Justice Updates – June 25, 2019
Corporate Stance to Abolish the Death Penalty. The deadline for submitting your vote for the Corporate Stance is tomorrow, Wednesday, June 26. Please use the online survey link to cast your vote.
Stop Detaining Children. After a huge outcry from citizens around the country, Customs and Border Patrol has moved most of the children from the Clint, Texas camp. Call your representatives and tell them that you do not approve of the treatment that children are receiving at the border especially at the Clint Border Patrol Station, the Homestead, Florida Detention Center and wherever they have sent the children taken from Clint. We must not allow this to continue.
A country/state/city/people is only as strong as its weakest link. How will the U.S. be judged as the world watches us mistreat children as young as four months old? Is it really necessary to demoralize and demonize people because we don’t want them to come to our country? “Think about this. The US government ARGUED IN A COURT OF LAW that its obligation to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions does not require it to provide kids with hygiene items such as soap or toothbrushes.” (Human Rights Watch) For more information, click here.
Concentration Camps? Immigrant detention centers like the one in El Paso keeping the children are being called concentration camps. Are they? “A concentration camp involves “mass detention of civilians without trial,” says Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. “Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz,” Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia, explained to Esquire. “Concentration camps in general have always been designed — at the most basic level — to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they’re putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way.” NCR tells us we can’t ignore this.
The Honduran Bishops Conference recently issued a scathing assessment of their government’s handling of recent conflict in the country with a cry of ‘enough.” Read about their statement.
Integral ecology: everything is connected writes Thomas Reese for NCR. “Integral ecology is a key concept in chapter four of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment. It flows from his understanding that “everything is closely related” and that “today’s problems call for a vision capable of taking into account every aspect of the global crisis.” Read more here.
Have you ever wondered what to do if you saw someone harassing another person because of their religion, race, or gender? The American Friends Service Committee have prepared this Bystander Intervention Do’s and Don’ts to help.
More pollution? The current EPA Administrator, Mr. Andrew Wheeler, testified to congress that from 2005 to 2017, the U.S. reduced its energy related carbon emissions by 14 percent. He failed to mention that they rose in 2018 and will continue growing this year. The EPA is implementing a new energy plan called the Affordable Clean Energy Rule. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council it could lead to as many as 5,200 premature deaths annually by 2030. Read more here.
