mob wrapped a noose around the mans neck, threw the rope over the tree, and hauled Randolphs body off the ground. He stirred and struggled, then stopped. No one was charged with Randolphs murder and his body was buried in an unmarked grave in the paupers cemetery of the local almshouse. Years later, the Montgomery County Detention Center would be built on part of the almshouse site.

The circumstances of Diggs-Dorseys lynching 16 years prior were not dissimilar. He had been accused of sexually assaulting a white woman, though Diggs-Dorsey claimed that the encounter had been consensual. To the white public, that didnt matter. Diggs-Dorsey was arrested; then a mob formed, overpowered the sheriff, took Diggs-Dorsey to the edge of town, wrapped a noose around his neck, and hanged him from a tree, as had been done to so many other Black men in the years following the Civil War. After Diggs-Dorseys body was taken down, pieces of the rope and parts of his clothing were distributed as souvenirs. He, too, was buried in the paupers cemetery.

After lynchings, across generations, souvenirs were brought home and shared with people who had not been able to attend the event itself, and they became heirlooms passed down to children that showed them the power their whiteness could wield. The historian David Roediger estimates that with these souvenirs, several million early 20th century whites witnessed a lynching or touched its relics.

One of the most unsettling yet ubiquitous aspects of lynchings across the country is that the people who committed these crimes, who took these artifacts home as souvenirs to share with their families, were rarely two-dimensional caricatures of evil; they were everyday people in the community: the grocer, the postman, the teacher, the doctor. It is its nucleus of ordinary men that continually gives the mob its initial and awful impetus, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America. They are people whose children and grandchildren are still part of these same communities today, here in places like Montgomery County. Some of them know what their fathers and grandfathers did, but they do not speak of it.

After the students went back to their seats, those of us present were silent as we processed what we had just heard.

I was unnerved in ways I hadnt expected to be. Part of why, I now realize, is because these stories, told in this place, recalibrated my own sense of my physical proximity to this history.

I am a Black American who is the descendant of enslaved people and who was born and raised in Louisiana. My grandfather once shared a story with me of how when he was 12 years old, someone in his small town of just 1,000 people had been lynched and castrated. I watched the way the veins in his temple rose as he recalled that event of 80 years prior. His memory was clear; his voice was certain.

From the March 2021 issue: Stories of slavery, from those who survived it

This history is never distant; it follows us everywhere we go. It lives under the soil of the playgrounds where we bring our children to play, under the concrete we drive on in our neighborhoods, and under the land upon which we live. It rests beneath our feet in ways that we arethat I amstill discovering. This is not true just of the Deep South; it is true of places across the country that pride themselves on tolerance and multiculturalism.

Montgomery County, Maryland, is such a place. We walked this morning past where my great-great-grandfather was enslaved, Jason Green, the chair of the Montgomery County Commission on Remembrance and Reconciliation, said that day at the event. But slavery didnt exist here. Not in this part of Maryland. Not precious Montgomery County. These are the stories we tell ourselves, that we tell each other. Murmurs of affirmation swept through the crowd.

But thats not the real history, and, as Green put it, telling the story accurately matters. According to researchers at the Maryland State Archives, the Equal Justice Initiative, and Bowie State University, at least 44 people were lynched in Maryland from 1854 to 1933. The Baltimore Sun has compiled a chronological list of these lynchings, along with short descriptions, and as I read through them I was struck by the consistency of the stories. Almost all of these lynchings involved the murder of a Black man by a group of white people. Many of these men were denied due process. All of the murderers avoided charges. According to Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, there is no record of any white person ever being convicted of lynching a Black person in the United States until 1999.

I was also struck, scrolling through the list, by how young many of the victims were, and one victim in particular.

In 1885, Howard Cooper was accused of assaulting a prominent local farmers daughter as she walked home. An all-white jury, which did not even leave the courtroom to deliberate, took less than a minute to find him guilty. He was sentenced to death. Local Black activists in Baltimore raised money for a federal appeal, but before they could proceed, a mob of more than 70 white men stormed the jail, where they found Cooper hiding under a mattress. They took him out of his cell, dragged him through the back door, and hanged him from a sycamore tree right outside the jailhouse. The next morning, as a train was passing by the site of the lynching, the conductor slowed the train down so that passengers could look more closely at the body as it hung there. His mother had to come the next day and collect her sons body. Cooper was 15 years old.

Maryland has long been a state whose history of racist violence defies easy categorization.

At the start of the Civil War, Maryland was a slave state with more than 87,000 enslaved people, but, like the other border states where slavery existedDelaware, Missouri, and Kentuckyit never seceded from the Union. It is the state where both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were born, raised, and enslaved; Baltimore at the time was home to the largest population of free Black people in the entire country, North and South. The numbers vary widely, but by one estimate, approximately 80,000 Maryland men fought for the Union; about 20,000 fought for the Confederacy. At one point, one-third of Montgomery Countys population was enslaved. And slavery was not outlawed in Maryland until November 1864nearly two years after the Emancipation Proclamationfollowing a ballot referendum, just a few months before the Thirteenth Amendment would abolish slavery nationally. The measure barely passed, with 30,174 voting in favor of freeing the slaves and 29,799 against: a difference of just 375 votes. Much of Marylands wealth came from the institution, and many were not ready to let that go.

The day after emancipation thus found black men and women in the same ambiguous position as on the day before: between slavery and freedom, struggling to define a new free status for themselves, wrote the late historian Ira Berlin, who was a professor at the University of Maryland. But the struggle proceeded on new terms. Instead of grappling with freedom on the terrain of slavery, they now grappled with slavery on the terrain of freedom.

And for so many formerly enslaved Black people in Maryland, as was the case across the country, the threat of lynching and racial terrorism would shape that terrain for another century. The public spectacle of violencethe way that 15-year-old Howard Coopers body hung for townspeople and passersby on the train to seewas meant to send a message about how white supremacy ruled that space. As Ifill writes, More than the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and Jim Crow segregation, lynching and the threat of lynching helped regulate and restrict all aspects of black advancement, independence, and citizenship.

Recently, however, Maryland has done more to confront its history of lynching than many other states.

This image was modified for The Atlantic by the artist Ken Gonzales-Day, whose technique, as showcased in his Erased Lynchings project, is to digitally remove the victim from historical photographs of lynchings. By erasing the victims bodies, Gonzales-Day pushes the viewer to focus on the crowd, and, by proxy, the racism and bias that were foundational to these acts of violence. (Digital alteration by Ken Gonzales-Day for The Atlantic. Source: The Baltimore News-American / Hearst)

One person responsible for that is Will Schwarz, a white man in his 70s with white hair and tortoiseshell glasses who serves as the founder and president of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project.

Like many involved in the lynching-memorialization work in Maryland, Schwarz first learned about this history through Bryan Stevenson, the public-interest lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, in Montgomery, Alabama. I had no idea, Schwarz told me, shaking his head. I dont think Im that atypical, but lynching wasnt even something that was mentioned when we were in high school.

Schwarz had been reading Stevensons book, Just Mercy, and later went to see Stevenson speak at a local event. He felt like he was able to connect the dots between the past and the present in ways he had never been able to do before. He wanted to get involved in work that excavated the history of lynching and assumed that someone in Maryland was addressing the issue. Black communities had been memorializing this history in informal ways for generations, but Schwarz couldnt find any formal organization doing so. So he started one, and it quickly grew. People realized that no one was going to take us by the hand and walk us through the garden of racial reconciliation, he said. It was something that we had to do ourselves.

The Maryland Lynching Memorial Project has partnered with local schools, churches, and community organizations to help bring these stories to the wider public. It has helped coordinate soil-collection ceremonies across the statein which local communities gather soil from the locations where lynchings previously took placeand has placed plaques on several lynching sites, including in front of the former Baltimore County Jail, where Cooper was murdered.

From the June 2021 issue: Why Confederate lies live on

I asked Schwarz if he has any hesitancy about being a white person leading an organization focused on the history of racial-terror lynchings. He said that he is mindful of the relationship between his position and his identity as an older white man, and added that he collaborates with, and often defers to, Black community members. But he also rejects the idea that his whiteness means he shouldnt be part of the work. White people are the people that did this, he said, so it makes sense that white people are involved in addressing it.

The work that Schwarz has done has been part of a broader push to get Maryland to more directly confront its history of lynchings. A pivotal moment came in 2018, when Nicholas Creary, then a professor at Bowie State University and a founding member of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project, reached out to Joseline Pea-Melnyk, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, with a proposal to create a commission to further research and account for the states history of racial terror. Pea-Melnyk was so compelled by Crearys proposition that, in the middle of their first meeting, she called the legislatures bill-drafting department and handed the phone to Creary so bill writing could begin right then and there. The following year, the Maryland legislature passed House Bill 307, and became the first and only state in the country to create such a commission. A lot of the victims families in the community never received a formal apology, Pea-Melnyk told me, and this is a way to honor their lives.

At the beginning of October 2021, the commission held a virtual public hearing on the lynching of an 18-year-old man named Robert Hughes in one of the states westernmost counties, Allegany. It was the first of what the commission expects to be at least a dozen hearings on lynchings throughout the state, and featured the testimony of two of Hughess descendants.

Recognition has come in other forms toosymbolic, yet significant. In May, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan pardoned 34 victims of racial-terror lynchings that took place in the state from 1854 to 1933. (Not all of the individuals who were lynched in Maryland were charged with a state crime, and therefore they were not eligible to receive a pardon.) He signed the order by the jail where Cooper was murdered. In no other state has a governor issued such a pardon.

Some in Maryland are also attempting to take the process of truth and reconciliation a step further, by interviewing not only the descendants of the lynching victims, but also the descendants of those in the lynch mobs. Charles L. Chavis Jr., a professor, the director of African and African American studies at George Mason University, and the author of The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State, has spent years combing through archives in order to identify people who participated in lynchings in Maryland. After identifying the participants, he traces their lineage and reaches out to their descendants. If they are willing, he sits down with them for interviews. Some are aware through family lore, but others have no clue whats going on, he said. Chavis believes that Black people deserve the opportunity to testify about the racial-terror violence they witnessed, experienced, and carry as part of their family story. But he also believes that Black people shouldnt be the only ones telling those stories, and that white descendants must confront what was done in their name. If your grandfather was part of a lynch mob that killed a manor a childChavis believes that is something you should know.

At the Montgomery County commemoration event, Jason Green stepped from the stage, and reflections were offered by Elliot Spillers. Spillers, who had flown in from Montgomery, Alabama, and was representing the Equal Justice Initiative at the event, finished his speech by recitingrather than singingthe words of Lift Every Voice and Sing, as written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900, before it was put to music and transformed into an anthem. I meditated on the lines at the beginning of the final stanza:

God of our weary years,God of our silent tears,Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;Thou who has by Thy mightLed us into the light,Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

Something about hearing the words for themselves, without the melody that has long accompanied them, gave me a different, more intimate, sense of their meaning. As Spillers recited the poem, everyone under the tent stood and let the words wash over them, many shutting their eyes as if listening to a prayer.

But the centerpiece of the event came next, behind the tent on a hill, where several mounds of dirt lay alongside one another.

We invite you to help fill the jars of soil, Lesley Younge, a middle-school teacher and a member of the Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project steering committee, said to the crowd. We have combined the soil collected here at Welsh Park with soil gathered near the sites where Mr. Diggs-Dorsey and Mr. Randolph were lynched and buried. One jar for each man will be held at [the Equal Justice Iniatives] Legacy Museum, along with jars of soil from other counties where lynchings took place.

Ive spent the past several years thinking about, visiting, and observing processes of reconciliation, memorialization, and reckoning with this nations history of racial violence. I have seen memorials, monuments, and observances across the country, and have grown accustomed to these sorts of proceedings. Yet this event moved me more than I could have anticipated. Here I was, in a park not so far from my own home, surrounded by a solemn procession of my neighborspeople I saw shopping at the grocery store, cheering at childrens soccer games, riding their bikes down the same roads I do. They bent down over patches of excavated soil, lifted the dirt with small shovels, and poured it into glass jars carrying the names of those whose lives had been taken by perhaps the most violent manifestation of white supremacy.

Sometimes, in these moments, at events like this one, I am not sure whether I want to simply observe whats happening around me or whether I should more directly participate in the proceedings. But on this day, I felt my body being drawn to the soil, so I listened to it. I got in line.

When my turn arrived, I made my way to the first mound of dirt and bent down on one knee. I felt the cool earth dampen my pants. I turned my head and looked at the white sheet of paper next to the dirt, and saw John Diggs-Dorseys name written on it, attached to two thin wooden sticks that lifted his name just slightly off the ground. I picked up the shovel and dug into the soil. I brought the shovel to the jar and let the soil fall in. A choir was singing a melody both comforting and haunting, its refrain evaporating into the air.

In that moment, I felt in my body one of the primary intentions behind this gathering. Decades ago, crowds had formed to watch the bodies of Black men dangle from trees and lampposts. Now a crowd had gathered on that same land to condemn what had been done.

I had not expected that placing a small shovelful of soil in a jar would transform the emotional tenor of the event. But I was wrong. Doing so made me feel closer to the stories that had been shared about these young men, and closer to this history.

In this soil there is the sweat of the enslaved. In the soil there is the blood of victims of racial violence and lynching, Bryan Stevenson has said about the importance of soil-collection ceremonies. There are tears in the soil from all those who labored under the indignation and humiliation of segregation. But in soil there is also opportunity for new life, a chance to grow something hopeful and healing for the future.

I went over to Beth Baker, a white woman with silver-white hair who is a local freelance writer and a member of the steering committee that helped organize the event. Around us, neighbors hugged one another; some held hands. Baker told me that not everyone had been on board when they first began putting ideas for the soil-collection ceremonies together. Some white community members had been skeptical of the first soil-collection event, and a few Black community members thought that this history might be too painful to revisit. A couple of days days after the Rockville event, however, she shared an email with me from one of the days volunteers, an older Black woman and member of the memorial project who had initially expressed hesitation: The occasion was a powerful reminder that throughout the world; every country, human, does not always come with a good history. It was a solemn, peaceful, introspective day.

This sense of solemnity was shared by Lesley Younge, who had opened the event by invoking the names of the men. As a teacher, Younge, who had black locs that fell to her shoulders, is aware of the implications this history has for her students. Theyre bringing up their own stories of racial injustice that theyre experiencing at 11 and 12 years old, and its all completely connected. And so just knowing my students stories makes this work feel really important, she told me. Younge said that teaching her students this part of the regions history is important because it allows them to ground themselves and their communities in an understanding of the policies, systems, and circumstances that gave rise to them. It also allows them to engage with the lives of people from previous generations.

Younge nodded to the tree whose branches hung over us. You always have to get at the root, right? If you want to dig up a tree, you got to get the roots or it just grows back.

To mark the end of the event, several students picked up the jars that had been filled with soil, and walked in a quiet procession past those whose hands had filled them.

A local pastor, Reverend Alyce Walker Johnson of the Clinton AME Zion Church, stepped barefoot into the center of a circle of people that had formed. Somebody said, Pastor, where are your shoes? She paused and looked at the people around her. Im on sacred ground.

Walker Johnson invoked the names of Randolph and Diggs-Dorsey once more, and the crowd repeated their names after her.

A few days later, I drove to the Montgomery County Detention Center, which was built years ago over the almshouse near Randolphs and Diggs-Dorseys graves. The colors of the foliage were beginning to change, and trees around the facility were ornamented in orange-yellow leaves.

I sat on a bench outside the facility and looked at the barbed-wire fencing that encircled several plain beige buildings. I reached down and dug my fingers into the earth and lifted it from the ground. The dirt was thin and dry and began falling between my fingers as quickly as I had lifted it up.

I looked around and tried to imagine where the bodies of Randolph and Diggs-Dorsey might lie, how far beneath the concrete of the parking lot or the foundation of the buildings their bodies might be buried. I looked down under my feet, where pine needles formed a thin blanket of brown, and considered the possibility that one of them might be buried beneath me.

Charles L. Chavis, the author of The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State, contributed research for the artwork in this article.

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The True Legacy of Lynching Lies in How We Remember the Victims - The Atlantic