North Carolina
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JUST AS FOR 50 years Ohio was a bellwether for presidential elections, since 2011 North Carolina has become a testing ground for Far Right legislation aimed at controlling federal election administration. In his book Indecent Assembly, author Gene R. Nichol says North Carolina is now “a laboratory for extremism.”
In September, the Supreme Court included on its docket a Republican-backed case out of North Carolina that pits voters against a state legislature that seeks to greatly increase its power over elections by limiting the ability of the state judiciary to review the actions of the legislature. This could potentially unbalance the fundamental checks and balances essential to a functioning democracy by giving one body total control over a function of government.
While the specific case of Moore v. Harper deals with whether the North Carolina state Supreme Court has the power to strike down state legislation that produced illegally gerrymandered voting districts, the federal Supreme Court will deliberate on whether the U.S. Constitution’s election clause, the primary source of constitutional authority to regulate elections, prevents a state judiciary from ordering a state legislature to comply with federal election laws.
Photo of Nikole Hannah-Jones | By Alice Vergueiro via Wikimedia Commons
For the board of trustees at UNC-Chapel Hill, Hannah-Jones is a living memorial, a journalist who will tell us what happened, who holds up memory and urges us not to look away.
Law enforcement officers spray protesters shortly after a moment of silence during a Get Out The Vote march in Graham, N.C., Oct. 31, 2020. Anthony Crider/Handout via REUTERS
Peaceful participants at a rally in a small North Carolina city to turn out the vote ahead of Tuesday's U.S. presidential election were pepper-sprayed by law enforcement officials on Saturday, according to videos broadcast online and witnesses.
An election worker places mail-in ballots into a voting box at a drive-through drop off location at the Registrar of Voters for San Diego County in San Diego, Calif., Oct. 19, 2020. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
The Supreme Court on Wednesday dealt setbacks to Republicans by allowing extended deadlines for receiving mail-in ballots in next Tuesday's election in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, states pivotal to President Donald Trump's re-election chances.
The Supreme Court of the United States is seen in Washington, D.C., Aug. 29, 2020. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo
The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a request by President Donald Trump's campaign to block North Carolina's extension of the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots in the latest voting case ahead of Tuesday's election.
Scott DeAngelo, his 22-year-old girlfriend and their 1-year-old daughter ended up at the Western Carolina Rescue Mission after running out of money at a motel. Image courtesy Youth Today.
As thousands of tourists fawn each year over the opulent trappings of western North Carolina’s Biltmore Estates — a four football-field-sized homage to America’s Gilded Age — one of the starkest examples of the nation’s homeless problem endures less than a mile away.
ONE SUNDAY MORNING at a small church in rural North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, a congregant discovered a snake slithering under the pews. Without interrupting the sermon, he picked up the snake and took it out of the sanctuary. When the service ended, the pastor, Brandon Wrencher, heard about what happened.
He laughed.
“We’re not snake handlers—up the street is a Pentecostal church,” said Wrencher. “They do not tell you these things in seminary. I did not prepare.”
There were a lot of things in Todd, N.C., for which Wrencher was not prepared. The unincorporated community of several hundred people sits about 30 miles from the Virginia state line and 20 from the Tennessee border, just outside the Cherokee National Forest. Todd boasts a couple of churches, a bakery, a closed-down general store, and zero stoplights. Wrencher estimates that half the population is over 50.
Social poverty
When Wrencher, his wife, and their children moved to Todd in 2013, the minister had to install a personal cell phone tower on his property so his family could get service at home. But more significant to Wrencher, who had previously worked at a predominantly African-American church, was the loneliness of his new ministry. That included both his own loneliness as one of the few African Americans in Todd and the widespread loneliness he discovered in the community.
“I knew it was all white. I knew it was rural,” said Wrencher. “I knew this church had started this intentional community and was trying to do revitalization work in the community and the church. I didn’t know anything beyond that.”
Todd’s problems quickly hit him. A once-vibrant timber industry was no more. The community was suffering from hunger and land neglect. But most devastating was what Wrencher called “social poverty.”
Members of the National Guard and Lumberton Police force rescue Eric Gilchrist, 65, from his trailer to take him to the hospital after experiencing breathing problems in Schoolview Mobile Home Park in Lumberton, N.C. Image via Patricia Nieberg
According to Army Capt. Chris Jakubczak, the National Guard’s first priority was to warn residents to follow evacuation orders, especially those who lived along the banks of the Lumber River. Many residents followed orders, while others chose to stay for various reasons.
Samuel Oliver-Bruno at CityWell UMC. Photo by Elizabeth Evans
Oliver-Bruno is one of six people publicly in sanctuary in the state (a seventh doesn’t want to be identified). During the 1980s, more than 100 churches sheltered Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants, and the movement has seen somewhat of a national revival in recent years. Though sanctuary churches often attract media attention, the men and women living behind church doors represent a network of families and communities living under the unpredictable threat of government-sponsored raids and arrests.
They were U.S. “torture taxis” in the years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Playing a key role in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition,” detention, and interrogation program, the two aircraft flew at least 34 separate “rendition circuits” that resulted in the kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture of at least 49 individuals, according to the U.K.-based Rendition Project, a coalition of academics, human rights investigators, legal teams, and investigative journalists who waded through reams of data, including falsified and redacted flight plans and other reports, to uncover the truth about the CIA program and its victims.
A typical flight circuit, according to The Rendition Project, went like this:
- A jet would take off from Johnston County Airport, about 30 miles south of Raleigh, and fly to Washington, D.C., to pick up the CIA “snatch team.”
- It would then fly across the Atlantic and stop for refueling somewhere in Europe.
- The next stop would be the pick-up location, often in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but also in Egypt, Gambia, Morocco, Malawi, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Djibouti, Macedonia, and elsewhere.
- Dummy flight plans would often be filed to obscure the true drop-off destinations, which included the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, CIA “black sites” in Poland, Romania, Afghanistan, and Lithuania—and one in Thailand that was run by now CIA director Gina Haspel.
- After delivering the prisoner, the plane would fly to a “rest and relaxation” location to refuel and to allow the CIA team to recover before being flown back to Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C.
- The final leg took the plane and flight crew home to Johnston County.
The commission against torture is following the lead of previous truth commissions, including its own state’s Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission and another focused on the 1898 Wilmington race riot—both of whose members and staff provided advice. The independent, nongovernmental torture commission held public hearings in November and December to investigate and encourage public debate about the role North Carolina played in facilitating the U.S. torture program between 2001 and 2006.
Image via Roger Netwon/Youth Today
It’s not just the Dreamers who stand to lose if there are no new legislative protections put in place: It could have hefty economic consequences for states like North Carolina. Patrick McHugh, economic analyst for the progressive research and advocacy organization North Carolina Justice Center, said the Cato Institute (a libertarian think tank) predicted that ending DACA could cost North Carolina $7.8 billion in the next decade alone.
Image via Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
When the Magi told King Herod about the heaven-sent child they’d come to honor, Herod also issued an executive order — kill every Hebrew child under 2. Herod’s henchmen would have slaughtered the Christ child along with the others had his parents not acted quickly to cross a border and protect their baby. Mary and Joseph were dreamers before Jesus. To prepare for Christmas is to remember Mary and Joseph’s dream and the civil disobedience it inspired.
Image via RNS/AP Photo/Steve Helber
“We request upon you to join with many other political and religious leaders to proclaim with one voice that the ‘alt-right’ is racist, evil, and antithetical to a well-ordered, peaceful society,” reads the letter first published by CNN.
The signers — including Southern Baptist Convention President Steve Gaines, former SBC President Fred Luter, and prominent African-American evangelical leaders T.D. Jakes and Tony Evans — reproach Trump for failing to speak out against the so-called alt-right.
“This movement has escaped your disapproval,” the letter reads.
Without naming names, it further states: “It concerned many of us when three people associated with the alt-right movement were given jobs in the White House.”
Image via RNS / Yonat Shimron
At a time when the far right often cites the inability — or refusal — of Muslims to assimilate, these young volunteers are ready, willing, and able to do what other religious groups in this country have been doing for decades: providing emergency aid, labor, and comfort to people suffering the effects of natural disasters
Image via REUTERS/Chris Helgren.
Even more difficult than the question of whether or not we are collectively willing to break the law is the question of whether we are ready to embody what a “culture of sanctuary” holistically invites us to be.
Image via RNS/Baptist Press/Matt Miller
“Barack Obama didn’t divide us,” said Nathan A. Finn, dean of the School of Theology and Missions at Union University, a Southern Baptist college in Jackson, Tenn.
“Donald Trump divided us. His personal behavior, his policy views, his temperament and character, his religious values, all were highly questionable.”
This decision is one of numerous lawsuits that accuse Republicans of discriminating against black and other minority voters who usually vote Democrat. The NAACP called this habit “apartheid voting districts” and claimed Republicans weaken and minimize the voting rights of black voters by packing them into one district and diluting their influence while surrounding them with more white voters that are likely to support Republican candidates. This practice is also known as racial gerrymandering.
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal by Republican leaders of a federal court ruling that removed ballot restrictions in North Carolina, due to the restrictions being discriminatory along the basis of race, reports Bloomberg News.
In the last year, dozens of organizations — from Google, Apple, and Microsoft to the NBA, Bruce Springsteen, and Nick Jonas — have pulled their money from the state in protest of the bill. Word of the new deal reportedly came hours before the NCAA was set to pull any future championship basketball games from the state for the foreseeable future.
Image via RNS/Adelle M. Banks
In her sermon on the last Sunday of Black History Month, the Rev. Maria Swearingen preached about her belief that black lives, “queer lives,” and immigrant lives matter.
And since it also was Transfiguration Sunday, she pointed to the story in the Gospel of Matthew where God declared Jesus “beloved.” That is a term, she said, that can be used for everyone.