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civil rights
Minnesota Proves Trans Inclusion Works; the Government Needs You to Believe It Doesn't
When we allow our government to dismantle the fundamental rights of transgender people, we validate a legal precedent that threatens the liberties of every single citizen tomorrow.
Sep 25, 2026
In 1993, Minnesota became the first state in the country to protect people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in its Human Rights Act, with explicit trans-inclusive language built into the law from the start. In 2014, the Minnesota State High School League clarified that student athletes can participate on teams that align with their gender identity. And just last year, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Cooper v. USA Powerlifting that it’s illegal discrimination for sports organizations to ban trans women from participating.
Throughout these 30-plus years of trans inclusion, girls' and women's sports in Minnesota have thrived—the state ranks No. 1 in the nation on Action Network's Girls' Sports Opportunity Index, which measures participation, access, and gender parity across all 50 states. Minnesota is also home to the winningest coach in Women's National Basketball Association history.
As a cisgender woman, I believe it's past time for more women like me to stand in loud, public solidarity with trans people, rather than let this manufactured fight be waged in our name. The people most invested in “protecting” women's sports have rarely shown up for women's sports at all. And as the executive director of Gender Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in the Upper Midwest, I’d love to know where all the urgency around fairness in women’s sports has been.
This is a familiar political playbook: Choose a wedge issue that polls well, use it to normalize the once-radical idea that civil rights law is negotiable, then expand from there.
I've spent years talking with women athletes across Minnesota. They talk about the sexual harassment. The state of their locker rooms. Subpar training facilities. Uneven access to fields and courts. Unequal pay and unequal media coverage. They talk about the coaches and administrators who still don't take their teams seriously. What they don’t talk about is the urgent need for the government to ban trans women from participating in sports.
So why does the noise persist? Republicans and their allies spent nearly $215 million on network television ads vilifying transgender people during the last presidential election cycle alone—more money than has ever been spent championing the women and girls they claim to want to protect.
Because sports was never the destination—they were the entry point. This is a familiar political playbook: Choose a wedge issue that polls well, use it to normalize the once-radical idea that civil rights law is negotiable, then expand from there. Across the country, courts are being asked whether Title IX protections extend to transgender students. The very law, passed in 1972, that guarantees equal access to education and athletics, protection from harassment, and freedom from discrimination based on sex, is being weaponized as a tool for exclusion. Executive orders now redefining "sex" across federal law and agencies don't stop at locker rooms either; they reach into schools, healthcare, and workplaces—into the fabric of American life. Title IX has never required schools to exclude trans students. It has long protected them.
What we are witnessing is not about fairness in athletics. It's political theater, and transgender youth are the ones paying the price—subjected to fear, harassment, and public scrutiny that lawmakers should be ashamed to have invited. What's happening now isn't a return to what the law always meant—it's a rewrite, carving an exception into a civil rights statute so that protections can be revoked for whichever group is politically convenient to sacrifice.
Attacks on trans rights, attacks on abortion rights, and persistent pay inequity are not separate fights; they are one fight against gender inequality, taking on different forms depending on the news cycle. Minnesota already answered the question of whether trans girls and women should have the right to play, with 30 years of evidence and a unanimous state supreme court ruling showcasing that trans inclusion works. The question still on the table is much more dangerous: Do we accept a government empowered to decide who gets rights, and who doesn't? When we allow our government to dismantle the fundamental rights of transgender people, we validate a legal precedent that threatens the liberties of every single citizen tomorrow.
If trans inclusion were the threat opponents claim, then three decades of it in Minnesota would have proven it. Instead, it's proven the opposite.
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Bush's Post-9/11 Policies Are Doing Further Damage in Trump's Hands
Because they were never decisively laid to rest by subsequent administrations, they formed the foundation for the excesses of the Trump administration’s foreign and domestic policies that we face today.
Sep 15, 2026
In response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration rushed to implement domestic and foreign policies that had dramatic consequences for the US and the world.
They pushed through far-reaching legislation which, when combined with Executive Orders and “national security” memoranda, effectively gutted one-half of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and erased 50 years of work advancing civil rights and liberties here in the US. In addition, the steps they took to justify the invasions, occupations, and nation-building gambits in Afghanistan and Iraq contributed to degrading the roles of the United Nations and NATO and contributed to dismantling the architectures of diplomacy, rights, and law that had been created by the international community in the aftermath of World War II.
The assault on rights and freedoms had been brewing before 9/11. Beginning in the Reagan era and continuing through the Clinton administration, there’d been “secret” plans to round up, detain, or deport “aliens” without due process. Because of domestic opposition, earlier administrations had been hesitant to publicly implement them. But with the nation reeling in shock in the aftermath of the terror attacks, it became possible for the Bush administration to openly give law enforcement agencies a grab bag of repressive tools they had been seeking. They did so knowing that domestic or partisan opposition would be muted because 9/11 had taken such a traumatic toll. In the end, the Bush-endorsed legislation was easily passed in Congress, with only one senator voting against the bill. And there was only modest opposition to the administration’s measures to use racial and ethnic profiling, deny due process to immigrants, conduct warrantless searches and surveillance, make use of entrapment techniques against vulnerable individuals, and implement a range of costly and invasive measures at airports—all of which have been shown to be wholly ineffective in protecting national security.
If the shock of the attacks had made the public more willing to accept new laws and programs that sacrificed the rights of others, they also created a sense of dread about what might happen next. America had invaded, bombed, and fought wars in other countries around the world, but not since Pearl Harbor, more than a six decades earlier, had the American homeland been attacked. This resulted in feelings of vulnerability. People wanted to know: “Who are these people who committed these crimes?” “Why did they do this to us?” and “What should we do now to respond?”
As a result of the US unilaterally steamrolling its way into the war, insulting allies who refused to join them, and faring so poorly in its execution of both conflicts, respect for the US plummeted worldwide.
It was a short time after the attacks that I accepted an invitation from the Council on Foreign Relations to participate in a post-9/11 study group to discuss these troubling questions and offer recommendations to policymakers, specifically regarding what America’s message to the world should be in this moment. The group they assembled was mixed and bipartisan, including former lawmakers and diplomats, military and government officials, and Middle East “experts.” In the months that followed, we met several times, seated around a conference table in center city Washington DC.
While many of us had questions and concerns, it was striking that a core group of participants came with an obvious agenda. The dust hadn’t yet settled, nor had the embers cooled at the site of the burning towers, but a cohort of the “study group” already had answers. America, they argued, had been attacked because it was perceived as complacent and weak. The terrorists saw that weakness and took advantage of it. The solution, they posited, was for America to demonstrate strength by dealing with a devastating blow so that our enemies would know better than to strike at us again. They had already settled on their preferred target: Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a ruthless leader who’d committed crimes against his own people and his neighbors—and so he was deemed a worthy and non-controversial foe.
Interestingly, at this very early point, the “pro-war hawks” had not yet fabricated their later justifications for the war they so desperately sought. There was no case being made that Saddam sponsored al Qaeda, or that he had weapons of mass destruction. This was to come later. In the beginning, the only justification they advanced was that America needed a dramatic display of strength to put fear into the hearts of those who might be inclined to attack again.
The group who advanced these views in the study group was part of a much larger ideological movement of “neoconservatives” who were growing in influence in Republican circles. They were ideologues whose belief system had more in common with Christian fundamentalism than with traditional Republican thinking. They saw a worldwide cosmic struggle between good and evil. America, of course, was the force for good. The evil had been the Soviet Union but had now been replaced with Arab or Islamic extremism. It was imperative that the forces for good be relentless in its never-ending struggle against evil—to root it out and crush it. No compromise was possible.
While then-President George W. Bush did not initially share their world view, the shock of 9/11 catapulted the neoconservatives into a dominant force shaping his administration’s policies. In the months and years that followed, the Bush administration made decisions reflecting their influence. The repressive legislation and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim programs were part of this, as were the wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The costs and consequences of these two ill-conceived wars have been immense in lost lives, treasure, and respect. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who perished, 7,000 US military personnel died. While the Bush Pentagon tried to sell the war to Congress by saying it would cost just a few billion dollars, it is now estimated to have cost between $6 and 7 trillion. And as a result of the US unilaterally steamrolling its way into the war, insulting allies who refused to join them, and faring so poorly in its execution of both conflicts, respect for the US plummeted worldwide.
These post-9/11 policies inflicted tremendous damage during the Bush years, but their consequences are still with us. Because they were never decisively laid to rest by subsequent administrations, they formed the foundation for the excesses of the Trump administration’s foreign and domestic policies that we face today.
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Human Rights Watch Details How Trump Has Gutted Federal Civil Rights Enforcement
"While claiming to protect all Americans, the administration is rolling back systems that communities have long turned to for relief.”
Aug 13, 2026
Eighteen months into President Donald Trump's second term in the White House, the administration has systematically gutted the infrastructure within the federal government that for decades had worked to ensure that civil rights and anti-discrimination laws were being enforced—and has turned agencies "against the communities they were meant to protect," as one researcher at Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
In a new report, the organization detailed how four key agencies have been substantially weakened since Trump took office and almost immediately, with the help of tech billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, set about slashing the federal workforce and demanding that the civil servants who remained be "fully on board" with the president's right-wing agenda.
The report, titled "Remedies Abandoned: US Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Trump Administration," explains how the US Department of Justice's (DOJ) Civil Rights Division lost about 75% of its attorneys after the White House told staff that they were not to operate independently from the president; the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education closed more than half of its regional offices and laid off nearly half its staff in one day; the Fair Housing Office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shrank from 31 staffers to 11; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reached its lowest staffing level in over four decades.
With the federal civil rights enforcement workforce decimated, the White House has abandoned discrimination complaints at the four agencies and has carried out demands outlined in Project 2025, the right-wing policy blueprint put forward by the Heritage Foundation. In addition to pushing for the administration to reclassify civil servants like those who were pushed out of their civil rights enforcement roles, the document called for presidential control of the Justice Department and an end to "disparate impact enforcement."
In April 2025, three months after taking office, Trump signed an executive order directing all federal agencies to eliminate their analysis of disparate impact—the framework that confronts discriminatory policies based on their impacts rather than their intent—to the "maximum degree possible."
Disparate impact analysis, said HRW, "allows people to challenge hiring criteria, lending practices, school discipline policies, and housing regulations that produce discriminatory outcomes even when no one can identify a smoking gun like a policy that explicitly says 'exclude Black applicants.'"
The executive order and related directives that followed had a sweeping impact, with HUD dropping seven major housing discrimination and environmental justice cases months later, after they had been ongoing for years.
For example, the agency informed Chicago officials it would no longer monitor the civil rights agreement that had required zoning reform to end concentrated industrial pollution in Black and Latino neighborhoods.
"Department leadership said it would no longer treat environmental harms as fair housing violations in situations without explicit indication of intentional discrimination, in line with President Trump’s April 2025 order seeking to end disparate impact enforcement," reads the HRW report.
HUD has closed at least 115 fair housing complaints without issuing findings on the claims of discrimination, and career attorneys at the agency filed a whistleblower complaint last September showing they'd been barred from contacting complainants and working with the DOJ to resolve the matters.
"One of the ways we know that our democracy is functioning and healthy is that your rights don't just disappear because the political winds shift," said Trey Walk, a US program researcher at HRW.
NEW: The Trump administration has gutted federal civil rights enforcement in the United States, leaving the people the laws were built to protect without adequate remedies.
In a new report, HRW documents the administration’s efforts to unravel the work of four key agencies… pic.twitter.com/4VADDpmFDR
— Human Rights Watch (@hrw) August 13, 2026
The Education Department's OCR also appears to have resolved no racial harassment cases in 2025, despite the fact that in 2024, such complaints reached a new record among Black and Latino students.
The case of a 12-year-old boy in Lubbock, Texas, who had been interrogated by school officials without his parents present and falsely accused of a sexual offense, had been close to being resolved when the OCR office for the region abruptly closed in March 2025. When an attorney for families in Lubbock who had had open cases emailed the federal investigator who had been working on the complaints, they received an autoreply, saying the employee no longer had access to any of the case files.
"Numbers illustrate the scale of abandonment," reads the report. "With 11,985 education-related civil rights cases pending when the administration took office, OCR reached just 112 resolution agreements across all of 2025—1% of the caseload, and 78% fewer than the year before on the same budget. OCR reported no resolution agreements for sexual harassment, none for sexual violence, none for racial harassment, none for discriminatory school discipline, and none for seclusion and restraint of students with disabilities. The 2025 case resolution number is low, even compared to previous years when the agency was not adequately staffed or funded."
Walk said that the Trump administration "is targeting efforts to address discrimination without offering any alternatives. While claiming to protect all Americans, the administration is rolling back systems that communities have long turned to for relief.”
More than half of OCR's nationwide staff were among the 1,300 Education staffers whose jobs were cut in a single day in March 2025. Vince L., a career attorney at OCR who was one of 40 people interviewed by HRW for the report, said that in the administration's first weeks, he and his colleagues had received a directive essentially saying: "Stop all work. Decimate staffing. Divert resources to political witch hunts."
"Seven of 12 regional offices shut with no notice," he said. "Some people didn’t even know until their computers didn’t work. You’d come in the next morning and your badge wouldn’t work. That’s how you’d find out you were being terminated.”
Similar scenes played out at the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, where an attorney identified as Gloria A. described how the department's independence from the White House "flew out the window" early in Trump's term when lawyers were directed to carry out the president's political agenda.
“We viewed ourselves as attorneys for the United States,” another civil rights lawyer who was reassigned to complete administrative work, told HRW. “Which is different.”
A significant sign of the gutting of civil rights enforcement at the DOJ came when the agency moved to dismiss multiple consent decrees to reform police departments.
A two-year DOJ probe had found a pattern of racially discriminatory force by the Louisville Metro Police Department, where officers fatally shot Breonna Taylor in 2020, but the DOJ moved to dismiss the consent decree that had demanded reform at the police department just six months after it was signed.
A similar consent decree was dismissed around the same time, in May 2025, in Minneapolis—almost exactly five years after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer there.
"At least four other consent decrees to reform police departments across the US were dismissed in the same period," reads the report. "In each case, the department withdrew before any independent finding that the underlying violations had stopped."
HRW called on Congress to conduct oversight hearings on "the collapse of enforcement capacity at key federal agencies" and urged state legislatures to pass or strengthen disparate impact standards, create or fund state fair housing enforcement agencies with investigative authority, and create private rights of action under state law for discrimination claims previously only covered by federal enforcement.
It called on state agencies to expand intake capacity to take complaints currently not being accepted at the federal level and urged state attorneys general to consider challenging federal agency decisions, including case closure policies that have harmed state residents.
The group emphasized that it was not making formal recommendations to the White House or any federal agencies.
"The leadership of these agencies have not demonstrated good faith interest in improving anti-discrimination enforcement in the US," said HRW. "The immediate remedies lie with Congress, state and local actors, the media and civil society, and international bodies. A future administration will need to rebuild what has been dismantled by this executive branch."
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ICE Funding Approved by Susan Collins and Trump GOP to Deliver Electric Shock Gloves to Agents Nationwide
"Congress must end the blank check to ICE," said the president of one immigrant rights group.
Aug 12, 2026
As Mainers continue to target Sen. Susan Collins' office with protests following a recent killing by an immigration agent, new reporting shows how some of the $70 billion she and her GOP colleagues gave to President Donald Trump's immigration agencies is being spent.
According to the Associated Press on Tuesday:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals.
ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” for officers and agents by March, according to a notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security.
The devices are known as the GLOVE, which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, and are manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. They have been used in recent years by some jails and police departments.
As the company's website explains, "the discomfort associated with the stimulation is usually effective in bringing individuals into compliance in less than three seconds and leaves no burns, marks, or scars." It describes them as a "humane, low-optics, de-escalation solution for many situations facing our men and women in uniform."
John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, told the AP that the sensation is "immediate and sharp," comparing it to a "bee sting."
While he said it could be an effective tool to prevent "resistance," he warned that it should not be used as a form of punishment against those merely exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence” or on high-risk populations such as children, pregnant women, or elderly or disabled people.
But given the recent record of rampant civil rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, excessive use of force, and efforts to lie about misconduct, civil rights advocates are warning that these gloves are being placed into, or onto, the exact wrong hands.
"ICE spent the last year showing this country that they are willing to disregard the law and are too quick to use force, with devastating and at times fatal consequences for citizens and noncitizens alike," Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Common Dreams. "Now they might be equipped with a device that allows them to deliver an electric shock with their hands by pushing a small button, in a move that might be imperceptible to those watching."
Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, concurred, telling Common Dreams that ICE is a "rogue agency with an $80 billion slush fund that allows them to concoct and fund new ways to visit cruelty upon our communities."
"Arming poorly trained agents with electric shock gloves to inflict pain on our neighbors is disgusting and barbaric," Matos added. "Congress must end the blank check to ICE, and ICE must get out of our communities.”
The shock gloves are just one way that immigration agencies are spending the $70 billion in additional funding they were given back in June, when Republicans in the Senate voted 52-47 to authorize the funding despite rampant lawlessness. Only one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), voted against supercharging the funding.
In a July 16 letter to Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, Collins defended her vote for the increased ICE funding by pointing to "reforms" passed in April as part of the Department of Homeland Security's broader appropriations bill, which included $20 million for body cameras and $2 million for "de-escalation" training.
Collins' office did not immediately respond when asked by Common Dreams whether she believes electric shock gloves were a good form of "de-escalation."
A five-term senator in the midst of a fierce reelection bid against Democrat Troy Jackson has taken fierce criticism for her vote to support ICE on the campaign trail, which has only grown in intensity since July's fatal shooting of 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford.
It was one of two fatal shootings of men without criminal records over the course of a week. ICE later acknowledged that the victims were not the target of their operations.
When asked after the shooting, Collins declined to say that she regretted her vote for increased ICE funding.
Protesters who gathered outside Collins' Biddeford office on Tuesday said she should.
"$70 billion to fund the terror that left my family and community in fear,” Fernanda McLaughlin, a Maine resident and community organizer, said over the loudspeaker, according to NBC News Center Maine. "You know what that money can be really used for? To feed Mainers. To fund our schools. To fund our health system."
"There were no guardrails included, and she still voted yes on it," McLaughlin said. "Simple guardrails that exist in nearly every other law enforcement agency across our nation."
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After Killings, Homan Says There Will Be ‘More Bloodshed’ Unless Dems ‘Shut Their Mouth’ About ICE
"They are blaming the opposition for people being killed by their police."
Jul 16, 2026
As Democrats demand investigations and accountability after a pair of fatal shootings by immigration agents, the White House border czar, Tom Homan, issued an ominous warning on Wednesday: Shut your mouth or the "bloodshed" will continue.
Since July 7, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have shot and killed two men—Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Guerrero in Maine.
The killings, which are part of a broader rash of violent behavior by immigration agencies, briefly led DHS to suspend the use of traffic stops by agents, before President Donald Trump ordered them to continue.
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers have promised to launch investigations and congressional hearings. Some have threatened to withhold funding for the agency unless reforms, like body camera requirements, are enacted, while others have called for the agency to be defunded or abolished.
Homan, a senior adviser to Trump tasked with coordinating immigration enforcement across agencies, took to Fox News on Wednesday night to address this heightened scrutiny.
Just one day before, Homan had defended the decision to temporarily halt vehicle stops, saying there should be a "short-term review to make sure ICE agents are safe and doing the right thing.”
But following Trump's orders, he reversed course entirely the next day and rejected the idea that anything about the agency's tactics needed reevaluation.
He told host Laura Ingraham, "President Trump was clear, this policy is not going away."
Instead of trigger-happy agents, he said that anti-ICE "rhetoric" from Democrats was to blame for the recent killings.
"It all goes back to the Dems who want to continually attack ICE and tell people to evade them and tell people don't comply, tell people to resist, and tell people ICE isn't a real law enforcement agency," Homan said.
"You and I talked about this a year-and-a-half ago, Laura," he continued. "I said, if the hateful rhetoric didn't stop, there would be bloodshed."
"I'm saying it right now," Homan said. "There's still going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted."
DHS has acknowledged that neither of the men who have been shot in recent weeks was the target of the ICE operations that led to their deaths.
A witness reported that Guerrero shouted, "I tried to stop" after being shot by an agent while his vehicle moved forward slowly.
ICE's use-of-force rules state that agents should only use deadly force if they believe an individual poses an imminent threat to an agent or someone else, not simply because they are fleeing arrest.
DHS claimed that Salgado attempted to "weaponize" his vehicle, but that claim has been undercut by video evidence and eyewitness accounts.
The agency said in a statement that Guerrero "attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon," a justification that has not been used for previous shootings.
Many Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), have provided information about individuals' rights when dealing with immigration agents—including the right not to answer the door without a judicial warrant, the right to decline a search or to sign documents, or the right to record law enforcement.
But Homan did not reference any particular case in which they encouraged those facing detention to "resist" by fleeing or attacking agents.
Several Democratic members of Congress, including Reps. Jimmy Gomez (Calif.), Jason Crow (Colo.), and Ilhan Omar (Minn.), among others, have published "Know Your Rights" documents explicitly warning people not to run away or resist arrest.
Agents have frequently faced criticism that they are not, in fact, "enforcing the law" as Homan claimed, but defying it by conducting indiscriminate arrests without warrants, using excessive violence, detaining legal residents and US citizens, and engaging in racial profiling.
Homan's remarks were widely seen as a deflection of blame from immigration agents and as a way to intimidate critics into silence.
"They are blaming the opposition for people being killed by their police," said Alex Nowrasteh, the senior vice president of policy at the libertarian Cato Institute.
USA Today columnist Chris Brennan said Homan was "threaten[ing] more governmental violence… unless Americans stop engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment."
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) called it "extremely irresponsible and dangerous language from the Trump administration's top immigration official."
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Trump Accused of 'Abandoning Kids With Disabilities' in New Assault on Education Department
"By moving special education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, the administration is taking us back to a dark period in American history."
Jun 17, 2026
The Trump administration accelerated its assault on the US Education Department on Tuesday by announcing that the agency's work defending civil rights and students with disabilities will be placed under the authority of other federal departments, a move that teachers, Democratic lawmakers, and advocacy organizations condemned as illegal and disastrous for vulnerable children.
Linda McMahon, the billionaire education secretary who has enthusiastically advanced the destruction of her own agency, announced the transfer of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services—which oversees the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)—to the US Department of Health and Human Services, headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Additionally, the Justice Department will oversee the work of the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, McMahon said, claiming the changes would "break down the bureaucratic barriers and strengthen the coordination of resources to improve programs that serve infants, toddlers, children, and adults."
Critics argued the moves would do the opposite, scattering crucial programs across departments that lack the expertise and resources to fulfill the education offices' mandates, ultimately depriving children and their families of support.
“Moving IDEA out of the Department of Education is not an administrative adjustment—it is an attack on the educational and civil rights foundation of the law," said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. "It would drag us backward by treating disability as a medical issue instead of an educational right and by unraveling decades of progress. The Department of Education is the only federal agency with the expertise, infrastructure, and specialists needed to protect students’ rights and ensure they receive the services they are guaranteed."
"Relocating the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice as part of this scheme would further erode federal oversight and endanger disability-rights enforcement nationwide," Pringle added.
The Arc of the United States, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said that "moving special education to HHS and civil rights enforcement to DOJ would split apart the offices responsible for making disability rights real in schools, leaving families chasing answers across the federal government instead of getting accountability from one education agency."
"Moving IDEA oversight into HHS pushes students with disabilities toward a medical model, where disability is treated as a diagnosis to manage instead of a natural part of human life," said Katy Neas, the group's CEO. "When that mindset drives education decisions, students are more likely to be segregated, underestimated, or treated as separate from the school community."
"It’s an outrageous betrayal that undoes decades of hard-won progress for students."
The changes that McMahon announced Tuesday are part of the Trump administration's effort to completely dismantle the Education Department, which cannot be legally abolished without congressional approval. The Washington Post noted that the newly targeted offices were among the last Education Department segments to "outsource major functions," underscoring that the administration's assault "has advanced far more than most observers predicted would be possible."
In addition to displacing agency functions, the Trump administration has gutted the Education Department's staff, firing nearly half of its workers in what opponents say is an obvious effort to decimate public education.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said the transfer of critical functions out of the Education Department is unlawful, "usurping the power of the purse while the Republican majority stands idly by, forfeiting their authority as a co-equal branch of government." DeLauro pointed to language in a 2026 appropriations measure enacted earlier this year that prohibits the Education Department from transferring responsibilities to other federal agencies without congressional approval.
“This is a disgraceful violation of the law," DeLauro said Tuesday. "By moving special education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, the administration is taking us back to a dark period in American history. One where individuals with disabilities were viewed not as whole persons deserving of an education, but as medical patients whose education is not a priority."
The top Democratic appropriator in the Senate, Patty Murray of Washington, warned that "the Trump administration is abandoning kids with disabilities and its most basic legal responsibility to protect the rights of every student in the classroom."
"Instead of helping kids get a great education, this administration is spending its time, energy, and taxpayer resources fixated on where employees sit and illegally trying to shutter the Department of Education," said Murray. "It’s an outrageous betrayal that undoes decades of hard-won progress for students."
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'Lawyers Have Been Disbarred for Less': Ethics Complaint Skewers Former Trump AG Pam Bondi
“The attorney general has the awesome responsibility to set a national example of ethical behavior... From her first day as attorney general, Bondi did just the opposite."
May 27, 2026
The former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court filed an ethics complaint against former US Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday, accusing her of fostering an "environment of lawlessness" inside the Department of Justice.
The 23-page complaint, submitted to the Florida Bar, accuses Bondi, who was fired in April by President Donald Trump, of having "engaged in what appears to be serious professional misconduct" and violating her professional responsibilities during her time leading the DOJ.
The complaint was filed by Peggy Quince, who retired from the bench in 2019 after serving on the state's high court for two decades. She was joined by a group of legal ethics organizations, including the group Lawyers Defending American Democracy (LDAD), where she now sits on the board. The complaint is also backed by over 100 legal scholars and retired judges.
"As the former chief justice of this state's highest court, there are key principles that we must protect," Quince said. "First, whatever legal position you have achieved, you are still bound to follow the Rules of Professional Conduct. All lawyers are alike in that regard, and no one lawyer is above the law. Second, the Florida Bar and the Florida Supreme Court have a duty to ensure that lawyers adhere to all applicable rules. That should be the baseline minimum for this profession."
“The attorney general has the awesome responsibility to set a national example of ethical behavior—and to ensure that DOJ lawyers live up to that standard,” said James W. Conrad, Jr., an LDAD volunteer and a principal author of the complaint. “From her first day as attorney general, Bondi did just the opposite, personally and repeatedly violating ethical standards and coercing Department lawyers into violating their own professional responsibilities if they wanted to keep their jobs.”
Citing a memo she signed on her first day on the job directing DOJ employees to engage in "zealous advocacy" for the policy set by the "chief executive," the complaint accuses Bondi of having fostered a “fall-in-line-or-be-gone” attitude within the department that measured success only by serving the interests of Trump.
As a result, it said employees "were induced to engage in acts they were ethically forbidden from doing, under threat of suspension or termination—or were fired for not doing so."
The complaint highlights the DOJ's "blatant violations" of the Epstein Files Transparency Act by failing to release large numbers of files, and overredacting ones that referenced powerful individuals—including Trump—while exposing sensitive information about more than 100 alleged survivors of the sex offender's abuse, including nude photos of some.
Under Bondi's watch, the complaint also says DOJ lawyers violated an “unprecedented number” of binding court orders, particularly in cases related to the unlawful detention of immigrants.
It cites a list created by Patrick J. Schiltz, the Chief Judge of the US District Court for Minnesota, which found that during US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) "Operation Metro Surge," the agency had violated 96 orders in a single month. A tally from another judge in New Jersey found between 52 and 72 violations within just two months.
In these cases, where ICE ignored orders to provide legal hearings, release detainees, or not remove them from the district, the complaint said Bondi took “no apparent action” to make the agency obey the law.
The complaint also accuses Bondi of directing employees to bring cases against Trump's political and personal enemies without probable cause, in direct response to the president's political pressure.
It cites Bondi's appointment of the inexperienced prosecutor Lindsey Halligan as US attorney to go after figures hated by Trump, like New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, after previous prosecutors balked at bringing charges due to lack of evidence. After Halligan's appointment was ruled to be improper, a judge threw out the indictments, though the DOJ has attempted to bring new charges.
A grand jury also declined the DOJ's attempts to bring felony charges against six Democratic congresspeople who made a video reminding members of the military that they could disobey unlawful orders issued by the president.
It also accuses Bondi's DOJ of attempting to hit anti-ICE protesters with vague and flimsy charges, like the man who was charged with felony assault for throwing a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection Officer and was ultimately acquitted.
“Bondi repeatedly ignored her ethical obligations,” said Virginia Canter, chief counsel and director of anti-corruption and ethics at Democracy Defenders Fund, another group backing the complaint. “She was responsible for releasing sensitive information about Epstein victims, shielding documents in the Epstein files from the American public, violating court orders, and charging citizens for crimes without probable cause. This warrants an investigation and action—lawyers have been disbarred for less.”
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Trump and the Supreme Court Try to Return the US to the 19th Century
With the Supreme Court’s rulings against the Voting Rights Act and the Trump administration’s refusal to enforce the Civil Rights Act, they are trying to repeal the legacy of the civil rights movement.
May 26, 2026
On December 18 1865, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, Republican from Pennsylvania, during debate on how to treat the traitorous Confederate states and on support for newly freed people who had been enslaved in the United States and in British North America for almost 250 years, warned, “If we fail in this great duty now, when we have the power, we shall deserve and receive the execration of history and of all future ages." The United States failed to rectify injustice in the past, and it is failing once again.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a key contributor to The New York Times’ award winning The 1619 Project, recently wrote that “The Civil Rights Era Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes.” In Tennessee, the white-dominated Republican controlled state legislature eliminated the state’s only Black majority congressional district after the MAGA-dominated Supreme Court ruled that congressional maps that ensured political representation for African Americans and other racial minorities now violated the Constitution. Other white-dominated, Republican-controlled states are racing to make similar changes. It is as if the Republican Party, with the aid of the Supreme Court, is trying to return the United States to the level of racism that dominated the country in the 19th and first half of the 20th century.
After the Civil War, Congress passed and the states ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution. The 13th Amendment ended chattel slavery in the United States. The 14th Amendment defined citizenship to include people born in the United States with very limited exceptions and ensured that all persons, whether citizens or not, were entitled to legal due process. The 15th Amendment prevented states and localities from denying Black men the right to vote. Each amendment included a clause that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” Rebelling Confederate states were required to approve the 14th and 15th Amendments to fully reenter the Union.
A right-wing dominated Supreme Court then proceeded to systematically emasculate the amendments and supporting legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The first Civil Rights Act enforced the 13th Amendment after a number of Southern states passed "Black Codes" to limit the rights of freedmen, and the Reconstruction Acts required the former Confederate states to accept the 14th Amendment. The Enforcement Acts provided federal protection for voting rights that were being interfered with by organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 targeted racial segregation and guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public accommodations including hotels and theaters and transportation and prohibited attempts to exclude them from juries. To put teeth in enforcement, violations were tried in federal, not state courts.
The Trump administration has launched a systematic campaign to undermine civil rights protections passed into law and approved by the Supreme Court in the 1950s and I960s.
In 1873, in the Slaughter-House Cases, the Supreme Court limited the ability of African Americans to sue in federal courts against discriminatory state laws. In 1876, in the United States v. Cruikshank, the court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not apply to private acts of violence, preventing federal authorities from prosecuting hate crimes, and in the 1883 United States v. Harris case the Court threw out the Enforcement Acts because Congress did not have the authority to punish private groups like the Ku Klux Klan for conspiring to violate the civil rights of African Americans.
The most damaging court decision was in a consolidated case known as the Civil Rights Cases. In 1883, by an 8-to-1 majority, the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The majority ruled that the 14th Amendment only applied to discrimination by state or local governments and did not permit the federal government to prohibit discrimination by private individuals. The only dissenting justice was John Harlan, who argued that government and individual actions often overlapped and the court was interpreting the 14th Amendment too narrowly. Harlan was also the only justice to vote against the majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that established that the Constitution permitted racially segregated “separate-but-equal” facilities.
It was not until the 1950s and 1960s, in what has been called the Second Reconstruction, that Supreme Court decisions and federal legislation, under intense pressure from the African-American civil rights movement, restored civil rights for African Americans stolen by a conservative Supreme Court in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. The best known Supreme Court decision was in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. Brown combined five cases challenging the legality of school segregation pursued by the NAACP and the legal team headed by Thurgood Marshall. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that segregated schools established a racial caste system and violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. In other decisions, the Warren Court ruled that Mexican Americans and all other racial groups had equal protection under the 14th Amendment (Hernandez v.Texas, 1954); that segregation in facilities serving interstate transport was illegal (Boynton v. Virginia, 1960); that election districts intended to prevent the election of Black representatives violated the 15th Amendment by disenfranchising Black voters (Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 1960); against segregation in public accommodations overturning the 1883 Civil Rights Cases decision (Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 1964); the federal government had the authority to abolish discriminatory literacy testing for voter registration (South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 1966); state laws banning interracial marriages were unconstitutional (Loving v. Virginia, 1967); and that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banning discrimination in the sale of rent of housing was constitutional (Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 1968).
Federal civil rights legislation passed in the Second Reconstruction included the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It was the first federal civil rights law passed by Congress since 1875. This law established the United States Commission on Civil Rights and a Justice Department Civil Rights division to investigate charges of racial discrimination. A 1960 law established federal penalties for interfering with someone’s ability to vote. Federal courts were authorized to appoint officials to assist African Americans in registering to vote in states and localities with a documented history of discrimination, and the 24th Amendment, ratified in 1964, outlawed poll taxes.
The two most important pieces of federal legislation during this period were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in public accommodations including hotels, restaurants, and theaters; ended discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce these regulations. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act established the “disparate impact” legal standard which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971). The disparate impact standard prohibits policies that disproportionately impact protected groups and does not require proof of discriminatory intent. It was later codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.
The Voting Rights Act included a number of key provisions. It allowed people to sue to overturn discriminatory laws and voter registration and candidate nomination procedures and provided for federal legal assistance. It also required states and localities with histories of discrimination to obtain prior approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court before changing voting rules. As a result of the Voting Rights Act, the racial disparity in voting registration rates declined from about 30% to 8% 10 years later. As a result of the Voting Right Acts, In addition, the number of Blacks serving in Congress increased from four in 1960 to 62 in 2023. In 2006, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized by Congress with wide bipartisan support.
However, since 2013, the Supreme Court has whittled away at voter protection for minority groups. In a 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the court eliminated the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2021 the Supreme Court made it more difficult to bring lawsuits challenging discriminatory voting rules, and in 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the court further gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing state governments to redraw election districts dividing up Black communities so it would be more difficult to elect Black officials.
The Trump administration has launched a systematic campaign to undermine civil rights protections passed into law and approved by the Supreme Court in the 1950s and I960s. In an attack on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Donald Trump issued an executive order in April 2025 ordering federal agencies not to support or enforce disparate impact claims, arguing that it was discrimination against white people and violated its interpretation of the equal protection of the law. The administration has cut funding for enforcement of fair housing laws, equal employment opportunities, and environmental justice for minority communities disprotortionately impacted by climate change and pollution.
With the Supreme Court’s rulings against the Voting Rights Act and the Trump administration’s refusal to enforce the Civil Rights Act, they are trying to repeal the legacy of the Second Reconstruction and return the United States to the era of Jim Crow segregation and racism institutionalized in the 19th century.
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Americans Are Fed Up With Reckless Federal Agents; Congress Must Act
A simple law could ensure that no federal agent is above the law.
May 16, 2026
The American public's patience with reckless federal agents has run out—but Congress has yet to act. While members of Congress debate funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, communities across the country remain at risk of further harm from lawless policing.
For months, polling has shown cratering support for ICE and the agency’s aggressive tactics, including a 30 point collapse in a single year. Recent YouGov and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) polling shows that Americans don’t think federal law enforcement should be above the law: 93% of voters—including 89% of Trump voters—believe that agents who violate people's rights must be held accountable. Former MAGA influencers have criticized ICE and compared the agency’s tactics to the Gestapo. Even current Department of Homeland Security agents have told reporters that they’re troubled by the agency’s tactics. And in cities across the country, the response has been unmistakable: massive demonstrations in response to violent raids and multiple fatal shootings by federal agents.
Americans have been demanding accountability because when agents can violently attack and kill community members without consequence, everyone is less safe.
Consider what happened to one ACLU client in Maine earlier this year.
When federal agents face no consequences, that impunity invites more wrongdoing, turns our freedoms into empty promises, and leaves us all unprotected.
On the morning of January 22, Juan Sebastián Carvajal-Muñoz was abducted in broad daylight by federal agents. A civil engineer, Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz was driving to his job when a dark SUV cut in front of his car, forcing it to stop. Three people approached his window and demanded to see his papers. He showed his driver’s license through the window, and the agents ordered him to get out of his car. When he reached for his phone to call for help and to record the interaction, agents violently smashed his car window, forced his car open, and dragged him out. Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz’s car was left running with the door open, and his phone was left lying on the street.
Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz was racially profiled and targeted as part of an immigration crackdown in Maine callously called “Operation Catch of the Day.” Mr. Carvajal-Munoz was caught, but for what? He was legally working in the United States on an H1-B visa, was not breaking a single law, and was simply driving as a Latino man. Mr. Carvajal-Munoz was able to sue for these constitutional violations under Maine’s Civil Rights Act, but people in most states cannot.
That’s because there’s an alarming accountability gap between federal and state officers. For example, after Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020, Mr. Floyd’s family sued the City of Minneapolis and police officers for violating his constitutional rights, ultimately securing a $27 million settlement. Federal law, however, does not allow the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good to file that type of lawsuit against the federal agents who shot and killed them just miles from where Mr. Floyd was murdered.
This illogical gap stems from a historical omission. After the Civil War, in response to pro-Confederate state and local officials’ widespread violations of the rights of Black people and Union sympathizers, the Reconstruction Congress passed a law allowing people to sue state and local officers for damages or other relief when their rights were violated. Unfortunately, that law, commonly known as Section 1983, did not cover federal officers.
In 1971, the Supreme Court filled that accountability gap, ruling in Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents that the logic of the Constitution demanded that federal officers could be sued for constitutional violations, too. For decades afterward, people sued federal agents over constitutional violations in what were known as Bivens actions. But in 2017, the Supreme Court severely limited when people can bring Bivens actions, and now it’s nearly impossible to sue federal officers for violating people’s rights. For example, in 2021, a federal court rejected Bivens claims against federal officers who were sued for attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a baton charge at Lafayette Square Park across the street from the White House. At the same time, the same court ruled that local officers could be sued for those same constitutional violations, which the court held “would have been clear to every reasonable officer.”
When federal agents face no consequences, that impunity invites more wrongdoing, turns our freedoms into empty promises, and leaves us all unprotected. US courts have long recognized the fundamental legal principle that where there is a right, there must be a remedy. In other words, a right that you can’t enforce is just a suggestion that government actors can ignore when it suits them. We are now seeing the very real results that follow when a right lacks remedies: Officers can terrorize and abuse people without repercussions.
Congress has the power to close this dangerous accountability gap and restore a basic promise: If a federal officer violates your rights, you can seek justice, just like you can when a state officer crosses the line. All Congress has to do is pass the Bivens Act, which would fix the historical omission by explicitly stating that, like state and local officials, federal officers can be sued when they violate our constitutional rights. As the Supreme Court pointed out in a 1980 case applying Bivens, “The ‘constitutional design’ would be stood on its head if federal officials did not face at least the same liability as state officials guilty of the same constitutional transgression.”
The weight of our constitutional rights is becoming clearer every day: None of us is safe when federal agents can harm people at will. Congress can and must pass the Bivens Act, a simple law that would restore accountability, compensate victims and their families, and deter the unchecked government violence that has become a hallmark of this administration.
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Thoughts on the Anniversary of 'Letter from Birmingham Jail'
Comparing the religious rhetoric and call to civic virtue of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the vile language and deeds of morally corrupt individuals as Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth.
Apr 20, 2026
Today is the 63rd anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s release from the Birmingham, Alabama jail in which he penned his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
The “Letter,” a response to eight White moderate clergyman who publicly called on King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to stop its desegregation campaign in the name of “law and order and common sense,” is one of the most widely discussed texts in US history. Most of the discussion has focused, rightly, on the way King carefully and respectfully outlines a justification and strategy of non-violent civil disobedience, to be undertaken when attempts to redress grievances are repeatedly ignored; after careful preparation; and in the name of a higher law. While scholars continue to discuss and debate the nuances of King’s text, the force of his arguments, and their general applicability, there can be no doubt that both the “Letter” and the Birmingham campaign that the “Letter” explains and justifies have informed subsequent generations of protest in the US and the world at large.
At a time when the Trump administration is making war on “domestic enemies” and continuing a campaign of terror against undocumented immigrants and anyone suspected of being “an illegal,” and when citizens have resisted these efforts in the streets of major American cities--most notably in Minneapolis this past January—both King’s example, and his “Letter,” justifiably loom large in public discussion. And while the citizens of Minneapolis surely did not literally follow King’s the letter of King’s “Letter,” their extraordinary and successful campaign of resistance to ICE was surely in the spirit of King’s text and his example.
To read King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is to be reminded of just how low our public life has fallen in the age of Trump...
As I reflect today on the “Letter,” however, I want to focus on a different dimension of the “Letter”: the way King--a holder of a doctorate in theology, a Black Baptist Minister, and the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—carefully braided together religious and secular rhetoric to make the case for a more inclusive democracy, invoking a range of exemplary religious figures and texts while deliberately using language that was itself manifestly inclusive. Many scholars have written about this. At the same time, I think it bears special emphasis given the way that the Trump administration, in ways large and small, hidden and public, is now promoting, with a vengeance, what can only be described as a form of militant Christian nationalism.
The New York Times reports that “Trump’s Planning of America’s 250th Suggests a Religious Focus.” Columnist Ja'han Jones, writing for MS Now, goes further, observing that “Trump is planning a Christian ‘revival’ for America’s 250th anniversary,” continuing: “Let there be no doubt. The president is using the milestone celebration to promote far-right evangelism and Trump-centric Christianity.”
In the same vein, Politico reports on the administration’s Easter enthusiasm:
several key Cabinet departments [were] heralding Christ’s resurrection on their official social media accounts. “He is risen,” declared the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. The Defense Department shared a post on X from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: “The tomb is empty. The promise is fulfilled. Through His sacrifice, we are redeemed. We stand firm in faith, courage, and truth.” The Justice Department also chimed in on X:“Today, as millions of Christians gather in their churches across the nation to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, this Department—is proud to defend religious liberty.”
Most disturbing has been the way the Trump administration has very publicly treated its war on Iran as a Christian holy war. Trump did this indirectly when he declared, on Good Friday, that:
As we rejoice in this Easter season, we are reminded that the life of Jesus Christ and the truths of the Gospel have inspired our way of life and our national identity for 250 years. From the Christian patriots who won and secured our liberty on the battlefield and every generation since, the love of Christ has unfailingly guided our Nation through calm waters and dark storms. . . . We acknowledge that, through Christ’s redeeming sacrifice, in the words of Holy Scripture, “Death is swallowed up in victory.” Above all, we echo with tremendous joy those sacred words that have given life, hope, and purpose to Christians for thousands of years: He is risen.
Hegseth has been more emphatically bellicose, especially in this much discussed, bone-chilling prayer offered at a recent Pentagon worship service:
Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.
The administration has been so resolutely Manichean and indeed bloodthirsty in its war rhetoric—with Trump going as far as to threaten the literal annihilation of not simply Iran but Iranian civilization itself—that Pope Leo XIV has felt obliged to publicly weigh in to call it to account. As Trump and his supine protégé JD Vance have responded with a combination of vituperation and arrogance, Leo has become more sharply critical even as he has continued to speak with great nuance. Trump’s Social Truth post representing himself as Jesus Christ, and the widespread charges of “blasphemy” that have followed, are simply surface expressions of the much deeper and more dangerous fact that the Trump administration is acting with utter contempt for any moral or political limits, and doing so by presenting itself as the veritable agent of a Christian holy war against the forces of the anti-Christ.
At a moment when such morally corrupt individuals as Trump, Vance, and Hegseth present themselves as agents of both religious virtue and “American Greatness,” King’s “Letter” exemplifies the way that serious moral and religious commitment can elevate democratic politics.
Beginning his “Letter” by immediately addressing the claim of his religious critics that he is an “outsider,” King makes no bones about his own religious connections and convictions. He points out that as President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he has come to Birmingham at the invitation of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. He then goes further, situating himself openly in a long tradition of Christian dissent:
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century b.c. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
But he then quickly shifts to the third and more general reason for his presence, articulating what are the most famous sentences of the “Letter”:
I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
From the start, then, King articulates a pluralistic sense of his own identity, as the leader of a specific Christian movement, as a Christian, and as a citizen of the US and indeed of the world.
The entire “Letter” draws its force from King’s consistent and persistent performance of a rhetorical and political pluralism. When rebutting the charge that he is an “extremist,” he begins, famously, by asking “was not Jesus an extremist for love”—and it is relevant that he speaks here of “Jesus” the man, and not “Christ,” not because he abjures the language of “Christ,” but because he wishes to strike an ecumenical tone, and to call attention to a kind of courage to which any good man can aspire. King then continues, in the same paragraph and in the same vein, to list the others with whom he identifies: Amos, Paul, Martin Luther, Paul Bunyan, Lincoln, Jefferson, three of whom are quite obviously not “Christian” at all.
When explaining his distinction between a just and an unjust law, he writes that “a just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law,” and then explains by citing Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Paul Tillich, “the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber,” and the language of the Brown v. Board decision itself.
When recalling heroic dissidents of the past, he names Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Daniel, the early Christians, Socrates, and the rebels behind the Boston Tea Party.
Every move King makes in the first half of the “Letter” is deliberately ecumenical, drawing on a plurality of religious sources, Biblical and theological, and a variety of secular sources, from Socrates to the American revolutionaries to Lincoln.
When King then shifts into a more direct critique of the church, he explicitly includes “white ministers, priests, and rabbis.” And when he makes clear his own deep personal Christian faith, charity, and love, he immediately shifts into a more general tone:
In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.
What then follows is a long critique of the church for its forgetfulness of a “God intoxication” that demands a concern for justice, concluding that “the judgment of God is upon the church as never before.” But even here, King refuses the rhetoric of jeremiad, opting instead for the words of hopeful persuasion with which he concludes:
I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
In his “Letter” King performs a sincere and serious religious commitment—a Christian, Baptist religious commitment, which he completely owns—while simultaneously performing a commitment to religious pluralism, democratic citizenship, and human rights. He ends with the hope of one day meeting his interlocutors “as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother” because he is a clergyman and a Christian, who is directly engaging other religious leaders, each of whom leads a different community in a distinct way, and each of whom can be regarded as a kind of “brother.” He does not limit this hope to only Christians. He makes no reference here to Christ or the crucifixion or the resurrection or the end of days or God’s harsh judgment. King speaks not in the language of Holy War or Crusade. He speaks in the language of brotherhood, fraternity, commonality, and citizenship.
And indeed, while speaking in the language of universalism and ecumenicism, King also very deliberately, and emphatically, invokes a distinctly American political tradition of freedom, articulating this political vision:
One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Unlike Trump and Hegseth, who wrap their unaccountable rhetorical and deadly violence in a cloak of evangelical Christian righteousness, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote these, his most famous words, from a jail cell, while placing his life on the line in the name of a real commitment to freedom and justice. It is impossible to separate out King’s exemplary political courage from his profound Christian convictions, which he shared with his SCLC colleagues, even as he marched and collaborated with many who did not share these convictions. King makes his Christian faith clear. But he makes equally clear that in a democratic society, or at least a society professing democratic values, it is both possible and necessary for people of good will from a variety of religious, cultural, and moral places to reach toward an overlapping and common commitment to equal dignity, justice, and citizenship.
To read King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” is to be reminded of just how low our public life has fallen in the age of Trump, and how corrupt, venal, and dangerous is the rhetoric of religious fundamentalism when deployed by cynical autocrats intent on targeting and destroying “enemies.” But it is also to be reminded that words can elevate as well as denigrate, and that true moral conviction, whatever its cultural or religious grounding, can make a real difference in promoting a better, more just and more democratic world.
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