California’s caste discrimination bill is a vote for all civil rights
In the fight for equal treatment under the law, one instance of discrimination is too many.
State Sen. Aisha Wahab listens to speakers during a news conference where she proposed SB 403, a bill that would add caste as a protected category in the state’s anti-discrimination laws, on March 22, 2023, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/José Luis Villegas, File)

Opinion
July 6, 2023
By  Nirvair Singh

(RNS) — The bill to ban caste-based discrimination in California, SB 403, moved a little closer to passage on Wednesday (July 5) as the state Assembly’s Judiciary Committee passed the bill 9-0 with two abstentions. The measure, which has already passed the Senate, now heads to a vote in the full Assembly, where its opponents have vowed to “educate lawmakers on the issue” to avoid its passage.

Much of the opposition to SB 403 has focused on the supposedly unnecessary nature of the measure. Those who oppose the bill assert that caste discrimination simply is not an issue — and that any attempt to address or even discuss it is, in fact, discriminatory.

But the argument that “talking about discrimination is the problem, not the discrimination itself” is tired, illogical and misleading. The voices making this argument must not be given precedence above the experiences of those who have suffered discrimination — nor should they deter the California legislature from moving this important bill forward.

In California, caste discrimination has been reported across every kind of industry — technology, education, construction, restaurants, domestic work and medicine. Documentaries and reporting by reputable news outlets have shown how caste discrimination particularly pervades the information technology industry, where many workers are South Asians or South Asian Americans.

RELATED: Caste discrimination laws remain fraught. Here’s why they shouldn’t be.

But while caste-based systems are strongly associated with South Asia, their analogs exist in South America, Asia and Africa, among other places. Caste discrimination is also found across several different communities of religious practice.

Data from Equality Labs shows that 1 in 4 caste-oppressed people have faced physical and verbal violence, 1 in 3 have faced education discrimination, and 2 out of 3 are impacted by workplace discrimination.

The reporting of these incidents may be more anecdotal and less scientific than both opponents and proponents of SB 403 would prefer, but reporting incidents of hate and bias has always been fraught. Those facing discrimination are often concerned that their experiences will be minimized or ignored. Especially with an issue as complex as caste, it is easy to imagine an affected individual not wanting to spend the time and energy to report discrimination to employers who at best don’t understand their situation or at worst willfully ignore it.

Without a law recognizing their experience, arguments that “there just isn’t enough proof” of caste-discrimination become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Why speak up if no one is going to listen?

Still, whether or not the numbers understate the problem doesn’t matter that much. In a nation that strives toward equal treatment under the law, even one instance of discrimination is one too many. At one point or another in our nation’s history, every kind of discrimination has been minimized or belittled — look no further than the battle over so-called wokeism, or the denial of systemic racism.

As a Sikh American, I am no stranger to bias. Our community has experienced hate firsthand since our earliest arrival in the United States, from the anti-Sikh violence in Bellingham, Washington, in 1907 to more recent discrimination in the aftermath of 9/11. To those outside our community, this persecution may seem insignificant. But when it is you, your parents or your children who suffer, you gain an appreciation for the need to do anything you can to make society safer and more inclusive for all.

As I was born in India, I can also attest to the pernicious nature of casteism: It is a daily burden and threat for those who are oppressed, but the rest barely notice. B.R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, wrote: “Caste is another name for control. Caste puts a limit on enjoyment. Caste does not allow a person to transgress caste limits in pursuit of his enjoyment.”

I choose to take a stand against caste discrimination because it is the right thing to do as a human, but also because it is fundamental to my faith. Sikhism was founded in the 15th century in opposition to the social inequalities of its time, including casteism. The cultural context of caste in the present-day United States is vastly different, but as long as such informal power structures persist, it is incumbent on all of us to make sure they are not left unopposed by the legal structures meant to govern and protect us.

RELATED: What California’s Ravidassia community believes and why they want caste bias outlawed

There is no denying that caste discrimination is real and that it affects us, but progress is being made. Cal State has updated its policy against caste-based discrimination. Tech companies such as Apple, IBM and Dell have done the same. Earlier this year, the Seattle City Council passed a law against caste-based discrimination.

Now, SB 403 gives all Californians a pathway to clearer data, a safer workplace and a more thriving community. All we need to do is have the courage to listen to those who are asking what more we can do to help, rather than those who are urging us to do less.

(Nirvair Singh is an IT professional in California. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

HINDUTVA IS FASCISM 

Smithsonian Folklife Festival on National Mall explores often-unfamiliar spirituality

The lead curator of the 'Creative Encounters' program hopes it will give the public a chance to 'pull back the curtain' on spiritual practices.

Elena Terry, right, leads a "Corn Futures" workshop in the Kitchen Theology tent during the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Thursday, June 29, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington. 

RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

June 30, 2023
By Adelle M. Banks

WASHINGTON (RNS) — In one corner of an array of colorful booths and tents on a hazy day in the nation’s capital, Elena Terry prepared to “celebrate the beauty of corn” through ancestral-inspired dishes like corn crepes on the first day of the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

“I want to be able to educate people about our life and our connection to food, the land, to each other and what that means as a Native woman in today’s world,” said the traditional Ho-Chunk woman from Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, in a Thursday (June 29) interview at the “Kitchen Theology” tent on the National Mall.

“I would like them to understand that we are still here, we do still live our religion daily and that it isn’t something that is structured anything like this other idea of what religion might be in that we are just spiritual people.”

Terry, the founder and executive chef of Wild Bearies, a nonprofit catering and community outreach organization, is one of dozens of participants featured in the festival’s program, titled “Creative Encounters: Living Religions in the U.S.” Steps away from her tent were booths about a Hindu temple in Illinois, Arabic calligraphy by a D.C. artist, and images of “santos,” or saints, from a New Mexico carver.

Michelle Banks, lead curator of the “Creative Encounters” program, said organizers hope it will give members of the public a chance to “pull back the curtain” on spiritual practices they know little about but that may be embraced by their neighbors.

Michelle Banks is lead curator of the “Creative Encounters” program of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

“One of the things we asked ourselves when we first started looking at this was: How often do people from any religious or spiritual community or tradition visit another place of worship?” she said in an interview in the Creative Encounters’ area across the street from the National Museum of American History.

RELATED: Finding spirituality on Earth’s ‘most secular’ continent

“We’re hoping to start a conversation,” she added, expecting some may use the festival as a way to “ask this question that I’ve been curious about but haven’t quite been sure how to ask about in the past.”

The program focuses on key ways faith practices are expressed, from “body and spirit,” including gestures and dance, to “sound religion,” including music, stories and mantras.

As she sat for an interview, a bell rang intermittently from a nearby booth of the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago.

Bhanoo Sharma, president of the temple in Lemont, Illinois, later explained that the sound accompanies prayer for priests and devotees alike.

Bhanoo Sharma at the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, titled “Creative Encounters: Living Religions in the U.S.”, Thursday, June 29, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

A Hindu booth at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Thursday, June 29, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

“When we’re praying, it’s kind of like we’re awakening ourselves,” he said. “The bell is almost a rhythmic chant while we’re singing. It helps, in a way, keep time as well. It’s also almost as if we are feeling like we are awakening God to listen to our prayer, symbolically.”

In the first couple of hours of the festival, Sharma said he was learning about the other traditions demonstrated nearby and found connections with lessons being taught by a New Mexico artisan who made carvings of saints using the wood available in his state.

“It’s very similar to the way our artisans carve our deities in India out of marble, and it’s just whatever material is available,” he said. “It’s kind of neat that everybody uses what’s convenient and what’s around them.”

Nicolás Otero, an Albuquerque teacher and artist, said he views the materials of his artwork as a divine gift.

“The earth is provided for us, so the paints come from the earth; the wood that we carve comes from the earth, given to us from a greater power, the creator,” said Otero, whose roots are Indigenous, Hispanic and Catholic. “That’s how I see and believe — how I’m able to do what I do.”


“Creative Encounters: Living Religions in the U.S.” at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Thursday, June 29, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

Bob and Ann Wicks, of Oxford, Ohio, said the exhibits helped them gain better understanding of traditions practiced around the country through conversations and interactions with the presenters.

“For me the most important thing is that these are traditions that are infused with meaning and have religious significance — more spiritual significance — within the community. That really helps provide a sense of unity,” he said.

His wife said they visited a table where they were told to “think of your ancestors” as they helped make flowers out of colorful tissue paper for the “ofrendas,” or offerings, for the Indigenous holiday Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead.

“There’s a lot of things that we had no idea that — on the surface, oh it’s just a flower and it’s just an arch — but actually it’s a lot more,” he said.


Alec Esparza, right, creates flowers with Smithsonian volunteer Seona Jung, left, and Smithsonian intern Paloma Sanchez on the National Mall. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

Alec Esparza, one of the East Los Angeles artists with Mexican roots, was creating the flowers with a Smithsonian intern and volunteer.

“It’s a celebration of life, not how they passed away or died,” he said of the recollection of ancestors. “So what we remember is how they lived, and we do that so that we never forget who they are and how they lived.”

As he spoke, to his left, shaped-note singers sang the tune often used with the song “Just a Little Talk with Jesus,” and to his right, a group demonstrating the work of the Threshold Singers, a hospice music ministry, encircled a woman stretched out before them as they sang gentle music.

The Threshold Singers, a hospice music ministry, demonstrate their singing around a lounging individual, Thursday, June 29, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

Arabic calligrapher Josh Berer describes himself as nonreligious but said his work immerses him in the sermons and other messages of the Muslim faith.

“Islamic calligraphy and the religion Islam are intrinsically and forever linked — without one there cannot be the other,” he said.

He pointed to a colorful illustration on display behind him as an example, featuring words from a sermon from Ali Ibn Abi Talib, an early leader of Shia Muslims and a relative of the Prophet Muhammad.

“It’s ultimately just life advice — how to be a good person in the world,” Berer said, noting that one part of the framed art can be translated to say: “One who rejects worldliness is not affected by poverty.”

He said being able to talk to passersby at the festival helped reinforce that this work of “sacred art” is a modern-day practice and not solely relegated to the status of a museum artifact: “It’s something that people aren’t really aware exists anymore.”

Hawaiians Kumu Micah Kamohoalii, center, and Arleen Wright-Kauahi, right, explain using bark to make clothing during the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Thursday, June 29, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

The festival, which returned to an in-person event on the Mall last year after going virtual in 2021, had to cancel its opening ceremony because of unhealthy air quality in the D.C. area — due to smoke drifting from wildfires in Canada.

Banks said some participants stayed away due to the conditions. She hoped for more robust participation during the rest of the festival, which is held through July 4 and again July 6-9.

RELATED: PHOTO GALLERY: The history and diversity of African American religious rituals

Why do we remember Srebrenica?

We must recall the daily, routine dehumanization that leads to genocide

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Omar Suleiman visits the Srebrenica Memorial Center, the site of a genocide from the 1990s in Bosnia. Photo courtesy of Suleiman

Islam Beyond Phobia
July 11, 2023
By Omar Suleiman

(RNS) — The genocide that occurred in Srebrenica 28 years ago this week, when some 8,000 mostly Muslim Bosniaks were killed by a Serbian nationalist militia, was the largest genocide Europe has seen since the Holocaust. It didn’t come out of nowhere: In the three years leading up to this genocide, an estimated 100,000 people were killed, 80% of whom were Bosniaks, one of three ethnic groups that called the fledgling state of Bosnia and Herzegovina home.

But in July 1995, Bosnian Serbs troops slaughtered Srebrenica’s men and boys before burying them in mass graves, raped an untold number of Bosniak women and removed an estimated 23,000 women, children and elderly, putting them on buses and driving them to Muslim-controlled territories.

It was the horrific climax of a disgraceful war. The international Muslim community mobilized, and the shame of the genocide prompted the West to act. A NATO-led bombing campaign led to the cessation of the Serbian murder machine.

On the 28th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, how do we reflect on the murder of thousands of Bosniak Muslims in a matter of hours? How do we avoid “statistical numbness,” one where casualty counts, past and present, are merely numbers, absent souls?
RELATED: Two years after US recognized Uyghur genocide, rights groups warn time is running out

The attitudes that allowed a genocide to occur in Srebrenica continue to inform our view of Muslims today. One phenomenon of the genocide that comes through is a dehumanization of the Muslim, apart from race, geography or identity. Despite their location in Europe and their Caucasian identity, Bosniaks were demonized, dehumanized and consequently assigned for slaughter precisely because of their Islam.

Post-World War II decolonization had already normalized the Third World Muslim victim of Africa and Asia, but in Europe itself, only a few decades separated from mass murder of millions of the continent’s Jews, the citizens of the world’s most prosperous region had told themselves they had left the savagery of the past behind. Insert Islam, however, and the Bosniak Muslim is transformed into a natural casualty.

Simply put, would the genocide of Srebrenica have been possible if the victims weren’t Muslim? Or did this prove that being Muslim alone potentially disqualifies one from being considered European or even human?

These questions about Srebrenica are especially relevant in our 21st century, whose futile wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in thousands of unnamed and unknown casualties.

What does it mean to remember? What good is remembering without pause, reflection and internalization? It’s important to frame the genocide of Srebrenica and similar atrocities primarily through the lens of personal accountability. In looking inward while reflecting on atrocity, we properly remember Srebrenica, converting remembrance from a ceremonial annual ritual to a transformative exercise of self-accountability.

When I visited the Srebrenica Memorial Center, I was chilled to the bone by the sheer number of graves, most of them containing bodies of Bosniak Muslims recovered from mass graves. They cover the ground as far as the eye can see. In Srebrenica, the air itself seems to bear witness to the bloodshed. Statistical numbness is impossible. Every grave is important. The difference between one casualty or two, much less 8,000, is the difference between night and day.

RELATED: Time to remember more than one atrocity? A defense of Holocaust Remembrance Day

At the memorial center, the shoes of the victims remain on display, each pair a reminder that we must humanize the statistic and bring life to the virtual. Every human being who once stood in those shoes had tried to escape the horrific cruelty of the tormentors. The victims thought of ways to run and hide, and dreamed of walking freely without fear. They were children, parents, spouses and siblings. But to those who massacred them, assembly line-style, they were less than insects.

Remembering genocide means remembering that it can only happen with this systematic dehumanization of a people. It doesn’t happen in one day; it takes sustained neglect of a fellow human’s plight. We are inundated with the news of casualties and tragedies every day, on our phones, televisions and computers. Over 10 killed here, 25 killed there. 700 killed there. Without proper remembrance, a cycle of empty condolences and endless anniversaries continues.

28 years after genocide, Bosniak Muslims mourn their dead but celebrate a return of Islamic life to Srebrenica

Though the area was depopulated of Muslims by the genocide, many survivors and their children have come back. 

Attendees gather around the rows of coffins returned to the memorial center in Bosnia in early July. Photo by Shahar Azran/WJC

July 13, 2023
By David I. Klein

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (RNS) — Nearly three decades later, Srebrenica’s dead are still coming home. Earlier this month, the remains of 27 men and three teenage boys were delivered to the remote valley that played host to Europe’s second genocide of the 20th century.

The victims, identified by the International Commission on Missing Persons, will be buried alongside the more than 6,600 graves that dot the Potočari valley in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, now home to the Srebrenica Memorial Center honoring the 8,372 Bosniak Muslims, mostly men and boys, murdered at the hands of Serb militias in 1995 amid the Bosnian war.

The Srebrenica massacre, carried out in an area the United Nations had declared a safe zone for refugees, has since been deemed an act of genocide by successive courts within the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, or ICTY.

The funeral honoring the 30 massacre victims, conducted by Bosnia’s highest-ranking Islamic leader, the Reisul-Ulema or grand mufti, Husein Kavazović, was part of a number of events commemorating the 28th anniversary of the genocide, including a march that drew thousands and, on Monday, a conference dedicated to both Srebrenica and Holocaust remembrance that was hosted jointly with the World Jewish Congress.

The conference was the project of Menachem Rosensaft, the WJC’s associate executive vice president and the son of two Holocaust survivors. Rosensaft has spent most of his life working in the field of Holocaust remembrance but in recent years has become an impassioned advocate for awareness of the Srebrenica genocide.

“We commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, because they’re our families, our communities, our people, but also because they were the victims of a genocide, they were the victim of a horrendous crime against humanity,” he told Religion News Service. “And we have to, in equal force, acknowledge and commemorate the tragedies perpetrated against others. Never again does not mean never again just to Jews, it means never again to anyone. We will not stand by when anyone is victimized, when anyone is oppressed. That has to be the basic basis of remembrance. It is what motivates the World Jewish Congress to be here and it is certainly what motivates me.”

On Tuesday, ahead of the funeral, Rosensaft gave a speech at the commemoration event. “If we forget them, our souls will turn to stone, our eyes will never again shed tears,” he said of the genocide’s victims.

“Our Bosniak nation is a nation that carries pain and sorrow,” Kavazović said in a statement to the wider Islamic community before the funeral. “I ask God to grant the families of the victims every good thing, that their children be strong, that they be a message to all those who did this, but also to those who may harbor the same in their souls for some future time.”

The dead of Srebrenica are not the only ones returning. Though the area was depopulated of Muslims by the genocide, many survivors and their children have come back.


Attendees join together for a presentation during the Srebrenica Genocide Commemoration in early July in Bosnia. Photo by Shahar Azran/WJC

Today, Srebrenica’s population is about half Muslim and half Orthodox Serb. The 23 mosques of Srebrenica destroyed in the war have all been rebuilt thanks to donations from around the world.

Damir Pestalic, the chief Imam of Srebrenica, stressed that though once empty, the community now has multiple full Islamic schools. Speaking alongside leaders from the World Jewish Congress on Monday (July 10), he recalled suggesting to his daughter that they move to California. He said she dismissed the idea, telling him she would “take one tree in Srebrenica over all of California or America.”

“We want the children who are born here to stay in Srebrenica,” Vahid Fazlović, the mufti of Tuzla, said during a commemoration event in Potočari on Tuesday. “The Islamic community will not falter in its relationship with Srebrenica, and in addition, it will constantly encourage all other institutions, all factors in our society, the state, to fulfill their obligations toward Srebrenica.

“It is up to us to pass on the awareness of this place to the generations that are growing up,” he added. “We have rejuvenated families here. Perhaps few expected that we would have new and good sprouts in Srebrenica. Thank God that is so. This is due to the people who returned here, with so much courage and daring, even after the crime.”

The return of Bosniak Muslims to Srebrenica has not been without conflict, though.

The crowd of attendees at the Srebrenica Genocide Commemoration lift the first coffin of remains overhead outside the memorial center in early July in Bosnia. Photo by Shahar Azran/WJC

This year’s commemoration comes at a time when tensions between Bosnia’s three constituent ethnic groups — Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs — are running higher than they’ve been in decades.

Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartate presidency, and the leader of Republika Srpska, the Serb majority enclave within Bosnia — where Srebrenica is located — has spoken openly of secession and continues to deny that Serb forces committed a genocide in Srebrenica in 1995. In March, Bosnia’s prosecutor office opened a case against Dodik for genocide denial, after remarks he made in Republika Srpska’s capital, Banja Luka, in February.

On Tuesday evening, after most mourners had left the area, a Serb church in the town of Srebrenica itself held a concert with nationalist songs, according to Bosnian Media.

Pestalic called on the church to explain the event.

“I want to invite the Serbian Orthodox Church to tell us what it was. The witnesses heard the announcement of the program, it was terrible. The announcement that they are celebrating the liberation day of Srebrenica tonight and that they want to liberate what little is left,” Pestalic said. “Let them answer what that means. All authorities should get involved. This is not a harmless situation. This is not only about humiliating the victims, but also about threats of new crimes.”


A woman kneels to touch one of the coffins during the Srebrenica Genocide Commemoration. The remains of many individuals were returned to the memorial center and included in part of the commemoration event in early July. Shahar Azran / WJC

Munira Subašić, the president of the Mothers of Srebrenica organization, which has fought for acknowledgment of the massacre as a genocide, spoke to those gathered at Monday’s conference about the ongoing difficulty to make the massacre part of the local school curriculum.

Subašić, who has lived in Srebrenica since the early 1960s, lost 22 close family members in the genocide, including her husband and son.

Currently, in state schools in Republika Srpska, even in areas around Srebrenica where a Bosniak Muslim majority has returned, said Subašić, the genocide is not taught about.

“When you go to a school in Srebrenica, it is as if you entered a church. It is important for them to have St. Sava there and Ratko Mladić, their national hero,” she said.

St. Sava, a 12th-century Serbian prince, monk and intellectual, is considered the patron saint of Serbs and education in the Serbian Orthodox Church, while Mladić was commander of the Army of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian war and is currently serving a life sentence in The Hague, Netherlands, after being convicted of genocide, four counts of war crimes and five counts of crimes against humanity by the ICTY.

During the war, Srebrenica was a Bosniak majority enclave within the Serb majority Republika Srpska. For the Serb militias who rejected the idea of being part of an independent Bosnian state, and instead desired to pursue independence or join with Serbia, Srebrenica was a complication. The Muslim majority region would have cut Republika Srpska in half.

In 1993, the United Nations declared the area, which had swelled to nearly 50,000 Bosniak Muslim refugees, a “safe zone” and called for both Bosniak and Serb forces in town to be demilitarized. But in June 1995, Serb forces under the command of Mladić assaulted the region and conquered the town. Within 10 days, the Serb forces had murdered more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslims, tossing them into mass graves along the river Drina.

Three days before the anniversary, more than 3,000 Bosniaks from around the country began a 100-kilometer march to the site, known as the Marš Mira or March of Peace, to pay their respects to the dead.

The march, which has been held each year since 2005, traces the reverse of the path a column of Bosniak men attempted to make to escape to safety during the slaughter. Most did not survive.

 


A gravesite waits empty and marked with a number during the Srebrenica Genocide Commemoration in early July. A number of remains were returned to the site as part of the commemoration ceremony. Photo by David Ian Klein

“Thousands were killed here They are gone. Their houses are gone. But today thousands of people are coming back to feel as one with them,” Asra, a Muslim woman who grew up in the nearby city of Tuzla but today lives in the Netherlands, told RNS about why she continues to visit for the anniversary events. She, like others interviewed at the gathering, offered only her first name.

For Adis, a Bosnian man from a town between Tuzla and Sarajevo, it was important for him as a Bosnian to understand the place where his country’s greatest tragedy occurred.

“I came to remember and get a feeling of what it must have been like then,”Adis told RNS. “When you are here, you can understand a little of what it was like when thousands were packed into this small place.”

Cihan, a Turkish man who came from the city of Batman in Eastern Turkey, told RNS he was inspired to come by the words of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first president, Alija Izetbegovic, who said, “If we forget the genocide done to us, we are compelled to live it again.”

“If we forget that genocide, that genocide can be again,” Cihan said. “We have seen too many genocides, unfortunately. That is why I am here.”

Rebecca Todd Peters is on a mission to get churches to talk about abortion

A Presbyterian minister and scholar is working to shift the cultural paradigm that abortion is sin.
A group of women from a Presbyterian church in Chapel Hill, N.C., came to hear Rebecca Todd Peters’ sermon at a Unitarian-Universalist church on July 9, 2023. One also asked her to sign her book, “Trust Women,” which Peters published in 2018. RNS photo by Yonat Shimron

July 13, 2023
By Yonat Shimron

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (RNS) — The Rev. Rebecca Todd Peters’ neon pink stole bearing the Planned Parenthood logo announced her subject even before she ascended to the lectern.

When she started preaching, she got right to the point. “Abortion makes many people profoundly uncomfortable,” she told a crowd of 200 at the Community Church of Chapel Hill, a Unitarian Universalist congregation “ — at dinner parties, in polite conversation, with friends and family and, too often, in church.”

Her sermon, like countless others she has given recently, aimed to challenge the perception that people of faith are against abortion and to tell the stories of women who have had them.

An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and a professor of religious studies at Elon University, where she heads the Abortion and Religion project, Peters is best known as one of the country’s leading ethicists on abortion rights.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court announced in May 2021 that it would hear Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that would eventually overturn Roe v. Wade, Peters has given more than 55 sermons and lectures on abortion across the country. Lately, she’s been especially in demand in North Carolina, after a new law banning most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy and restricting abortion-related medications went into effect earlier this month.

Until last year, abortions were legal in North Carolina until fetal viability, generally between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy. Last August, a judge ruled that abortion was no longer legal after 20 weeks.

The new 12-week ban, which passed with lightning speed by North Carolina’s Republican-dominated legislature, stunned many state residents, and especially members of the religious left.

While most liberal Protestant denominations — including Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and Unitarian Universalist — have official positions in support of reproductive rights, Peters said these groups too often duck conversations about abortion, leaving Catholics and evangelical Christians to win the day with messages that abortion is a sin.


Rebecca Todd Peters is a professor of religious studies at Elon University, author and community leader. Photo courtesy of Peters

Her mission is to step into that void. As a first step she talks about her own reproductive history, gladly volunteering that at 55, she is married, has two children and has undergone two abortions.

“I felt God’s presence with me as I made the decision to end two pregnancies and I felt no guilt, no shame, no sin,” she told the congregation in Chapel Hill. “A forced pregnancy or birth is not holy.”

Peters, whose father was a pastor, has been working in the church and on reproductive issues since her first job after college. Working in the women’s advocacy office of the Presbyterian Church’s Louisville, Kentucky, headquarters, she began volunteering to escort women to an abortion clinic amid crowds of hostile protesters shouting, yelling and intimidating the women.

“These people said they were Christian, and it was just this huge disconnect for me — this, cognitive dissonance,” she said. “How can these people say that they are loving Christians and be so horrible?”

It set her on a path to study the role of Christianity in shaping cultural attitudes on abortion. She earned a master’s of divinity and later a Ph.D. in Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Her mentor there, Beverly Wildung Harrison, wrote the 1983 classic “Our Right to Choose.”

Peters wants to push back against a moral framework around abortion that requires women to justify their reasons for ending a pregnancy. In this, she’s referring not only to the typical justifications — rape, incest or the life of the mother — but any justification. The underlying assumption is that abortion is wrong and that women have an obligation to bear a child, an idea Peters believes is rooted in Christianity’s patriarchal vision of womanhood.

RELATED: Poll: Support for abortion rights is strong, even among most religious groups

This framework leads women to feel ashamed about abortion, effectively silencing them. The pregnant woman is erased, replaced with ultrasound photos of the fetus.

Peters instead advocates for reproductive justice, a term that originated among Black community leaders who felt the focus on abortion rights was too narrow and needed to be expanded to include concerns about reproductive health care more generally.

Not all listeners at the Community Church of Chapel Hill accepted Peters’ arguments. One church member who declined to give her name said Peters neglected to mention one of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill.

But far more people gave Peters an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

Outside the Community Church sanctuary a long line of people stood to greet Peters, among them four women who are reading her 2018 book “Trust Women” as part of their Presbyterian church’s reading group. The group invited Peters to speak at their church. One of the women asked her to sign her copy.

The members of SACReD join together for a group photo during a training. 

Photo courtesy of Rebeca Todd Peters

“I just think she hit it head-on; she nailed it,” said Rosanne Tiller, a 37-year-old physician and a mother of two who is now expecting her third.

Tiller said her favorite message from Peters is the three-pronged statement of the reproductive justice movement: Women have the right not to have a child; the right to have a child; and the right to raise a child in a safe and healthy environment.

Polls, such as a recent PRRI survey, show majorities of American religious groups support legal abortion. White evangelicals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter-day Saints and Hispanic Protestants are the only exceptions. Even among those groups, support for legal access has been growing.

Religious congregations in North Carolina have begun stepping up their support for legal abortion. In the state’s Triangle region, an interfaith coalition on reproductive justice formed this past spring, with members of Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker, Unitarian Universalist and Jewish congregations.

Next month, the group will screen a new documentary called “Plan C,” about activists and providers who are building a network to mail abortion pills, such as mifepristone and misoprostol, to women who need it. One of the churches in the coalition is also planning a two-day symposium this November on reproductive issues.


Beth Welton of Chapel Hill’s Church of Reconciliation holds a sign that reads “Women of Faith of Oppose SB 20,” the new North Carolina law banning abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy. Welton demonstrated against the law in Raleigh, the state capital, in June. Photo courtesy of Beth Welton

Beth Welton, one of the coalition’s organizers, called the day in June 2022 when the Dobbs decision was handed down “one of the most horrifying days I’d experienced as an adult.”

“We were just complacent,” said Welton. “We got out-talked. That’s why it’s so terribly important as a coalition that we continue to grow and have a narrative to counter that other narrative that people of faith are opposed to abortion.”

Other North Carolina churches have joined SACReD, the Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity, which Peters co-founded with partners in Texas, with the aim of shifting the cultural paradigm around abortion.

RELATED: Catholic Democrats issue new ‘statement of principles’ defending abortion rights

The group’s first in-person training took place in Chapel Hill in April. Peters helped write SACReD’s seven-week curriculum that provides religious congregations with guides for small-group discussions about sex, reproduction and abortion.

Peters is not waiting for churches to subscribe to the curriculum. She is delivering sermons as far from home as Wisconsin and Minnesota, filled with pithy statements designed to startle her mainline audiences into action: As she told the Community Church of Chapel Hill: “Abortion is a moral good. Abortion is an act of love. Abortion is an act of grace,” and finally: “Abortion is a blessing.”

The Bhagavad Gita, the bomb and the dharma of Robert Oppenheimer

How did the atomic physicist’s fascination with the Gita influence his feelings about the making of the bomb? 

From left, Donald Cooksey, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Robert Thornton, J. Robert Oppenheimer and William Brobeck examine the 184-cyclotron during a press visit in the spring of 1946. Photo by Donald Cooksey, courtesy of the National Archives catalog

Opinion
July 12, 2023
By Syama Allard

(RNS) — On July 16, 1945, in the desert 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, a nuclear weapon was tested for the first time.

Recalling the scene 20 years later, J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” uttered words he would henceforth be known for. Pale and emaciated for his 61 years, eyes gaunt, the physicist persistently avoided the camera as he spoke with emotionally subdued precision:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

At the time, only a small number of Americans knew much about the Scripture Oppenheimer quoted, though his hauntingly poignant delivery gave his recitation a special weight. The true impact its spiritual source had on Oppenheimer, however, and on the development of atomic weaponry remained largely unknown.

According to James A. Hijiya, author of “The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Oppenheimer’s interest in ancient Indian philosophy grew out of a rebellion against his own upbringing. Of Jewish descent, his family was affiliated with Felix Adler’s Society for Ethical Culture and sent young Oppenheimer to the society’s school in New York, where his father was on the board of directors.

Abandoning religion’s spiritual and supernatural aspects, the school taught the importance of human welfare based on a foundation of secular moral principles. It also provided excellent training in the sciences and classics, but Isidor Isaac Rabi, a physicist who met the young Oppenheimer in 1929, before working with him later on the Manhattan Project, said Oppenheimer was already seeking “a more profound approach to human relations and man’s place in the universe.” He appeared to have found this approach in the Hindu classics, which seemed to interest him even more than physics.
RELATED: How Buddhist and Catholic survivors responded to Hiroshima and Nagasaki

In 1933, while he was teaching at Berkeley, his interest apparently reached new depths when he met Arthur W. Ryder, a professor of Sanskrit who taught Oppenheimer the language. Especially captivated by the Gita, Oppenheimer called it “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.”


J. Robert Oppenheimer, atomic physicist and head of the Manhattan Project, circa 1944. Photo courtesy of the National Archives catalog

Always keeping a well-worn copy of it near his desk, he gave the book to friends and regularly quoted passages, once at a memorial service for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. When asked by Christian Century magazine in 1963 to name the top 10 books that shaped his “vocational attitude” and “philosophy of life,” Oppenheimer listed the Gita, along with Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

A 700-verse dialogue between an ancient warrior named Arjuna and his cousin Krishna (a form of Vishnu), the Bhagavad Gita is set on a battlefield at the edge of war.

Hoping to install his eldest brother, Yudhishthira, as ruler of a kingdom that has been usurped by their cousin Duryodhana, Arjuna is torn. Faced with the prospect of fighting an army filled with his friends and relatives, he despondently turns to Lord Krishna and asks if the throne is worth the price of slaying so many of his loved ones. Motivated by envy, Duryodhana might be in the wrong, but surely his crime doesn’t justify fratricidal bloodshed. Casting his weapons aside, Arjuna falls to the ground, overwhelmed with grief.

From a spiritual perspective, the peaceful solution feels like the obvious one, especially considering the stakes. Yet Krishna, who eventually reveals himself to be a manifestation of the divine, actually chastises Arjuna, albeit lovingly.

As a warrior, Krishna argues, Arjuna’s dharma, or sacred duty, is to fight, no matter what the outcome. While in life we can’t control the result of our actions, we can control our actions, and our best-performed actions are the ones most aligned with our nature. Just as the heart best serves itself and the body by performing its function of pumping blood, Arjuna best serves himself and society by performing his function as a warrior in the face of battle.

For him, the pacifist’s route — a route that isn’t his but that of a renunciate — isn’t selfless but the opposite, an action based on his own desire. If everyone discharged the duties of others instead of their own, the world would fall into disarray. Faith in the higher cosmic order dictates that all beings execute their responsibilities, even when doing so causes unhappiness or distress.

Inspired by these words, Arjuna asks Krishna to exhibit his cosmic identity, as a way of strengthening faith in the order he’s referring to. Pleased by his cousin’s change of heart, Krishna assents to the request and manifests a bewildering display of wondrous, brilliant and unlimited visions.

It’s at this moment, as an unfathomable radiance blazes from an incomprehensible form containing all that has ever existed, Krishna says the famous line, describing himself as the “destroyer of worlds” — not to instill fear, but to emphasize that ultimate destiny was out of Arjuna’s hands.

Arjuna, left, and Lord Krishna. Image by MahaMuni/Wikipedia/Creative Commons

Gathering his senses, Arjuna prepares for battle, fulfilling his role to provide a providential end that has already been set in motion.

Understanding Oppenheimer’s quote in broader context, you can see how he, who had his own considerations of pacifism, might have quelled his doubts through the model of Arjuna. As Hijiya thoroughly conveys, the scientist very much determined his duties by his profession as a nuclear physicist, and made various statements in the course of making the bomb, as well as in the years after, touting the importance of following these duties.

In 1945, he told his peers at Los Alamos, “If you are a scientist, you cannot stop such a thing. … If you are a scientist you believe … that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values.” Going further, in a magazine article published during the same period, remarking on whether it was good to give the world increased power, he said, “Because we are scientists, we must say an unalterable yes.”

If it was his duty as a scientist to help create the bomb, he believed it was the duty of the country’s political leaders to decide what to do with it. When fellow Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard wanted to circulate a petition cautioning President Harry Truman against dropping the weapon on a Japanese city, Oppenheimer forbade it, saying the country’s statesmen had information the scientists did not possess and were therefore the most qualified to determine its proper use.

Fate, Oppenheimer clearly surmised, was out of their hands. All they could do was play their parts to the best of their abilities, and allow others to play theirs.

Despite his distaste for the violence and suffering the bombs caused, and despite his criticism toward furthering the nuclear arms program after the war ended, it should come as no surprise that in his final years, Oppenheimer said that if he could go back in time, he would do things the same way.

RELATED: After 75 years, a question about race haunts Truman’s calculation on Hiroshima

His lack of regret shouldn’t be mistaken for a willful hardening of his heart. The footage of him reciting the line from the Gita makes it painfully clear that the bomb’s success brought him no joy. Like Arjuna, he carried out the obligations of someone in his position, surrendering to a destiny beyond his own comprehension.

(Syama Allard is a content writer for the Hindu American Foundation, based in Florida. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Why the movie ‘Exodus’ still matters

On the 75th anniversary of Israel’s birth, the blockbuster movie still raises serious questions.
Martini Judaism

July 13, 2023
By  Jeffrey Salkin


(RNS) — They just don’t make movies like this anymore.

You know the kind — the ones with casts that contain every A-list actor and actress in the industry.

That was the 1960 movie “Exodus,” directed by Otto Preminger. The screenwriter was the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, who based his script on the 1958 blockbuster novel by Leon Uris, which had been the biggest bestseller since “Gone With the Wind.”

Uris’ epic dive into Jewish history crossed the generations, chronicling the emigration to the land of Israel and the struggles that accompanied its creation. In particular, it focused on the voyage of the refugee ship “Exodus,” which defied the British blockade of the land of Israel, and the subsequent creation of the state.

The book was not only iconic; it was redemptive. It was nothing less than a modern Haggadah for a modern Pesach. In the former Soviet Union, refuseniks passed dog-eared copies of the novel around; it served as the inspiration for their own anticipated exodus.

Because I am in Israel, and it is Israel’s 75th birthday, and because recent events have made me wistful for that old heroic image of Israel, I decided to watch the movie again.

So, how does it hold up?

Surprisingly well.

This is why it still matters.

The conversation about Jewish power. The main dramatic tension in the film is the conflict between the two Ben Canaan brothers. Barak, the father of Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman, at his blue eyes-est), is a statesman, a moderate. His brother Akiva is a leader of the Irgun, the militant underground force that regularly attacked both British and Arab targets.

The duo was not invented for mere dramatic effect. The tensions were, and are, real — between the Haganah’s policy of restraint and the Irgun’s policy of attack.

As I watched “Exodus,” I reflected on how that sibling rivalry — which ideology will shape the future of the Jewish nation? — is alive and well today.

Consider: The leader of the Irgun was Menachem Begin, who would ultimately serve as prime minister of Israel. His teacher was Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. Jabotinsky’s secretary was the late historian Benzion Netanyahu, father of Benjamin, the current prime minister.

I write this with almost unspeakable pain: Akiva Ben Canaan’s heirs are winning.

The presence of the Holocaust. When the novel and the movie each appeared, the Holocaust had barely appeared in American popular culture; up to that point, only the various popular culture iterations of Anne Frank’s diary had made a mark.

So “Exodus” was a key moment in the American cultural experience of the Holocaust — decades ahead of its time.

First, there is the scene when Karen, the young refugee girl, reunites with her father, who had survived the camps. He is entirely broken and unresponsive. My parents explained that he was “shellshocked” — the only available term for what we now call PTSD.

That scene made an indelible impression upon me; it was the first time that I had encountered anything about the Holocaust.

Second: Dov Landau (Sal Mineo), the young hothead who wants to join the Irgun. The Irgun leaders interrogate him mercilessly on how he survived the camps. He explains that he had been a sonderkommando, responsible for disposing of bodies in the ovens, but there are holes in his story.

Finally, he breaks down and he admits that he had survived because he was a sexual slave in the homosexual brothels of the SS: “They used me like you would use a woman!”

In retrospect, this is remarkable. The conversation about the ovens was decades ahead of its time; no one was talking about that grisly reality.

But, to talk about homosexual rape in the camps? No one was talking about that then; not many more are talking about it now. “Exodus” named the un-nameable.

The meaning of Zionism. The American nurse, Kitty Fremont, takes an immediate liking to Karen. She invites the girl to return to the United States with her, in essence to become a bourgeois American, and to escape the burdens of Jewish history and destiny.

Karen refuses Kitty’s offer. Her place is with her people, and she wants to be a pioneer in the building of the land.

Welcome to Zionism 101.

Where is Judaism in “Exodus?” The short answer: missing in inaction.

With the exception of the mashgiach (supervisor of kashrut) who is checking the meat in the Acre prison, and the traditional shoveling of dirt into a grave, you will see no Jewish religious ritual, though you will see Christian religious processions.

The only name of God that you will hear is Allah, referred to respectfully by Barak Ben Canaan, and invoked by the muezzin in Akko; Elohim doesn’t get a shoutout.

So, where, exactly, was Judaism? It has vanished. In that sense, “Exodus” understood Zionism all too well. The new Jew is the secular Zionist.

The relations between Jews and Arabs. The first dramatic pairing in the film was the two Ben Canaan brothers. The second was Taha, the mukhtar of Abu Yesha, the Arab village that is adjacent to the moshav of Gan Dafna and Ari’s boyhood friend, and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husayni (sometimes, Husseini).

The grand mufti represents the nightmare. He was the chief Muslim religious authority of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937, during the time of the British Mandate. As such, he was the undisputed leader of the Palestinian Arab community, and he was as close to pure evil as the past century has produced. (See the excellent biography, “Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam.”)

The Nazi in the film says that the grand mufti “was our guest in Berlin during the war.” That is true. Al-Husayni was a Nazi sympathizer and a virulent Jew-hater. He had trained an elite corps of Bosnian Muslims for the SS, planning to exterminate the Jews of Palestine.

The grand mufti represents the nightmare. His militant Islam still exists.

Taha represents the dream — of Arab-Jewish cooperation.

That was not a fantasy. The story of Arab cooperation with Zionism is underappreciated. As Hillel Cohen writes in ”Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration With Zionism, 1917-1948,” there were many stories of local Arabs inviting Jewish immigrants to purchase land. My Israeli friends who grew up in Haifa and Akko speak of their grandparents’ warm friendships with Arab families in the 1940s.

As the state of Israel is declared, Taha declares to Ari: “You have won your freedom and I have lost mine.”

Ari refuses to see this as a zero sum game. He begs Taha and his people to stay on as residents of the new state — to become Israeli Arabs — that we “work together as equals in the free state of Israel.” Ari sees the promise in Israel’s Declaration of Independence — that Israel would be both a Jewish stateֶ and “a state of all its citizens.”

That tension — Jewish state, or a state of all its citizens — is still raging today.

Then comes the scene that ranks with the most horrific of my childhood cinematic memories. The mufti’s forces cannot abide Taha’s warm relationship with the Jews. They destroy the Arab village. They hang Taha, daubing his body with Stars of David.

As the film ends, Ari says over the joint grave that receives the bodies of both Taha and Karen, who has been killed by an Arab fighter: “I swear on the bodies of these two people that the day will come when Arab and Jew will share in a peaceful life in this land that they have always shared in death.”

”Exodus” forces me, and all of us, to demand that Ari’s prayer be more than a prayer.

It is not too late, but the clock is ticking.

 

Where will SCOTUS draw the line on religious liberty?
At this point it’s impossible to say.

 Justice Neil Gorsuch

Spiritual Politics

July 13, 2023
By Mark Silk

(RNS) — The most consequential religion case of this year’s Supreme Court term wasn’t actually a religion decision. 303 Creative v. Elenis featured a conservative Christian website designer who, having decided to begin designing websites for weddings, claimed that her free speech rights would be violated if Colorado’s anti-discrimination law forced her to design a wedding website for a same-sex couple.

Yes, they would, said the court’s six-member conservative supermajority, with its three liberals dissenting.

Why the court chose to take up this feared possibility, in apparent violation of the Constitution’s requirement that the judiciary confine itself to actual cases and controversies, may perhaps be explained by what happened after its Masterpiece Cakeshop case four years ago. In that actual controversy, involving a Christian baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple who asked him to, the court found that the Colorado Civil Rights Division had acted prejudicially in ordering the baker to bake the cake, and the case was sent back for a rehearing.

But rather than rehear the case, the Civil Rights Division decided to let the baker have his way — very likely figuring that with the famously LGBTQ-supportive Justice Anthony Kennedy now retired and replaced by Brett Kavanaugh, a second ruling against the baker would be overturned on the merits. Deprived of that opportunity, the court granted certiorari to a hypothetical.

Did I mention that Masterpiece Cakeshop was also a free speech case? One reason is that, under current First Amendment law, religious free exercise cases cannot be brought in federal court against state laws that are “neutral” and “generally applicable.” Colorado’s anti-discrimination law is both.
RELATED: LGBTQ+ Americans are more religious than our Supreme Court battles let on

Still, just as the freedom of speech clause is adjacent to the free exercise clause in the First Amendment, so has free speech long been free exercise-adjacent in jurisprudence — going back to West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), in which the court ruled that children of Jehovah’s Witnesses could not be compelled to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school.

Indeed, Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the 303 Creative majority, cites Barnette repeatedly and quotes from that most famous of sentences in Justice Robert Jackson’s majority opinion: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Doth Gorsuch protest too much? Allowing a child to opt out of a patriotic exercise is a far cry from enabling a small business owner to discriminate against a protected class of people. Still, it’s easy enough to come up with hypothetical examples of small business owners who should be permitted to turn down clients who ask them to engage in expressive conduct (speech) they find unconscionable.

A Jewish baker, say, asked by local white supremacists to decorate a cake with swastikas. Or a Muslim glassmaker asked to design a window depicting Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Or a Hindu flag maker asked by the Freedom from Religion Foundation to create a banner that reads, “Celebrating a Century of Godlessness.”

So why not Lorie Smith, the Christian website designer? In her case, according to Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion, the court’s decision committed the “grave error” of “conflat[ing] denial of service and protected expression.”



Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Specifically, wrote Sotomayor, Smith conceded that “if a same-sex couple came across an opposite-sex wedding website created by the company and requested an identical website, with only the names and date of the wedding changed, petitioners would refuse. That is status-based discrimination, plain and simple.”

In the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, baker Jack Phillips said he’d have no problem with a same-sex couple coming into his store and buying a cake off the shelf for their wedding. He just didn’t want to have to create it to order for them.

Smith, while insisting that she’d design a website for a business owned by a same-sex couple, made it clear that she doesn’t want her work in any way associated with same-sex weddings. To consider that to be “compelled speech,” a la Gorsuch, is a step beyond what Phillips claimed.

The question is how many steps further this court will go.

In the Hobby Lobby case decided a decade ago, the court for the first time permitted a for-profit corporation a religious free exercise right, in that case to refuse to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that female employees receive contraception coverage as part of their health plan — provided the for-profit company was “closely held” and its religious belief “sincere.”

Will the current court extend a right to refuse wedding services to same-sex couples to family-owned companies like Hobby Lobby that have hundreds of stores and thousands of employees? What about publicly traded companies? At this point it’s impossible to say where it will draw the line.

This week, the Minnesota state Court of Appeals, deferring to an order from Gorsuch, decided that an Amish community doesn’t have to obey state health regulations and install a septic system to treat water used for dishwashing, laundry and bathing (“gray water”) — because the government failed to demonstrate a compelling interest in its doing so in violation of religious scruples.

'We need action': Treaty 6 chiefs declare opioid crisis emergency

Story by Aaron Sousa • CBC


The Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations is calling on provincial and federal governments to provide immediate support to address the deadly opioid crisis.

The nations declared a state of emergency on Monday at their annual general meeting.

Treaty 6 territory covers the central regions of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Figures provided by the Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations show Indigenous peoples in Alberta are seven times more likely to die of opioid toxicity. Leaders say death rates have spiked since the provincial government closed safe consumption sites.

Grand Chief Leonard Standingontheroad said people will continue dying if harm reduction isn't made available and hopes provincial and federal leaders step up to the plate.

"We need action right now, not just talk about it," he said.


Dr. Esther Tailfeathers was senior medical director with Alberta Health Services' Indigneous Wellness Core. (EstherTailfeat1/Twitter)© Provided by cbc.ca

The confederacy said 71 First Nations in Alberta have already declared an opioid crisis state of emergency, but only about two dozen have received funding to come up with solutions.

The chiefs noted the Indigenous Health Equity Fund, announced in February, promised $2 billion in federal funding over 10 years, but they said it was not communicated well and funding has not been provided.



Carolyn Bennett, federal Minister for Mental Health and Addictions, makes an announcement regarding the decriminalization of people who use hard drugs in Vancouver on Jan. 30, 2023. (Ben Nelms/CBC)© Provided by cbc.ca

Dr. Esther Tailfeathers, the former medical lead for the Indigenous Wellness Core Network at Alberta Health Services, applauded the Treaty 6 chiefs for taking a stand.

"All of our nations are suffering and we're burying people daily," she said.

"We're asking for help and nobody's helping."

Tailfeathers, who now works as a family doctor in Blood Tribe, said Indigenous communities are routinely left out of obtaining proper resources to handle addiction issues.

Tailfeathers said recovery treatment beds promised to First Nations are often non-existent or inaccessible and that's part of the reason why her community launched harm reduction treatment programs in 2014.

"[The province] can continue to preach abstinence-based therapies, but people can't even make it to the abstinence-based therapy because they're dying on the streets," said Tailfeathers.

"We're creating an eventual crisis that's going to be even larger than today."

She said if the Alberta government is unwilling to provide support, the federal government needs to step in.

Carolyn Bennett, Canada's minister of mental health and addictions, told an event in Edmonton on Monday that solving the opioid crisis means listening to the Treaty 6 chiefs and giving them the support they need.

"There's no treatment model for people who are dead," she said.

Alberta Mental Health and Addiction Minister Dan Williams said in a written statement the province is partnering with First Nations in the spirit of reconciliation.

He joined Indigenous leadership in calling on Ottawa to provide more support to nations, as they have been "absent in this conversation for far too long."

"The federal government has failed to support First Nations to address addiction, and Alberta has been left to address the issues resulting from their failures," said Williams.

"There is no solution to the deadly disease of addiction that does not involve partnerships with First Nations and a shared focus on recovery, which is why Alberta's government is making these investments.

"Our government will continue to work with the Confederacy of Treaty 6 Nations to address the deadly disease of addiction in Alberta."

As for Standingontheroad, he said the confederacy already has a plan on how it will help its people.

"We just want commitment in the dollars to make this happen."

ICYMI

Watchdog probing claims that Nike Canada, gold company benefiting from forced Uyghur labour

Story by Catharine Tunney • CBC - Tuesday, July 11,2023

Canada's watchdog for corporate wrongdoing says she has enough to launch an investigation of allegations that Nike Canada and a gold mining company are benefiting from the forced labour of Uyghurs in China.

It's the first time the office of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) has launched an investigation since the federal government appointed Sheri Meyerhoffer to the role in April 2019.

"These are very serious issues that have been brought to our attention," Meyerhoffer said Tuesday.

"Canadian companies are expected to respect Canadian standards for human rights and environmental protection when they work outside of Canada."

A coalition of 28 civil society organizations, including the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, launched more than two dozen complaints with her office regarding forced labour practices.

In the first complaint, they alleged that Nike Canada Corp. has supply relationships with six Chinese companies that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) identified as using or benefiting from Uyghur forced labour.

The think tank released a report in 2020 estimating that more than 80,000 Uyghurs had been transferred to work in factories across China. It said some were sent directly from detention camps.

Last year, the United Nations concluded China had committed "serious human rights violations" against Uyghurs and other Muslim communities, particularly arbitrary detentions that may constitute crimes against humanity.

The coalition argued there is no indication that the popular clothing company has taken any concrete steps to ensure "beyond a reasonable doubt" that forced labour is not involved in its supply chain.

In a separate complaint, the group alleges that Dynasty Gold Corp. allows for forced labour at its gold mine in the Hatu district, close to what China has called "detention" centres or "re-education" camps.

The complainants point to a statement from the mine's CEO in January 2021 that "many ethnicities, including Uyghur, were represented in all ranks of the work force."

Meyerhoffer said she assessed the two complaints and decided there was enough to dig deeper.

"On their face, the allegations made by the complainants raise serious issues regarding the possible abuse of the internationally recognized right to be free from forced labour," Meyerhoffer said in a copy of her initial assessment, made public Tuesday.

"I have decided to launch investigations into these complaints in order to get the facts and recommend the appropriate actions. I have not pre-judged the outcome of the investigations. We will await the results and we will publish final reports with my recommendations."

Nike Canada denies the allegations

The complainants' allege that Nike Canada is the primary customer of Qingdao Taekwang Shoes Co. Ltd., a factory that reportedly employs Uyghur workers who attend classes in the evening for "vocational training" and "patriotic education."

It also said the clothing company has relationships with five other companies accused of using Uyghur forced labour:

Haoyuanpeng Clothing Manufacturing Co. Ltd.,
Esquel Textile Co. Ltd.,
Qingdao Jifa Group,
Huafu Fashion Co. Ltd.,
Texhong Textile Group.

Meyerhoffer's office said it made several unsuccessful attempts to make contact with Nike Canada Corp beginning in the summer of 2022.

Earlier this year, Nike Inc., the parent company, turned down the ombudsman's request for a meeting but sent a statement saying it is "committed to ethical and responsible manufacturing and we uphold international labour standards," said the ombudsman report.

"We are concerned about reports of forced labour in, and connected to, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Nike does not source products from the XUAR and we have confirmed with our contract suppliers that they are not using textiles or spun yarn from the region," said a copy of Nike's statement.


The Nike logo is displayed at a Nike store in South Miami on Sept. 20, 2011. (The Associated Press)© Provided by cbc.ca

Meyerhoffer said there is a conflict between what Nike says and what an Australian Strategic Policy Institute report said about the factories in the region.

Related video: Corporate ethics czar probing claims of forced labour in China by Nike Canada, Dynasty Gold (The Canadian Press)   Duration 1:56   View on Watch

For example, she said there is a contradiction with regard to Nike's claim that Qingdao Taekwang Shoes Co. Ltd. stopped hiring new employees from Xinjiang after human rights abuses were reported in 2019 by the ASPI.

CORE said it will proceed with an investigation through independent fact-finding on the Nike assertions, but added that mediation is available at any stage of the complaint process.

"Given the high-risk context, there is a need for enhanced human rights due diligence to identify, prevent and mitigate the human rights-related risks of Nike's operations," said the initial assessment report.

"In this regard, Nike Canada Corp. has not provided a satisfactory response or remedy to the allegations in the complaint, nor satisfactorily demonstrated that it conducts human rights due diligence."

Mining company 'deliberately avoided' participating: ombudsman

Meyerhoffer fared worse when trying to get Dynasty to respond despite multiple attempts

"DYG [Dynasty Gold Corp.] only provided its comments to the draft initial assessment report. Prior to that, DYG appears to have deliberately avoided participating in and cooperating with the CORE's dispute resolution process without providing any explanation," said the report.

The mining company eventually did send a comment denying it has operational control over the Hatu mine. Meyerhoffer said that might not be true given statements it has made in corporate documents and press releases.

"DYG's assertion that it terminated its mineral exploration activities in Xinjiang in 2008 does not seem to be supported by its press releases dated January 25, 2021 and April 13, 2022," says the report.

"Even if DYG does not have operational control, DYG is still responsible for ensuring that forced labour is not present in the Hatu mine over which it asserts 70 per cent ownership."



Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE), Sheri Meyerhoffer, holds a news conference in Ottawa on Tuesday, July 11, 2023. Ottawa's corporate-ethics watchdog has announced investigations into a mining corporation and the Canadian branch of Nike for possible forced labour in supply chains. 

(Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)© Provided by cbc.ca

In a statement issued to CBC News, Dynasty's CEO Ivy Chong called the initial assessment "totally unfounded."

"Like many western companies, the wages that we paid to local workers were almost double the local wages. We gave them on-the-job training, such as how to use mining software etc. Everyone was happy working for us," said Chong.

"We don't understand on what evidence and basis that CORE conducts its investigation on Dynasty Gold Corp."

Meyerhoffer said her team won't be able to travel to the Xinjiang region to conduct their investigations.

China insists it's not committing genocide

The coalition filed 13 admissible complaints with the CORE office, Meyerhoffer said Tuesday. Her assessments on the remaining 11 will be made public in the coming weeks.

"It is our mission to resolve human rights complaints in a fair and unbiased manner in order to help those impacted and to strengthen the responsible business practices of the companies involved," she said.

In January 2021, the federal government announced a suite of new regulations to ensure that Canadian companies are not complicit in human rights abuses or the use of forced labour in China's Xinjiang province.

Later that year, Canadian MPs passed a motion saying that China's persecution of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim groups amounts to genocide, according to the definition set out in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and most of his cabinet were absent for the vote.

China has called the genocide allegations "the lie of the century."

Conservative MP Garnett Genuis said it's "shameful" that the federal government hasn't recognized the Uyghur genocide.

"Over 600 shipments of goods have been denied entry to the United States over concerns about products tainted by Uyghur slave labour. Under Justin Trudeau, not a single shipment has been denied into Canada. Zero," wrote the international development critic in a media statement.

"CORE has an important role to play, but more direct leadership from the government is also required."

NDP MP Heather McPherson said Tuesday's report shows that CORE lacks teeth.

"Clearly these companies don't care. They don't feel it will hurt their bottom line," she said.

"This ombudsperson needs the power to compel testimony and witness and documentation and does not have that."