The Spring Break Border Walk from Roma to Brownsville has been wonderfully chronicled by Matthew Webster’s Walk Diary at Smart Borders
“It was hotter than a human heart, the organ this entire walk has targeted. Believing that people are innately good, we feel that they simply must not know the wonderful people and beautiful places which a wall would destroy and immigration legislation could enhance.”
Emial from John Wheat Gibson:
“Today the US attorney filed a motion to abate or dismiss the suit in Abilene to drug Rrustem Neza. He said he filed it because of Congressman Louie Gohmert’s private bill.”
Note: for more information on the case of Rrustem Neza and the efforts of Rep. Gohmert, please see the Texas Civil Rights Review Index of Documents, “Saving Rrustem Neza.”
A Texas Civil Rights Review Editorial
Terms like ignorance, indignation, hatred, divisiveness, and racism surely apply to the typhoon that swirls around the sound bites of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. You can tell by how nobody pays any attention to Rev. Wright’s insistence that he be judged by theological standards.
For his own part, the right Reverend couldn’t have been more clear about it. When he was invited onto Fox News March 1, he begged for a conversation that would be literate in the works of black liberation theology. But this is the conversation that was denied to him. Instead, the Fox News interrogator smirked about Wright’s “black church” and asked a hateful question about why there can be no “white churches”.
Perhaps Fox News should break the ice and name itself White News, if that would satisfy their juvenile sense of fair and balanced branding.
Rev. Wright is a preacher, a pastor, and a theologian of accomplishment and distinction who has now been relegated to a whipping boy of ugly white backlash. It is quite hateful and divisive what has been done to the man, and a bolder crop of presidential candidates might be calling on so many grown men to apologize for their disrespectful treatment of the Reverend.
Returning to the juvenile question of why there is such a thing as Black Entertainment Television, but not White Entertainment Television as such, or a proud black church but not a proud white church as such, one only has to know the basic facts of American history. Pretending that one does not know these basic facts while at the same time drawing a salary as a professional journalist is stark evidence of racist malice aforethought.
In ten days, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is scheduled to be honored in Texas; therefore, Texas has the opportunity to honor him properly as a distinguished theologian and pastor.
Here’s all the Governor has to say as he hands Rev. Wright the first James Farmer, Sr. award for unflinching courage to speak truth to power:
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I am not a theologian, I am a Governor. You and I have chosen lines of work which have long traditions of close relations. There has hardly been a time when your profession and mine have not rubbed close together. Thank goodness the ancient Hebrew people had the strength of character to treasure the words of their prophets, even when the words must have been scathing to hear. We are here to say that today, we commit to the courage it takes to hear a prophet, and to the justice required to honor the prophet’s voice as an indispensable public good. This is a free state in a free country, and we have the audacity to hope that you to will enjoy your stay.
Note: we have found one item on the internet that pays Rev. Wright the respect that he requested from Fox News: to be treated as a man of the cloth. Please see “Race and Religion in Context” by Daniel Pulliam at getreligion.org.
Oops! Posse gets wrong man. See Fox News’ effort to curb ‘excesses’ of the great media riot of ’08.
(March 20, 2008) The attorney for Albanian refugee Rrustem Neza reports that US immigration authorities have resumed questioning his client directly, in violation of procedures that require them to notify legal counsel.
On the same day that attorney John Wheat Gibson expressed his concern in writing, he received an order from the federal district court of Abilene closing the case that sought to dope and deport Mr. Neza.
“I would appreciate it if you would explain to your client that it is unethical to communicate directly with an adverse party who is represented by counsel without obtaining the consent of counsel,” wrote Gibson to Assistant US Attorney E. Scott Frost of Lubbock. “In this case, your client did not even notify me of his intent to communicate directly with my client.”
Gibson explained that immigration authorities have asked Mr. Neza, to fill out a questionnaire with information that they already have.
After sending the letter, Gibson received a copy of the federal court order, dated March 20, closing the case that had attempted to get court permission to dope Mr. Neza for the purpose of deporting him in a submissive posture. Efforts to place Mr. Neza on a commercial airplane in 2007 were turned back because of his loud protests.
Mr. Neza has been seeking asylum since two of his cousins were killed in the aftermath of the assassination of Albanian Democrat Azem Hajdari. Mr. Neza fears that the same faction that killed his cousins and Hajdari will kill him, too.
Mr. Neza’s efforts to remain in the USA took a turn for the better when he was recently released from a year’s imprisonment at Haskell following a US House of Representatives Subcommittee Hearing that ordered a report on his case.
“It is clear that your client’s attempt to communicate [with] my client is nothing but a charade, so that the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement can tell the Congress that it conducted an ‘investigation,’ when, in reality, it has no intention of investigating anything, but only intends to rubber stamp the refusal of other bureaucrats to allow Mr. Neza to present his case for asylum to an immigration judge,” wrote Gibson in his letter to the US Attorney’s office of Lubbock.
The House Subcommittee on Immigration ordered the report in connection with a special bill filed in Mr. Neza’s behalf by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Nacogdoches).
For more information on Mr. Neza’s case and Rep. Gohmert’s efforts to help him, please see the Texas Civil Rights Review index of documents, “Saving Rrustem Neza.”–gm
Toleration and the American Pulpit
By Greg Moses
What happened to Rev. Wright’s religious freedom? Sen. Barack Obama’s ‘race speech’ continued to presume that Rev. Jeremiah Wright deserves no special consideration on grounds of religious freedom. On Easter Sunday, perhaps, Americans will want to consider whether the pulpit at church deserves any special respect.
A cable newscaster on Good Friday asked in a tone of voice that expressed her wide-eyed naivety: “What is liberation theology?” Having covered the news for many years, and having covered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright thunderstorm for two weeks, it was still a question that she had not bothered to research. And frankly, I don’t want to experience that learning curve as part of my continuing coverage of the Presidential campaign.
I doubt that the summer of ’08 will be the time to provide a sufficient, good-faith answer to the question of liberation theology or how the black social gospel is spiritual grandfather to these momentous American movements. Such an attempt at national education played out upon our contemporary media landscape would likely morph into witch-hunt.
Sen. Barack Obama appears to agree with this assessment. The Senator’s public review of Rev. Wright’s oratory during Tuesday’s ‘race speech’ did not mention either keyword, neither liberation nor theology. And yet, Rev. Wright has asked that these be the key words applied to any serious assessment of his work.
Because it would likely be a poisonous time and place for the adult discussion that liberation theology requires, I think Obama’s judgment call is valid as he tries to move public discussion around the issue of liberation theology rather than through it.
However, I think there is a stronger argument than Obama’s for going around Rev. Wright’s oratory as a campaign issue. The stronger argument is that the American unity that Obama claims to want will require some faith in the principle of religious toleration.
Since it is liberation theology that is required to understand Rev. Wright, and since theological agreement is precisely the kind of thing that should not be required in the context of public policy debates, then it is time to agree that when Rev. Wright speaks from a pulpit in a church, it is better that a tolerant society back off of his comments as a Presidential issue.
There is some sophistication in the careful wording of Sen. Obama’s speech, which hints that he knows the difference between theology and policy discourse, even as he confines Rev. Wright’s oratory upon a two-dimensional plane of public policy. The clues are in the repeated uses of the phrase ‘as if’: “he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country . . . is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”
Sen. Obama has three times denied the truth of his own pastor with the phrase ‘as if.’ But is not the theological function of prophetic speech to talk precisely ‘as if’? Public policy may spend long hours concerning the need to ‘store up’ resources for long-term planning. But does that dismiss the value of the prophet who walks up and says: “You fools, not tomorrow, but today, your souls are required of you!” As if there is no time.
Although it is unlikely that the cable news cyclists would respect calls for religious toleration in behalf of Rev. Wright, I think that toleration is the better argument for moving on.
The argument from toleration has the benefit of refusing to flatten theological oratory onto the plane of policy-speak. And if we achieve this act of toleration for Rev. Wright, then we will strengthen the three-dimensional life of spiritual language for all theologies (or anti-theologies), and maintain a more healthy distance between church and state as a precious resource for everyone’s freedom of worship in a robust democracy.
Not only do the continued houndings of Rev. Wright exemplify racialized ignorance, as Sen. Obama argues, but they also tighten the bands of religious intolerance that have too broadly constricted our national character for at least the past seven years. On this issue, perhaps, another great speech needs to be written that would restore Rev. Wright to the dignity that any theologian deserves when his name is dragged through the galleries of public-policy clamor.
NOTE: Article revised for OpEdNews (Easter Sunday, 2008)
Texas Civil Rights Review 