ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Should FBI Director Comey Clarify His Vague Letter to Some Members of Congress?

The Clinton campaign is asking the FBI to issue more details about the investigation concerning Hillary Clinton. I think this is a mistake. Clinton and other Democrats (not to mention Republicans) are asking Director Comey to again violate the rules which prohibit the Bureau from commenting on ongoing investigations and not to intervene in election campaigns. It was wrong for the Director to comment before, and I do not think his prior breaking of the rules should serve as a cover for further interventions in the campaign. It ought to be obvious that the Bureau is supposed to operate as an independent nonpartisan agency. It should not be conducting investigations or commenting on investigations because Congress, a political candidate, or a political party wants it to do so. I get that the Clinton campaign wants to make it clear it has nothing to fear. There are better ways.

Did the FBI Director Violate the Hatch Act?

In case you missed Richard Painter's excellent op-ed in the New York Times here.

My Take on FBI Director Comey

FBI Director James Comey’s decision announcing that the Bureau is investigating e-mails found on a computer used by Huma Abdin in connection with the investigation of Hillary Clinton is inconsistent with D.O.J. policy, indefensible, and was apparently prompted by his ineptitude in the execution of the prior questionable decision to make public remarks attempting to justify the decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

According to long established D.O.J. rules, the FBI does not comment on ongoing investigations, and the usual practice is not to comment on decisions not to go forward with a prosecution. Comey’s prior decision to publicly comment on the decision not to prosecute was itself unusual, and it was difficult to defend because the claim that Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling e-mails intervened in the election with no law enforcement purpose. What has turned out to be equally problematic, Comey left the impression that the Clinton case was closed. It would have been more precise to say that the evidence available to the FBI did not give a reasonable prosecutor a basis to proceed with a prosecution. Comey should have said that if other evidence came to the attention of the FBI, it would examine it with care. I assume that is what he really meant.

Had he said that, he would have had no cover for his claim that he needed to disclose the examination of the newly discovered e-mails because the case he intimated was closed was no longer closed. As it stands, Attorney General Lynch urged him not to violate D.O.J. rules. Those rules are particularly important when an FBI action taken can be seen as attempting to influence an election, and traditionally the period within 60 days of an election has been treated with special care by the FBI. But Comey was concerned that he might later be criticized for holding back – when, of course, the very point of the rules is to be circumspect and hold back. He was concerned that his integrity might be questioned. But Comey’s statements intervene in the election in a significant way; they have had the effect of exposing the existence of two investigations (Weiner and Clinton, not to mention Abdin); they have prompted speculation that Clinton must be guilty of something though the existence of not-yet-explored e-mails does not make it especially likely that the investigation will produce a different outcome than that previously reached. That Comey would ignore the urgings of the Attorney General, violate the rules, further sully the reputations of people when no decision to prosecute has been made, and intervene in a Presidential election to head off a possible criticism down the line leads me to think that the characterization of him as a person of integrity is inapt. People of integrity do not sacrifice others; they do not abuse the functions of a powerful agency; they do not compromise a Presidential election to head off possible future criticism.

For helpful links, see http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/29/report-james-comey-loretta-lynchs-advice-sending-letter-congress/

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/hillary-clinton-fbi-james-comey-disclosure-prosecutors-230467

Steven H. Shiffrin on the First Amendment

 

Since Steve did not provide a link to his new book (available in paperback!), here is one from the publisher, Cambridge University Press, and here for Amazon, where you can preview parts of the book. Hearty congratulations to Steve!

What's Wrong with the First Amendment?

My new book What's Wrong with the First Amendment? has now been published in hardback, paperback, and e-book formats by Cambridge University Press. 

The book argues that the US love affair with the First Amendment has mutated into free speech idolatry. Free speech has been placed on so high a pedestal that it is almost automatically privileged over privacy, fair trials, equality and public health, even protecting depictions of animal cruelty and violent video games sold to children. At the same time, dissent is unduly stifled and religious minorities are burdened. The First Amendment benefits the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. By contrast, other Western democracies provide more reasonable accommodations between free speech and other values though their protections of dissent, and religious minorities are also inadequate. The book argues that US free speech extremism is not the product of broad cultural factors, but rather political ideologies developed after the 1950s. It shows that conservatives and liberals have arrived at similar conclusions for different political reasons.

Reviews & endorsements

Advance praise: 'Steven H. Shiffrin challenges the conventional wisdom that safeguarding the freedom of speech necessarily entails protecting almost all communicative activities without regard to the functions they serve or the costs they generate. Deploying examples with a master's touch, he demonstrates how such indiscriminate blindness to consequences ill serves the noble, centuries-old struggle for freedom of thought. This book is much needed in an age when the bloating of the First Amendment threatens to cheapen it.' Vincent Blasi, Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties, Columbia Law School

Marxism (or ‘the Left’), Art & Aesthetics: A Select Bibliography

Here is my bibliography for Marxism (or ‘the Left’), Art & Aesthetics.

“’Stupid people often accuse Marxists of welcoming the intrusion of politics into art,’ John Berger once wrote, with his customary pugilistic elegance. ‘On the contrary, we protest against the intrusion. The intrusion is most marked in times of crisis and great suffering. But it is pointless to deny such times. They must be understood so that they can be ended: art and men will then be freer.’ Presented in this way, art and artists don’t just have a moral interest in political struggle. Anyone who is interested in art has an interest in struggling for a more equal world because equality is a condition for creativity to realize its full potential in our lives. At this point, however, we begin to transcend the question of artists as a professional group. In fact, we begin to see that making the distinction between art in a narrow sense and art in its broad sense is already political, in that it forces us to interrogate the conditions that create this separation, which confines our aspirations for our creative selves to one particular niche career.”—Ben Davis, from his collection of superb essays, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2013): 181.

The Black Panther Party was founded 50 years ago today

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense). The Party was the handiwork of Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, although it has been said that the “first” such party was actually Alabama’s Lowndes County Freedom Organization:

“Jim Crow was a grim reality in Lowndes County, Alabama, at the beginning of 1965. African Americans attended separate and unequal schools, lived in dilapidated and deteriorating housing, and toiled as underpaid and overworked domestics and farm laborers. They were also completely shut out of the voting process. There were five thousand African Americans of voting age in an overwhelmingly black rural county, but not a single one was registered. Most were too scared to even try. Francis Moss, born nearly seventy years earlier, was among those immobilized by an overwhelming fear of white violence. ‘I used to run in the house whenever I saw a white man coming down the road,’ she said. ‘I was afraid I’d be killed. And I wasn’t a baby the, but a grown woman.’

By the end of 1996, however, Jim Crow was crumbling. The most obvious sign of its demise could be found on the voter rolls, which listed the names of nearly three thousand African Americans. In a remarkable display of collective courage, African Americans managed to set aside their fear and act on the powerful impulse to end segregation immediately. ‘Negroes ain’t planning on scaring no more,’ said a black farmer. Their fierce determination to take action also led them to embark on a radical experiment in democracy. With the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) [including Stokely Carmichael, ‘one of SNNC’s most experienced field secretaries’], they created the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), an all-black, independent political party whose ballot symbol was a snarling black panther.* ‘We ain’t backing up,’ said Sidney Logan, Jr., the LCFO candidate for sheriff. ‘We’re looking for power.’ Their bold bid to take over the local government transformed Lowndes County from an unheard of bastion of white supremacy to the center of southern black militancy. [….]

The creation of LCFO was the defining event of the Lowndes movement. It transformed local black political behavior by providing African Americans with a framework for a new kind of political engagement. It inspired black activists and emboldened black radicals nationwide, including Oakland-based organizers Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who named the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense after the LCFO ballot symbol. It also provided SNCC organizers with a new, more radical, organizing program that they famously called Black Power.”—Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York University Press, 2009).

* Jeffries says “the logo was the brainchild of SNCC field secretary Ruth Howard, who patterned it after the panther mascot of Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia” (now Clark Atlanta University), although it is found on a 1936 WPA (Federal Art Project) poster for the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.  In any case, as Jeffries explains, the “snarling black panther” was as ballot symbol adopted “to meet the state requirement that every political party have a logo due to the high rate of adult illiteracy.”

  *       *      *        

Black Panther Party Platform and Program: “What We Want, What We Believe” (1972) (modified from the original, 1966 version)

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black and oppressed communities. We believe that Black and oppressed people will not be free until we are able to determine our destinies in our own communities ourselves, by fully controlling all the institutions which exist in our communities.

2. We want full employment for our people. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every person employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the American businessmen will not give full employment, then the technology and means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalist of our Black and oppressed communities. We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people. Therefore, we feel this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings. We believe that if the landlords will not give decent housing to our Black and oppressed communities, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people in our communities, with government aid, can build and make decent housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people in our communities, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for the people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society and the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else.

6. We want completely free health care for all Black and oppressed people. We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventative medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give all Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide ourselves with proper medical attention and care.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people, other people of color, all oppressed people inside the United States. We believe that the racist and fascist government of the United States uses its domestic enforcement agencies to carry out its program of oppression against Black people, other people of color and poor people inside the United States. We believe it is our right, therefore, to defend ourselves against such armed forces, and that all Black and oppressed people should be armed for self-defense of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces.

8. We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression. We believe that the various conflicts which exist around the world stem directly from the aggressive desires of the U.S. ruling circle and government to force its domination upon the oppressed people of the world. We believe that if the U.S. government or its lackeys do not cease these aggressive wars that it is the right of the people to defend themselves by any means necessary against their aggressors.

9. We want freedom for all Black and poor oppressed people now held in U.S. federal, state, county, city and military prisons and jails. We want trials by a jury of peers for all persons charged with so-called crimes under the laws of this country. We believe that the many Black and poor oppressed people now held in U.S. prisons and jails have not received fair and impartial trials under a racist and fascist judicial system and should be free from incarceration. We believe in the ultimate elimination of all wretched, inhuman penal institutions, because the masses of men and women imprisoned inside the United States or by the U.S. military are the victims of oppressive conditions which are the real cause of their imprisonment. We believe that when persons are brought to trial that they must be guaranteed, by the United States, juries of their peers, attorneys of their choice and freedom from imprisonment while awaiting trials.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people's community control of modern technology. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. * Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, May 13, 1972.

Black Panther Party Community Programs, 1966 - 1982

1. Alameda County Volunteer Bureau Work Site
2. Benefit Counseling
3. Black Student Alliance
4. Child Development Center
5. Consumer Education Classes
6. Community Facility Use
7. Community Health Classes
8. East Oakland CIL (Center for Independent Living) Branch
9. Community Pantry (Free Food Program)
10. Drug/Alcohol Abuse Awareness Program
11. Drama Classes
12. Disabled Persons Services/Transportation and Attendant
13. Drill Team
14. Employment Referral Service
15. Free Ambulance Program
16. Free Breakfast for Children Programs
17. Free Busing to Prisons Program
18. Free Clothing Program
19. Free Commissary for Prisoners Program
20. Free Dental Program
21. Free Employment Program
22. Free Food Program
23. Free Film Series
24. Free Furniture Program
25. Free Health Clinics
26. Free Housing Cooperative Program
27. Food Cooperative Program
28. Free Optometry Program
29. Community Forum
30. Free Pest Control Program
31. Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program
32. Free Shoe Program
33. GED Classes
34. Geriatric Health Center
35. GYN Clinic
36. Home SAFE Visits
37. Intercommunal Youth Institute (becomes OCS by 1975)
38. Junior and High School Tutorial Program
39. Legal Aid and Education
40. Legal Clinic/Workshops
41. Laney Experimental College Extension Site
42. Legal Referral Service(s)
43. Liberation Schools
44. Martial Arts Program
45. Nutrition Classes
46. Oakland Community Learning Center
47. Outreach Preventative Care
48. Program Development
49. Pediatric Clinic
50. Police Patrols
51. Seniors Against a Fearful Environment
52. SAFE Club
53. Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation
54. Son of Man Temple (becomes Community Forum by 1976)
55. Sports
56. Senior Switchboard
57. The Black Panther Newspaper
58. Teen Council
59. Teen Program
60. U.C. Berkeley Students Health Program
61. V.D. Preventative Screening & Counseling
62. Visiting Nurses Program
63. WIC (Women Infants, and Children) Program
64. Youth Diversion and Probation Site
65. Youth Training and Development

My select bibliography for the Black Panther Party is here.

The USS Kitty Hawk “mutiny” and Vietnam antiwar resistance among sailors (1970-1972)

Friends and family of Kitty Hawk SOS sailors wait at Fleet Landing in San Diego to distribute copies of the ‘Kitty Litter,’ the sailors’ anti-war underground newspaper. Photo by Norman L. Bleier

During the Vietnam War on this date in October 1972, there was a “mutiny” or “riot” on the Navy aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk ostensibly led by African American sailors (‘The ship’s complement consisted of 4,483 sailors, aircrew, and Marines, 302 of whom were black.’) Accounts vary as to what precisely precipitated the mutiny (and various conditions contributed to its proximate causes), one stating it began when Marines attempted to disrupt a protest meeting of black sailors. The meeting had been called in response to what occurred when the warship was in Subic Bay, the night before its scheduled departure

“…[S]erious fighting erupted at the Subic Bay men’s club, the San Paquito. On the evening of the twelfth, after the first full day of combat in the Tonkin Gulf, the ship’s intelligence investigator exacerbated still smoldering tensions by calling in only black sailors for questioning and possible criminal action related to the brawl at Subic. Outraged at what they considered blatant discrimination, over one hundred blacks gathered for an angry meeting on the mess deck at approximately 8 P.M. The ship’s Marine detachment was summoned to suppress the meeting, and an explosive situation soon developed. Commander Benjamin Cloud, the executive officer and a black man himself, entered the area and attempted to restore calm by ordering the blacks and the Marines to separate ends of the ship. Moments later, however, Captain Marland Townsend, the commanding officer, arrived and issued conflicting orders. As confusion spread, the blacks and the armed Marines encountered each other unexpectedly on the hangar deck, and a bitter clash quickly broke out. The fighting spread rapidly, with bands of blacks and whites marauding throughout the ship’s decks and attacking each other with fists, chains, wrenches, and pipes. [….] Finally, after a 2:30 A.M. meeting in the ship’s forecastle, the fighting subsided. The uprising left forty whites and six blacks injured. Of the twenty-five sailors arrested for the incident, all were black.” (David Cortright)

Twenty-nine sailors–all but three of them black–were eventually charged with crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and 19 were found guilty of at least one charge.

The “mutiny” should be viewed as part of widespread antiwar protests within the US armed forces, in this case, as part of the movement called SOS (Stop Our Ships/Support Our Sailors). H. Bruce Franklin provides the requisite historical context which should preclude us from reducing this incident to solely racial tensions and provocations:

“In 1970 and 1971, ships had been sporadically forced out of action by outbreaks and even sabotage by crew members. Occasional inconspicuous newspaper articles allowed perceptive members of the general public to get inklings of what was happening to the fleet. An early example was the destroyer Richard B. Anderson, which was kept from sailing to Vietnam for eight weeks when crew members deliberately wrecked an engine. Toward the end of 1971, the sailors’ antiwar activities coalesced into a coherent movement called SOS (Stop Our Ships/Support Our Sailors) that emerged on three of the gigantic aircraft carriers crucial to the Tonkin Gulf Strategy [and later, Operation Linebacker]: the USS Constellation, the USS Coral Sea, and the USS Kitty Hawk. (One early act was a petition by 1,500 crew members of the Constellation demanding that Jane Fonda’s antiwar show be allowed to perform on board.) On these three ships alone that fall, thousands of crew members signed antiwar petitions, published onboard antiwar newspapers, and supported the dozens of crew members who refuse to board for Vietnam duty.

In March 1972 the aircraft carrier USS Midway received orders to leave San Francisco Bay for Vietnam. A wave of protests and sabotage swept the ship, hitting the press when dissident crewmen deliberately spilled three thousand gallons of oil into the bay. In June the attack carrier USS Ranger was ordered to sail from San Diego to Vietnam. The Naval Investigative Service reported large-scale clandestine movement among the crew and at least twenty acts of physical sabotage, culminating in the destruction of the main reduction gear of an engine; repairs forced a four-and-a-half month delay in the ship’s sailing. In July the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was prevented from sailing by a major fire deliberately set by crewmen, which caused millions of dollars of damage to the captain’s and admiral’s quarters of the ship. In September and October the crew of the Corral Sea, which had been publishing the antiwar newspaper We Are Everywhere for a year, staged renewed protests against the war, with over a thousand crewmen signing a petition to “Stop Our Ship.” It was forced to return to San Francisco Bay, where crew members held a national press conference and helped organize rallies and other demonstrations. Almost a hundred crew members, including several officers, refused Vietnam service and jumped ship in California and Hawaii. In September crew members of the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga organized their own “Stop It Now” movement, and navy intelligence tried unsuccessfully to break up the SOS movement on the showpiece carrier USS Enterprise, home of the antiwar paper SOS Enterprise Ledger. A bloody September battle between groups of marines on the amphibious landing ship USS Sumter in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam was not made public until the following January.”

Franklin proceeds to note the outbreak that took place on the Kitty Hawk—“where organized antiwar activities (including publication of the antiwar paper Kitty Litter) had continued during its eight-month tour off Vietnam”—only to be followed several days later by fighting on the Kitty Hawk’s oiler, the USS Hassayampa. “The Kitty Hawk was forced to retire to San Diego, whence it sailed to San Francisco in early January, where it underwent a ‘six-month refitting job.’ The sailors’ movement had thus removed this major aircraft carrier from the war.”

That “Black Power” ideology and political praxis was making inroads among African American soldiers in the antiwar movement is evidenced in what is described as the “largest and most significant” of these antiwar protests and rebellions, namely, one that took place aboard the USS Constellation in early November 1972, and “has been aptly described as ‘the first mass mutiny in the history of the U.S. Navy.’”

“In October, during training operations off the Southern California coast, black crew members formed an organization called the ‘Black Fraction,’ with the aim of protecting minority interests in promotion policies and in the administration of military justice. Throughout October the group held several meetings, including one attended by the ship’s executive officer, where programs were developed to defend blacks subjected to court-martial proceedings and to examine the ship’s records for evidence of discrimination in non-judicial punishment. As the organization grew in strength, the command, on November 1, singled out fifteen leading members of Black Fraction as agitators and ordered that six of them be given immediate less-than-honorable discharges. At approximately the same time, a notice appeared in the ship’s plan of the day announcing that 250 additional men were to be administratively discharged. Fearing that most of these punitive releases would be directed at them and angry at the command’s apparent efforts to suppress their activities, over one hundred sailors, including a number of whites, staged a sit-in at the after mess deck on November 3 and demanded that the ship’s commander, Captain J.D. Ward, personally hear their grievances. The captain refused to acknowledge them, however, and the dissidents continued their strike throughout the day and into the early morning hours on November 4, refusing a direct order to report for muster on the flight deck. As tensions aboard the ship mounted, a series of high-level consultations were held among Captain Ward, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Zumwalt in Washington, and other senior naval commanders. To avert another Kitty Hawk, the officials reluctantly decided to cut sea operations short and return the rebels to San Diego as a ‘beach detachment.’ Captain Ward pulled the ship into the harbor on the fourth and allowed more hand one hundred thirty men to go ashore. The Constellation returned a few days later to pick up the dissidents, but the men refused to board ship, and on the morning of November 9 staged a defiant dockside strike—perhaps the largest act of mass defiance in naval history. Despite the seriousness of their action, not one of the one hundred thirty sailors was arrested. Several of the men received early discharges, but most were simply reassigned to shore duty.” (David Cortright)

References:

• Cortright, David. Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2005 (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975).
• Fanklin, H. Bruce. Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
• Freeman, Gregory A. Troubled Water: Race, Mutiny, and Bravery on the USS Kitty Hawk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• Sherwood, John Darrell. Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet during the Vietnam War Era. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

My select bibliography for the Vietnam War is here.

Can the President Order the Prosecution of Hillary Clinton or anyone else?

Good discussion of this in Politico.

Learning about the world of Islam

Everything (well, not everything, but a lot of stuff) you wanted to know about the Islamic World but heretofore (and apart from Wikipedia) did not know where to begin, I have gathered together below. The following resources should suffice by way of an introduction and material for further exploration, research and reading, should you summon the requisite motivation:

• Islam Study Guide
• Islam & Muslims in the United States: A Select Bibliography
• Islamic Studies Bibliography
• The Bedouin: An Introductory Bibliography
  
• Democracy and Islam
• Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Bibliography 
• Modern Iran: A Basic Bibliography
• The Modern and Post-Modern Arab World: A Basic Bibliography 
• Poetry and Islam: An Introduction 

Are U.S. Marriage Laws Unconstitutional?

Recently, I proudly presided at the wedding of Jacob Shiffrin and Sarah Olbrantz in Saint Louis, Missouri. It was a wonderful event. But, how you might ask, could I have the authority to marry them. I am not a judge, a clergyman, or authorized by a religious institution of which Jacob or Sarah are members as Missouri law seems to require. The answer, of course, is that I became a pseudo-clergyman on line in a couple of minutes. Missouri accepts such credentials. So do most states (although questions have been raised in Connecticut, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, and New York). Although Missouri permits judges to marry couples, some states require that only spiritual leaders preside at weddings.

Suppose, however, that a couple want a non-religious social worker to marry them. Is a state law preventing the social worker from marrying the couple constitutional? It strikes me that a law forcing a couple to be married by a minister or a pseudo-minister establishes religion within the meaning of the First Amendment. If the purpose of such laws is to assure that couples are well advised, there is no basis for excluding the social worker. If the purpose of the law is to impose religious advice on the couple, the laws would seem to clearly violate the First Amendment.

In 1753, Parliament required that couples be married in Anglican churches with exceptions for Jews and Quakers. We have come a long way since then. We have a long way to go.

James Forman, October 4, 1928 – January 10, 2005

“James Forman (October 4, 1928 – January 10, 2005) was an American Civil Rights leader active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the International Black Workers Congress.”

*    *    *

The following is from the Foreword (June 1997) by Julian Bond to James Forman’s The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1997 ed. [Macmillan, 1972]): xi-xiii.  

“James Forman is one of the under-appreciated figures of the modern civil rights movement. His autobiography, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, is a classic.

In a determined voice, Forman describes his life and activism. He doesn’t mince words. Nor is he cautious in his descriptions of those he believes to be enemies of black progress, whether black or white. Revolutionaries is precious because it represents one of the very few autobiographies by a youthful activist. [….]

James Forman had enormous influence on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the civil rights movement, and on me personally. He molded SNCC’s near-anarchic personality into a functioning, if still chaotic, organizational structure, and insured that most of its parts functioned smoothly most of the time. He brought his trained historian’s eye and values to our work, thereby accounting for the large repository of field and other reports, giving SNCC the best detailed records (for its short life) among its contemporary and often competing organizations.

‘Write it all down’ was his constant injunction; because he insisted, the SNCC files contain often lyrical descriptions of exactly how an organizer goes about his or her work. Here one may learn who the real ‘leaders’ are, and how those who aspire to leadership can be helped to develop to their fullest. The SNCC field secretaries’ reports, written at Forman’s insistence and withheld at great peril, offer a day-to-day account of community organizing that cannot be found anywhere else. [….]

Forman’s scholarly bent also guided his selection of SNCC staff; the organization had the best research arm of any civil rights organization before or since. Field secretaries entered the rural, small-town South armed with evidence of who controlled what, and who, in turn, owned them.

‘Power structure’ was no abstract phrase for SNCC’s brand of brothers and sisters, but a real list with real people’s names and addresses and descriptions of assets and interlocking directorships, demonstrating how large interests, ranging from Memphis and New York banks to the Queen of England, might own at least partial control of a plantation in Mississippi’s Delta. Knowledge of who owned what was crucial to SNCC’s strategies. From it, we knew that Southern peonage was no accident, but rather the deliberate result of economic policies determined thousands of miles away from the cotton field. [….]

James Forman was slightly older than most SNCC people, and that age advantage gave him a solemnity and seriousness well suited to the task he undertook. Undoubtedly, his military experience—recounted in frightful detail in these pages—made a great difference, too, for most of us were just old enough to worry about the draft when the movement caught us up and made several of us happily ineligible for military service. Imposing governance on the self-styled revolutionaries was a difficult task, but Forman proved equal to it.

He became SNCC’s Executive Secretary because the field staff wanted firm assurance that they would receive their meager pay on time and, equally as important, that a steady hand was ever present in the Atlanta headquarters to insure that the jailings, beatings, and deaths they expected to occur would not pass by unnoticed.

Forman was a master propagandist. He insisted that SNCC develop a publicity apparatus—called Communications—and that it produce material of the highest quality and unassailable objectivity. In time, we owned a large web-fed offset press, had four staff photographers and a professional-level darkroom, and printed a newspaper, The Student Voice. [….]

My favorite Forman memory is of the many youthful whites who trickled into the office, usually convinced that their unique determination and commitment were just what the movement needed, demanding to be put to work leading demonstrations in deepest Mississippi or organizing some other dangerous action elsewhere. Forman’s usual response was to give them a broom and instructions to report back when the office floors were swept. Some left before they finished; those who completed the task were given a second look. He also often swept the floor and cleaned restrooms, believing he ought never [like Mohandas Gandhi] to ask anyone to do task he would not do himself.

‘Forman provided a necessary ingredient in the development of an organizational structure for the southern student movement,’ writes SNCC historian Clayborne Carson. ‘Without a leader like Forman, who was prepared to assume responsibility for fund-raising and directing the activities of a full-time staff, it is unlikely that SNCC could have become a durable organization.’

Carson is right—without Forman, there would have been no SNCC, at least not the one that developed in the early 1960s. Without SNCC, it is doubtful that the movement would have succeeded as well as it did….” [….]