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Daily Dose: Recession injustice?
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The medium may be different, but this week’s news looked more like 1969 than 2009.
First a Philadelphia swim club canceled the swimming privileges of a group of day campers, allegedly because the majority of the children were minority. The swim club responded to the allegations saying that the club was overcapacity. That was not the experience of the children of Creative Steps, the day camp who paid to use the club weekly throughout the summer. In fact, according to reports, the mostly white club members got out of the pool and stood with arms folded while the Creative Steps children played.
Yesterday, the pool was closed and protesters stood at the gate with signs saying, “Jim Crow swims here.”
In another story, the American Civil Liberties Union is demanding that a Virginia jail stop removing biblical passages and other religious material from letters written to inmates. Anna Williams, whose son was detained at the jail, brought the matter to the attention of the ACLU alleging that jail officials cut out sections of letters she sent to her son that contained Bible verses or religious material. The ACLU, its state chapter and several other organizations, sent their own letter on Thursday to jail officials asking that the issue be resolved without litigation. The officials responded publicly that they had yet seen the letter.
Religious freedom is written into the Constitution. Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It’s 2009.
Has the deep recession affected the sensibility of our country? Is our sense of justice receding along with our 401K savings? In the words of Malcolm X:
You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
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