Discrimination

Web designer Lorie Smith, plaintiff in a Supreme Court case who objects to same-sex marriage, poses for a portrait at her office in Littleton, Co., Nov. 28, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt

In a blow to LGBTQ+ rights, the Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the constitutional right to free speech allows certain businesses to refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings, ruling in favor of a web designer who cited her Christian beliefs in challenging a Colorado anti-discrimination law.

Mitchell Atencio 6-01-2022

An illustration of blood donation by Mitchell Atencio/Sojourners. Original arm image by Kazuo ota, original rainbow image by Rafael Garcin, via Unsplash. 

In the summer of 2009, when I was 12 years old, a street racer crashed into my grandparents' minivan. The accident, by all means, should have killed my grandad, who was in a coma for several weeks after the crash. While undergoing emergency surgeries, he lost 98 units of blood in six hours — about the blood of 10 people. They were pumping blood into him as fast as it was coming out. Ever since that day, blood donation has held a place close to my heart.

Robert Hirschfield 11-17-2021
Lawrence Joseph gestures with his hand as he looks off camera

Lawrence Joseph during an interview in 2002 / Chester Higgins Jr. / The New York Times

HISTORY HAS PAID personal attention to Lawrence Joseph, a Maronite Catholic from Detroit. In 1967, when Joseph was 19 and just finished with his freshman year at the University of Michigan, his father’s grocery-liquor store was looted and burned during the Detroit Rebellion. The five-day uprising of Black people reacting in part to police abuse and brutality and its fierce suppression by law enforcement and the National Guard made him “acutely conscious of America’s deeply systemic violence.”

Joseph, a poet who was also a lawyer who taught at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., and at Princeton, was living a block from the World Trade Center in 2001 when the two planes attacked. He and his wife had to evacuate their apartment. It was weeks before they could return. In the title poem of his 2017 volume So Where Are We?, Joseph writes:

flailing bodies in midair
the neighborhood under thick gray powder—
on every screen. I don’t know
where you are, I don’t know what
I’m going to do, I heard a man say;
the man who had spoken was myself.

Madison Muller 11-10-2021

In an increasingly polarized Congress, protections for pregnant workers via the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act may be an avenue for bipartisanship between conservative and progressive lawmakers and activists — especially for Christians.

“That’s the sort of thing that catches the attention of both those who are operating in worker justice, for women in particular … but also those who are concerned with the unborn,” said Clayton Sinyai, executive director of the Catholic Labor Network. “This [bill] is pro-worker, pro-family, and pro-life, and all of those are concerns for Catholics.”

 

John Allan Knight 7-20-2020

Demonstrators gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, July 8, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

The Supreme Court recently issued a ruling that stripped the protections of anti-discrimination laws from thousands of teachers at religiously affiliated schools.

Megan Lebowitz 3-02-2020

Image via Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock 

In February 2017, Kashgary and her 53-year-old mother Sureyya co-founded Ana Care & Education, a Uyghur language school in Fairfax. Every Sunday, children and teenagers attend lessons on Uyghur language, culture, history, dance, and more.

Lu Zhao 7-03-2019

The Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group promoting programs to eliminate homelessness, found that among homeless adults who identify with the gender they had at birth, 48 percent do not have any type of shelter. That compares with 56 percent of homeless transgender adults who had no place to sleep or live. The largest percentage of shelterless, homeless adults based on gender were nonbinary or genderqueer — identifying with neither of the two main genders.

"Wall of Hope" 2010 Vigil for Marcelo Lucero. Image courtesy of Long Island Wins. 

On Nov. 8, 2008, Marcelo Lucero, an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador working at a dry cleaning store, was attacked by seven teenagers from the local high school in Patchogue, Long Island, and stabbed to death. His attack, according to testimony, was part of a weekend “sport” in which these teenagers routinely targeted and attacked brown-skinned people.

This conflict has implications far beyond cake shops or even adoption. Most states still don't protect LGBTQ individuals from discrimination in the workplace, housing, and public accommodations., and under the Trump administration, the Justice Department has taken the position that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not cover sexual orientation or gender identity. Wherever advocacy groups are able to secure legal protections for LGBTQ individuals, we should expect pushback from certain religious groups hoping to gain an exemption from those rules.

Simran Jeet Singh 8-09-2018

Image via Phil Murphy / Flickr

The racist attacks spiked again after 9/11, particularly because Americans did not know about the Sikh religion and conflated the unique Sikh appearance with popular stereotypes of what terrorists look like.

Image via Ben Northern / Flickr

The ConversationThe idea of humanity, excluding no one, Arendt wrote, “is the only guarantee we have that one ‘superior race’ after another may not feel obligated to follow the ‘natural law’ of the right of the powerful, and exterminate ‘inferior races unworthy of survival.’” As she herself witnessed, the first steps are the abrogation of minority rights and the refusal of asylum to refugees.

Joe Kay 7-03-2018

There’s always been a deep tension between those who believe the powerful words about freedom for all and those who believe that such freedom should be reserved to them alone. There have always been those who believe that their personal freedom is unbreakable but the freedom of others can be rationed.

Jim Wallis 6-27-2018

Image via shutterstock/EddieHernandezPhotography 

In a way, it's a cruel joke that the majority used yesterday's decision to officially overturn the Korematsu v. United States decision of 1944 that upheld the government's right to intern Japanese Americans in concentration camps. While this was a welcome and long-overdue step, it's also a way for the conservative majority to attempt to wash its hands, Pilate-like, of the consequences of asserting that current and future presidents have the power to keep members of a disfavored group out of the country if they simply massage the language of their executive orders and proclamations sufficiently. As Justice Sotomayor argued in her dissent, it "merely replaces one gravely wrong decision with another." It's a slippery slope that risks pointing us backwards towards our shameful past, in which the high court long upheld the constitutionality of slavery, Jim Crow laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, many grievous harms to Native American people and communities, and other horrors, all of which we rightfully recognize today as counter to the principles of the Constitution and the tenets of Christian faith. 

Image via Catherine Bebbington/Creative Commons

Speaking to members of Parliament on Wednesday, Spielman reiterated her concerns about religious extremism in English schools and said her inspectors had found in some private Islamic schools that children had been shown films of people being beheaded and that they had been taught that it is acceptable for men to beat their wives.

Image via Scott Chacon/Creative Commons

David Himbara, a Rwandan international development advocate based in Canada, called the government’s justification for the closures bogus and said the “real reason … is fear and paranoia.”

the Web Editors 2-27-2018

An American flag still stands next to one of over 170 toppled Jewish headstones after a weekend vandalism attack on Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in University City, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, U.S. February 21, 2017. REUTERS/Tom Gannam

Greenblatt attributed the spike in numbers to President Donald Trump failure to denounce events such as the Charlottesville white supremacist rally and various incidences of bomb threats, cemetery vandalism, and school bullying. 

Bobby Ross Jr. 2-20-2018

Image via Bobby Ross Jr. / RNS

“Look, if you want to be a racist old grandpa, you can be a racist old grandpa,” Johnson said. “But you cannot serve in public office. It’s wrong. I mean, everyone has the right to free speech, but you don’t have the freedom of the consequences of your free speech, right?”

Ten Rohingya Muslim men with their hands bound kneel as members of the Myanmar security forces stand guard in Inn Din village September 2, 2017. Picture taken September 2, 2017. Handout via REUTERS

The Reuters report drew on interviews with Buddhists who confessed to torching Rohingya homes, burying bodies, and killing Muslims in what they said was a frenzy of violence triggered when Rohingya insurgents attacked security posts last August.

The account marked the first time soldiers and paramilitary police have been implicated by testimony from security personnel in arson and killings in the north of Rakhine state that the United Nations has said may amount to genocide.

the Web Editors 12-07-2017

Former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager gestures as he testifies in his murder trial at the Charleston County court in Charleston, South Carolina, November 29, 2016. REUTERS/Grace Beahm/Post and Courier/Pool/File Photo

On April 15, 2015, Slager tased and shot Scott five times in the back. A video from witness Feiden Santana surfaced, showing the fatal shooting. 

Image via Fredrick Nzwili / RNS

AIDS killed his wife in 2013, and his 13-year-old daughter the next year. And when his flock found out that Mutuse himself tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, many abandoned him — and some thought his diagnosis justified the burning of his church.