I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: president obama

  • STOP KILLING US – a peaceful protest in Red Bank, South Carolina


     

    Protest in Red Bank, South Carolina, USA on June 02, 2020

    WISTV.com

    If all lives matter, then why are you not OUTRAGED by Americans being murdered, tear gassed and arrested for peaceful protests? (sign held by woman in the middle)

    If a small percentage of looters discredits an entire movement, THEN what does a small percentage of BAD COPS DO??? (sign held by woman at the end)

    My thanks to our friend Michelle who came to take Spike for his walk this morning and mentioned the protest this week in Red Bank, South Carolina. She told me two of our local TV stations, WISTV and WLTXTV, had aired a brief broadcast about the gathering this past Tuesday, June 2nd.,  in the midst of the much lengthier coverage for the larger protests continuing this week in Columbia, the state capital.

    Minneapolis, St. Paul, New York City, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, Atlanta – I’ve watched this week as hundreds of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets of our major cities to protest the senseless murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis. The news coverage has been 24/7 since the crime was committed on May 25th.

    Red Bank is not an incorporated community, but it is locally recognized and identified by name as a census-designated place in Lexington County which is distinguished primarily as the politically conservative next-door neighbor of the more liberal larger city of Columbia in Richland County. Crossing the Congaree River from one county to the next sometimes reflects more than a geographical change on a map.

    According to the news reports, Highway 55 Burgers Shakes and Fries teamed up with Sandpit Fitness in their shopping center to offer a place for the protesters to peacefully gather to make their voices heard on the matters involving the death of George Floyd. Like their counterparts in Columbia and other cities across the world, their messages were direct, simple, profound. Stop killing us, won’t you?

    The police were called by someone who feared these people and their signs in Red Bank. However, no arrests were made.

    Amendment 1 to the Constitution of the United States says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

    The people of Red Bank are citizens of the United States; they are entitled to petition our government for equal justice and fair treatment by police officers who are sworn to serve and protect all citizens. They may not have a town hall, but they have a right to their voices.

    The events of the past week since the murder of George Floyd have weighed heavily on us in our home. Pretty and I are outraged by the police actions we have seen with our own eyes as we are also outraged by the ongoing failure of the leadership of our country at the highest levels. The president is a shameful disgrace devoid of any pretense of compassion. He stood as the fairy tale emperor with no clothes when he held a Bible in front of a church after an assault on peaceful American protesters to make way for him to pass by.

    And yet as I have watched the diversity of the crowds peacefully protesting, I share a hope with former President Obama who admonishes us to look to the next generation for answers to the problems of race we leave them as part of our legacy. We should have done better. Now they must do better if our democracy is to survive.

    To the Red Bank peaceful protesters for a better nation, I say thanks to you for your courage to exercise your rights. Onward, together.

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Road to Equality – Revisiting the Obama Presidency


    President Barack Obama was the first American President I ever heard who openly supported marriage equality for LGBT citizens. My emotions were a mixture of joy and amazement the first time I heard him say the words. I felt an overwhelming sense of validation because a President of the United States declared my love for Teresa was as deserving of respect as his love for Michelle. He set me free with his words, my personal emancipation proclamation.

    He is also responsible for the appointments of two Supreme Court Justices without whom the votes on the bench could have gone differently. The road to marriage equality would have been a much longer one without the support of this American President throughout his presidency. His is a legacy of love.

    First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage?

    Ask the Supremes

    (originally published April 04, 2013)

    The dust has settled after the media frenzy surrounding the Supreme Court hearings on two cases affecting the future of same-sex marriage in the United States. Whew! The gays and gay-friendlies partied. Jon Stewart skewered DOMA and its supporters on Comedy Central. The Republicans tried desperately to find someone – ANYONE – in their party to explain their position on marriage on CNN in a way that the general citizenry wouldn’t characterize as narrow-minded at best or bigoted at worst. That search is ongoing and a generous reward is offered to the finder.

    The hearings are over and the rulings expected in June. Eight Associate Justices and the Chief Justice hold the key to opening doors of equality that have been slammed shut since the founding fathers held these truths to be Self-evident in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. “…That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

    I am amazed to realize I have seen all of these Supremes don the robes of the Court at the end of the required appointment process…

    … Justice Sonia Sotomayor … is a Yale graduate who was appointed by President Barack Obama. She is the sole Hispanic Supreme. Justice Elena Kagan is another Obama appointee …at the time of her appointment she was Dean of the Harvard Law School…

    In summation, Your Honors, I find that the fate of same-sex marriage in the United States in 2013 rests with folks who graduated either from Yale or Harvard law schools and were born in the New York/ New Jersey area on the East Coast or California on the West Coast with one stray Southerner thrown in for good measure. Well, maybe not good measure, but certainly thrown in.

    The question before us today is whether this hodgepodge of political appointees will take its place in history as the Court that restores the unalienable rights of a minority of its LGBT citizens who have been made to feel “lesser than” and treated with discrimination that often threatens their Lives and their Liberty and always endangers their pursuit of Happiness.

    I respectfully ask the Court to stand and deliver on the promises that have been the hopes and dreams of all Americans for more than two hundred years.

    I rest my case.

     Let’s Hear It for the Supremes!

    (originally published June 26, 2013)

    Well, I never.  No, really, I never.  Today’s decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to give equal federal treatment to same-sex marriage in the twelve states and District of Columbia that recognize these marriages is a stunning pivotal day in our nation’s history of constitutional revelation.  I honestly thought this day was my dream to be realized in a future generation.

    And while I understand the significance of this ruling for our country and for the message it sends around the world to other nations about American civil liberties, today the political became personal.

    I share this day especially with the woman I love, a woman who has been with me through the battles in our state for justice and equality for the past twenty years and a woman who raised a son during difficult times of  hurtful discrimination against them both.  We live in the states of South Carolina and Texas which are states that are unaffected by this ruling.  Yet we celebrate with our brothers and sisters who will benefit from the victory today and we will continue to work until all of us are treated fairly and have the opportunity to pursue happiness.  Teresa, I share this day with you.

    I have many personal heroes during the past twenty years of my activism in South Carolina – both sung and unsung.  I am grateful to all of them for the labor we’ve made together in the days before Will and Grace and afterwards.

    But today is Edith Windsor day for me.  I will forever remember the petite 84-year-old lesbian from New York who changed the course of history with an outrageous act and a not-so-everyday rebellion.  Thank you, Edie.

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  • Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares


    In 1991 the great country troubadour Travis Tritt wrote and sang these immortal words about an ex-girlfriend who had apparently had a change of heart and wanted to reconnect with her former sweetheart.  Alas, as the songwriter penned, her man wasn’t buying it.  Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares, he suggested.  In 1991 a quarter was the cost of a local telephone call in those dinosaur-like objects we called pay telephones.   They are as extinct as the Tyrannosaurus Rex is today —  to everyone except my four-year-old friend Oscar who continues to experience their magic every day in his vivid imagination.

    One year later in a totally unrelated incident the government of the United States created Operation Sea Signal to get ready for a huge migration of refugees from Haiti and Cuba.   Two years later in 1994 Operation Sea Signal became Joint Task Force 160 which was responsible for taking care of more than 40,000 migrants who would be either sent back to their countries or paroled to the United States.  Camp X Ray was the name of the facility at the Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay where this operation was located.  In 1996 Operation Sea Signal was over, and our military left Camp X Ray.

    In December of 2001 Joint Task Force 160 was re-activated and Camp X Ray became a temporary home for people who were captured and deemed potential terrorists involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks on our soil or suspected al-Qaeda or Taliban operatives with ties to our relatively new war in Afghanistan.  If you’re still reading and trying to keep a timeline, the first detainees were sent to Camp X Ray in January, 2002.  Surprise!  The very next month Joint Task Force 170 was brought into existence as a new intelligence gathering group of our folks to wheedle secret information out of our population of detainees who had been moved from the old Camp X Ray to the new 410-bed Camp Delta in April.  By November of 2002, everybody decided it was silly to have two joint task forces when one was enough.  So….160 and 170 became Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

    Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares, I might say at this point eleven years later.  I was fifty-six years old when I first heard of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and like most liberal Americans, I dismissed it at the time as something President Bush and Vice-President Cheney had dreamed up to play a part in the Global War on Terror and I confess I’ve tried not to think about its continued existence or the people who’ve lived there all these years. Snippets of news from Guantanamo nagged at me periodically over the years, but I was forced to give it more thought  when presidential candidate Barack Obama campaigned about closing Guantanamo Bay during his 2008 run.  Hooray! I thought.  At last, I can get this little persistent sense of liberal guilt behind me.  President Obama did win that first term and was re-elected in 2012.  But today is just past the middle of the year in 2013, and I know that the prison in Guantanamo houses more horrific acts than ever before.

    To his credit President Obama has issued executive orders to close our base there.  To their shame, the Senate has refused to fund closure.  In the 2010 Omnibus Defense bill we have renamed our detainees alien unprivileged enemy belligerents.  Wow.  Look that up in your Funk & Wagnall.  The political football that is Guantanamo has been kicked around our judicial system for years, too,  with the most recent ruling coming this week from U. S. District Judge Gladys Kessler who said she didn’t have the jurisdiction to respond to the petition of Syrian detainee Jihad Dhiab to stop his forced feeding at the prison.  She tossed it back to President Obama and basically said Shame on all of us if we allow this nightmare to go on.

    I remember the movie Iron-Jawed Angels from 2004 about the determined suffragettes in America and England who used hunger strikes to draw attention to their cause.  They, too, were force-fed at the hands of guards who had little tolerance for their beliefs.  The images were painful to watch on the screen then, as the videos and pictures of the force-feeding at Guantanamo are now.  The prison population at Guantanamo is now 166 and more than a hundred are on a hunger strike to protest the length of their imprisonment without trials. Unbelievable as it seems, 86 of our current alien unprivileged enemy belligerents have been approved for release to other countries, but political interests waylay the process.

    One of my personal heroes is a fellow Texan Molly Ivins, an author and columnist who died in 2007.  She was famous for her essays regarding personal liberty and our values as a nation.  She was also famous for her dislike of the Iraq war.  In her last column, she had this to say:  “We are the people who run this country.  We are the deciders.  And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell.”

    Well Molly, this is my own particular hell-raising day.  Mr. President, get us out of this sorry mess we call Guantanamo Bay.  Senators, act like you got a little bit of sense on this issue and close it down.  Supremes, it’s on your watch, too.  In the end, it’s not about liberal vs. conservative values – it’s about human dignity, respect for each other and fair treatment.

    And Travis Tritt, you can keep your quarter.  You’ve found someone who cares.