ABOLISH SCOTUS

The US supreme court is letting prayer back in public schools. This is unsettling

The court’s rightwing majority was extremely receptive to a case this week that would weaken the separation of church and state

A district judge called Kennedy’s claim to be engaged in ‘personal, private prayers’ a ‘deceitful narrative.’

Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Moira Donegan

THE GUARDIAN
Tue 28 Jun 2022 

On Monday, the United States supreme court overturned decades of precedent governing the separation of church and state, and achieved one of the most long-standing goals of the Christian right: the return of official Christian prayer to public schools.

Kennedy v Bremerton School District had a strange path to the supreme court. Initially filed in 2015, the case concerns Joseph Kennedy, formerly a public high school football coach from a Seattle suburb, who sued the community that used to employ him for religious discrimination after the school objected to his habit of making public, ostentatious Christian prayers on the 50 yard line at football games, surrounded by young athletes. Kennedy has lost at the district and circuit levels; he moved to Florida in 2019, which technically should have rendered his case moot. But the supreme court agreed to hear his case anyway. This week, they ruled in his favor, 6-3.

Students now face the prospect of their schools becoming sites of religious pressure and indoctrination

The facts of what happened with Coach Kennedy at the school district are contested, but only because Kennedy himself keeps revising them. In allowing Coach Kennedy to pray publicly at school, while conducting his official duties as a public official, Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, characterized the prayers this way: “Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.”

Sam Alito, in his concurrence, claimed that Kennedy “acted in a purely private capacity.” That’s Kennedy’s version of events. But evidence suggests things looked different. In her dissent, Justice Sonya Sotomayor cast doubt on the idea that the coach offered his prayers “quietly, while his students were otherwise occupied.” She included a photograph of Coach Kennedy at one of his game night prayers. In the picture, he stands surrounded by a dense group of dozens of high school football players, uniformed and kneeling at his feet. Kennedy is speaking with a football helmet in his hand, stretched high above his head in what looks like a gesture of command. Spectators can be seen in the background, looking on from the stands. Quiet and private this was not.

The court held that the school was required to allow this: that in attempting to maintain separation of church and state – as is required by the first amendment’s establishment clause – they were actually infringing on Coach Kennedy’s free exercise rights. Thus, the court allowed the free exercise clause to effectively moot the establishment clause, denying Americans like Coach Kennedy’s students the freedom from religion that the church-state divide had previously granted them. It should not escape us that in issuing this ruling, and overturning a decades-old test for establishing the efficacy of church-state separation measures, the court relied on a version of the facts that is blatantly, demonstrably false.

All of this could have been avoided, because in fact, over the course of Kennedy’s employment, the school district took pains to balance the coach’s desire for prayer with their own obligations to remain religiously neutral. Starting from when he began coaching in 2008, Kennedy, an evangelical Christian, initially prayed to himself at games, a practice that nobody had a problem with. He says that he got the initial idea from a movie, the low-budget 2006 Christian football drama “Facing the Giants,” which he saw on TV. The film features a fictional coach who prays with his high school football team. But at some point, Kennedy’s praying became louder, and more public. He would stand on the 50-yardline just after the final whistle, and pray out loud. Teen athletes, both from his team and from the opposing side, would kneel with him in a large scrum; Kennedy mixed his prayers with pep talks. Kennedy says that the visible center of the field was an important location for him. “It made sense to do it on the field of battle,” he told the reporter Adam Liptak.

It is these public prayers, conducted while Kennedy was acting in his official capacity as the coach, that became an issue. The school tried to accommodate Kennedy, offering him ways to exercise his faith that did not involve students, and did not risk giving the impression that his religion was endorsed by the public school. Kennedy refused, and lawyered up. He eventually left the school – voluntarily – and began to claim that the district’s policies amounted to both religious discrimination and a violation of his free speech rights.

Kennedy and the First Liberty Institute, the conservative legal group that is funding his lawsuit, have tried to cast him as a first amendment hero. Before his departure from Bremerton, Kennedy spent months working with his media-savvy legal team to draw attention to his own prayers. The football games became a chaotic mess of culture-war politicking, with reporters, politicians, and evangelical Christians flocking to the field to witness Kennedy’s displays and join him in prayer. Parents complained about the shambolic “stampedes” of Kennedy’s fans, who would run, phones outstretched through the stands to join his prayer circles at the end of the games, sometimes knocking people down. Players were made uncomfortable, with one telling his father that he feared that if he didn’t pray, he “wouldn’t get to play as much.” Other coaches weren’t thrilled, either. In effect, the school-district-sponsored football games became more about Kennedy’s religious practice than about the football itself.

As it has done with increasing frequency over this term, the court threw out a long-held precedent in order to secure a conservative outcome in Kennedy’s case: Lemon v Kurtzman, the 1971 case that established a three-part test for Establishment Clause compliance. The new right-wing court, it seems, isn’t interested in Establishment Clause compliance at all. By ruling in Kennedy’s favor, they have opened the door for any Christian public official to claim that they are being discriminated against if any limits are placed on their religious expression during the conduct of their jobs, and imperiling any public bodies that try to maintain a separation between their employee’s private religious actions and their own public official ones. And they have made American public schools vulnerable to the religious proclivities of their teachers and administrators, which can now be wielded in ways that coerce the participation of students.

The supreme court seems poised to allow this. Why? Because its conservative supermajority has adopted a radically expansionist view of the first amendment’s free exercise clause, interpreting the constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion in a way that in fact tramples on the freedoms of others. An emergent trend in conservative thought – backed by a growing body of case law emerging from the Republican-controlled federal bench – has begun framing what were once considered standard features of the separation of church and state as oppressive discrimination against Christians.

It’s an absurd argument, one that would not hold water before this court if it were brought by a non-Christian. But Kennedy got a sympathetic ear, and a maximalist ruling. “That’s protected speech,” Amy Coney Barrett declared bluntly of Kennedy’s prayer circles at oral arguments. For Christians, at least, the supreme court has redefined religious liberty – as religious privilege.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

NCAA

Growing Participation, Widening Funding Gap

A report from the National Collegiate Athletic Association finds women’s participation in college sports is growing—but so is the funding gap between men’s and women’s programs.

Sara Weissman
June 28, 2022

STEPH CHAMBERS/GETTY IMAGES


Women are participating in college sports at higher rates than in the past, but men’s participation still outpaces women’s—and the funding gap between women’s and men’s programs continues to widen, according to a recent report by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The report, released Thursday by the NCAA inclusion office, marks the 50th anniversary of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs that receive federal funds and is well-known for opening up opportunities in college women’s sports.

“Title IX has been a federal law for 50 years,” the report reads. “This milestone anniversary marks an opportune time to ask why aren’t we there yet? How can we work together to eliminate sex discrimination in education? How can we succeed at providing equitable intercollegiate athletics participation opportunities; at using resources to provide equitable treatment and to create equitable experiences for all student-athletes; and at hiring and retaining diverse leaders who reflect the demographics of the increasingly diverse student-athlete population and serve as impactful role models?”

The report found that the number of women competing in college sports has increased significantly over the decades. The overall women’s participation rate in college athletics was 43.9 percent in 2020, compared to 27.8 percent in 1982, when the NCAA started hosting women’s championships across divisions.

“The number of women competing in college sports is an enormous lift from 50 years ago,” said Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

About 47 percent of athletes in Division I were women in 2020, compared to only about 26 percent in 1982. However, women made up 54 percent of the student body in Division I institutions in 2020, so the gender breakdown of athletes in the division was still out of pace with that of the student body.


Meanwhile, Divisions II and III had lower participation by women relative to their male counterparts. Division II had a 15.4 percent gap in participation rates between men and women’s sports in 2020, and Division III had a 16 percent gap, according to the report.

Opportunities in men’s college sports have grown at a slightly faster rate than women’s sports in the last two decades. Male student athletes gained nearly 73,000 participation opportunities between 2002 and 2020, while female athletes gained more than 67,000.

“Sport was a domain dominated by boys and men in our country for many decades before Title IX opened the doors for educational and athletics opportunities for girls and women,” Amy Wilson, NCAA managing director of inclusion and the author of the report, wrote in an email. “That ‘head start’ for men in the sports world in terms of acceptance and opportunities means we need continued progress for girls and women. I do not think the cause for lagging participation rates is that female student-athletes are less interested in college sports participation opportunities.”

An especially stark finding was that Division I athletic departments typically spend twice as much on men’s programs compared to women’s programs, with the largest disparity in the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, the roughly 130 institutions that play big-time football. The report found a 23 percent difference in total spending between men’s and women’s athletics programs in Division I and an 8 percent difference in spending in Divisions II and III. The gap in total expenses increased three percentage points in Division I, one percentage point in Division II and stayed the same in Division III over the last five years.

These findings come after an external review of gender equity in NCAA championships, commissioned by the NCAA and conducted by an outside law firm last summer, which found an approximately $35 million spending gap between the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments in 2019.

Across multiple reports on gender equality in sports, “we’re seeing consistent findings in terms of clear increases in opportunities for girls and women,” said Ellen J. Staurowsky, a professor of sports media at Ithaca College whose research focuses on equity in college athletics. “We’re seeing findings that continue to affirm the fact that Title IX did not destroy men’s sports. That misperception had been prevalent for so long. We’re still seeing tremendous gaps in terms of resource allocation.”

She believes there needs to be much more transparency regarding how athletic departments spend their budgets.

“We need to see more specifics about where the money is actually flowing,” she said.

Wilson said she hopes the report motivates presidents, chancellors and athletic department heads to reflect on their individual institutions’ practices and “prioritize equity in athletics.”

“I hope the disparities in the overall data spur campus and athletics department leadership to recommit to reviewing their participation opportunities, athletics’ financial aid and student-athlete experiences and treatment in their women’s and men’s athletics programs,” she said.

Women also occupy relatively few leadership positions in college sports, especially women from underrepresented backgrounds. They hold about a quarter of NCAA head coaching and athletics director positions and 30 percent of conference commissioner positions. Meanwhile, only 16 percent of female head coaches of women’s teams and female athletics directors were minority women.

Lapchick found the lack of women’s athletic leadership noted in the report to be especially jarring. He believes it should be mandatory for athletics departments to have diverse pools of candidates for positions to ensure more gender and racial diversity and pointed to the “Russell rule,” adopted by the West Coast Conference, as a model. It requires member institutions to include a candidate from a historically underrepresented background in the pool of final candidates for every athletic director, senior administrator, head coach and full-time assistant coach position in the athletic department.

“It’s my hope that … 10 years from now, 20 years, whatever reports we issue show we’re more closely following equality for both race and gender in the years ahead,” he said.

Crime and profit: Why prison is good for business in the U.S.

Data Speaks



Opinion 

28-Jun-2022

A murky world inhabited by the U.S. government, private corporations that build, manage, supply and service jails, lobbyists, and a myriad of other groups …

Welcome to the prison–industrial complex, a system that incentivizes corporate profit over offender rehabilitation and well-being.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. It's the third most populous country worldwide, with over a billion fewer people than India, yet its total prison population is over four times larger. The American incarceration rate is even more dramatic. Thirty-four of its states have a higher incarceration rate than any country other than the U.S.



Does this mean that Americans are more prone to crime than other nationalities?

Of course not. In fact, the prison population over the past decades was bloated by a series of political campaigns and harsher sentencing legislation during the War on Drugs era from the 1970s to 1980s.

Nationwide, there was an abrupt rise in the number of people caged in the 1970s, and this trend kept accelerating through to the 2000s. Drug offences made up 63 percent of all federal prisoners in the U.S. in 1997.

Yet the weak connection between drug imprisonment and drug problems in the U.S. suggest that expanding incarceration is not likely to be effective in reducing drug crime, according to Pew Research Center.

For example, the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that in 2019 those defined as "high-level suppliers" or "importers" who take larger responsibilities in drug trades, only represented 11 percent of federal drug perpetrators, and lower-level actors like street dealers, couriers and mules made up around half of those. And they can be rapidly replaced.

So who does mass incarceration benefit? Here comes the next component of the prison–industrial complex. Overcrowded prisons make room for more profit opportunities for private corporations.

Both founded after President Ronald Reagan institutionalized the War on Drugs, CoreCivic and GEO Group collectively have over half of the prison contracts in the U.S.

Despite occasional fluctuations, the net incomes of the two companies in a recent seven years were significantly higher than the last seven-year period between 2006 and 2012, as their annual reports indicate.

Overall, there are over 4,100 companies that aim to directly profit from the prison industry. They include private prisons, private companies with overpriced commissaries and telephone services, and those using underpaid or even unpaid prison labor in their supply chains.

U.S. criminal justice officials claim that prison labor programs offer job skills to inmates that help prepare them for life on the outside. But the U.S. still has one of the world's highest recidivism rates – 76.6 percent of prisoners are rearrested within five years.

In Norway, inmates who were unemployed before conviction saw an increase of 40 percent in employment rates after release. The recidivism rate in Norway is only 20 percent. In short, rehabilitation can be effective – so why isn't it in the U.S.?

Let's look at the money flows, the last and critical element of the prison-industrial complex. Public data shows that private corporations in the prison industry could be generous political spenders.

Since 2010, 48 companies have spent a combined $17 million on lobbying as well as financially supporting federal and state candidates, major party committees and ballot measure committees. And 44 of them have revenues from the prison industry only.

The top two on the list, GEO Group and CoreCivic donated heavily to Donald Trump during his presidential campaign in 2016. Less than a month into the Trump administration, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded a six-month-old Obama directive aimed at curtailing the use of private prisons.

More prisoners mean more contracts and more opportunities for profit, contributing to higher political spending, and that in turn leads to support from the government to build a sentencing system that cages more people. That's how the cycle of the prison-industrial complex circulates – and who it benefits.

 opinions@cgtn.com. Follow @thouse_opinions on Twitter to discover the latest commentaries in the CGTN Opinion Section.

SAN ANTONIO

Indigenous advocates want Brackenridge bond project to recognize native peoples’ history

by Lindsey Carnett

June 28, 2022

Matilde Torres, an Indigenous environmental advocate, says the San Antonio River and its surrounding trees in Brackenridge Park speak to thousands of years of native history and cosmology. 

Credit: Bria Woods / San Antonio Report



Standing before about 50 people in a large room at the Witte Museum during the last public meeting on the Brackenridge Park bond project, Matilde Torres held one end of a laminated poster depicting an intricate cave mural painted thousands of years ago in the Lower Pecos region of southwest Texas.

The ancient work contains the origin story of her ancestors, Torres explained, and the San Antonio River plays a central — and spiritual — role in that story: the headwaters of Yanaguana, or Spirit Waters, as the river was known to the Coahuiltecans, is considered the sacred spot where life began.

That conviction is one reason why Torres and other Indigenous descendants say they oppose the removal of dozens of trees from the banks of the river at Brackenridge Park as a part of the 2017 bond project.

“Those trees are alive and they’re also a part of the underworld, and the middle world and the upper world,” Torres said. “Everything that flows within that tree is water, right? Those are waters [that were] within our ancestors.”

More than just opposing the tree removal, however, Torres and others want to ensure that as Brackenridge Park is revitalized, it represents and honors the history of the people who lived along its banks for 12,000 years before the Spanish arrived.

Origin stories

The 26-foot-long cave painting, now known as the White Shaman Mural, is considered one of the most important and illuminating pre-historic artifacts of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands Archeological District. Located in Val Verde County, about 200 miles from San Antonio, researchers have been studying its many-layered meanings for decades. That includes Gary Perez, an Indigenous descendant and researcher who has deciphered crucial elements of the mural for the Witte Museum.

In his interpretation, Perez sees a map of Texas — perhaps the oldest one in existence. This map includes depictions of the four great springs of Central Texas, Perez said: Barton Springs in Austin, Comal Springs in New Braunfels, San Marcos Springs in San Marcos, and the headwaters of the San Antonio River, now known as the Blue Hole.

He and Torres recently shared various aspects of their ancestors’ origin story and other cosmological myths of the Payaya people, one of the Coahuiltecan tribes of South Texas who lived along the banks of the San Antonio River, likely within the bounds of modern-day Brackenridge Park.

“Our roots go deep,” Perez said. “These trees are our teachers because the trees teach us that our roots go deep and are everywhere.”

The headwaters of the river, which spring from the Edwards Aquifer on property now owned by the University of the Incarnate Word, was a sacred pilgrimage site for Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, Perez said.

The story goes, Torres said, that a waterbird flew into the Blue Hole, where he encountered a blue panther that lived there. Startled, the waterbird immediately flew back out, flinging water droplets from his tailfeathers. These droplets fell onto the land, and from them sprang life.

The Payaya were one of the groups upon whose sweat the San Antonio de Valero Mission was established, according to accounts kept by the Texas Historical Association. They are mentioned in records of this mission as late as 1776.

Today, the story of the blue panther and the waterbird is loosely depicted through art and sculptures at Yanaguana Garden in Hemisfair.

Torres and Perez also said they share Indigenous people’s cosmological belief that the part of the river where the bond project will be primarily focused — the horseshoe bend just north of Joske’s Pavillion — aligns perfectly with the Eridanus, a constellation in the southern celestial hemisphere, each winter solstice.

Matilde Torres points out that the shape of the San Antonio River at the horseshoe bend in Brackenridge Park is the same shape as the constellation Eridanus. 

Credit: Bria Woods / San Antonio Report

Indigenous populations native to the area, Perez said, believed a bridge between the physical world and spirit world opened there at midnight on the solstice — “much like the bridge in [the movie] Coco does on Dia de Los Muertos,” Torres added.

Both said the headwaters and the river are still considered sacred to local Indigenous people today, and they want to see that reality represented inside San Antonio’s central park.

Representation within the park

Over the last several decades, Brackenridge park has fallen into disrepair.

In an effort to reverse that slide, the City of San Antonio commissioned a master plan in 2016 “to shape the future development and rehabilitation of Brackenridge Park for many years to come.” That master plan was finalized and approved by City Council in 2017.

As a part of the process, the Brackenridge Park Conservancy, a nonprofit created in 2008 to help restore and care for the park, commissioned extensive research on the park and its history. The result was the Brackenridge Park Cultural Landscape Report, which aims to understand the park’s assets and deficits, and asks how best to accurately reflect its history while also serving city residents in the decades to come.

According to the report, the occupation of the area by Indigenous people prior to written history is one of eight distinct timeframes encompassed by the parkland’s history.

In 2017, San Antonio voters approved an $850 million bond for city projects, with $116 million to improve parks. Of that, roughly $7.75 million was to be used to “repair and enhance” historic features of Brackenridge Park, including the Lily Pond, Upper Labor dam, Upper Labor acequia, the pump house and Lambert Beach.

While the coronavirus pandemic slowed down those plans, city staff went before the San Antonio Planning Commission in January seeking a project variance to remove 104 trees — including nine heritage trees — as part of the project. City staff said those trees were either damaging the historic structures, are diseased or invasive, and so should be removed. To replace the lost tree canopy, the plan has always included planting new trees.

While the planning commission approved the removal, the city’s Historic and Design Review Commission delayed making a decision after about dozens of citizens spoke passionately against the action. The city paused the project, and later announced a series of public meetings to get input from the community on the design process.

Those meetings began in March; at the last one, city staff shared a preliminary design that it called phase one of the project, and announced three more meetings to discuss phase two.

Torres has attended all four public meetings, joining environmentalists and other advocates who continue to strenuously object to any tree removal. Attendees also continue to demand that the city cease its rookery mitigation efforts in the park.

During the last meeting, city officials and project designers announced they would be able to save 19 of the trees originally slated for removal by relocating them within the park.

But like others who have shown up to every meeting, Torres was not impressed with the city’s most recent effort. Prioritizing the walls and other “built” structures at the expense of the trees favors colonial and post-colonial history over Indigenous history, she said.

She chided officials for not reaching out to any Indigenous groups before designing the project, even though three tribes (the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, the Lipan Apache Band of Texas and the Comanche Nation Historic Preservation Office) had written letters opposing the tree removal.

San Antonio Parks and Recreation Director Homer Garcia said during the meeting that while he hasn’t seen the letters, he would be happy to meet with representatives from San Antonio’s indigenous community, as did Kinder Baumgardner, managing principal with the SWA Group, the landscape architecture firm designing the project.

“We know that there are these Indigenous contributions and significance to the park,” Baumgardner said. He added he and his staff will look for ways to incorporate Indigenous history into phase two of the project.

To date, no meeting has been set; Garcia told the San Antonio Report he and his staff plan to call Torres and Perez this week to set up a time.

Torres stressed she is just one representative, and said she hopes Garcia speaks with representatives from multiple tribes.

“One thing they need to understand is that [one group doesn’t] speak for all Indigenous people,” Torres said. “I would like to see [the city] invite these other groups, invite these other tribes as well [and to] make it a day for them to share their knowledge, to share their stories.”

Colombia's tribunal exposes how troops kidnapped and killed thousands of civilians

By John Otis
Published June 28, 2022 

Carlos Saavedra For NPR

Blanca Nubia Monroy photographed at her home in Bogotá, Colombia. Her son Julián Oviedo was kidnapped and killed in 2008. The Colombian army is accused of taking civilians, killing them, and disguising them as guerrilla fighters to falsify higher body counts.


BOGOTÁ, Colombia — In front of a war crimes tribunal, Blanca Monroy took the microphone and addressed the former Colombian army officers who were responsible for killing her son. He was an unemployed carpenter who, in 2008, was kidnapped, shot 13 times and was then buried in a mass grave.

"No one understands the pain of a mother who loses her son. It's an emptiness that will never, ever, be filled," she said. "You should ask God for forgiveness."

Carlos Saavedra For NPR

Monroy got the Libra symbol tattooed on her arm. Her son had the same tattoo, and it was how she identified his body.

Monroy's son died in one of the darkest chapters of Colombia's 50-year guerrilla war. To run up body counts, Colombian soldiers kidnapped and executed more than 6,400 civilians from 2002 to 2008 and falsely reported them as Marxist guerrillas killed in combat, a special tribunal found.

The killings, known in Colombia as "false positives," were never fully investigated by Colombian courts. But now the tribunal, set up under a 2016 peace deal, is trying to get to the bottom of what happened. And it could result in a former high-ranking officer in the country's U.S.-backed military being convicted of war crimes.

This comes as Colombia's Truth Commission is about to release its final report, documenting accounts from people affected by the long civil war.

There was pressure to pump up body counts

Formally known as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, the tribunal functions outside of Colombia's regular judicial system and has a 15-year mandate to prosecute the most heinous crimes committed by guerrilla fighters and the government troops they fought against. The tribunal started work in 2018 by investigating thousands of kidnappings carried out by the rebels, but it has now moved on to abuses committed by the armed forces.

/ Nicole Acuña Cepeda/JEP
Accusers face former Colombian army officers in the second day of special tribunal hearings in Ocaña, Colombia, on April 27.

Most of the false positive killings took place in the 2000s, when Colombian military officers came under fierce pressure to crush the guerrillas. Failure could derail their careers. However, reporting bigger body counts could mean promotions, overseas postings and other benefits.

"There was constant pressure from our superiors, including the army commander, to produce combat deaths," former Lt. Col. Álvaro Tamayo, one of the defendants, told a war crimes tribunal hearing in April in the northern town of Ocaña, where many of the false positive killings took place.

"'Good' officers produced bigger body counts. 'Bad' officers didn't," he said. "This generated psychological pressure and fear of being demoted or expelled from the army for a lack of operational results."

So, some officers hatched a lethal conspiracy.

They lured poor, unemployed young men from Bogotá and other cities to small towns near the war zone with promises of jobs. Then, according to testimony gathered by the tribunal, soldiers gunned them down, planted weapons on them, dressed them in camouflage and reported these innocent civilians as rebels killed in combat.

Officers can avoid prison

The tribunal's estimate of false positives goes far beyond previous tallies. And the tribunal's president, Eduardo Cifuentes, says the real number could be even higher than what investigators found. He tells NPR the killings are "the absolute worst" of Colombian war crimes.

/ Carlos Saavedra For NPR
Eduardo Cifuentes is the president of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a tribunal set up to prosecute war crimes in Colombia. Here he shows an Italian Renaissance painting made by Ambrogio Lorenzetti called <em>The Allegory of Good and Bad Government</em>.

The top priority of the tribunal is to learn exactly how and why the crimes happened. The goal is to make sure they never happen again and to help the country heal after decades of warfare.

"Our objective is reconciliation," said tribunal judge Alejandro Ramelli, speaking at the Ocaña hearing. "But you can't forgive if you don't know what happened."

That's why the tribunal is being lenient with defendants. They can avoid prison if they confess to and fully explain their crimes, including who gave the orders. They're also required to make up for some of the harm they've caused and participate in public hearings held in former war zones where the crimes were documented.

/ Carlos Saavedra For NPR
Alejandro Ramelli, one of the judges who heard the case of alleged extrajudicial killings in Ocaña, sits in his office in Bogotá on June 8.


Mothers want false positives' names cleared

The hearing in Ocaña took place in a local university auditorium where a dozen defendants, now stripped of their military uniforms, sat stiffly onstage and heard directly from the relatives of their victims.

When it was her turn to speak, Zoraida Muñoz faced the former army officers and insisted that it made no sense to target her 22-year-old son, who was himself a former soldier.

"I want my son's name cleared," she said. "He was no guerrilla. He'd just gotten out of the army. But he was abducted and killed."

/ Carlos Saavedra For NPR
/Zoraida Muñoz is part of a group of mothers denouncing extrajudicial killings known as "false positives." The mothers say their sons were kidnapped by the Colombian army, killed and disguised as guerrillas to add to a fictitious war record. The mother of Jonny Duvián, who was killed in 2008, Muñoz spoke at the hearing in Ocaña. Here she is photographed at her home in Bogotá, Colombia, on May 18.

The defendants include a retired general who stands to become the highest-ranking former officer convicted of war crimes. They all sounded deeply repentant. At one point, former Lt. Col. Tamayo admitted that he gave the direct order to execute several innocent civilians on the outskirts of Ocaña.

"I betrayed my family and the army," Tamayo said, his voice breaking. "I am a disgrace."

Sandro Pérez, a former army sergeant, was even more blunt, saying, "I became an assassin, a monster for society, a death machine."

Not all Colombians are on board with the tribunal

The testimony has been riveting. But critics in the right-wing political and military establishment claim it could hurt army morale and damage the institution. They insist that the tribunal should stick to investigating massacres and kidnappings carried out by the guerrillas and that it is placing far too much blame for war atrocities on government troops.

President Iván Duque, a conservative who opposed Colombia's peace treaty, tried in 2019 to overhaul the tribunal and strip it of some of its powers, saying, "we can reform and design a [court] that assures genuine truth and justice to all Colombians." But that effort failed.

/ Nicole Acuña Cepeda/JEP
Victims and loved ones fill the audience of the tribunal and photos, flowers, messages and other items line the walls in the auditorium of Francisco de Paula Santander University in Ocaña, Colombia, on April 26.

Some critics accuse the tribunal of exaggerating the scope of army atrocities.

"What we are seeing is the case of a few bad apples," says John Marulanda, a former army colonel who heads a national association for retired military officers. "You cannot generalize and say 'all the army is involved.' "

He thinks military judges or the country's ordinary justice system should handle the false positives cases. However, 15 years after the army killings were first revealed by human rights groups and mothers of the dead, there have been only a handful of convictions.

Testimonies show the killings were carefully coordinated

This so-called "impunity gap" justifies the efforts of the war crimes tribunal to revisit the cases, says Rodrigo Uprimny of the Bogotá human rights group Dejusticia. What's more, he says the testimony makes it clear that the killings were carefully coordinated and not the work of just a few out-of-control troops.

"When you see a colonel saying 'I did that, I did that, I did that,' really confessing systematic crime in public view, it's really very powerful," he says.

Accused soldiers who fully cooperate with the tribunal will not go to a traditional prison, though their freedom will be restricted. They'll also spend up to eight years performing community service in the neighborhoods of their victims.

/ Nicole Acuña Cepeda/JEP
Retired Colombian military commander Paulino Coronado (right) speaks at the special tribunal in which army officers are accused of killing civilians and presenting them as false combat casualties, in Ocaña, Colombia, on April 27.

At first, that didn't sit well with Blanca Monroy, who spoke at the Ocaña hearing and whose son, Julián Oviedo, was shot 13 times.

"I was thirsty for justice and I wanted them put in jail," she says, speaking from her modest home in Bogotá.

But the war crimes tribunal allowed her to meet face to face with the men responsible for her son's death. She rebuked them. She cried with them. Gradually, she says, she even began to forgive them.

"I no longer feel fury or hatred," she says. "Now I feel at peace."

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Texas tragedy is apparently latest in global series of migrant suffocation deaths

Police work at the scene where a tractor-trailer full of dead bodies was discovered Monday in San Antonio.
(Eric Gay / Associated Press)

ASSOCIATED PRESS

JUNE 28, 2022 

Authorities in Texas say that 46  (53) people believed to be migrants were found dead in a tractor-trailer and 16 others were taken to hospitals Monday in a remote part of San Antonio.

The deaths were apparently the latest in what has become a global series of mass deaths from suffocation or heat during human-trafficking attempts. Here’s a look at some of those incidents:

— June 27, 2022: 46 people believed to be migrants were found dead in a sweltering trailer on a remote back road in southwestern San Antonio.

— Oct. 23, 2019: 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead in a truck trailer in Essex, England. Four men were jailed for manslaughter.

— July 23, 2017: Eight immigrants were found dead in a sweltering trailer at a San Antonio Walmart parking lot. Two others died later in hospitals. The driver was sentenced to life in prison.

— Feb. 20, 2017: 13 African migrants suffocated inside a shipping container while being transported between two towns in Libya. A total of 69 migrants, most from Mali, were packed into the container, according to the local Red Crescent branch.



— Aug. 27, 2015: Austrian police discovered an abandoned truck containing the bodies of 71 migrants, including eight children, from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The truck, found along a highway, had crossed into Austria from Hungary.

— April 4, 2009: 35 Afghan migrants suffocated inside a shipping container in southwestern Pakistan. Authorities said that more than 100 people were packed inside the container.

— April 9, 2008: 54 Burmese migrants suffocated in the back of an airtight refrigerated truck in Ranong, Thailand.

— May 14, 2003: 19 migrants died inside a sweltering tractor-trailer while they traveled from southern Texas to Houston.

— June 18, 2000: 58 Chinese migrants were found dead inside a truck in the English port town of Dover. The Dutch truck had transported the migrants across the English Channel from Belgium. Two people survived.

TRUMP'S BANK

From Peru to Uganda, activists call on Deutsche Bank to drop fossil finance

Tom Sims and Marta Orosz
Tue, June 28, 2022 


Activists meet Deutsche Bank to voice concerns about energy project in Amazon




FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Climate activists from Peru to Uganda are descending on Deutsche Bank's headquarters in Frankfurt this week to call on Germany's largest lender to stop financing fossil fuel companies.

The demand comes as Deutsche Bank markets itself as a lender that firms can turn to as they transition to a greener future, a strategy it views as key to delivering its own turnaround and boosting profits.

On Monday, two leaders of indigenous Peruvians and several climate activists met with Deutsche Bank staff in the sustainability department to demand it stop working with Peruvian state oil company Petroperu, which they say is harming wildlife and waterways in the Amazon.

On Tuesday, Fridays for Future activist Luisa Neubauer from Germany and Evelyn Acham from the Rise Up Movement in Uganda will also meet with Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing to insist he distance the bank from an oil pipeline plan in Africa.

Sewing has said sustainability is "at the core of our strategy", but for many activists, the bank isn't doing enough.

In a blow to its green credentials, Deutsche Bank's fund unit DWS is facing allegations of so-called "greenwashing" for allegedly misleading investors over how sustainable its investments are. DWS has denied the allegations.

Deutsche Bank declined to discuss the meetings or its dealings with Petroperu, but said it understood and appreciated demands and views of activists.

"We are committed to reducing our own CO2 emissions and in particular those of our loan portfolio to net zero by 2050," it said.

In Peru, the government wants to ramp up oil production in some of its dormant Amazonian fields as global crude prices soar on supply fears linked to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Deutsche is a lead bank for a $1.3 billion loan for Petroperu and played a key role in recent talks with creditors to extend a deadline for the energy firm to provide its 2021 audited financial statements, according to Petroperu.

Missing that deadline prompted credit agencies to downgrade Petroperu to junk status and sent its bonds tumbling.

The bank financing has helped Petroperu modernise a refinery to increase its ability to process more crude oil.

Shapiom Noningo Sesen, an indigenous leader of the Wampis Nation and part of Monday's meetings, said he asked Deutsche to reevaluate its role, and that activists would keep the pressure on the bank until it drops Petroperu.

He said locals couldn't eat fish anymore due to pollution and toxins were ending up in their blood.

"These companies are just playing with our lives, our culture and our history," he said through an interpreter.

Petroperu didn't respond to a request for comment. It said this month it was "committed to caring for the environment through responsible practices".

Ricardo Perez, an official with Amazon Watch, said he would also visit other banks to pressure them to end dealings with Petroperu.

But for now his focus was on Deutsche, which Perez said "has invested in the biggest driver of new oil production in the Amazon for the next decade".

(Additional reporting by Marco Aquino in Lima; Editing by Mark Potter)

Fears of violence against pro-choice protests intensify amid wave of attacks

Use of teargas and arrests by police and targeting by anti-abortion activists disrupts demonstrations in multiple states

New York police clear people protesting against the supreme court’s Roe v Wade decision from the street. 

Photograph: Caitlin Ochs/Reuters


Erum Salam

Tue 28 Jun 2022

Fears over police violence and attacks by anti-abortion activists have been growing following a wave of incidents at demonstrations against the US supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, which upheld the constitutional right to an abortion.


‘A matter of life and death’: maternal mortality rate will rise without Roe, experts warn

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of people have gathered at protests objecting to the ruling. The protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful but some have seen incidents of police violence – including attacks on protesters – and an incident of a car driving dangerously through marchers.

Law enforcement cracked down on protests in multiple states, wielding batons and forcibly removing protesters from public spaces and firing teargas in Arizona.

Over two dozen pro-choice activists were arrested in New York City as protests took place in Washington Square Park, Union Square and in front of the NewsCorp building in midtown, home to Fox News studios.

Pro-choice supporters hold signs at a rally outside the South Carolina statehouse. Photograph: Meg Kinnard/AP

In Arizona, police fired rounds of teargas into protesters from inside the state Capitol building. Police later issued a statement saying they were concerned protesters would gain access to the building.

In Greenville, South Carolina, six protesters were arrested following a clash with police that left some injured. In one video widely circulated on social media, a police officer is seen threatening a woman with a Taser and throwing an elderly man to the ground.

Allen Chaney, a spokesperson for South Carolina’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union told the Guardian: “The ACLU of South Carolina strongly condemns violence against peaceful protesters. It should be the case that you can show up and peacefully protest in this country without fear of violence or wrongful arrest.”

Protesters get ready to march to the governor’s mansion in Des Moines, Iowa. Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP

Meanwhile, a pickup truck ploughed through protesters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, hospitalizing one woman. The Cedar Rapids police department declined to comment on the incident. The state recently passed a law making it legal for drivers to hit protesters with vehicles in certain circumstances. Other states in the US have passed similar laws.

In Los Angeles, California, the Full House actor Jodie Sweetin was surrounded by police officers and pushed to the ground in front of fellow pro-choice protesters.

In a statement following the event, Sweetin said: “Our activism will continue until our voices are heard and action is taken. This will not deter us, we will continue fighting for our rights. We are not free until ALL of us are free.”

Journalists reporting in Los Angeles were also involved in violent incidents at the hands of police. Reporter Tina Desiree Berg was grabbed by a police officer, despite wearing a press badge around her neck. Samuel Braslow, another reporter for the Beverly Hills Courier, was also filmed being pushed by police.

Police hold a pro-choice demonstrator to the ground in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Vishal P Sing/Reuters

The Los Angeles police department issued a statement to the Guardian: “The LAPD is aware of the video clip of a woman being pushed. The force used will be evaluated against the LAPD’s policy and procedure.

“As the nation continues to wrestle with the latest supreme court decision, the Los Angeles police department will continue to facilitate First Amendment rights, while protecting life and property.”

In response to the arrests, private companies such as Live Nation Entertainment and the clothing retailer Patagonia offered to bail their employees out of jail, if arrested while peacefully protesting.

The company issued a statement that said: “Patagonia supports choice.”

“Caring for employees extends beyond basic health insurance, so we take a more holistic approach to coverage and support overall wellness to which every human has a right.”

Did violence follow Roe decision? Yes — almost all of it against pro-choice protesters

Right claimed to fear pro-choice "rage" after SCOTUS decision — but so far the violence is directed at protesters

By KATHRYN JOYCE
PUBLISHED JUNE 28, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)

NYPD officers arrest several abortion rights activist after they blocked traffic while protesting the overturning of Roe Vs. Wade by the US Supreme Court, in New York, on June 24, 2022.

 (ALEX KENT/AFP via Getty Images)

Before the Supreme Court even announced its decision overturning Roe v. Wade last Friday, right-wing politicians and media had begun warning of a wave of violent demonstrations or riots by pro-choice protesters. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., called on "all patriots" to defend local churches and crisis pregnancy centers, while Fox News hyped warnings about a "night" or "summer of rage" and various far-right activists — from the America First/groyper movement to the Proud Boys to a staffer for Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake — issued threats against leftists they claimed were about to become violent.

But it appears that most of the violence that occurred in response to the Roe decision this past weekend was directed at pro-choice demonstrators, not caused by them.

On Friday night, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a man drove his pickup truck into a group of women protesters, hitting several and driving over the ankle of one woman. Iowa journalist Lyz Lenz, who was covering the protest, noted on Twitter that the attack came at the end of a peaceful event, as demonstrators were crossing the road at a crosswalk while the man had a red light. "The truck drove around other cars in order to hit protesters," Lenz wrote, adding that the driver "was screaming" while a woman in the truck with him begged him to stop.

As Andy Campbell and Alanna Vagianos reported at HuffPost, a number of other protesters ran after the truck, trying to stop it, but the driver continued on, knocking over several people. The woman whose ankle was run over was sent to the hospital. As of Saturday, the man had not been charged with any crime.

RELATED: Amid all the gloating, anti-abortion right dreams of bigger wins — and possible violence

That same night, at a pro-choice protest in Providence, Rhode Island, an off-duty police officer named Jeann Lugo — who, until this weekend, was a Republican candidate for state Senate — punched his Democratic opponent, reproductive rights organizer Jennifer Rourke, in the face.

Providence police arrested Lugo and charged him with assault and disorderly conduct, placing him on administrative leave. On Saturday, Lugo dropped out of the Senate race and announced he would not be seeking any political office before apparently deactivating his Twitter account.

In Atlanta, photographer Matthew Pearson documented a group of more than a dozen Proud Boys coming to counterprotest a pro-choice demonstration, while an Atlanta antifascist group posted photos of the group boarding a Humvee painted with the Proud Boys' logo.

In several other states, police responded to demonstrations against the SCOTUS ruling with heavy-handed tactics and violence.

In Greenville, South Carolina, multiple videos seemed to show police arresting and dragging pro-choice protesters away, as others in the crowd screamed at them to stop. In one video, a young woman is violently shoved backward into the street, where she falls and appears to hit her head. When an older woman comes over, apparently to help her, she is also put in handcuffs and taken away.

In a statement, the Greenville Police Department said it was conducting an internal review of the incident.

At the Arizona state capitol in Phoenix, police shot tear gas canisters into a crowd of protesters on Friday night, allegedly without warning, after some protesters began banging on the windows of the building, and, a video taken from inside the capitol indicates, one person kicked a glass door several times.

Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who has called for hanging "traitors" who refused to overturn the election, declared a protest that resulted in no arrests or injuries the "#J24 Arizona Capitol Insurrection."

Republican lawmakers claimed in a statement that "extremist demonstrators" had tried to "make entry by breaking windows and pushing down doors" and described themselves as having faced a "hostage" situation and an "insurrection" meant to overthrow the state's government, although there were no arrests, injuries or broken glass. State Sen. Wendy Rogers — who called for building gallows and hanging "traitors who betrayed our country" during a speech to the white nationalist America First movement this February — declared the protest the "#J24 Arizona Capitol Insurrection," and, along with her GOP colleagues, called for more arrests. At HuffPost, Sebastian Murdock reports that after the protesters dispersed and moved to a park downtown, they were tear-gassed again. According to AZ Central, at a subsequent protest on Saturday, numerous legal observers were handcuffed and detained, one for around two hours.

In Los Angeles, videos show numerous violent confrontations between police and both protesters and the press. In one video, taken by photographer Michael Ade, LAPD officers are seen pushing protesters to the ground and striking at least one with a baton after the group tried to occupy or shut down the 101 freeway. In another video taken by Ade, which subsequently went viral, police shove former "Full House" actor Jodie Sweetin backward off a highway embankment — where, Ade tweeted, Sweetin was trying to lead protesters away from the road — and sent her sprawling to the pavement.

In downtown L.A., video by documentarian Vishal Singh depicts a woman protester shoved backward onto the ground and shot in the stomach with a riot gun projectile. In another video, police appear to beat a man who is being arrested, banging his head against a concrete curb before dragging him away while other protesters yell that the man is having a seizure.

Although the man has since been charged with attempted murder — for allegedly using an aerosol can as a makeshift flamethrower against an officer — Singh said, "It was one of the most brutal arrests I've ever seen, if not the most brutal."

When local journalist Tina Desiree Berg, who was wearing press credentials and took extensive footage of the protests throughout the weekend, tried to get a better angle of the man being arrested, one police officer punched her in the head before another shoved her to the ground, later telling her on video, "We're trying to protect you."

"If he had just walked over and said, 'Can you move over a foot,' I would have complied," said Berg in an interview with Salon. "I don't think this protest would have escalated to any violence if the protesters had just been left alone."

Berg, it turns out, was far from the only journalist hit or manhandled by LAPD officers last weekend, and, as Los Angeles Times journalist Kevin Rector writes, LAPD officers on Saturday repeatedly violated protections for journalists covering protests that were recently expanded by both state law and LAPD policy. Singh himself turned around at one point to find an LAPD officer pointing a riot gun, which fires lead beanbag rounds, at his head from just a few feet away. And a video from Beverly Hills Courier journalist Samuel Braslow shows a national legal observer being shoved to the ground by an officer.

Southern California right-wing extremists "will take any excuse to get in the streets and fight with 'antifa.' But these guys view anybody as 'antifa.'"

Singh also noted that a far-right activist associated with the white supremacist Rise Above Movement, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as "a Southern California-based racist fight club," posted a message on Telegram claiming that an allied "nationalist" had infiltrated the pro-choice protest. On Monday afternoon, the same activist published a video clip, taken from a short distance, of Singh standing at the protest, with the caption, "Hi Vishal."

Already over the last three days, right-wing groups in the area have threatened to counterprotest pro-choice demonstrations, and Singh said he's seen several people from those circles at protests over the weekend, including a man who assaulted him at an anti-vaccination rally last year.

"Typically [that man] shows up at right-wing or Proud Boys protests," said Singh. "But at every one of the protests over the last few days, he was following [protesters] around."

Berg notes that clashes between far-right extremists and counterprotesters have become a regular occurrence in Southern California. "These events are monthly at this point," she said. "This group is incredibly radicalized. They are very homophobic, very misogynistic, incredibly racist. They want white nationalism and the hood is off. So they'll take any excuse to get in the streets and fight with 'antifa.' But people should understand: these guys view everybody as 'antifa.' We've seen them call LAPD officers 'antifa.'"

However ludicrous that might seem, she continued, "They also really believe they are on a mission that is morally correct and that they're the good guys. When you view it through that lens, it's easy to see how things have become so violent in the way that they have. And I think it's going to get worse."

While conservative media and politicians have raised the issue of vandalism or violence against crisis pregnancy centers since the draft SCOTUS opinion was leaked in May, successfully calling for an FBI investigation, a new report released Friday by the National Abortion Federation noted a sharp increase in incidents of vandalism, assault and battery and hoax bomb threats against actual abortion clinics in 2021, including a 200% increase in reports of stalking clinic staff.

Read more on America after the fall of Roe v. Wade:

What the anti-abortion movement wants next — and how we can respond

How to access abortion in a post-Roe world

AOC unleashes anti-Republican Twitter blitz after Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade

KATHRYN JOYCE is an investigative reporter at Salon, and the author of two books: "The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption" and "Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement."

'Deeply hurtful': More states make it harder for LGBTQ people to foster or adopt children

Cristina Silva, USA TODAY

Tue, June 28, 2022 

Fatma Marouf and Bryn Esplin wanted a big family. The married couple, who both work as professors at Texas A&M University, knew they had love and security to give. 

But when they applied to foster a refugee child under a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services program operated by the Conference of Catholic Bishops in Fort Worth, Texas, they were told they couldn’t move forward. The agency wouldn’t work with two mothers.

“They said you have to ‘mirror the Holy Family’ and I was stunned,” said Marouf. “I didn't really know what that meant."

Esplin, who grew up Mormon and always thought, the more children in the home, the merrier, was also shocked.

“It was deeply hurtful,” she said.

The couple is now at the forefront of a series of legal battles playing out across the nation over the civil rights of same-sex couples to parent children. LGBTQ activists said there has been a growing resurgence of state legislation and lawsuits in recent years trying to block these couples from fostering or adopting children, even in some cases going as far as to make it difficult for same-sex parents to have rights to children they conceived through fertility treatments.

LGBTQ activists warn attacks on same-sex parents are part of a larger campaign to discredit LGBTQ couples and challenge gay marriage. Many legal scholars have said the Supreme Court’s ruling last week overturning Roe v. Wade, which had protected abortion rights for nearly 50 years, has provided a path for other rights not explicitly detailed in the U.S. Constitution to be scrutinized, including gay marriage.

At the center of these parenting disputes are two very different viewpoints. The first is that denying same-sex couples equal rights as different-sex couples is discriminatory, homophobic and illegal under the Constitution’s equal protection clause. LGBTQ activists note such policies can make it harder to find homes for children in need – there are more than 400,000 foster children across the United States and experts predict the number of children who will need temporary and permanent homes could balloon over the next decade with abortion rights being restricted in many states.

The other viewpoint is that religious institutions should not be forced to serve people who do not share their beliefs that marriage is only between a man and a woman and that children should ideally have one male and one female parent.

Fatma Marouf (left), Bryn Esplin (right), and their daughter at home in Fort Worth, Texas.

Many same-sex couples said they only found out about the barriers to parenthood after they made the decision to start a family. After the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling declaring gay marriage a constitutional right, these couples said they were flabbergasted to find out they were being ruled out as parents because of who they love.

“I’m a law professor, and I was still completely shocked that it was allowed,” said Marouf of learning in 2017 that she and her wife could not foster a refugee child through Catholic Charities Fort Worth. The couple is at the center of a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services and the Conference of Catholic Bishops over the matter. “It would be like telling me you have to be a Catholic to apply.”

In al, 12 states allow state-licensed child welfare agencies to refuse to work with LGBTQ couples if doing so conflicts with their religious values, including Texas, Virginia and Arizona, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank focusing on LGBTQ research. Arizona passed its policy in April. Only 29 states and Washington, D.C., explicitly prohibit discrimination in adoption based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Plaintiff Jim Obergefell holds a photo of his late husband John Arthur as he speaks to members of the media after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling regarding same-sex marriage June 26, 2015, outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. The high court ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry in all 50 states.

The breakdown is similar when it comes to foster care services.

“It has been a challenging few years,” said Naomi G. Goldberg, LGBTQ program director for the Movement Advancement Project.

The Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage sparked a backlash that has only grown, said Goldberg. “We saw states reacting to that and saying, ‘We still don’t want to treat couples fairly.’”

Activists are pushing for the Biden administration to issue a Health and Human Services policy prohibiting discrimination in government-licensed foster and adoption services. Passage of the Equality Act, which would expand civil rights laws to include protections based on sexual orientation and gender identification, would also better guard same-sex couples, said Goldberg.

Research shows being LGBTQ is immaterial to someone’s ability to be a good parent, said Camilla B. Taylor, director of constitutional litigation for Lambda Legal. Government-funded foster and adoption agencies that refuse to work with same-sex families are violating the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, she added. Lambda Legal is representing Marouf and Esplin in their lawsuit against the federal government.

The First Amendment also prohibits the government from favoring any one religion or faith, meaning religious organizations shouldn’t be able to punish prospective parents who don’t share their values, Taylor said.

“There are certainly efforts underway to chip away at marriage equality, if not overrule it altogether,” said Taylor. “We know we are going to have a fight on our hands.”

Supreme Court ruling sparked backlash to LGBTQ rights

The backlash against same-sex couples isn’t new. In the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of the AIDS epidemic and widespread homophobia, a handful of states passed laws or debated passing laws preventing same-sex couples from adopting or serving as foster parents. New Hampshire became the first state to repeal its ban in 1999, according to the ACLU. 

More recently, the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015 establishing the federal right to gay marriage acknowledged LGBTQ families who had long been raising “hundreds of thousands of children.” And in 2017, the Obama administration enacted rules prohibiting discrimination in adoption and foster care agencies funded by Health and Human Services.

But as more states have contracted foster care services to private agencies and more LGBTQ couples have expressed a desire to adopt, the national debate over who is allowed to care for children has intensified.

In 2019, the Trump administration granted a waiver from federal non-discrimination rules to South Carolina that allowed the state to continue its contract with a religious organization that refused to work with same-sex couples. In that instance, a Christian lesbian couple, Eden Rogers and Brandy Welch, were told by Miracle Hill Ministries, the state’s largest foster care contractor, that they could not be foster parents because they were a same-sex couple. Lambda Legal is also representing the couple in its ongoing legal fight against the Department of Health and Human Services and the state of South Carolina.

In 2020, after the Trump administration vowed to remove all Obama-era protections against discrimination in federally funded adoption and foster care, Tennessee joined the list of states embracing similar measures to allow government-funded foster care and adoption agencies to exclude LGBTQ families.

The Supreme Court dealt somewhat of another setback to same-sex couples when it ruled in 2021 that the city of Philadelphia had to work with a Catholic organization that said religious beliefs meant it would not place children with same-sex couples. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said in the ruling that “gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth,” but concluded there could be an exception for religious reasons in this specific case.

Breanne Brodak, left, and Cortney Tucker kiss after getting married in Pontiac, Mich., Friday, June 26, 2015, after The Supreme Court declared that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the United States. Michigan was one of 14 states enforcing a ban on same-sex marriage.

Despite barriers, same-sex families are thriving. There are roughly 543,000 married same-sex couples and another 469,000 same-sex couples who are not married but live together. Of those, roughly 16.2% are raising children, according to the Williams Institute, a think tank focused on LGBTQ law and policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Compared with different-sex couples, same-sex couples are seven times more likely to foster or adopt, the Williams Institute found. Many of these families represent people of color. About 34% of African American LGBTQ adults and 39% of Latino LGBTQ adults are raising children, while 21% of white LGBTQ adults are parents.

And it’s likely the need for same-sex adoptions will only grow, with Millennials and Gen Z Americans identifying as LGBTQ at much higher rates than previous generations, said Kerith J. Conron, research director at the Williams Institute.

With so many children in need, federal contractors shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ couples, said Cathryn Oakley, state legislative director and senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ civil rights organization. The group recommends that LGBTQ parents take extra protections, such as adopting the child their partner gave birth to during the relationship, which Oakley called “a deeply discouraging thing” for many same-sex couples.

“That is a really disheartening thing for folks to have to do. Why shouldn't your relationship with your child be treated the same way as the relationship that other parents have with their child,” she said. “It is humiliating and degrading because that is not something that a different-sex couple would be encouraged to do or experience. There would be no confusion or assumptions.”

LGBTQ parents forced to adopt their biological children

Colorado House Majority Leader Daneya Esgar and her wife, Heather Palm, are one of the same-sex couples at the forefront of the fight for equal parental rights. The couple had a daughter through in vitro fertilization, with the genetic material coming from Palm, and Esgar carrying the baby. Then Palm found out that because she hadn’t given birth to the child, she would have to adopt her daughter through a stepparent adoption process, Esgar said.

“It was completely insane to us,” Esgar said. “I can’t believe this is still something that exists that no one talks about. You would never assume things are still so unequal."

Esgar worked with lawmakers in Colorado this spring to pass Marlo’s Law, named after her daughter, which ensures same-sex couples have a more streamlined process to guarantee their parental rights.

Daneya Esgar

Esgar said she is concerned about the recent wave of anti-LGBTQ curricula adopted in conservative states and worries more gay rights could soon disappear. She wants more allies talking to their school boards, writing letters to elected officials, in the streets protesting anti-LGBTQ measures. At the same time, she said she is buoyed by the many Pride flags she sees in different communities.

Esgar said people who question the integrity of her family are coming from a place of fear. When Marlo turns one year old in July, the family will get together for a small party to celebrate.

“Marlo is one of the most loved children I’ve ever seen,” Esgar said. “People just adore her and how can you not? You walk into a room and the girl lights up.”

LGBTQ parents can lose rights in divorce

In Oklahoma, a case has challenged whether same-sex parents can continue to have claims to a child after a divorce.

Kris Williams and her then-wife had a child using a sperm donor. Both had been active in LGBTQ civil rights movements, protesting a 2018 state law that allowed religious organizations to refuse to help same-sex couples foster or adopt.

When their child was born, Williams cut the umbilical cord in the hospital. The couple named the child after her uncle, said Hanna Roberts, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma, which is representing Williams in the case.

Then Williams’ wife took steps to end the marriage in 2021. She claimed that because Williams didn’t have biological ties to the child and had not adopted the child, she had no rights. Her wife also claimed in court documents that Williams had physically attacked her. At the same time, the sperm donor was demanding rights to the child. Williams’ name was removed from the birth certificate, Roberts said.

Williams’ case made plain how tenuous LGBTQ parental rights might be, said Roberts. For months, Williams has not been able to see her child. But same-sex couples were meant to enjoy all the benefits of marriage as other couples under the Supreme Court ruling, including not having to adopt the child they had with their spouse, said Roberts.

“It is not a question of whether or not these rights were extended to same-sex couples,” Roberts said. “Is it just a question of whether or not states are going to recognize that these rights have been extended.”

A person spreads wings with the words "Black Trans Lives Matter" written on them during the Brooklyn Liberation's Protect Trans Youth event at the Brooklyn Museum on June 13, 2021, in the Brooklyn borough in New York City. Brooklyn Liberation organized a march and rally as an emergency action response to legislation to restrict trans rights across 34 states.

Critics of same-sex parents point to values

Many critics of same-sex parents point to their religious beliefs against same-sex relationships, while others insist a so-called traditional family is simply best.

Lynn Wardle, a retired law professor at Brigham Young University in Utah who has advocated against same-sex marriage, said children raised by same-sex couples “can turn out just wonderfully." Still, he feels strongly that children are more likely to have a better life if they have both a mother and a father. He said children have historically been raised by different-gender parents and when that doesn’t happen, either because of divorce or a parent dies, children can face greater challenges.

“It’s a moral issue, and people feel strongly that children have a right to be raised by a mom and dad, not by two men or two women,” he said.

Religious organizations that don’t want to work with same-sex couples shouldn’t be forced to do so, said the Rev. Paul Sullins, a research faculty member at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and a senior research associate at the Ruth Institute, a Louisiana-based Catholic organization that opposes gay marriage. Those couples should turn to non-religious organizations, he said.

“If a Jewish deli doesn't want to have non-kosher food, it doesn't burden the general public if there are lots of delis with non-kosher food,” he said.

He said it is in the best interest of children to place them in a home that more closely represents their culture, such as placing Black children with Black parents when possible and straight kids with straight parents. He pointed to data that shows gay male couples are more likely to practice open relationships than other couples and that lesbians have higher divorce rates compared with other couples. 

He said he would support some exceptions, such as same-sex couples adopting a child who is related to them.

Parents with love to offer children

For many LGBTQ activists, it is not acceptable for the government to fund agencies that shun same-sex couples.

Youth activist Javier Gomez reacts after President Joe Biden handed him a pen he used to sign an executive order at an event to celebrate Pride Month in the East Room of the White House, Wednesday, June 15, 2022, in Washington.

Marouf first visited Catholic Charities Fort Worth as part of her work as an immigration attorney. During a tour of the facility, staff showed her where refugee children were living and invited her to apply to become a foster mother.

Marouf and Esplin wanted to grow their family and many of the refugee children in Fort Worth came from the Middle East just like Marouf’s family. When the agency initially described the requirements of becoming a foster parent, they never mentioned that same-sex couples would not be considered.

After they were denied, Marouf reached out to federal officials to inquire whether the agency’s refusal to work with them was legal. She imagined they would say something like, Oh, no, they can’t do that, let’s call them. For months, she said, she didn’t get a reply.

Fatma Marouf (left), Bryn Esplin (right), and their daughter at home in Fort Worth, Texas.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Conference of Catholic Bishops, which receives millions of dollars in grant funding from the federal government to help find homes for refugee and migrant children, also did not respond to a request for comment. In 2019, a federal district court denied motions by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Conference of Catholic Bishops to dismiss the lawsuit.

While waiting for their lawsuit to move forward, Marouf, now 45, and Esplin, now 38, used fertility treatments to have a biological daughter, who is now nearly 3. Both of their names are on the girl’s birth certificate.

“Our daughter is the light of our lives and so you can’t even begin to articulate and appreciate that love until you have it, even though we always knew we wanted a family,” said Esplin. “I continue to believe that Fatma and I have so much to offer.”

Sometimes the couple is asked whether they would consider moving to a more progressive state where they might not have to fight so hard to be recognized.

Marouf and Esplin said they want to stay and make it better for other same-sex couples in Texas.

“The message it sends to our kid and to society is that we are not adequate parents,” Marouf said. “And to us, that is a battle worth fighting.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: With Roe decision, LGBTQ parents worry their rights will be hit next