06/13/24
Good morning! It’s Thursday, June 13th.
National Sewing Machine Day!
No comment.
And now, the news.
Digital Passport Renewal
-via ABC News
Let’s start with some fairly innocuous news because, spoiler alert – it’s all downhill from here! (But please stick around!)
On Wednesday the State Department announced that they have launched a beta program that will allow a small number of online passport renewals every day.
Eligible applicants must be 25 or older, living in the United States or one of its territories, and have a passport that is, or was, valid for a 10-year stretch, issued between 2009 and 2015, and you can’t need any changes to your passport (such as name, gender, or date or place of birth).
You also shouldn’t have any international travel planned for the next eight weeks, because once your application is submitted, your old passport will be canceled.
I’m into this. It’s 2024, we literally have more technology in our phones than what sent early shuttles to space. If I can order a house on the internet (I haven’t! I’m just saying… I could), certainly we can renew a passport on a secure site.
House Votes to Hold Merrick in Contempt
-via CBS News
For these next three stories, the order I’ll be going in is… what made me angriest? Least to most.
This story is what made me the least angry and yet, as you may hear in the dulcet notes of this scratchy voice, I am already angry. So just imagine what the final story is going to be…
Okay, first up… on a 216-207 vote along party lines, minus one Republican who sided with Democrats, the House voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress after defying subpoenas to hang over the audio from the President’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
In a statement, Garland said: "It is deeply disappointing that this House of Representatives has turned a serious congressional authority into a partisan weapon."
To which Speaker Johnson said, wait. What else are we meant to be doing here?
Johnson will now have to hand the case over for criminal prosecution, which is unlikely to happen because, as the Department of Justice wrote last month, "No U.S. Attorney has pursued criminal contempt charges against an Executive Branch official asserting the President's claim of executive privilege."
So we’ll see what happens but I really just can’t understand how anyone can look at these House Republicans and think they deserve a second term. What have they done that doesn’t include trying, and failing, to find a crime that the President has done simply because they are backing a literal felon.
They tried to impeach Biden, but couldn’t find any crimes. Put his son under a prosecutorial microscope, and it failed to yield the results they wanted. So now they’re doing anything they can to get their hands on some audio that I’m sure they’ll be super normal and not at all weird about once they have it…
Absolute insanity.
Southern Baptists Say No to IVF, Maybe to Women
In the year of the Barbie blu-ray, the Southern Convention ended its two-day meeting by rejecting, but only just barely, a measure that would have enshrined into their constitution a ban on churches with women pastors.
Yeah.
You heard that correctly.
However, though it only just barely didn’t make it into their constitution, there is still an official doctrinal statement saying the office of pastor is a boys-only club. Which means they can oust churches where women serve as pastors.
I’m sorry, I misspoke.
I meant to say, this means they can continue to oust churches where women serve as pastors.
As they have done in the recent past. And by recent I mean… Tuesday. They gave churches the boot on Tuesday because women were pastors.
Want to be more upset? One pastor there said this isn’t about “preventing women from exercising their gifts,” because they can still be children’s ministers.
Just can’t be ministers for adults.
That same pastor (who is a pastor at the Immanuel Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky in case you’re looking for a church to skip) said there is a lot of “confusion about gender” in the wider culture because of what he called “the ravages of the LGBTQIA agenda.”
First of all… it’s actually LGBTQIA+
Second of all… shh shh shh… no more microphone for you.
The convention also voted on Wednesday to oppose the use of IVF. It’s not a ban, but it is a public opposition.
Because of, from what I’m gathering, the use of embryos in the process? People without a firm grasp of science should not be able to vote on things like this.
And listen, on the one hand, who cares what comes out of these conventions? They’re not setting law outside of the churches under their wing.
But first of all – there are people within that church who desperately want to have a kid, and now the church, where they find community and love and guidance, just told them that the only way they could ever have a child is wrong. Imagine how incredibly painful that must feel.
Also, no they’re not setting law here, but these groups do donate to like-minded politicians who go to Washington and vote with this group in mind.
If you’re so against IVF, and don’t need it, don’t use it! But you don’t get to go to a convention vote on the way strangers get to create a family.
Oklahoma Supreme Court dismisses Tulsa Race Massacre Suit
-via AP News and Tulsa History
And here is the story that really, truly, made me see red.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court has dismissed a suit by the survivors if the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, meaning it is unlikely the city will ever make financial amends for the horror, the absolute horror, that occurred when a violent white mob set the town on fire while looting and killing. When the National Guard was finally called in, all Black Tulsans were imprisoned. Meaning more than 6,000 people were held at a convention hall for up to eight days.
The attack lasted twenty-four hours, literally decimating 35 city blocks, including 1,256 homes and almost every single church, school, business, as well as a hospital and library. More than 800 people were injured and possibly as many as 300 dead.
Not one single person has ever, in the 103 years since this occurred, been prosecuted by the government at any level. Municipal on up to federal.
Those 6,000 imprisoned Tulsans? It was official policy to release a black detainee only upon the application of a white person, and only if that white person agreed to accept responsibility for the detainee’s subsequent behavior.
Tulsa was known as Black Wall Street because of the concentration of wealth and success in those 40 blocks.
But that one word, Black, made them a threat in the eyes of their white neighbors. Simply because they were successful while also being Black.
Hundreds dead. Hundreds more injured. And not even one single prosecution.
And now, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiff’s grievances about the destruction did not fall within the scope of the state’s public nuisance statute.
In their decision, the court wrote: “Plaintiffs do not point to any physical injury to property in Greenwood rendering it uninhabitable that could be resolved by way of injunction or other civil remedy. Today we hold that relief is not possible under any set of facts that could be established consistent with plaintiff’s allegations.”
There are only two survivors of the massacre that are still alive.
No one was charged. The city and insurance companies never compensated victims for their losses. Wealth, and the ability to generate generational wealth, was stolen in the 24 hours of May 31st and June 1st 1921.
There is no way to truly, genuinely, move forward unless we pay for the past. 103 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, there are a lot of things we just can’t do. We can’t rebuild the buildings in the early dawn on June 2nd. We can’t put books back into a library, or a roof over someone’s head.
Things were lost in 24 hours that can never be found. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing that can be done.
There are a lot of things we can, and should, do. Starting with one of my very favorite phrases for moments like this:
F you. Pay them.
And that’s it. That’s the news.
I actually have so much more to say about all that but it all circles around the same concept… pay the survivors.
I’m proud of Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher who, at over 100 years old, should not have to be forced to continue to fight for some basic compensation for the horror they somehow survived.
I’m also proud of sewing machines. No segue makes that not weird! Sewing machines, plus my mom’s hard work, have kept me in quilts my whole life so no complaints here!
But more than sewing machines… because you also have a great way of keeping things together… I’m proud of you.