Attorney General Eric Holder
Eric Holder. Image via a katz / Shutterstock.com
Eric Holder, former attorney general under President Obama, waded into the debate over reparations for slavery at Georgetown University, reports America magazine.
While the call for reparations is an old one, the conversation really entered mainstream circles with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 essay on the subject in The Atlantic. Holder’s comments on April 29 continue that conversation.
The first same-sex marriage ceremony in Jersey City. Photo: Reena Rose Sibayan/The Jersey Journal. Courtesy The Star-Ledger/RNS
In a major victory for same-sex marriage rights, the Justice Department will soon grant married gay and lesbian couples the same rights in legal matters as other married couples.
The new policy announced by Attorney General Eric Holder on Saturday, in New York, marks the latest step by the Obama administration to extend rights to same-sex couples that are afforded to married, heterosexual couples.
“In every courthouse, in every proceeding and in every place where a member of the Department of Justice stands on behalf of the United States, they will strive to ensure that same-sex marriages receive the same privileges, protections, and rights as opposite-sex marriages under federal law,” Holder said in prepared remarks to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group that works on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equal rights.
Photo by Ted Majdosz
On May 23, President Obama gave a major address from the National Defense University, in which he personally acknowledged for the first time the U.S. government’s killing of four Americans — along with scores of others — under its program of assassination by remotely controlled drones. I was able to watch this televised speech from the privileged vantage of a federal prison on the last day of a sentence resulting from my protest of drones operated from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.
Over the previous six months in the Federal Prison Camp at Yankton, S.D., I had watched from afar as the discussion on drone warfare emerged from the fringe and into the mainstream. Fellow prisoners brought me clippings on the subject from their local newspapers and kept me apprised of what they heard on the evening news. The American people seemed to be just awakening to the reality and consequences of wars being fought and assassinations carried out by unmanned but heavily armed planes controlled by combatants sitting at computer screens at stateside bases far from the conflict.
Attorney General Eric Holder, RNS photo courtesy Lonnie Tague for the Department of Justice
Attorney General Eric Holder and other legal experts strategized with black religious leaders May 30 about new restrictive state voting laws that could affect their congregants by reducing early voting and requiring identification.
“I would argue that of all the freedoms we have today, none is more important or more sacred than the right to vote,” Holder told about 200 people gathered for a meeting of the Conference of National Black Churches and the Congressional Black Caucus.
He acknowledged concerns about new voting laws and said his department has launched more than 100 investigations about racially discriminatory voting practices.