In 1863, as blood poured and body counts climbed, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring more than three million enslaved people living in Confederate states finally free.
But two years passed before African Americans in Texas got word. They were free, but didn’t know it.
Today, we are free but often fail to fully know our hard-won freedoms, such as by not exercising and protecting our right to vote. It’s understandable, given the seemingly inexhaustible energy expended trying to roll back other people’s freedoms.
In the past year, we’ve seen spirited attacks on voting rights in the attempts at eliminating convenient drop boxes and in trying to disqualify mail-in ballots date-stamped on Election Day but not arriving within three days. In 2021, the legislature passed new voting district maps brazenly announced and designed to favor one party over the other, on top of cracking minority districts in the most diverse county in the Free State.
Extremists in our state have abandoned the notion that all Kansans deserve political representation, with some explicitly stating their desire to make Kansas as unwelcoming and unsafe to vulnerable populations as possible.
So yes, it’s understandable if some people don’t exactly feel free since so many people in power seem hell-bent on denying freedoms, advantages and opportunities.
Those incredible people in Texas back in June of 1865 didn’t know they were free, but we do—and we must act accordingly by voting, by volunteering, and working with groups like the ACLU of Kansas fighting daily to protect those freedoms.
So, as Juneteenth approaches, let’s think about freedom not as a destination, but as journey, one requiring our constant attention, consciousness, and vigilance.
Date
Monday, June 19, 2023 - 5:45am
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The term “butterfly effect” wasn’t coined until 1960 by MIT Meteorology Prof. Edward Lorenz, but by then, Fern Van Gieson had already established herself as a model for the now widely-accepted theory that small, seemingly uneventful actions can result in powerful and wide-ranging consequences.
At the time, Fern, who was white, had lived in Washington D.C. and in Santa Barbara, graduated from Oklahoma A & T (Oklahoma State University), worked as a copywriter at Boeing, and co-founded the Wichita Branch of the Urban League with a Black man.
And in her embodiment of the butterfly effect, this petite person who died last month at 95, exerted outsized influence on the pre- and post-civil rights social climate in Wichita and in Kansas. We owe her a debt of gratitude.
If you knew her at all, you knew she was a woman before her time. Her brand of cross-racial, cross-gender, and cross-continent activism feels common now, but Fern engaged in this work during the era of segregated swimming pools, restaurants, and schools.
A friend said, for example, that her job at the YWCA cafeteria offered one of the few places integrated settings where Black diners could eat.
In essence, Fern was attuned to the plights of her community, while most others remained blissfully unconscious about such issues.
She actively advocated for civil rights, for women’s rights, and for international peace. She was one of the organizers of a local chapter of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and Kansas Women's Political Caucus, where she pushed for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
She’d later fight for LGBTQ equality and environmentalism.
Fern lived in accordance with her ideals. She was an active member of the First Unitarian Universalist Church. She was the Woman of the Year at the 1985 Wichita Women's Fair, and she received the 2014 Civil Rights Trailblazer Award from The Kansas African American Museum.
I selected her for that Trailblazer Award because she helped change this world for the better. And we can all aspire to follow her example and create our own butterfly effects for a better world.
Fern, rest in power, and in protest.
A memorial for Fern has been established with the First Unitarian Universalist Church, 7202 E. 21st, Wichita, KS 67206. Services in care of Downing & Lahey East Chapel. Share tributes online at: www.dlwichita.com
Date
Monday, May 22, 2023 - 10:30am
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Extremists in the Kansas legislature have introduced a staggering 12 anti-LGBTQ+ bills this legislative session. This week, they passed Senate Bill 180, the so-called “women’s bill of rights,” because they’re concerned about women’s rights.
Sound fishy? It should. It’s not about women’s rights. It’s about discriminating against trans people.
Sen. Renee Erickson, R-Wichita, introduced this bill that would require state agencies to define “women” and “men” based solely on their reproductive capabilities. In reality, SB 180 is just the latest effort to shock a small, shrinking and fearful electoral bloc by scapegoating an already vulnerable minority community of transgender people for political gain. Single-sex spaces aren’t in danger. This bill does nothing to protect women from discrimination truly affecting them, such as pay inequity, sexual violence or domestic violence.
The bill provides “a meaning of biological sex for purposes of statutory construction.” Does that sound like a women’s rights issue?
Under this mask of disingenuous paternalism, SB180 is one of the most extreme efforts yet to erase transgender people’s ability to even exist in modern society, prohibiting them from accessing bathrooms or locker rooms or having a driver’s license that matches their gender.
But Kansans aren’t asking for this. Instead, it’s national groups attacking the humanity of trans people that are driving this bill in Kansas and other states.
When Erickson’s fellow Wichita legislator Brenda Landwehr claimed this bill protects women’s rights, she sidestepped the bill’s real intention.
“Women have fought for over 50 years to gain certain rights in this country,” Landwehr was quoted as saying in a news report. “And these rights are being eroded. I really wish people would not take it that we’re targeting another group of people.”
Well, people are funny that way. They tend not to like being attacked for who they are.
On Tuesday, the bill cleared its final hurdle in the Kansas Senate and is now on Governor Kelly’s desk, with extremely small margins in both houses that point to possibly overriding Kelly’s expected veto.
Now, if Erickson, Landwehr and other extremist legislators really cared about women’s rights, they would not have tried to pass a constitutional amendment denying women bodily autonomy last summer.
If they really cared about women’s rights, they’d ensure Kansas women had the support they needed to thrive. Instead, they’ve proposed SB 180 — a bill that could lead to dozens of domestic violence and rape crisis programs in Kansas losing federal funding, as the executive director of the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence warned.
Proponents of this bait-and-switch claim they are advocating for women’s rights — and assume Kansans will take them at face value, without thinking critically about how this bill would actually secure or advance the rights of women. They assume Kansans won’t see the farce here, won’t make the connections to lawmakers’ entire raft of bills restricting access to gender-affirming care and limiting trans students’ rights in schools.
And, if Erickson, Landwehr and others really want to support gender equity, there’s a huge opportunity that has been available for the past 100 years.
Lawmakers originally drafted the Equal Rights Amendment (“ERA”), in 1923 — a measure that said, “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
It passed Congress in 1972 but fell short of the three-fourths majority of states needed for ratification.
Kansas legislators can support the ERA if they’re truly serious about women’s rights.
But everyone — including those supporting SB 180 — understands that that won’t happen. Because there is a key word missing in the text of SB 180:
Equality.
Date
Saturday, April 8, 2023 - 3:30pm
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