Tag: church
Proud Boys

Judge Orders Million-Dollar Fine For Proud Boys In Black Church Attack

A Washington, D.C. judge has ordered a group of Proud Boys members to pay over $1 million for their role in destroying property belonging to a well-known, majority-Black, Washington, D.C., church in 2020, CNN reports.

This comes after, in May, District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Lt. Shane Lamond was indicted on four federal criminal charges, when Justice Department prosecutors alleged "that Lamond shared police information with" Proud Boys member Enrique Tarrio "and tipped him off about the case against him: the one in which he was arrested for his part in burning a Black Lives Matter sign that had been stolen from" the DC-based Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Judge Neal E. Kravitz's decision also comes nearly two months after Tarrio and fellow member, Joseph R. Biggs, were included in the group of five men found guilty of seditious conspiracy by a D.C. jury for their participation in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

Per CNN, according to the order, "The church sought compensatory damages as part of the civil suit, in part to repair the sign and increase security in the wake of the attack and due to 'ongoing threats.'"

After the decision, Arthur Ago, the attorney representing the church, said, "The ultimate goal of this lawsuit was not monetary windfall, but to stop the Proud Boys from being able to act with impunity, without fear of consequences for their actions. And that's exactly what we accomplished."

Kravitz noted in his order, according to the report, "on December 12, 2020, several people in Proud Boys regalia 'leaped over Metropolitan AME's fence, entered the church's property, and went directly to the Black Lives Matter sign," adding, "They then broke the zip ties that held the sign in place, tore down the sign, threw it to the ground, and stomped on it while loudly celebrating. Many others then jumped over the fence onto the church's property and joined in the celebration of the sign's destruction."

Noting this is not the first act of terror the Proud Boys committed, the judge added that they have "incited and committed acts of violence against members of Black and African American communities across the country," emphasizing, "They also have victimized women, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, and other historically marginalized people."

Describing the attack as "highly orchestrated" and "hateful and overtly racist conduct," Kravitz emphasized, "For generations, the leaders of Metropolitan AME and the members of its congregation have vocally and publicly supported movements for civil rights and racial justice," noting, "Church leaders and congregants view supporting the Black Lives Matter movement as a continuation of the church's mission of advocacy for civil rights and racial justice."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump Calls For New Civil Rights Agenda In Visit To Black Church

Trump Calls For New Civil Rights Agenda In Visit To Black Church

DETROIT (Reuters) – Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stepped up his bid to win over minority voters by addressing a largely black church in Detroit on Saturday and calling for a new civil rights agenda to support African-Americans.

As scores of protesters outside chanted “No justice, no peace,” Trump said he wanted to make Detroit – a predominantly African-American city which recently emerged from bankruptcy – the economic envy of the world by bringing back companies from abroad.

Trump separately met with about 100 community and church leaders, his campaign said, in his latest push to peel away minority voters from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

His outreach to minorities over recent weeks comes as he seeks to improve his chances in the Nov. 8 election and shake off months of offending the sensibilities of black and Hispanic voters with his hard line on immigration and rough-hewn rhetoric.

“I fully understand that the African American community is suffering from discrimination and that there are many wrongs that must still be made right,” Trump said at the church which was half-full. “I want to make America prosperous for everyone. I want to make this city the economic envy of the world, and we can do that.”

His address of over 10 minutes at the Great Faith Ministries International church received moments of applause, including when he said Christian faith is not the past, but the present and the future.

Accompanying Trump to the church was Ben Carson, the former Republican presidential hopeful who grew up in the city and whose childhood neighborhood Trump visited on Saturday.

Trump has argued that his emphasis on job creation would help minority communities in a way that Democrats have failed to. But Clinton has accused Trump of aligning himself with racists.

Opinion polls show Trump has low support among minorities.

“I believe we need a civil rights agenda for our time, one that ensures the rights to a great education, so important, and the right to live in a good-paying job and one that you love to go to every morning,” Trump said.

“That can happen. We need to bring our companies back,” he added.

Emma Lockridge, 63, said as she entered the church that she found his comments about Mexicans and Muslims “hateful.”

“That’s my major reservation with Mr. Trump is how he’s treated those particular sets of people,” said Lockridge, who is retired and an environmental activist.

But she said she also had concerns about Clinton’s support in the 1990s for crime legislation signed by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, which many black Americans say contributed to high incarceration rates in their communities.

Vicki Dobbins, an activist protesting outside, said she was disappointed the church asked Trumpto speak.

“I believe that Trump coming to Detroit is a joke, and I’m ashamed of the pastor who invited him,” she said. “In my opinion, he stabbed everyone in the back.”

(Reporting by Emily Stephenson; Additional reporting by Emily Flitter in New York and Tim Branfalt in Detroit; Editing by Leslie Adler and W Simon)

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump attends a church service, in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., September 3, 2016.   REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

After Orlando, a Small-Town Pastor Finds Her Voice

After Orlando, a Small-Town Pastor Finds Her Voice

Last Sunday started to bloom as it usually does for the Rev. Robin LaBolt, layer upon layer of her morning ritual gently unfurling.

Pastor Robin, as her parishioners call her, awakened at 5:30 a.m. and headed for the kitchen of her home in Sycamore, Ohio — population 847, by the most recent census count. She made coffee for herself before strolling into the living room and settling into her favorite chair. She reached into the basket on the floor and pulled out her iPad to check the news.

She doesn’t remember which news organization’s headline she saw first. Doesn’t matter. They all said the same thing: Twenty people were dead and dozens more were wounded after a gunman opened fire in a gay bar in Orlando, Florida.

“Dear God,” she said aloud in the empty room. “Dear God. No.”

Her immediate conclusion: It was a hate crime. “He goes into a gay bar and starts shooting?” she said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “It’s a hate crime.”

Pastor Robin knew the challenge waiting for her at Sycamore United Church of Christ.

“We’re a small town,” she said. “It’s not exactly an LGBT-friendly area. Not that anyone says bad things about them. They’d just rather not talk about it.”

Last fall, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, she approached her church’s governing board. “I need to know if I’m going to be able to officiate these weddings,” she said.

Permission denied.

“They were worried about backlash in the congregation and in the community,” she said. “I was devastated.”

After the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, silence at Sycamore United Church of Christ was no longer an option, she decided.

At 8 a.m., Pastor Robin walked out her front door and across the street to the church where she has served as head pastor for seven years. She sat down at her desk to think about how to alter her sermon. She had planned to talk about community. She still would, she decided.

She didn’t write down what she wanted to say about the massacre in Orlando. She didn’t have to. Her mind was full of thoughts for the people she knew in Sycamore’s LGBT community.

Later that day, she would send a text message to a close friend who is gay: How are you? I have been thinking of you. I love you.

I love you, too, her friend responded.

She sent another text to the mother of a gay child: I imagine you may be afraid … I will continue to work to make this a safe community. The mother forwarded the text to her children.

“Sometimes people don’t want to talk,” Pastor Robin said. “They just want to know that somebody cares.”

At the 10 a.m. service, Pastor Robin talked about the church community, lifting up the good works of the congregation. She celebrated a woman’s fifth anniversary of church membership, too.

Then she turned to the tragedy in Orlando.

When she mentioned the 20 dead victims, she could tell by the look of shock on so many faces that most had not heard the news.

“Something took hold of me,” she said. “It really was one of those Holy Spirit moments when I suddenly knew what to say.”

She told them, “I’m not interested in what your personal feelings are about gay people. But I am interested in what God has to say about all of us. God loves all of us, without exception — period. And that’s what we are called to do, too: Love everyone.”

Immediately, she felt such relief.

“I felt no fear,” she said. “Not being as explicit about this as I’ve wanted to be has taken a toll on me emotionally and spiritually. I was respecting them at the cost of my theological integrity. It felt like a sin of omission. It felt like a betrayal to my friends and my family.”

Pastor Robin and a few members of the congregation are organizing a vigil for the Orlando victims on Friday at 7 p.m. on the Wyandot County Courthouse lawn. She hopes that other pastors in the community will join her. It’s a fitting ending for her, as she is leaving the Sycamore church later this month. Long before the Orlando shootings, she had accepted a new position at a more progressive UCC church.

“I took this church as far as I could,” she said. “There are wonderful people here, but I am an activist. Our LGBT friends need us, their allies, to stay strong for them, to speak out for them. And right now, they need to know that we support them, that we know they are grieving.”

Her new church is in Spring Hill, Florida, only an hour and a half north of Orlando, where 49 innocent people were killed and more than 50 others are injured.

“Yeah, I thought about that,” she said. “I am ready.”

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate.

Photo: People take part in a candlelight memorial service the day after a mass shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, U.S. June 13, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Christmas Joy Without Piety

Christmas Joy Without Piety

WASHINGTON — I once told a favorite pastor of mine that I liked him because he wasn’t too pious.

As soon as the words were out there, I wondered if I should have just kept my mouth shut — I’m not good at that — since he might have found my compliment offensive. After all, many priests aspire to being pious, which can be defined as “devoutly religious” or “prayerful.” This would seem to be part of a cleric’s job description.

But this priest ratified my original intuition by saying thanks. He knew I had in mind the other definition of pious, “making a hypocritical display of virtue.” I am always skeptical of those who present themselves as very holy and righteous. Their lack of humility blinds them to the sins that should matter to us most — our own.

The other thing about my priest friend is that he is a very cheerful man and thus never went in for the deadly seriousness that some pious people use as a battering ram against fun, laughter and joy. If religious faith isn’t about joy, there’s no point to it.

You can make the case that Christmas is the religious holiday best suited for those who are skeptical of piety. If you put aside television ads for BMWs and the like, it’s the most humble holy day and the one closest to where people live. It’s astonishing to have a religious celebration of God as a helpless child. The idea of God being self-effacing enough to enter such a state is revolutionary. And, yes, babies are incapable of piety.

Or consider “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” my favorite Christmas song. It was discovered and perhaps partly written by John Wesley Work Jr., the son of a slave and the earliest African-American collector of spirituals and folk songs who spent much of his professional life at Fisk University. The song embodies a joyous demand, much as a movement makes demands on its loyalists. One lyric tells us: “Down in a lowly manger our humble Christ was born.” Three things about this: The manger is lowly, Jesus is humble, and (in most versions, at least) he’s “our” Christ. Power and affection flow both ways.

Christmas also inspires a certain theological humility, or it ought to. The birth story appears in only two of the four Gospels, and the tellings are different. Luke describes the shepherds, the angels and the manger while Matthew introduces the wise men, who go to a home, not a manger.

That popular devotion merges the two narratives together should not offend us. It’s important to learn from what the theologian Harvey Cox calls “people’s religion” and to examine not only “what is written, preached or taught,” but also “the actual impact of a religious idea on people.” Cox is hard on his fellow liberals who look down condescendingly upon the religious faith of those whose side they usually take in social struggles. “Those who support justice for the poor cannot spit on their devotions,” he wrote acidly in his book “The Seduction of the Spirit.”

In fact, more than any other religious holiday, the widespread celebration of Christmas arose from popular demand. The holiday has been highly controversial within Christianity and celebrating it was once illegal in New England. The Puritans had some decent arguments that the day was a form of idolatry and paganism that could be traced back to ancient Rome and had little scriptural support. The pious Puritans also didn’t much like all the raucous revelry its celebration entailed. It was not until 1870 that President Ulysses Grant declared Christmas a federal holiday.

Might it quell the kerfuffle around the “Christmas wars” if we acknowledged that the original war on Christmas was waged by very devout Christians? Of course not, because the controversy is about politics and television ratings, not religion.

Still, I cannot go with those who simply see Christmas as a winter solstice celebration under another name. There is a radical intuition about God in that manger (even if it’s only in one Gospel). And nearly every Christmas story comes back to liberation and salvation, compassion and the quest for second chances. That’s true of Dickens’ tale about Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s true of It’s a Wonderful Life, and it’s true of the lyrics of “Good King Wenceslas” (“Ye who will now bless the poor/Shall yourselves find blessing”).

And if this sounds a little pious, please forgive me. After all, it’s Christmas.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: Brook Ward via Flickr