Friends of Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter (D-Orangeburg) gathered at the historic Robert Mills House in downtown Columbia on May 22 to honor the legislator for her commitment to progressive values and her long history of speaking truth to power.
Category Archives: SC News/Commentary
Remembering Sean Kennedy
Family and friends gathered in a downtown Greenville park on May 16 to honor the memory of Sean Kennedy on the first anniversary of his murder. His mother, Elke Kennedy, has campaigned tirelessly in the past year to educate the public and to promote passage of hate crimes legislation in South Carolina. She established Sean’s Last Wish Foundation to further that work.
After an emotional ceremony, the crowd filed down to the Falls Park bridge and dropped daisies into the Reedy River.
Read an earlier blog post about Sean here.
Friends of South Carolina’s public schools:
Today you can sign the petition for a constitutional amendment to insert “high quality education” into our state constitution, replacing the current South Carolina standard of a “minimally adequate education.”
Go to www.GoodbyeMinimallyAdequate.com. Sign the petition and then forward it to your network of friends and supporters of South Carolina’s children. South Carolinians of school age and up are encouraged to sign. NO OUT OF STATE ADDRESSES, PLEASE !!!
We are shooting for 1,000,000 signatures of South Carolinians. Let’s make history. Sign and forward now!
Bud Ferillo
Score one for thinking people
WYFF TV: JONESVILLE, S.C. — Following a day of national attention and public outcry over a sign in front of a small church in a small town, the message has been changed.
The sign in front of the Jonesville Church of God said, “Obama, Osama, hmm, are they brothers?”
On Tuesday, the Church Of God’s International Office issued a statement saying that the sign had been removed.
The message on the sign now reads: “How will you spend eternity, smoking or no smoking?”
Pastor Roger Byrd said that he had just wanted to get people thinking. He said that the message wasn’t meant to be racial or political.
“It’s simply to cause people to realize and to see what possibly could happen if we were to get someone in there that does not believe in Jesus Christ,” he said.
When asked if he believes that Barack Obama is Muslim, Byrd said, “I don’t know. See it asks a question: Are they brothers? In other words, is he Muslim? I don’t know. He says he’s not. I hope he’s not. But I don’t know. And it’s just something to try to stir people’s minds. It was never intended to hurt feelings or to offend anybody.”
Obama has said repeatedly during his campaign that he is a Christian and attends Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
The amount of attention the message received surprised Byrd.
“I’m very surprised,” he said, “It shocked me and startled me.”
Byrd had said that he and his congregation decided on Sunday night to leave the sign up, and that he didn’t want it to appear that controversy forced him to take the sign down.
The WYFF4.com story about the sign was viewed more than a quarter million times by users across the country. Hundreds of negative comments regarding the sign were posted online. On Tuesday, Byrd apparently decided the wording on the sign should be replaced.
He was not available for comment on Tuesday.
Obama-Osama sign outside SC church
Geoff Miller sent this today.
A Pentecostal church in South Carolina has put up a sign asking if Obama and Osama are brothers. Religious nutters embarrass the Carolinas again. The real God must be furious!
Take action!
File a Complaint with the IRS: A referral of an exempt organization may be made by submitting Form 13909, Tax-Exempt Organization Complaint (Referral) Form.
Form 13909 and any supporting documentation may be submitted in a variety of ways. They can be sent via:
* Mail to IRS EO Classification, Mail Code 4910DAL, 1100 Commerce St., Dallas, TX 75242-1198,
* Fax to 214-413-5415, or
* Email to eoclass@irs.gov.
Submission of Form 13909 is voluntary.
Church Number and Address
864-674-6843
621 Forest Street Jonesville, SC 29353
State office for denomination:
864-963-4751 (Extension 102 for the “State Overseer”, Thomas Propes)
adminbishop@sccog.com
National office:
kbell@churchofgod.org
423-472-3361
Network members make news
The SC Progressive Network is always proud of its members, but this week several of them got the media attention they so deserve. Read about what they’re up to, and be inspired by their dedication to work and community.
South Carolina Coalition for Healthy Families helped successfully defeat a bill that would have required women view an ultrasound before obtaining an abortion. A compromise was reached that changed the language to “allow” rather than “require” a woman view an ultrasound image. You can link to the bill here. Read more in The State, the Greenville News, and WIS News 10.
Conchita Cruz, an organizer for Coalition for New South Carolinians, was featured on the cover and lead story in Free Times.
Ed Madden, a longtime Network activist who has served on our executive committee and on the boards of SC GLPM and SC Equality Coalition, was featured in the arts section of Free Times for his debut poetry book, Signals. Join him for his launch party on April 20 at the Hunter Gatherer Pub, 900 Main St., in Columbia and on April 23, 7-9pm, at if Art Gallery, 1223 Lincoln St. Madden describes the book as “meditations on personal and cultural memory, race, and sexuality in the New South.” It includes several poems on the politics of race and sexuality in Southern culture, and at least two poems written at and about SC Progressive Network events.
And the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Columbia’s effort to “go green” was featured in The State.
Great work, comrades!
Sean’s last wish
Elke Kennedy sent this piece around to friends today. After her son’s death, she founded Sean’s Last Wish (a Network member) to work for passage of hate crimes legislation in South Carolina. The editorial was published in Washington Blade.
Gay man’s killer should be the last homophobe to get away with murder.
By Jeff Marootian
SEAN WILLIAM KENNEDY would have turned 21 on April 8, but his life was taken from him last May when he was beaten to death while walking home from a bar in Greenville, S.C.
After an evening of fun with friends, you’re happy as you walk toward the comforts of home. A car speeds up beside you. An unfamiliar man jumps out. He calls you a faggot and punches you in the face knocking you out. As you fall, unconscious, your head cracks on the curb.
Stephen Moller, who issued that blow to Sean’s head, later left this voicemail for a friend of Sean’s: “You tell your faggot friend that when he wakes up he owes me $500 for my broken hand.”
As punishment, Moller will likely serve less than a year in jail for an act of violence motivated by hate and fear. Less than a year for ending the promising life of a mother’s son, brother to loving siblings and a friend to many.
In Sean’s case, the prosecutors claim they cannot prove “malicious intent” — that Moller intended to kill Kennedy.
So, they have formally charged him with involuntary manslaughter. While this carries a maximum sentence of five years, Moller will likely be set free with little to no time actually served.
A JURY SHOULD have the option to decide if this is a hate crime and prosecutors should have the option to ask for such a verdict. Sadly, hate crimes laws do not exist in South Carolina and the federal statute for hate crimes does not include sexual orientation and gender identity. The major force of hate crimes laws lies in the generally included “penalty enhancement” clause that empowers the court to increase the penalty for someone convicted of such a crime. Sean’s killer should spend more than one year in jail.
Having spent five years working as a civilian in a law enforcement agency, I have heard most of the arguments from all sides of the hate crimes issue.
There has been a great deal of meaningful debate about their effectiveness and concern over their justification. Proving that hatred is a motivation can be both costly and untenable, but this cost pales in comparison to the cost of letting offenders slip through a faulty system.
SINCE SEAN KENNEDY’S death, there have been several other high profile incidents that involved killing motivated by hate and fear. No single law will end the cycle of ignorance that leads people to this type of violence.
Our energies must be focused on changing the root causes of this kind of violence, and the criminal justice system must be united and unwavering in handling these types of crimes. Sean is sadly not the last LGBT youth to be killed because of who he was, nor was he the first.
We should work to honor Sean’s last wish that his killer must be among the last to be prosecuted under a sieve-like system that lets Moller slip through.
For more information about the passage of hate crimes laws, visit www.seanslastwish.com.
Mind the pay gap
UAW-CIO Fair Practices and Anti-discrimination Department poster c.1950
By Mary Beth Maxwell
Recent headlines reveal what many of us already know — Americans are witnessing the highest inflation rates seen in over 20 years. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food prices climbed nearly five percent in 2007, and as housing and energy costs skyrocket out of control, working families are getting squeezed. In these difficult times, we should also be reminded that women face even greater financial struggles when weathering this economic storm.
With the observance of Equal Pay Day on April 24, we mark how far into each year a woman must work to earn as much as a man did in the previous year. Recent wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not give cause for celebration. In 2007, women earned only 80 cents for every dollar a man earned. This pay gap was substantially greater for minorities, with African-American women making only 70 cents and Hispanic women making only 62 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. While women are more reluctant to negotiate salaries and are often employed in underpaid professions, one grim reality remains — gender-based discrimination still inherent in our society has largely caused the pay gap that persists today.
Upstate progressive throws hat into ring
Ted Christian has announced he is running against US Rep. Bob Inglis, the congressman who is so low-profile it’s easy to forget he’s even in DC. Christian is one of three candidates vying for the Democratic congressional nomination, along with Paul Corden, a former marketing executive and retired community college teacher from Spartanburg, and Bryan McCanless of Greenville. Inglis faces a primary challenge from Charles Jeter, an environmental engineer and Reagan administration official from Greer.
Here is a clip from Christian’s kick-off press conference on March 31.
Here is a bit about the candidate, taken from his Web site.
Bio:
I grew up in Florida, received a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida in 1983, and then worked in Houston on the space shuttle and space station programs until basically retiring on stock market investments in 1991. I moved to Greenville in 1999, and bought a house off North Main.
Why am I running?
As much as anything, I’d like to raise the bar a bit.
The democratic process in our country has become a money driven circus, with politicians marketed substantially like cereal, in many cases qualified for office by not much more than money and packaging, while the principal fixed goal of either main party has become greater market share and the power it brings.
The consequences of this political retailing are increasingly dire. Our country now as a matter of stated policy wages aggressive war, the greatest of crimes, invading other nations without legitimate cause. The US is increasingly under what amounts to martial law, with American citizens subject to imprisonment without charge and search without warrant. The US now tortures people, sometimes to death, and laws against torture are brushed aside by a President who essentially proclaims himself above the law. A potentially ruinous public debt continues to mount, the current administration having amassed nearly as much debt as all the previous administrations combined. The US military budget is by any rational standard morbidly obese, greater than all the military budgets for the rest of the world combined, fueling a spiraling arms race which threatens to eventually destroy humanity. The US operates a de facto concentration camp in Cuba, to the detriment of our global standing. The US is effectively a client state of Israel, degrading the quality of American political leadership and compromising prospects for peace in the Middle East. Election turnouts are at historic lows, and with the increasing use of unverified computer voting many have lost confidence their votes are even counted. The Constitution has substantially in principle, and in no small measure in fact, passed into history.
These are grave matters, yet it is unlikely most will be discussed in any substantive fashion, if they are broached at all, by most politicians in the coming election. The American political process is plainly dysfunctional, and we need to talk about it.
Gas gouging and green jackets
By Martha Burk
Paid at the pump lately? Who hasn’t, and we’re paying more with each tank. Gas is up a quarter a gallon in the last two weeks alone, but don’t expect big oil to feel your pain. The moguls at ExxonMobil, the fattest of the petroleum cartel cats, will squander several millions of your fuel dollars sponsoring the Masters golf tournament and entertaining their buddies during the April 8 to 12 festivities.
The Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, is famous for its top notch course, beautiful azaleas, members in green jackets — and sex discrimination. A female may be good enough to take the Oval Office, but no woman is good enough make it through the front gates of Augusta National as an equal. Even after a national argument five years ago that played out from network TV to kitchen tables, the boys in green refused to allow women members into their exclusive club. They’re still standing firm.
Augusta National lost its TV sponsors for two years over their refusal to admit women, but ExxonMobil came to the rescue, stepping up to the sex-segregation plate with a new multi-year contract to underwrite the Masters broadcast. Female shareowners are outraged, and have filed stockholder resolutions demanding that the company account for the number of dollars spent at Augusta and other venues that discriminate on the basis of gender. The resolutions state the obvious — the company wouldn’t do it if the subject was race. But apparently the boys in the boardroom (there are only two women out of 13) don’t think sex discrimination is such a big deal. Management sent out a letter last month urging stockholders to vote against this simple demand for disclosure.
But don’t think the company isn’t trying to woo women’s dollars while thumbing its nose at the principles of fairness and equality. In a breathtaking act of corporate hypocrisy, last month ExxonMobil also ran a nationwide full page color ad in the New York Times touting its celebration of International Women’s Day, and its support for women rising in the ranks of business — in Africa. The ad cost only a few hundred thousand — several million less than the Augusta sponsorship. Guess they think female newspaper readers are a cheap date.
Women at ExxonMobil are not buying the stonewalling by company management on the Augusta National issue, and women at other firms involved with the club continue to complain of sex discrimination to national women’s rights groups. Attitudes that begin on the golf course naturally spill over to the office, where women say they are passed over for promotion, paid less, and even sexually harassed at many of the companies these guys head. The National Council of Women’s Organizations has been making sure women at the green-jacketed CEO companies get a little payback. The group helped women employees at Morgan Stanley sue that company two years ago for discriminatory employment practices. They recently got a settlement for $46 million. And importantly, they got a change in company policy that expenses and entertainment at discriminatory clubs will no longer be underwritten with company dollars.
Exxon ought to listen to this canary in the coal mine. Women — no doubt including some of its own employees — are fed up. The company’s record-breaking bottom line has been fattened by their work. That bottom line has also been pumped up by female customers who must drive to get to work, school, church, and the grocery store. So whether you’re a woman behind the wheel or a man who cares about the women in your life, the next time you need a fill-up, consider what you’re really paying for when you choose one brand over another.
While ordinary people struggling to balance their checkbooks, the corporate guests of ExxonMobil are struggling to get another drink at the company-sponsored open bars in Augusta, Georgia. And oh yeah, the corporation gets to deduct every penny. Hold that thought. It just might cause you to drive to the next pump a little further down the block.
Burk is author of “Your Money and Your Life: The High Stakes for Women Voters in ‘08 and Beyond”