“madiba magic” ~ once in a hundred years

17 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by Editor in Apartheid, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, Death and dying, From the Republic of Conscience, Funerals, Human Rights, Loss, Nelson Mandela, Northern Ireland, Politics, saying goodbye, Seamus Heaney, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Cure at Troy, Themes of Childhood, Writing

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#MandelaDay2017, Amnesty International, Barack Obama, Free Nelson Mandela, Mandela, Mandela Lecture, Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, Northern Ireland, Paul Simon, Seamus Heaney, South Africa, United States

Men and women, all over the world, right down the centuries, come and go. Some leave nothing behind, not even their names.

~ Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013)

Nelson-Mandela-Portrait

Not you, Nelson Mandela. One hundred years ago, you came into this world with boldness and made your mark on it – Madiba will ring out forever. Today, former President of the United States, Barack Obama, is in Johannesburg, to commemorate the anniversary of your birth, and he is doing so with an eloquence and a rallying cry that many Americas have missed – a reminder to cleave to your values of democracy and diversity, of equity, of kindness:

I believe in Nelson Mandela’s vision. I believe in a vision shared by Gandhi and King and Abraham Lincoln. I believe in a vision of equality, justice, freedom and multi-racial democracy, built on the premise that all people are created equal.

Madiba, I am drawn back to June of 2013, to when we heard news that you were gravely ill. As reports poured out of Pretoria, South Africa that you were on life support, we held our breath, not wanting to accept that you were frail at 94, ill, and nearing the end of your life. Then – and today – in my mind’s eye, you are still at the beginning of your life as Mandela, the free man, who stepped onto the world’s stage in 1990 after spending 27 years behind bars.

In the darkest days of Apartheid, no one – other than you yourself – could have imagined the man in that tiny cell as the future President of your country, that you would one day stand among rock stars and royalty and popes and presidents to advocate for democracy and justice, to inspire a vision of peace that transcended race and creed, that you would matter to so many people and that he would make so many people matter. People like me. As Obama is reminding us today:

Through his sacrifice and unwavering leadership and perhaps, most of all, through his moral example, Mandela and the movement he led would come to signify something larger. He came to embody the universal aspirations of dispossessed people all around the world.

Mandela mattered to me because he embodied what could be. Like Martin Luther King‘s dream of what America could be and like the peace once envisioned for Northern Ireland by Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, Mandela’s vision of South Africa as a democratic rainbow-nation inspired the first all-race democratic election, moving more than 17 million black South Africans to vote for the first time. Such a sight to behold, even on a tiny television screen in a tiny country on the other side of the world. Before us, a reminder that anything can happen, that Seamus Heaney‘s hope and history can rhyme.

For my 24th birthday not long before I emigrated to the United States, a boyfriend surprised me with a ticket to Paul Simon’s Graceland concert in Dublin. Boisterous and beautiful, the performance sparkles in my memory as one that transcended the ugliness of apartheid. Simon had been and still is widely criticized for performing in South Africa, but how could I fault him for accepting an invitation from black South African musicians to collaborate on some of the most hopeful and uplifting music ever created? This was glorious music that represented the “days of miracle and wonder” that were possible in the heart of Nelson Mandela or, years earlier, in the universal dream of Martin Luther King. In accepting a Grammy award for the album, Simon said of his fellow musicians and friends:

They live under one of the most oppressive regimes on earth today, and still they are able to produce music of great power, nuance and joy, and they have my respect for that.

photo (75) Simon was also one of the first people Mandela invited to South Africa. I imagine a smile spread across Mandela’s face – showing he was no longer a prisoner – not merely because the bars had been removed, but because he had left bitterness and rancor behind. Not everyone could or would. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had deemed Mandela a terrorist, speaking for most of her party. I remember well, when the Iron Lady took office, her strident refusal to enforce sanctions on apartheid while much of the world was doing so. Her policy of “constructive engagement” with the country’s white minority government polarized her such that following her death, there were reports of only a few tears shed in South Africa.

As young university students in 1984, we sang along with The Specials urging those who could to “Free Nelson Mandela.” How could we not? His release was a moral imperative; it was the right thing to do against a racist regime. We were young and full of hope for a better future, and it was through that lens that Thatcher and others in her party appeared resolute in their support of white rule which seemed only to prolong Mandela’s imprisonment in that tiny cell.

On the other side of the argument, there were those, including De Klerk, who felt that “Thatcher correctly believed that more could be achieved through constructive engagement with his government than international sanctions and isolation of the South African government.”

The truth lies somewhere in the middle. It always does.

When Mandela walked out of jail, the world cracked open. While enormous challenges lay ahead and even more bloodshed, apartheid would eventually come to an end. Together, De Klerk and Mandela would rise up to be honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace for their shared vision of a South Africa without apartheid, of a democratic nation. Perhaps this would be the example for other countries beleaguered by bigotry and bitterness, proof positive that it is possible to sustain humanity in a world defined by brutal divisiveness.

Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award inspired by fellow Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney’s “From the Republic of Conscience,” was presented to Mandela in 2006. Perfect then that Heaney would be the first to congratulate Mandela thus:

To have written a line about “hope and history rhyming for Mr. Mandela in 1990 is one thing . . . to have the man who made them rhyme accept the Award inspired by my poem is something else again.

At the beginning of the summer of 2013, I imagine Seamus Heaney was vexed over the thought of a world without Mandela. I think we all were. I remember a Sunday morning conversation with my husband about Mandela’s charisma and fortitude, his inestimable influence – the “Madiba magic” that changed the world. Drinking our coffee, aware of our smallness in the world, we were sad that Mandela’s time was coming to an end. I didn’t want to believe it – the world still needed him, and so I turned to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, the way I still do in the in-between times.

And then, just six months later, Madiba was gone. Seamus Heaney was gone. My husband was gone too. Gone. Like three shooting stars – startling and beautiful and gone forever. For a time, it felt like the world might end. But only for a time. Only for a time.

There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

Thank you Nelson Mandela.

America – a no-go area.

30 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by Editor in Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Governor Jan Brewer, Immigration, Memoir, Politics, Racial Profiing, SB1070, Seamus Heaney, Sectarianism

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amnesty, Apartheid, Arizona, Arizona SB 1070, Belfast, Desmond Tutu, immigration, Jan Brewer, Joe Arpaio, Nobel Peace Prize, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, South Africa, United States, United States Supreme Court

In his first ten days in office, the President of the United States has shown us that the lessons of history do not apply to him. Swiftly and proudly, he has signed a string of Executive Orders, the most recent barring citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering America for at least 90 days. He’s not done yet. The order – signed on International Holocaust Remembrance Day – also calls for a review of more countries to be added to the ban; a suspension of America’s refugee program; a ban of all Syrian refugees; and, a call for new immigration screening procedures. “Extreme vetting,” he barks.

My preoccupation with this is personal, taking me back home, to Northern Ireland in the 1980s, a time when it was not uncommon for me to hand over my driver’s license for inspection by a member of the British Army or an RUC officer at seemingly random road closures and checkpoints.

200px-PVCP_near_Newry

I recall a snowy afternoon at the top of the Ligoniel Road in Belfast. A student teacher, not yet twenty-one and heading home for Christmas, I was moving out of the Halls of Residence at Stranmillis College. My little Datsun weighed down with library books and lecture notes, clothes and toiletries, boxes of vinyl records and cassette tapes, a collection of concert posters wrapped in rubber bands, my prized hi-fi, and a violin, I somehow looked less like a university student and more, perhaps, like an IRA terrorist. Even though I had my license and could answer politely and truthfully, the young soldiers’ questions about where I had been and where I was going – “extreme vetting” – still I had to step aside in the slush and the snow. Cold and annoyed, I watched and waited as they rifled through the contents of my car, looking under the seats and in the trunk, emptying out my make-up bag, disturbing the folders of college papers. All in the name of security I know, but to this day I question the randomness of it. I remember raging inside – seething – that I was being subjected to such treatment in my own country. My. Own. Country. I said nothing. Not a word. Soon, they sent me on my way, but I will never forgot it or the way it made me wonder about what it was about me on that particular day that would cause British soldiers with guns to interrogate me and order me out of my vehicle and search its contents? Did I fit some profile? Did I look like a terrorist? What was the ‘reasonable suspicion?” Who was I?

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1995, poet Seamus Heaney shares a heart-stopping moment from the history of our anguished and wounded Northern Ireland. In this story, lies a powerful lesson about humanity – one that would serve well the President of these United States and anyone who aspires to the ideals of America and to the future we desire for our children and ourselves:

“One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA . . . The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.”

********

We all get it. We understand that illegal immigration is a problem of monumental proportion for these United States, but the executive order out of the White House on January 27, 2017 PROTECTING THE NATION FROM FOREIGN TERRORIST ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES is not the answer. We know better. We are better than this.

I recall a college assignment from years ago, requiring us to draw comparisons between South Africa and Northern Ireland. Trying to confront the political impasse and to overcome the sectarianism that had defined us for too long, I suppose it made sense to learn from South Africa’s shameful past. But I never thought I would be compelled to revisit the topic as an immigrant in America in 2017. Never. The new President of the United States of America has taken me back to times I thought were behind us forever.

Times such as those when an apartheid government condoned the “banning of people.” Between 1948 and 1991, such a government severely restricted the movement of black South Africans and their political activities. The apartheid government’s mantra was simple:

Ban them.
Keep silent their opposition to apartheid.
Harass them at the slightest provocation.

They took it one step further by banning political opponents and using indefinite detention, imprisonment, torture, and political assassination. I could digress here and go back to the enactment of Internment Law in my Northern Ireland, but that is another sad chapter for another day. And finally, in South Africa, banning led to banishment, removing people from their homes and families, stripping them of their citizenship, and deporting them to remote areas of the country, the ill-named “homelands,” often without basic living necessities and always indefinitely.

For me, Donald Trump’s promises are eerily reminiscent of early apartheid laws in South Africa, particularly the “pass laws” that were put in place to segregate the population and to severely restrict the movement of South African blacks. It required all African males over the age of 16 to carry a “reference book” (formerly a ‘passbook’), documentation of personal information and employment history. Following its enactment, many Africans were then compelled to violate the pass laws in order to find work to support their families. This led to harassment, fines, and arrests. More bloodshed. It also led to resistence, because invariably, people will rise up against such abominations. In South Africa, there was the early Defiance Campaign, the massive women’s protest in Pretoria (1956), and then the 1960 massacre of 69 protestors at a ‘pass burning’ at the police station in Sharpeville.

There was Nelson Mandela.

Nelson-Mandela-Portrait Mandela mattered – and he does today more than ever – because he represented what could be. Like Martin Luther King‘s dream of what America could be and like the peace Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan once envisioned for Northern Ireland, Mandela’s vision of South Africa as a democratic rainbow-nation inspired the first all-race democratic election, moving more than 17 million black South Africans to vote for the first time. Such a sight to behold, even on a television screen on the other side of the world – a reminder that anything can happen, that Seamus Heaney‘s hope and history can rhyme.

As young university students in 1984, we sang along with The Specials urging those who could to “Free Nelson Mandela.” How could we not? His release was a moral imperative, the right thing to do against a racist regime. We were young and full of hope for a better future, and through that lens, we saw Margaret Thatcher and others in her party as resolute in their support of white rule which seemed only to prolong Mandela’s imprisonment in that tiny cell. Thatcher had even deemed Mandela a terrorist, speaking for most of her party. I remember well, when the Iron Lady took office, her strident refusal to enforce sanctions on apartheid while much of the world was doing so. Her policy of “constructive engagement” with the country’s white minority government polarized her such that when she died, there were reports of only a few tears shed in South Africa.

But when Mandela walked out of jail, a joyous crack was heard all over the world. While enormous challenges lay ahead with more blood spilled, eventually, apartheid would be taken down. De Klerk and Mandela, together, would rise up to be honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace for their shared vision of a South Africa without apartheid, a democratic nation, an example for other countries beleaguered by bigotry and bitterness, proof positive that it is possible to sustain humanity in a world defined by brutal divisiveness. It is possible to sustain humanity without a ban on immigrants or a Muslim registry.

The President’s Executive Order needs to sit on a shelf along with the pass laws of Apartheid, the Internment Act Law in Northern Ireland, and that book of laws in Nazi Germany prior to World War II that required Jews to carry papers and citizens to prove they weren’t Jewish. It is an assault on the ideals of America and reminds me of something Archbishop Tutu said about Arizona’s anti immigrant law, SB1070. Tutu raised the specter of apartheid, where black Africans could be jailed for being in their own country without their papers, degraded and deemed less worthy because of the color of their skin, and he cautioned us:

Abominations such as Apartheid do not start with an entire population suddenly becoming inhumane. They start here… They start with stripping people of rights and dignity – such as the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Not because it is right, but because you can.

Abominations start here. #Resist

Hope Ripples in Ireland.

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Editor in Gay Rights Movement, Ireland, Marriage Equality Referendum, Memoir, Politics, Seamus Heaney, Senator David Norris

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Bobby Kennedy, David Norris, gay rights Ireland, Heaney "The Cure at Troy", marriage equality referendum, same sex marriage, Vote Yes 2015, Yes Equality

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
― Robert F. Kennedy

Dublin murals Photo source: www.theplaidzebra.com

Mother Ireland is poised to send forth another ripple of hope on May 22, 2015 when the marriage equality referendum hands her an opportunity to become the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular, national vote. A seminal moment for a tiny country of less than 5 million people, an island where homosexuality was still a crime just 22 years ago, where divorce did not become legal until 1997, and where a woman still must travel to another country to have a legal abortion.

In the gay rights movement, the current is building. In the 1970’s the first ripple of hope was sent forth by David Norris, then a Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. Founder of the Irish Gay Rights Movement, the National Gay Federation and the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform, in 1977 he initiated the legal action to decriminalize homosexuality in Ireland, arguing that the laws violated the Irish Constitution’s position on privacy.

In 1980, his case was defeated in the High Court. On appeal, it was defeated by a ruling of three to two, but in 1988, Norris v Ireland was successful at the European Court level, in his challenge of the constitutionality of criminalizing certain homosexual acts. Just five years later, victory. The law was changed – homosexuality in Ireland was no longer a crime with the Former Tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore, asserting rightly that

The sexual activities of consenting adults in the privacy of their home are a matter for the people concerned and should not be the business of the Dáil, the Garda or anybody else, including the peeping Toms of the self-appointed moral police from whom we hear a great deal nowadays

With the appointment of the first openly gay Minister, Health Minister Leo Varadkr, in 2015, it seems the tide has turned, but Gilmore, perhaps recalling the late 1980s, cautions against complacency, reminding the electorate that not everyone who supports marriage equality will necessarily vote, but that those who are “highly motivated to block this referendum from passing” will be sure to vote.

Then there is what Independent Senator Rónán Mullen characterizes as a “silent dissent.”

Mullen “guesses most politicians will vote against it . .. but nobody will ever know.” While he does not name names, saying “that’s not the way you do business,” he would have us all believe that there is significant and strident opposition, that the sky is falling.

No.

The sky is not falling. The walls are coming down . . .

But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

from “The Cure at Troy” Seamus Heaney

do the right thing this time, Governor Brewer.

21 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by Editor in American Dream, Arizona, Belfast, Borders, Bullying, Gay Marriage, Governor Jan Brewer, Human Rights, Immigration, Marriage, Politics, Racial Profiing, SB1062, SB1070, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Troubles

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Arizona, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, Belfast, discrimination, immigration, LGBT community, Northern Ireland, racial profiling, SB1062, SB1070, Senator Steve Yarborough, The Troubles

A version of this article also appears at IrishCentral.com: Arizona Governor Could Show us That Lessons of History do not Apply to her Again.

The last time I hoped Arizona Governor Jan Brewer would do the right thing was in the summer of 2010. I was sitting in my Principal’s office, only half-enjoying a visit from a former student – each of us was tense, awaiting announcement regarding SB1070. Surely our state’s Governor would do the humane and right thing? Surely she would refuse to sign an insidious and un-American piece of legislation that would criminalize undocumented immigrants and would require state and city police officers to check the immigration status of a detained, stopped or arrested individual, if they reasonably suspect he or she could be an undocumented immigrant. Surely a Governor of these United States in 21st Century America would veto any legislation that had the potential to institutionalize racial profiling?

She didn’t. Perhaps she still doesn’t get the difference between the right to do a thing and doing the right thing, because in a heart-stopping instant, Governor Brewer showed us that the lessons of history apparently do not apply to her. Swiftly and proudly, she signed an inhumane bill into law, and the world finally paid attention to an Arizona that, measure by measure, would continue to make the American life unlivable for immigrants.

What I found most harrowing then, with my personal baggage as an immigrant from Northern Ireland living in Arizona, was the prospect of immigrants being required to have their immigration papers on their person at all times. Shades of my home country in the 1980s, during The Troubles, when it was not uncommon for me to hand over my driver’s license for inspection by a member of the British Army or an RUC officer at random road closures and checkpoints.

200px-PVCP_near_Newry I well recall a snowy afternoon at the top of the Ligoniel Road in Belfast. A student teacher, not yet twenty-one and heading home for Christmas, I was moving out of the Halls of Residence at Stranmillis College. My little silver Datsun weighed down with library books and lecture notes, clothes and toiletries, boxes of vinyl records and cassette tapes, a collection of concert posters wrapped in rubber bands, my prized hi-fi, and a violin, I somehow looked less like a university student and more, perhaps, like an IRA terrorist. Even though I had my license and could answer politely and truthfully, the young soldiers’ questions about where I had been and where I was going, still I had to step aside in the slush and the snow, watching and waiting as they rifled through the contents of my car, looking under the seats and in the trunk, emptying out my make-up bag, disturbing the folders of college papers. All in the name of security I know, but to this day, I question the randomness of it.

I remember raging inside – seething – that I was being subjected to such treatment in my own country. My. Own. Country. I said nothing. Of course, I said nothing, and I was soon sent on my way, but I never forgot it or the way it made me wonder about what it was about me on that particular day, that would cause British soldiers with guns to interrogate me and have me step out of my vehicle and search its contents? Did I fit some profile? Did I look like a terrorist? What was the ‘reasonable suspicion?” Why me?

Fast forward to 2014, and we find ourselves waiting again to see if the Governor of a beleaguered Arizona will do the right thing. SB 1062 has passed both chambers of the Arizona legislature, and only Governor Jan Brewer can stop this discriminatory rule from going into effect.

By a 33-27 vote, the Arizona legislature passed this bill that would grant businesses the right to refuse service to anyone, as long as servicing those individuals would be a substantial burden to their religious freedom. You’ll pardon me, I’m sure, for wondering about the homophobes who might be able to make a religious claim that refusing service is, you know, consistent with their religious beliefs.

Under the bill introduced by Republican State Senator Steve Yarborough, individuals and businesses would be granted the legal right to refuse services to individuals or groups if they claimed that doing so would “substantially burden” their freedom of religion. In other words, business owners acting on sincerely held religious beliefs, can refuse services – discriminate against – groups that they perceive act in ways contrary to their religious beliefs. If signed into law, the bill would essentially legitimize discrimination against the LGBT community. Come to think of it, there is the potential for discrimination against other protected groups including non-married women, minorities, gays, people of other religions, or anyone they refuse to serve. You get the picture, and it is a distressing picture, given that we are, after all, in America in the 21^st century. Well, we’re in Arizona, which often seems very far from the noble, inclusive idea of America itself.

I’m a straight woman, a newly single parent, an immigrant, a widow, a cancer patient. Often, I am the one in the room that represents everybody’s worse nightmare – my dead husband and my breast cancer reminding folks of what they fear the most –disease, loneliness, their own mortality. So why do I care so much about SB 1062? Because it is yet another bill with immeasurable potential to hurt good people, to deeply wound families who want nothing more than to get up every day knowing they are valued in their homes and schools, by their churches, and by their elected officials; knowing they are not “less than.” A bill like SB1062 terrifies me because it signifies a hardening of the heart in Arizona, an indelible mark we find in deeply wounded faraway places. Places like my Belfast. Like Sarajevo. Like Johannesburg. Like Gaza.

This evening, I wonder what I can say to my hairdresser? Topher is a gay man, not yet thirty years old, a restless soul who came to Arizona – like me – in pursuit of sunny days. By all accounts, he is doing well. He has been promoted four times in one year, he has a full clientele, and he has even begun contemplating owing his own salon. In Arizona. My daughter adores him. In the weeks following her dad’s death, Topher brought a smile to her face by cutting her bangs and straightening her hair, knowing how important such things can be when you’re sixteen and insecure about your looks.

As more states legalized gay marriage, he and his partner, Ian, changed wedding plans and finally settled on Hawaii, for an intimate ceremony in front of close family. One day, he hopes to raise children with the man he loves, and until today, he envisioned doing so in Arizona. But at what cost?

As he styled my daughter’s hair this evening, I asked him about SB 1062. He told me of his shock, that at the beginning of the year, he had begun to believe that the times really were a-changin’, that we were genuinely celebrating each other’s differences, and slow as it was, change was being embraced.

As a young boy in Indiana, he had been bullied, beat up, and ridiculed in small schools in small towns. At about 10 years old, he knew he was different, he wasn’t sure how. By 13, he knew he was gay and soon the snide comments and the name-calling taught him that who he was, was somehow not okay in our world. In school, the place where he should have been safest, he was scared all the time. His teachers never intervened to halt the bullying. Not once. He was kicked out of his church youth group. Soon, he was in a position of vulnerability, an easy target for an older man who would abuse him.

One night, when he was about 15 years old, two big men came to the basement where he slept and took him away to a behavior modification program. For twenty-two months, he was assigned to a “family” of 25 boys. Constantly under surveillance, his stay there began with nothing. Even his shoelaces were taken away. He had to earn salt and pepper and the right to make a phone call, and occasionally a candy bar; he had to request permission to speak, to go to the bathroom. As a gay boy, he was designated to “the black cloud,” a kind of solitary confinement where essentially, he didn’t exist. He wasn’t taught how to operate in the real world and so even after being released to his family home, he would still call out “Crossing” when he crossed the line from hallway to bathroom.

Four times, Topher attempted suicide. Four times. He failed. Why? He tells me that, of course, he didn’t know what he was doing, but more importantly, while he doesn’t subscribe to institutionalized religion, he believes there’s something to be said about the undaunted human spirit, and that his spirit just wasn’t ready to leave. He forgives the Mormons who coaxed him to “pray the gay away.” He forgives the teachers who turned a blind eye to his tormentors. He says all of it has made him a stronger, better man, one who can champion for other children today, children who deserve a place at the table. Barely a month after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, it pains me to know we are having these discussions in Arizona. It’s wrong. On so many levels.

When I look at this young man, his easy smile tempered by new doubt, I could almost weep for those who don’t know him, who will designate him as less than acceptable, who would put him in a box where he is neither seen nor heard. Discriminated against. Discarded.

Really. I traded Northern Ireland for a place where a young and joyful man – interested only in what we all want for those we love and who love us – might be turned away?

Dear Governor Brewer, you have five days. Do the right thing. Veto SB1062.

Please share this message if you stand opposed to the dangerous “license to discriminate” SB1062, which would allow businesses to deny services to LGBT Arizonans

Please email or contact Governor Brewer to Veto this bad bill NOW at http://azgovernor.gov/contact.asp

We cannot be silent or passively enable the passage of the Arizona Legislature’s so-called “Free Exercise of Religion” (House Bill 2154 & Senate Bill 1062) bill which was passed this past week. The legislation apparently is ready for Governor Janet Brewer’s signature as soon as this coming Monday.

From the Arizona Republic, “We need to veto the dangerous anti-LGBT “license to discriminate” legislation, saying SB1062 is a “do-it-yourself black eye” that would severely harm economic growth and make it harder for businesses to recruit and retain top talent to our state. SB1062 is bad for business and bad for Arizonans.

Many groups and organizations such as the Greater Phoenix Black Chamber of Commerce also is urging Gov. Brewer to veto anti-gay legislation.

Join the Anti-Defamation League, the Human Rights Campaign and the Greater Phoenix Economic Council to immediately contact Governor Brewer’s office asking her to veto HB 2154 and SB 1062. E-mail the Governor’s top staff: Scott Smith at ssmith@az.gov and Lorna Romero at lromero@az.gov to veto HB 2154 and SB 1062.

SB 1062 is bad for business and bad for Arizona. Please take action