9 years later, families of 43 missing Mexican students march to demand answers in emblematic case

DANIEL SHAILER
Tue, September 26, 2023








Relatives and sympathizers of 43 missing Ayotzinapa university students march on the 9th anniversary of their disappearance, in Mexico City, Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023. 

(AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Chanting from one to 43, relatives of students abducted nine years ago counted out the number of the missing youths as they marched through Mexico City Tuesday to demand answers to one of Mexico's most infamous human rights cases.

With President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's term ending next year, family members face not only the prospect of a ninth year of not knowing what happened to their sons but fears that the next administration will start the error-plagued investigation over from scratch yet again.

In 2014, a group of students were attacked by municipal police in the southern city of Iguala, Guerrero, who handed them over to a local drug gang that apparently killed them and burned their bodies. Since the Sept. 26 attack, only three of their remains have been identified.

After an initial coverup, last year a government truth commission concluded that local, state and federal authorities colluded with the gang to murder the students in what it called a “state crime.”


Ulises Gutierrez Solano joined the march in honor of his brother, Aldo, a student who survived the initial kidnapping but was left in a “vegetative state” since 2014 after police shot him in the head while the others students were being abducted.

“This is an atrocity to humanity, to society,” said Solano. “How could they do so much harm to so many people?”

López Obrador had pledged to solve the case and recent years have seen a painstakingly slow release of documents from the abduction, as well as a slew of arrests. But activists and human rights organizations say the government has not done enough to atone for the murders, investigate exactly what happened, and punish the culprits.

Tensions rose just hours before the march, when the families and their lawyers rejected a series of documents the Mexican government offered to make public, claiming the specific military files they requested months ago were not included. The army said it didn't have those files.

“Since August the families have been asking, but they just gave us part of the information” said Nicholas Mendéz, leading a group of students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “That’s worrying because we’re changing government next year.”

López Obrador’s six-year term ends in September 2024 and, Mendéz feared, petitioning a new president for information could mean starting from scratch.

“We can’t have another six years of nothing,” Mendéz said.

In a press conference Tuesday morning, Mexico's president insisted all of the relevant documents had been released.

“We have principles; we have ideals, and we speak the truth,” López Obrador said, promising also to publish government social media messages about the case.

The students from a radical teachers' college had travelled to Iguala to hijack buses to get to a protest in Mexico City, but were intercepted by corrupt police linked to the Guerreros Unidos gang. Iguala officials thought the students were going to disrupt a local political event, and one of the hijacked buses may have carried a drug shipment.

Recent years have seen a run of government and army officials from the time arrested, but no more remains have been found.

Then-Attorney General, Jesús Murillo Karam, and the head of his anti-kidnapping unit have been arrested for their initial, botched investigation following the abductions. Almost a dozen military personnel, including the commander of the area where the students were abducted, have also been arrested.

After evidence used to assemble an expert report in August was undermined, the case’s chief prosecutor, Omar Gómez Trejo, resigned. Just this year a party from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission which has been investigating the incident since 2015 also withdrew from Mexico.

As families marched through the city, they passed barricades erected to protect monuments. The march was peaceful, notwithstanding isolated incidents of violence when demonstrators attacked and damaged some stores, according to local media.

At one traffic circle, activists had plastered posters in remembrance not just of the 43 students, but of all Mexico’s missing.

The Ayotzinapa atrocity has taken on symbolic significance for a country with more than 110,000 missing people.

Pablo Hector Gonzalez has traveled from Guerrero every year to join the march.

“After nine years, in force, we will insist until the truth appears and until all the guilty are punished,” he said.

Nine years after 43 Mexican students vanished, parents still seek answers

Arturo Conde
Mon, September 25, 2023 

Nine years after 43 students from a rural teacher’s college in Mexico disappeared, their parents find themselves in an uphill battle.

“It’s complicated. You’re looking for your son, and the government denies you justice,” Antonio Tizapa, the father of one of the missing students, said in an interview. “If they don’t want us to keep protesting in the streets, tell us where our children are.”

In July, a panel of independent investigators presented evidence in its sixth and last report about the 43 missing students. According to the multiyear investigation, Mexican security forces at the local, state and federal levels at the time “all collaborated to make them disappear.”



Meanwhile, the remains of only three students have been formally identified in the last nine years.

On Sept. 26, 2014, Tizapa’s 20-year-old son, Jorge Antonio, traveled with dozens of classmates from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College to the city of Iguala in the southwestern state of Guerrero.

The students commandeered buses in Iguala, as they had done other times, to travel roughly 120 miles to Mexico City. They planned to march on the 46th anniversary of the Tlatelolco Massacre to honor hundreds of students whom Mexican police and military officials murdered on Oct. 2, 1968. The students were taken away by local authorities and then disappeared. Their disappearances made international headlines.

The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto at the time initially tried to close the case. It said that local authorities in collusion with a drug cartel arrested the students after they left the bus station and that, according to the testimony of multiple drug traffickers, they had been handed over to Guerreros Unidos, a cartel that murdered them and incinerated their bodies at the Cocula garbage dump.

For more from NBC Latino, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

But the investigative body of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights helped reopen the case by exposing how authorities tortured suspects to get their testimony.

“This allowed us to continue fighting for justice,” Tizapa said.

Last year, "we were given a video that showed what really happened at the Cocula garbage dump," he said.

Tizapa referred to new evidence presented last year by the investigative body, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, which said the Mexican government at the time intentionally falsified information and withheld leads. Among the evidence were drone photos and video that may have showed Mexican marines staging the area where the students had been reported killed.

The panel's final report in July said local, state and federal security forces did know about the students' abductions and were complicit in their disappearances.

Looking back at one of Mexico’s most notorious human rights cases, a member of the panel asked at the July news conference: “How was it possible for it to happen in a small city with two battalions of about 600 men?”

According to the investigation, military commanders and members of two battalions had to have colluded with drug trafficking and organized crime. The panel also said that “without a doubt” police, state agents and other authorities were complicit.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said his administration plans to continue to investigate the case, and he has pointed to the arrests of military officials and other people. The armed forces have denied having any information about the students' disappearances, Reuters reported last week.

Investigators also said security forces had put the students under surveillance and stigmatized them as insurgents. The negative characterization also influenced the investigation after the disappearances, they said.

The panel emphasized at the news conference that unlike with the allegations by the Mexican security forces, “there’s not a single document that we have analyzed that indicates that the young people were colluding with drug trafficking. Not one.”
Where are they?

For parents, the arrests and the recent findings are not enough.

“With Peña Nieto’s government, they told us our sons were murdered and incinerated,” Tizapa said. “With Obrador, the government tells us: ‘Yes, they took our boys and murdered them. But we don’t know where they are.’ Both governments are telling us practically the same thing.”

Despite the progress that has been made, Tizapa and other families say they still need answers from the government, including the military.

Mario González, the father of another missing student, said in a phone interview Friday: “We met with the president of the republic to ask him to give us the missing information on the whereabouts of our children.

“Unfortunately, the president has empowered the military in Mexico a lot. And he remains stubborn, saying that the military has already handed over everything. So we are now here protesting in front of Mexico’s military headquarters,” González said.

González said the families need the support of the Mexican people to pressure the government to get answers from the military.

“I think what happened awakened the conscience of many people. And nine years later, we still feel the solidarity,” he said.

César Manuel, González’s son, was a 20-year-old freshman at the teacher’s college when he disappeared with classmates in 2014.

González said he believes the Ayotzinapa case can resonate with everyone, because the 43 students were just “chamaquitos,” or young people, who were looking for a better life.

“My son wanted to be a teacher. And I am proud of him. He isn’t perfect. But the teacher’s college gave him what he needed, what he wanted to be,” he said.

González said such schools are often the only pathways available for rural students to secure their futures. And he described the attack on the 43 students as an attack on who they were — and their activism.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

"Intersex is a beautiful thing": Despite having surgery forced upon her, this activist found healing

KNOWN IN THE ANCIENT WORLD AS HERMAPHRODITES

Mary Elizabeth Williams

SALON
Tue, September 26, 2023 

Alicia Roth Weigel Photo illustration by Salon/Tanialee Gonzalez/Getty Images

"Anyone who's like, 'Well, I've never met an intersex person,' I can guarantee that you have," says author and advocate Alicia Roth Weigel. "You just didn't know it." To all superficial appearances, Weigel seems like a cisgender woman. Yet when her mother was pregnant with her, the doctors told her to expect a son, because the amnio test showed the presence of XY chromosomes. But Weigel, like millions of other people around the world, was born intersex. And after undergoing surgery for what doctors at the time referred to as a "disorder of sex development," Weigel spent a childhood full of procedures and monitoring — and believing she had to be cautious in how she understood and explained her own body.

Now, however, she's one of the most visible intersex individuals in America, speaking out against invasive bathroom bills, working to keep the I in LGBTQIA+ from standing for "invisible" and sharing her own story in her cheekily named new memoir "Inverse Cowgirl." 

The physical sex traits that we're born with from hormones, chromosomes, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, all of those things are also not always binary," Weigel explained during a recent Salon Talks conversation. "They don't always fit neatly into a male or female box on a birth certificate." Weigel opened up about her "inadvertent" coming out during a Texas legislature senate hearing, what progressives get wrong about allyship and how she got the place where she can say, "I'm now really proud to have this body."

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

For those who don't know what the term intersex means, tell me about what makes you and millions of other people around the world unique.

Intersex is exactly what it sounds like if you break the word down. We are born intersex, between the sexes. In this day and age, people have started to understand that sexuality is not binary. You're not only gay or straight; there's a whole spectrum in between. Folks are starting to come around to the fact that gender is also not binary. You're not only a man or a woman, there's also a beautiful spectrum in between. What society is just starting to learn is that sex is also not binary. So, the physical sex traits that we're born with from hormones, chromosomes, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, all of those things are also not always binary. They don't always fit neatly into a male or female box on a birth certificate.

For me, what that meant is I have XY chromosomes, which many people associate with being a boy. But I was also born with a vagina. Instead of having a uterus and ovaries on the inside, I was born with internal testes. If sex is a spectrum, my body was born a little bit closer to the center of that spectrum. I have aspects of both. People don't understand how common that is. We are around 2% of the world's population, the same percentage of the world that is born with red hair or green eyes. Anyone who's watching this like, "Well, I've never met an intersex person," I can guarantee that you have and you just didn't know it.

Perhaps they didn't know it because unfortunately, a lot of intersex people undergo surgeries without our consent either in infancy or in our childhood that push our bodies one direction or the other. They try to force our bodies to fit into those binary boxes on that very first piece of paper that parents receive when you're born, a birth certificate. What we are advocating for as a community is rather than force-altering a body to fit on a piece of paper, you could just change the piece of paper. We exist; our bodies are born this way. We are not mythical, legendary creatures. We are certainly not monsters. We are human beings just like the rest of y'all. The first step is really raising visibility of our community and our existence in general. That's what I hope my book will be a part of doing.

You talk very candidly about what you went through — the gonadectomy, the monitoring and the observation that you had to go through your entire childhood. This is not uncommon, and people don't realize that this is happening to millions of people around the world. Tell me about how your family was told you had a "disorder."

Intersex is the term that we prefer as a community because it doesn't pathologize us, it doesn't refer to us as a problem. Prior, we had been referred to as having "disorders of sex development," or DSDs. The issue with that terminology is it in[plies] that there is an issue with how we are born that needs to be fixed. My body was fully functional when I was born. The reason that I look the way I do, that I present so femme outwardly is because despite the fact I was born with testes, my body does not absorb testosterone. My testes would've produced testosterone, but my body would have urinated some of that out, and the rest would have converted to estrogen. I would've developed totally naturally on my own.

The doctors told my parents that I could get testicular cancer and they recommended removing my testes. If you put yourself in my parents' position and you have a newborn baby and you're hearing your child could get cancer, of course you're going to do whatever is in your power to prevent that from happening. Unfortunately, that was not the full scenario. That message was not inaccurate in that I could have gotten testicular cancer, but anyone who is born with testicles could also get testicular cancer. What the real picture shows is that as someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, which is my intersex variation, my risk of getting testicular cancer was only somewhere between one and 5% — at some point, much farther down the line in adulthood. This cancer never happens in childhood.

By removing my testes for some theoretical future, very small risk of cancer, that also put my body into hormone withdrawal because they were taking my hormone producing organs that my body needed to function properly. That has necessitated that I take hormone replacement therapy, similar to what transgender individuals take, but not to affirm any gender presentation purely because my body needs hormones to survive. All of our bodies need hormones to survive. Hormones determine a lot more than your cup size or your facial hair or the tenor of your voice. They affect a lot of your internal bodily functions. By removing my testes in infancy and forcing my body into hormone withdrawal, that was leeching calcium from my bones. I found out in my early 30s that I now have osteoporosis, which is something that you think of usually with post-menopausal women or older, elderly individuals. That's very common for intersex individuals because they were trying to fix something that wasn't broken in the first place, they created problems for me.

That is one piece of what I experienced as a kid, the medical, physical fallout from my surgery. In addition to, and honestly more impactful in my life, is the psychological and the emotional harm of being told that you are inherently a problem because of how you're born and that you should never tell anyone because you'll be made fun of and you'll never find a good husband one day. The way that you internalize that as a kid is like, "OK, I'm inherently [un]lovable simply for existing." So intersex people, we end up creating this whole facade, this whole story, this lie that we tell to people because there's so much stigma surrounding our bodies that we don't want anyone to ever find out that this is how we're born.

I know this is also common, I've talked to a lot of my intersex friends about this. A lot of us who date men, at some point, we have to tell them we're not going to be able to bear their children. A lot of us have told these people that we had childhood ovarian cancer and they removed our ovaries and so we are infertile. Because of this weird, incomplete information that doctors feed to our parents and all this homophobia and transphobia that conditions us to believe that we're not lovable if we actually shared the truth of who we are and the truth about our bodies, we end up concocting this crazy lie that we were walking around with childhood cancer.

Our main argument is there's nothing inherently wrong with us in the first place. We're all born with bodies, each and every one of us. Anyone who's listening to this conversation is born with a body. Why should we be conditioned to feel so much shame simply for being born into the body that we were born into?

I have reached a point where I'm now really proud to have this body and I want to help other intersex people who were born the way I was, not have to spend so many years of their lives as I did living in this deep closet where they're feeling shameful simply for existing. Intersex is a beautiful thing, and I hope that's something that comes across in my book.

In your book, you call out those of us on the side of the aisle who think of ourselves as progressive. You call out certain aspects of the LGBTQIA+ community for not recognizing, not welcoming, not including because the intersex community might be "confusing," that it might muddle the waters in some ways to advocate for this really significant population. I want to ask you about that, about that ignorance or misplaced advocacy that you've seen from people who one would expect to be your allies.

In this current climate with rampant attacks on the transgender community, there is certain messaging used by the left that unintentionally might harm the intersex community. For example, when we're fighting these bans on transgender care for trans kids, there is this message that's often touted that, "Oh, surgeries don't happen on children. This only happens on adults."

It is true that gender-affirming surgeries do not happen on trans children, but they do happen on intersex children without our consent. Whether they be vaginoplasty or gonadectomies or all of these surgeries that transgender people might elect to have with their consent at some point as lifesaving care to help them affirm their existence, those same exact procedures are often forced on intersex kids who are not only not old enough to participate in that decision making. Most of the time, we're not even old enough to speak.

To sterilize me as an individual, before I'm old enough to form words, obviously, I am not a consensual participant in that conversation. The World Health Organization, the United Nations, all of these multinational organizations, they define these surgeries as torture. They call it intersex genital mutilation. A lot of the advocacy community has caught up, but unfortunately, here in the United States, I would say the LGBTQI+ community has not quite caught up. I think it's because when we come in and start advocating for our rights and for our needs by saying, "Hey, we need a seat at the table. We should not do surgeries on children without their consent," there's this fear that that muddles this message surrounding transgender children.

I want to make this very clear to folks: the same bills that target transgender kids and say, "Don't offer gender-affirming care to transgender kids" all contain specific written loopholes that say you can continue to force the same care on intersex kids who have not asked for it. What this shows is that the legislation is not based in science, it's not based in logic, it's not based in what's healthiest for children, which is what they're claiming is the root of this legislation. The root of this legislation is trying to force children into what a certain swath of society deems normal. They don't think trans kids are normal, so they say, block this care from them that they desperately need in order to survive. They also don't think intersex kids are normal, so they say, force those same procedures onto intersex kids so that they look more normal to us, so that we can be more comfortable looking at their bodies. And so really, it's the same exact fight that we're fighting. It's just a little bit of a shift in messaging, which is all about people being able to make decisions for themselves surrounding their bodies in a way that keeps them healthy and happy. I really don't think it muddles the message. It just requires us to massage that message a little bit and learn about a new community that has gone completely unheard in the shadows for far too long.

This is a healthcare issue that doesn't just affect intersex people. It affects their parents, partners and families. You talk in this book about how difficult it has been for you to get care, how you have put yourself out there, as you put it, a "long-term guinea pig" for what intersex procedures have done to people over time. This is something that I think a lot of us don't necessarily think about is that someone living in an intersex body needs specific care, and how difficult in our American healthcare system it is to get that care. What can we do to change that?

If you see the film about my work in the intersex movement "Every Body," you'll see it centers on the surgeries that we experience non-consensually as children.That makes a lot of sense because when people hear about it, I think they're alarmed. It brings them into our cause and helps them understand the urgency of the fight that we are fighting. Unfortunately, something that's not talked about enough, but is equally dire of a situation is the utter lack of intersex-competent care for intersex adults. We already have a lack of competent care for intersex children. That care is focused on hiding who we are, not keeping our bodies healthy. That being said, at least there are some doctors and clinics that specialize in care for intersex children. But once you hit 18, once you age out of pediatrics, you're left completely high and dry. There's just nothing.

There are a few providers across the United States who have seen enough intersex patients that even if they don't claim to be experts, they will say, "Hey, I've treated enough patients that I can help you." I have run surveys with intersex individuals across this country, and in Texas, we have found that intersex individuals have to travel at minimum 50 miles to find doctors who have any idea what their bodies might need. Most of them have to access via telehealth. There's one individual that we spoke to who literally flies to Japan simply to see a doctor who has any idea what her body needs. So in light of all of this, I partnered with a group here in Texas called Texas Health Action who run Kind Clinics across the State of Texas. These are LGBTQI+ affirming clinics that offer everything from STI testing to gender-affirming care for trans folks to HIV care.

I helped them develop an intersex care offering because while our bodies have a lot of overlap with the trans community – in terms of what we need, in terms of, for example, hormone replacement therapy – there are also some really unique features such as bone density issues like with my osteoporosis. I worked with Texas Health Action. We created a specific intersex healthcare offering for intersex Texans that we just launched on Sept. 1. First and foremost, I want Texans to know this is available, so you should check out Kind Clinic and you can finally find a doctor who is able to meet your needs.

I don't want this to be the only intersex clinic in the country, I want this to be the first of many. I want to see LGBT clinics across the country. I want to see sexual health and wellness clinics across the country, and I want to see women's health clinics because a lot of intersex people are women. I want to see all of these clinics updating their standards of care, their standard operating procedures to better serve the intersex community, and I am here to work with any of those clinics who would like to learn how to do that.

Not everyone has had to go through what you've had to go through, but all of us have a moment in our lives where we have to be honest, and we have to be brave, and there may be something really painful on the other side of that. Maybe it's just, "I need to be true to myself and I need to tell the world who I am." How did you do it and how do you offer a message of maybe a little hope and support? 

I actually did this backwards. I became so wrapped up in the attacks on my transgender friends that I ended up coming out inadvertently in a Senate hearing at the Texas legislature for the first time. Only after coming out in that hearing to try to protect my transgender friends, did I process what that would mean for my life to be out as an intersex individual, what that would mean for my family relationships, for my friendships, and just for me in terms of understanding myself and my identity and how I operate in the world.

It was only after I came out very publicly as an advocate that I really started doing the internal work to process and learn to really love myself, to unlearn everything I had been told about myself and truly learn who I am, not who I've been told to be, not who society has deemed to be normal or appropriate, who I really am as an individual.

There have been many things that have assisted me in that process. Definitely talk therapy, definitely the use of certain plant medicines and fungi. I am really heartened to see the conversations and actually a bipartisan effort by Dan Crenshaw who's a Republican legislator here in Texas with AOC who's about as far on the opposite side of the aisle as you can think of from Dan Crenshaw. But they have joined forces to fight for FDA trials on the use of psilocybin to treat PTSD, which is what's found in mushrooms, and that has been hugely instrumental in my own journey. Everything from plant medicine to talk therapy, to movement, learning how to move my body through running and yoga in a way that helps me feel really strong and powerful and at peace with myself has been really instrumental in my journey. And forging real, honest relationships with people who know and love the full me.

That was probably the hardest piece. Whenever any of us needs to own who we are in a way that we fear might drastically alter our relationships in our lives, which are arguably the most important thing to any of us, it can be really scary. I won't sugarcoat it ,and I'll say that sometimes relationships do fall by the wayside. But those relationships were based on false pretenses. They were not loving who that person really is as a person. What ultimately made me decide to come out was the decision that I wanted to be loved because of who I was, not in spite of who I was. I didn't want to have to apologize for my existence anymore when my existence is not hurting anybody else, and it's not an issue in the first place.

I hope people will read the book because it's a long and complicated journey. But I do think beyond the politics, beyond the healthcare, beyond the issues of body autonomy and all the other things that this book speaks to, above all, I think this is a book about healing. From the first page to the last page, it really shows all the different ways that I have found healing and I have found peace and contentment in myself and that I have learned to love myself. I hope that those lessons might benefit anyone, intersex or not.

Poll: Republicans see Trump as a ‘person of faith’ ... more so than Mitt Romney, Mike Pence and others

Suzanne Bates
Tue, September 26, 2023

Michelle Budge, Deseret News / Source: Getty Images

More than half of Republicans see former President Donald Trump as a person of faith, putting him ahead of more vocally religious figures like his former vice president, Mike Pence, according to a new national poll conducted by HarrisX for the Deseret News.

Registered voters were asked whether they considered a list of political figures people of faith. Trump rose to the top of the list for Republicans, while President Joe Biden topped the list for Democrats. Among independents, Sen. Mitt Romney was most likely to be chosen as a person of faith.

Among Republicans, 53% said Trump was a person of faith, ahead of every other person on the list — although he was statistically tied with Pence, who came in at 52%.

Trump also led several of his other opponents in the Republican presidential primary, with 47% of Republican respondents saying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a person of faith, 31% for Sen. Tim Scott, 31% for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, 30% for entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and 22% for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Only 23% of Republicans said Biden is a person of faith, while 12% said the same of Vice President Kamala Harris.

The poll was conducted Sept. 8-11, among 1,002 registered voters, and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points.

At a Faith & Freedom gala in June, Trump said he had championed policies favored by Christian voters, including appointing conservative justices to the Supreme Court, who then overturned Roe v. Wade, returning control of abortion laws to state legislatures.

“No president has ever fought for Christians as hard as I have,” he said, adding, “I got it done, and nobody thought it was even a possibility.”

But Trump rarely talks about his personal faith, unlike some of his Republican opponents in the 2024 race for the presidency, chief among them his former running mate, Pence.

Both Pence and Scott have made their Christian faith central to their pitch to voters, especially in Iowa, where many of the caucusgoers are evangelical Christians.

But despite their faith-based appeal to Iowa voters, both men are stalled at 6% in the latest CBS Iowa state poll, compared to 51% for Trump and 21% for DeSantis.

But, the Deseret News/HarrisX poll shows evangelical voters were much more likely to say Pence is a man of faith (65%) than Trump (37%). Catholic voters and nonevangelical Protestants were also more likely to say Pence is a man of faith, showing the perception of Trump as a man of faith was more related to voters’ political identity than their religious identity.

Related

• Meet the evangelical pastors who could choose the next president

Democrats were most likely to say Biden is a person of faith. He topped the list among registered Democratic voters at 63%.

Biden has been vocal about his Catholic faith. In a piece for the Christian Post in October 2020, Biden wrote:

“My Catholic faith drilled into me a core truth — that every person on earth is equal in rights and dignity, because we are all beloved children of God. We are all created ‘imago Dei’ — beautifully, uniquely, in the image of God, with inherent worth.”

Harris came in second among Democratic voters, with 45% of Democrats saying she is a person of faith. She was raised an an interfaith household, by a Hindu mother and a Christian father, and her husband is Jewish. She identifies as Baptist, according to news reports.

Among independent voters, the political figure most likely to be chosen as a person of faith was Romney, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with 42% saying he was a person of faith.

With two-thirds of Americans in the Deseret News/HarrisX poll, or 69%, saying religion is very or somewhat important in their lives, it isn’t surprising that voters want to see their party’s figureheads as people of faith.

The Deseret News/HarrisX poll also showed that many Americans aren’t sure whether or not politicians are people of faith. Half of those polled said they weren’t sure if Ramaswamy, Haley, Scott or Christie were people of faith. Almost that many said the same about Harris.

"How you lose your democracy": Shocking new research shows Americans lack basic civic knowledge

Chauncey DeVega

SALON
Tue, September 26, 2023 

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Republicans are systematically eroding the basic civil rights of the American people. As we are seeing in other countries that are experiencing what experts describe as "democratic backsliding," Republicans are doing this by undermining and corrupting America's democratic institutions from within. If Republicans get their way, free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, equal protection under the law, the right to privacy, the right to vote, and other basic freedoms and rights will be severely restricted.

In an example of Orwellian Newspeak, Republicans present themselves as defenders of freedom, when they actually oppose it. More specifically, Republicans believe that freedom is the ability and power of a select group of White Americans (rich, white, "Christian" men) to take away and otherwise deny the rights and liberties of other Americans and people in this country they deem to be less than, second-class, not "real Americans" and the Other, such as Black and brown people, the LGBTQI community, women, non-Christians, and other targeted groups.

Unfortunately, many Americans are unaware of their basic constitutional and other guaranteed rights and liberties – and how the country's democratic institutions are ideally supposed to function. How can the American people defend and protect their democracy and rights, if they lack such basic knowledge?

Such an outcome is not a coincidence: it is the intentional outcome of how the American right-wing and conservative movements have undermined high-quality public education for decades with the goal of creating a compliant public that lacks the critical thinking skills and knowledge to be engaged citizens. Now new research by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center provides insight into the extent of this crisis. Some of the Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey's findings include:

[W]hen U.S. adults are asked to name the specific rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, only one right is recalled by most of the respondents: Freedom of speech, which 77% named.  
 
Although two-thirds of Americans (66%) can name all three branches of government, 10% can name two, 7% can name only one, and 17% cannot name any.

I recently spoke with Matthew Levendusky, who is a Professor of Political Science, and the Stephen and Mary Baran Chair in the Institutions of Democracy at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, about this new research. His new book is "Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide."

In this conversation, he explains how America's democracy crisis is connected to a lack of basic political knowledge and civic literacy, the role that education can play in equipping Americans to defend their democracy, and why contrary to what many "conservatives" like to believe, America is not a "republic".

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

How you are feeling about the country's democracy crisis, given your new research that shows a lack of basic civics knowledge among a large portion of the American public?

I am worried, with occasional glimmers of hope. But mostly I worry. Why? Our data show that people lack key civics knowledge, continuing a trend from recent years. A new report from Pew confirms what many suspected: Most Americans are fed up with government and don't think it's working. Those two things are deeply related.

To understand why, it's helpful to take a step back and think about why civics matters, broadly speaking. The main reason is that we want people to understand how they can make their voices heard in our democracy. But you can't make your voice heard if you don't understand our system of government. For example, if you don't know the three branches of government and their roles, then you won't know why President Biden and Congress are sparring about spending, immigration, green energy, etc. If you don't know what rights are protected by the First Amendment or what they mean, then you won't understand why the government can't censor the New York Times, but Facebook can make you take down a post that violates its community standards policy. If you don't know which branch has the responsibility of determining whether a law is constitutional, you won't understand why the Supreme Court and its rulings are so important and influential. In short, without some basic civic knowledge, you can't even follow the news of the day to be an informed citizen. If you can't do that, then you cannot know what to expect out of your government. That is not—at all—to say that a lack of knowledge is the root of dysfunction (it is not). But it is to say that they are related.

The concepts of civic literacy and engaged citizenship are not commonly discussed among the news media and general public. Can you explain those two concepts in more detail and why they matter?

What we can measure in a survey is civic literacy, which is your comprehension of basic facts about our system of government. So, for example, we ask if people know the three branches of government, what rights are protected by the 1st Amendment, who is responsible for determining the constitutionality of a law, and so forth. This gets at the pre-requisite knowledge you need to understand government and to participate in our system. But engaged citizenship—having people really how know to function in our governmental system, and make their voices heard—is the deeper goal.

This matters because we do not just want people to vote, we want them to cast an informed vote. This means, at a minimum, that they know where the candidates stand on the issues that matter to them, and they understand the office's role in our democracy. For example, if you don't know that the president is responsible for nominating Supreme Court justices who are then confirmed by the Senate, you won't know to investigate the types of justices that a candidate might nominate. Likewise, if you don't know the candidate's positions (or have been misled about them), then you cannot effectively cast your vote on the issues that matters to you.

But even more importantly, we want people to participate in government more broadly. This can be many things: going to a community meeting (such as a school board meeting), volunteering for an election or civic activity (shout out to poll workers, the unsung heroes of democracy!), or working to solve problems in your community. For most of us, local participation is more important than national participation. Few people can meaningfully participate in national politics beyond voting (this is just as true of political scientists as it is of regular folks). But we can all participate locally, and for most of us, that is where we interface with government the most: local governments help pave our roads, police our streets, teach our children in schools, and so forth. What would this knowledge look like?

Take the case of Philadelphia. Here, the information needed to participate could be identifying your councilperson, knowing what they can resolve, and how to contact them. It could be knowing who controls the schools, and what are the roles of the mayor vs. the school board. You could also investigate what should be reported to 311 to get a response from a city agency, and what a registered community organization can help to address. These would differ from place to place, but the core idea is that it would help citizens see how they could uncover how the government can help them solve problems in their lives.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

I went to a very good public school system.  I remember taking social studies and civics courses. Obviously, given my career path, those courses and teachers had a great influence on me. Are such courses still taught today? What is their content?

Many states—including Pennsylvania—have civics requirements, and that's helpful for teaching this sort of civic literacy. But it is on all of us, as citizens, to help the next generation learn how to participate more meaningfully in our democracy. Happily, there are so many great resources for those who need to do this. For example, the Civics Renewal Network provides thousands of free, non-partisan, high-quality learning materials about civics that anyone can use. For example, Annenberg Classroom provides 65 high-quality videos about various key Supreme Court decisions, as well as extensive materials about our system of government. While much of this is aimed at teachers, who can use it directly in their classrooms, parents and others could also make use of this material. [In full disclosure, both CRN and AC are part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, but I would endorse their content even if I did not work there.]

If I could add something to civics education in our current moment, it would be teaching people skills on how to have conversations across lines of difference. This is something that I discuss in my new book, and I show can reduce animosity and improve understanding between the two sides.

What does this look like? There are many ways of doing this, but they tend to share a few things in common. These are conversations centered on genuinely listening to the other person and their point of view, what some scholars call "perspective getting" so you can understand why they believe what they believe. The goal is to understand those with whom you disagree, not to persuade them. This means asking probing questions and keeping an open mind. These are also conversations grounded in what Keith and Danisch call "strong civility," basically the idea that we treat each other as political equals and respect the other person's right to take part in the political process.

But this takes practice, and can be intimidating, so it's something we all need help to do well. Happily, there are a number of groups working to do this, but it is a vital civic skill as well that we all should try to master.

What measures of political knowledge and civic literacy were used in the new research? What do those measures help to reveal (or not) about a person's relationship to democratic citizenship and its demands and requirements?

Surveys like ours ask about the key ingredients of civic literacy. Do you know what the three branches of government are? Do you understand their roles? Do you know key rights guaranteed by the various key amendments?  Do you know what a 5-4 Supreme Court decision means? And so forth. These are some of the benchmark pieces of information people need to know to be informed citizens.

And our survey—like many others—finds that many Americans do not. For example, one-third do not know the three branches of government. While most people know that the First Amendment to the Constitution protects freedom of speech, they don't know the other rights protected by it (freedom of the press, freedom of religion, right to petition the government, and right to peaceably assembly). And even though most people know that free speech is protected by the First Amendment, they don't understand what that means: roughly half think (incorrectly) that it requires Facebook to let you say whatever you'd like on its platform.

This sort of lack of basic information is quite troubling, as it highlights that citizens lack that core civic literacy.

Many Americans do not have a basic understanding of politics and government. Yet, we are also in an era of 24/7 news media and the Internet. The high levels of civic ignorance and lack of knowledge among the American people is an indictment of our country's political culture, political elites and the news media, the educational system, and other key agents of political socialization.

This is why the well-documented decline of local media is so important. If you like politics, there's never been a better time to be alive. You can read Politico, First Branch Forecast, subscribe to Ezra Klein's podcast, etc. You can consume politics all day, every day. But if you don't like politics (and most Americans do not!), it's never been easier to avoid it, so scholars have found that civic knowledge similarly polarizes based on political interest.

In the days of a robust local media, that was less pronounced: if you subscribed to the local paper to get the sports scores, you also flipped past some national stories, and at least glanced at them. Now, you don't even get this sort of by-product coverage. This is especially consequential for coverage of sub-national politics. All of the sources I discussed above focus on national politics, covering the minutiae of the debates between McConnell, Schumer, Biden, and so forth. But there is far less attention to state and local issues, and indeed, there are just far fewer reporters covering that today than a generation ago.

Given that the business model of local journalism has collapsed, I don't have a great solution to this problem, but it is an important one that many scholars are working to solve.

As a function of a deep hostility to real multiracial pluralistic democracy, there is a right-wing talking point that America is actually a "republic" and not a "democracy". Of course, this is not true. What intervention would you make against that disinformation and propaganda?

As someone who has taught core undergraduate American politics classes at Penn for many years, this is a perennial question that comes up every year. When people ask which is right—are we a republic or a democracy—the correct answer is that we're both.

For the Founders, "democracy" meant some sort of direct democracy, where the people themselves rule. Functionally, that doesn't exist anywhere in the modern world, at least not at scale (the closest we get are ballot initiatives and referenda in some states). But we have elements of that spirit animating our government today, most notably when we talk about the "will of the people" and public opinion, which is central to our modern understanding of how our government functions.

But we are also a republic, where it is not just what the people want directly that matters, but how that is filtered through our institutions that shapes outcomes (the Electoral College being perhaps the most striking element of that). I try to emphasize to students that our system has both elements, the key is to harness the best of both without succumbing too much to their weaknesses.

Imagine that you are a doctor of American democracy. What is your diagnosis and prognosis for the patient in this time of crisis? How does your new research (and related work of course) help to inform your conclusion(s)? 

Like many others, I fear for our system, and there are real signs of trouble for American democracy. What, then, is to be done? The first, I think, is to put pressure on elites to a bulwark against backsliding. As many scholars—myself included—have shown, backsliding is more the fault of elites than voters (i.e., it is less about voters demanding elites break norms than it is elites breaking norms that voters then rationalize as unimportant). Our job as citizens is to demand better of them. In 2020, despite real threats—including January 6th—the guardrails of democracy held. They need to be strengthened and reinforced to ensure that they can continue to flourish.

At the outset, I said that I occasionally see glimmers of hope. Those glimmers are the people who are working to make our democracy better. They are working to help us better understand one another, build bridges, and make America live up to its founding promises to all Americans, not just some of them. That is hard, difficult work. But it is the work we need at this moment.

SCI-FI-TEK FOR OVER 70 YEARS
US aims to create nuclear fusion facility within 10 years, Energy chief Granholm says

STEPHANIE LIECHTENSTEIN and MATTHEW DALY
Updated Mon, September 25, 2023

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm gestures as she speaks at the UN offices in Vienna, Monday Sept. 25, 2023. Granholm has emphasized the importance of nuclear fusion as a pioneering and future-oriented technology in the clean energy transition. As part of its clean-energy agenda, the Biden administration wants to "create a commercial nuclear fusion facility within 10 years," Granholm said in an interview with The Associated Press in Vienna. 

(AP Photo/Stephanie Liechtenstein) 

VIENNA (AP) — The Biden administration hopes to create a commercial nuclear fusion facility within 10 years as part of the nation's transition to clean energy, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Monday.

Calling nuclear fusion a pioneering technology, Granholm said President Joe Biden wants to harness fusion as a carbon-free energy source that can power homes and businesses.

"It’s not out of the realm of possibility” that the U.S. could achieve Biden’s “decadal vision of commercial fusion,” Granholm said in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press in Vienna.

Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. Unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste. Proponents of nuclear fusion hope it could one day displace fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. But producing carbon-free energy that powers homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away.

A successful nuclear fusion was first achieved by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California last December in a major breakthrough after decades of work.

Granholm also praised the role of the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog in verifying that states live up to their international commitments and do not use their nuclear programs for illicit purposes, including to build nuclear weapons.

“The IAEA is instrumental in making sure that nuclear is harnessed for good and that it does not fall into the hands of bad actors,” she said.

The watchdog organization has agreements with more than 170 states to inspect their nuclear programs. The aim is to verify their nuclear activities and nuclear material and to confirm that it is used for peaceful purposes, including to generate energy.

Nuclear energy is an essential component of the Biden administration’s goal of achieving a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 and net zero emissions economy by 2050.

Asked about the difficulty of finding storage sites for radioactive waste, Granholm said that the U.S. has initiated a process to identify communities across the country who may be willing to host an interim storage location. Currently, most of the spent fuel is stored at nuclear reactors across the country.

“We have identified 12 organizations that are going to be in discussion with communities across the country about whether they are interested (in hosting an interim site),” she said.

The U.S. currently does not recycle spent nuclear fuel but other countries, including France, already have experience with it.

Spent nuclear fuel can be recycled in such a way that new fuel is created. But critics of the process say it is not cost-effective and could lead to the proliferation of atomic weapons.

There are two proliferation concerns associated with recycling, according to the Washington-based Arms Control Association: The recycling process increases the risk that plutonium could be stolen by terrorists, and second, those countries with separated plutonium could produce nuclear weapons themselves.

“It has to be done very carefully with all these non-proliferation safeguards in place,” Granholm said.

Professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the U.S. has taken a smart approach on fusion by advancing research and designs by a range of companies working toward a pilot-scale demonstration within a decade.

“It doesn't guarantee a particular company will get there, but we have multiple shots on goal,” he said, referring to the Energy Department's milestone-based fusion development program. “It's the right way to do it, to support what we all want to see: commercial fusion to power our society” without greenhouse gas emissions.

On other topics, Granholm said that depending on whether the U.S. government shuts down or not, the Biden administration could announce in October details on an $8 billion hydrogen hub program that will be funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law.

A hub is meant to be a network of companies that produce clean hydrogen and of the industries that use it — heavy transportation, for example — and infrastructure such as pipelines and refueling stations. States and companies have teamed up to create hub proposals.

Environmental groups say hydrogen presents its own pollution and climate risks. When released into the atmosphere, it boosts volumes of methane and other greenhouse gases.

“Our goal is to get the cost of clean hydrogen down to 1 dollar per kilogram within one decade,” Granholm insisted.

As fossil fuel emissions continue warming Earth’s atmosphere and extreme weather phenomena occur globally, Granholm was asked her opinion on the announcement by U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that the U.K. will delay crucial climate targets.

Sunak said last week that he will push back the deadline for selling new gasoline and diesel cars and the phasing out of gas boilers as part of one of his biggest policy changes since taking office.

“When you see the heatwaves that the U.K. experienced this summer, I think it becomes obvious that we need to put on the accelerator,” she said, while adding that the U.K. has been a “great partner” in pushing modern technologies.

“We want to see everybody moving forward as quickly as possible (on the clean energy transition), including ourselves,” she said.

Shayne Looper: Did Christianity support the institution of slavery?

OF COURSE IT DID, SO DID ISLAM

Tue, September 26, 2023 

During the 19th century, slaveholders sometimes used Bible verses to defend their right to own slaves. In our time, atheists have used the same Bible verses to defend their claim that Christianity is a sham and its moral standards noxious. But both those who used Bible verses to defend slavery and those who use slavery to condemn Christianity overlook slavery’s historical context and misunderstand the reasons for the apostolic instructions.

Slavery is very old, older than the Bible itself. When the Bible was being written, people could not imagine a world without slaves. As we take electricity for granted, they took slavery for granted. Burning coal or firing up nuclear power plants may be a selfish and harmful way to produce energy — people in future generations may think it the epitome of foolishness and even arrogance — but few people would suggest that we do away with electricity. Likewise, it never occurred to people in antiquity to do away with slavery.

Ancient slavery differed from the slavery we know about, which marred America from the 17th century through the 19th century. When people claim that Christianity supports slavery, they have in mind the African slave trade in Europe and in the Americas, and that is at best misleading. It was, in fact, Christians who led the campaign to end slavery in Europe and America.

Ancient slavery differed from its modern counterpart. In antiquity, slaves often sold themselves into slavery, usually to pay off debts. They then saved their money (they frequently were paid) in order to buy their way back out. Some slaves were like family members: loved, honored and well-treated; others were treated poorly, neglected, and abused. Some slaves were better educated than their masters. They sometimes held positions of importance. Slaves were not only laborers; they were also accountants, lawyers, soldiers, teachers and administrators.

The slavery of the first century Mediterranean never oppressed a particular people group because of their ethnicity or the color of their skin. Slaves in Paul’s day were not kidnapped from their homes and forced into slavery. Unlike their 18th-century American counterparts, few first-century slaves spent their entire lives in slavery. And unlike 18th century slaves, first-century slaves were often better off financially than the day laborers who were free.

In ancient Israel, slaves would serve no more than seven years, when the law required their release. A slave could choose to remain with his or her master if they liked the work and appreciated the security, but a master could not force anyone to remain in slavery.

When people fault the biblical writers for their failure to denounce slavery, they frequently ignore what the writers did say. For example, the apostles counsel Christian slaves to buy their freedom if they are able. They command masters to treat their slaves with justice and remind them that they also have a Master who is watching and will hold them responsible for their actions.

The Christian perspective on slavery was unique among the ancients. Greek and Roman moralists sometimes addressed slaves’ responsibility to their masters (and for that matter, wives to their husbands) but not of masters to their slaves (or husbands to their wives). It took someone with a radically different outlook to even think in that way — someone with a mind being reshaped and renewed by a connection to God.

When the Apostle Paul told slaves to obey their “earthly masters with respect and fear,” he used the same words he employed in a different context of all Christians. He wrote, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” where in the original language the prepositional phrases are identical. That he used the same expression to describe working out salvation and working second shift reveals the importance of work and work relationships, regardless of one’s status as slave or free.

Though Christians like the Apostles Paul and Peter accepted slavery as a societal institution, they also recognized the dangers inherent in it. They insisted that Christian masters treat their slaves justly, and offered counsel to slaves that would make their lives better. Though they did not denounce slavery as an institution, they did denounce injustice and oppression within the institution.

— Find this and other articles by Shayne Looper at shaynelooper.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: Did Christianity support the institution of slavery?