Category: Violence

Peace & Justice History for 4/19

April 19, 1911
More than 6,000 Grand Rapids, Michigan, furniture workers—Germans, Dutch, Lithuanians, and Poles—put down their tools and struck 59 factories in what became known as the Great Furniture Strike.
For four months they campaigned and picketed for higher pay, shorter hours, and an end to the piecework pay system that was common in the plants of America’s “Furniture City.” Although the strike ended after four months without a resolution, Gordon Olson, Grand Rapids city historian emeritus, said once employees returned to work, most owners did increase pay and reduce hours.


The Spirit of Solidarity — a $1.3 million granite sculpture, plaza and fountain — sits on the land of the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum on the banks of the Grand River near the Indian mound.
The Strike’s history from the APWU 
On the 100th anniversary of the strike
April 19, 1943
On the eve of Passover, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began when Nazi forces attempted to clear out the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, to send them to concentration camps. The Germans were met by unexpected gunfire from Jewish resistance fighters. The destruction of the ghetto had been ordered in February by SS Chief Heinrich Himmler:
“An overall plan for the razing of the ghetto is to be submitted to me. In any case we must achieve the disappearance from sight of the living-space for 500,000 sub-humans (Untermenschen) that has existed up to now, but could never be suitable for Germans, and reduce the size of this city of millions—Warsaw—which has always been a center of corruption and revolt.”

 
These two women, soon to be executed, were members of the Jewish resistance.
” …Jews and Jewesses shot from two pistols at the same time…
The Jewesses carried loaded pistols in their clothing with the safety catches off…
At the last moment, they would pull hand grenades out…and throw them at the soldiers….”
 
Captured Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Learn more about The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (it’s the search page for the national Holocaust Museum.)
April 19, 1971

As a prelude to a massive anti-war protest, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) began a five-day demonstration in Washington, D.C. The generally peaceful protest was called Dewey Canyon III in honor of the operation of the same name conducted in Laos.
They lobbied their congressmen, laid wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery, and staged mock “search-and-destroy” missions.

Read more about this action 
April 19, 1997
Two Swedish Plowshares peace activists, Cecelia Redner, a priest in the Church of Sweden, and Marija Fischer, a student, entered the Bufors Arms factory in Karlskoga, Sweden, planted an apple tree and attempted to disarm a naval cannon being exported to Indonesia. Cecelia was charged with attempt to commit malicious damage and Marija with assisting in what was called the Choose Life Disarmament Action. Both were also charged with violating a law which protects facilities “important to society.”
Both women were convicted, arguing over repeated interruptions by the judge, that, in Redner’s words, “When my country is arming a dictator I am not allowed to be passive and obedient, since it would make me guilty to the crime of genocide in East Timor. I know what is going on and I cannot only blame the Indonesian dictatorship or my own government.” Fischer added, “We tried to prevent a crime, and that is an obligation according to our law.” Redner was sentenced to fines and three years of correctional education. Fischer was sentenced to fines and two years’ suspended sentence.
Both the prosecutor and defendants appealed the case.
No jail sentences were imposed.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april19

From Stonewall to now: LGBTQ+ elders on navigating fear in dark times

(I saved this to post, then it got buried in email, but it came up again today. -A)

Mar 17, 2025 Orion Rummler

This story was originally reported by Orion Rummler of The 19th. Meet Orion and read more of his reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Karla Jay remembers joining the second night of street protests during the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. For her, and for so many other LGBTQ+ people, something had shifted: People were angry. They didn’t want things to go back to normal — because normal meant police raids. Normal meant living underground. It meant hiding who they were at their jobs and from their families. They wanted a radical change.  

Radical change meant organizing. Jay joined a meeting with the Gay Liberation Front, which would become the incubator for the modern LGBTQ+ political movement and proliferate in chapters across the country. At those meetings, she remembers discussing what freedom could look like. Holding hands with a lover while walking down the street, without fear of getting beaten up, one person said. Another said they’d like to get married. At the time, those dreams seemed impossible. 

Jay, now 78, is worried that history will repeat itself. She’s worried that LGBTQ+ people will be put in the dark again by the draconian policies of a second Trump administration. 

“Are things worse than they were before Stonewall? Not yet,” she said. “It’s certainly possible that people will have to go back to underground lives, that trans people will have to flee to Canada, but it’s not worse yet.” 

The 19th spoke with severalLGBTQ+ elders, including Jay, about what survival looks like under a hostile political regime and what advice they would give to young LGBTQ+ people right now. 

Many states protect LGBTQ+ people through nondiscrimination laws that ensure fair access to housing, public accommodations and employment. Supreme Court precedent does the same through Bostock v. Clayton County. Other states have passed shield laws to protect access to gender-affirming care for trans people.But to Jay, a cisgender lesbian, it all still feels precarious. The Trump administration is trying to make it harder for transgender Americans to live openly and safely, and lawmakers in more than a handful of states want to undermine marriage equality. 

“We have forgotten that the laws are written to protect property and not to protect people. They’re written to protect White men and their property, and historically, women and children were their property,” she said. “To expect justice from people who write laws to protect themselves has been a fundamental error of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans community.” 

To fight back, LGBTQ+ Americans need to organize, Jay said. That starts with thinking locally — supporting local artists, independent stores and small presses, as well as LGBTQ+ organizations taking demonstrable political action and protecting queer culture. 

“See what you can do without going crazy. If you can focus on one thing and you can spend one hour a week, or you can spend one day a week, that’s much better than being depressed and doing nothing,” she said. “Because the person you’re going to help is yourself. This is the time for all of us to step up.” 

Renee Imperato (far right) poses with other demonstrators during a protest outside the Stonewall Inn.
Renee Imperato (far right) poses with other demonstrators during a protest outside the Stonewall Inn, after the word transgender was erased from the National Park Service’s webpage, in New York, on February 14, 2025. (Courtesy of Renee Imperato)

Renata Ramos feels obligated to share her experiences with young people.As a 63-year-old trans Latina,she wants young people to know that so many of their elders have already been through hard times — which means that they can make it, too, including during this moment. 

“I’m not scared in the least. Because we have fought so many battles — the elders. We have fought so many battles, with medicine, with HIV, with marching on Washington, with watching our friends die,” she said. “It’s been one war after another in our community that we have always won. We have always been resilient. We have always stood strong. We have always fought for our truth, and we’re still here. They haven’t been able to erase us.” 

As Ramos watches the Trump administration use the power of the federal government to target transgender Americans and erase LGBTQ+ history, she’s not afraid for herself. She’s afraid for young LGBTQ+ people, especially young trans people who now find themselves at the center of a growing political and cultural war. If someone transitioned six months ago, she said, they now have a target on their back — and little to no experience with what that feels like. 

“They don’t know what it is like to be a soldier going into war, as far as social issues. So I fear for them,” she said. “Who wouldn’t be scared?” 

Criss Christoff Smith has seen firsthand what that fear can look like. On January 28, at 3 a.m., he received a phone call from an LGBTQ+ person who was considering taking their own life. This was a stranger —someone who admired from afar Smith’s advocacy as a Black trans man and Jamaican immigrant. This was someone who had been considering a gender transition for years, Smith said, who was now feeling broken. He spoke with them for two hours. 

“It’s been quite dark,” Smith said. The onslaught of policies targeting marginalized people and the turbocharged news cycle are working to keep Black and trans people in a constant state of fear and uncertainty, he said.  

“I tell everyone in my community, you have to stop responding to those alerts and just try to go inward,” he said. “Find a space of peace and spirituality.”

To Smith, who is 64, looking inward can mean reflecting on what’s still here. Although the Trump administration is going to make daily life harder for LGBTQ+ people, he said, laws can’t be undone with the stroke of a pen on an executive order. LGBTQ+ Americans need to find whatever source of strength and peace they can find right now — and try to remove themselves from the daily fray as much as possible — while still finding ways to take action.  

“This is the time when we really have to find community, where we really have to hone in on our spiritual feelings and try to talk to someone. Don’t keep it to yourself,” he said. Joining protests or lobbying days at state capitols are great ways to find community in-person, Smith said — to be around like-minded people and to not feel so alone. 

“That’s the best space to be in, not home alone and in your feelings and in your mind, because we can get lost there thinking negatively. So we have to stay positive and stay with like-minded people, and have those people constantly around you to reassure you and just hold you tight in that space,” he said. 

Protests against the administration’s hostile LGBTQ+ policies have been ongoing — including outside the Stonewall National Monument. In at least one way, history is already repeating itself. 

The National Park Service deleted all references to transgender and queer people from its web page honoring the 1969 Stonewall uprising — the most well-known moment from LGBTQ+ history in the country — leaving references to only lesbian, gay and bisexual people.  Hundreds gathered in New York City to protest. Among them was Renee Imperato, a 76-year-old trans woman and New York native. 

“Protests like this are our survival,” she told The 19th over email. “The rhetoric of this administration is driving a violent onslaught against our community. The Stonewall Rebellion is not over. We are at war, and we are still fighting back. What other choice do we have?”

Jay, herself an old hand at joining protests and demonstrations, said that she’s been afraid before every one of them. She’s lost sleep the night before and feared for her safety — but she did it anyway. 

“I’m afraid I’ll be beaten. I’m afraid I’ll be arrested. But if you don’t do something even though you’re afraid, they win,” she said.

Peace & Justice History for 4/12

April 12, 1935
60,000 students across the U.S. took part in the first nationwide student strike. The protest was against fascism and participation in any war.
 
Posters from the anti-war movement of the 1930’s
One of the events that day 
April 12, 1963
Martin Luther King, Jr. and his fellow ministers Fred Shuttlesworth and Ralph Abernathy, along with 60 others were arrested on Good Friday in Birmingham, Alabama, for marching downtown.
They had been denied a parade permit, and were violating a court order banning them from all protest activities. Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor had sought the injunction to put an end to a series of sit-ins, kneel-ins, boycotts and other nonviolent actions designed to challenge the local and state segregation laws.

Fred Lee Shuttlesworth (left), Ralph David Abernathy (center), and Martin Luther King Jr. (right) march on Good Friday on April 12, 1963, in Birmingham.
The Birmingham campaign of 1963 
Arrest in Birmingham 
April 12, 1971

Protest at Fessenheim
The first European demonstration against nuclear power brought together 1300 peacefully to oppose construction of a nuclear power plant at Fessenheim, on the Rhine in the Alsace region of France. The four 900 megawatt reactors have been in operation since 1977.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april12

Peace & Justice History for 4/10

April 10, 1516
In what was the first ghetto, Jews in Venice, Italy, were forced to live in a specific, restricted area of the city known as Campo del Ghetto Nuovo. The word “ghetto” comes from the Venetian word “geto,” meaning foundry. Prior to becoming an exclusively Jewish neighborhood, the Venice ghetto was the site of a foundry.
After its establishment the city’s Jews, who were allowed to attend to their business during the day (though required to wear a yellow badge or scarf indicating their religion), were forced to return to the ghetto where gates were locked to keep them inside overnight.
Venice also restricted the living quarters of Germans and Turks, all to satisfy the demands of the Roman Catholic Church.

The site of the Ghetto Nouvo today
April 10, 1971
Ninety-year-old Jeannette Rankin, the first female member of Congress (R-Montana), and the only one to vote against U.S. entry into both World Wars, led 8000 in protest of the Vietnam War in a women’s peace march on the Pentagon.
 
April 10, 1972

Charlie Chaplin received an honorary Oscar for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.” The British native’s political views had previously been criticized, as had been his failure to apply for U.S. citizenship.
Pressed for back taxes and accused of supporting subversive causes during the McCarthy era, Chaplin left the United States in 1952.Informed that he would not be welcomed back, he retorted, “I wouldn’t go back there if Jesus Christ were president.” He returned briefly from exile, however, to accept this award and received the longest standing ovation in Academy Award history, lasting a full five minutes.
Charlie Chaplin, one of PBS’s American Masters 
April 10, 1981
The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (also known as the Inhumane Weapons Convention) started gathering signatures of nations willing to abide by its limitations.
Currently, 109 countries have agreed to ban or limit munitions that cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants, or affect civilians indiscriminately. So far the restrictions cover mines, booby traps, incendiary weapons (such as Napalm) and blinding laser weapons.
This Life photograph of a naked child running down a street in Vietnam screaming in agony captures the effects of Napalm. Nick Ut’s photograph of Kim Phuk, taken in 1972, won the Pulitzer Prize ( Associated Press).

Not all country signatories have agreed to all its provisions
How militaries think about incendiary weapons
April 10, 1994
France, Belgium, the U.S., among other countries airlifted their nationals out of Rwanda as the wholesale slaughter of Tutsis at the hands of the Hutu majority proceeded. Rwandan employees of Western governments were left behind.
The International Red Cross was already estimating the death toll in the tens of thousands.
April 10, 1998
The Northern Ireland peace talks ended with an historic accord—called the Good Friday Agreement—reached after nearly two years of talks and 30 years of conflict. Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine) was chair of the talks which established a Northern Irish Assembly for both the Irish Catholic republicans and the British Anglican unionists.

Senator George Mitchell

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april10

Peace & Justice History for 4/9

April 9, 1898
Ida Wells-Barnett, a journalist, speaker and advocate for suffrage, wrote to President William McKinley requesting federal action against those who lynched the U.S. Postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina.

Ida Wells-Barnett
Though the federal government had previously refused to involve itself with the thousands of lynchings, leaving them to be dealt with at the state level, Ms. Wells-Barnett insisted that a postmaster’s murder was a federal matter.
“We most earnestly desire that national legislation be enacted for the suppression of the national crime of lynching . . . .
Her open letter to President McKinley 
=============================================
April 9, 1947

The first freedom ride, the “Journey of Reconciliation,” left Washington, D.C. to travel through four states of the upper South.In response to a Supreme Court decision (Morgan v. Virginia) outlawing segregation on interstate busses, the group of both black and white Americans rode together despite “Jim Crow” state laws making it illegal.
Together on the bus, and arrested several times for being so, were George Houser, Bayard Rustin, James Peck, Igal Roodenko, Nathan Wright, Conrad Lynn, Wallace Nelson, Andrew Johnson, Eugene Stanley, Dennis Banks, William Worthy, Louis Adams, Joseph Felmet, Worth Randle and Homer Jack.
Two African-American members of the group, Rustin and Johnson, served on a chain gang for 30 days after their conviction in North Carolina. The integrated bus tour was sponsored by CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) and FOR (Fellowship of Reconciliation)
Read more about the freedom rides
============================================== 
April 9, 1981
Members of the Bigstone Cree band of indigenous people ended a 250-mile march to the capital, Edmonton, to highlight their economic plight in northern Alberta, Canada.

==============================================
April 9, 1995
Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara first publicly acknowledged error in prosecution of the war in Vietnam. “Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”
Robert McNamara, Fog of War
==============================================
April 9, 2000
Jubilee 2000 National Mobilization Day in Washington, D.C. brought together individuals and groups demanding cancellation of third world debt.
“Every child in Africa is born with a financial burden which a lifetime’s work cannot repay. The debt is a new form of slavery as vicious as the slave trade.”
Jubilee USA Network 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april9

Russia is building an electronic registry of LGBTQ+ citizens

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/01/russia-is-building-an-electronic-registry-of-lgbtq-citizens/

You know this is what the fundamentalist religious right wants to do this here.  This is one of the reasons the maga right loves Russia and Putin, he hates who they hate.  He wants a straight cisgender stereotypical white society the same as they do.  Hugs

======================================================================

Raids across the country are yielding the data to supply it.
By  

Russia’s Interior Ministry has plans for a sweeping electronic database of LGBTQ+ people in the country, Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet, revealed this week.

Citing anonymous sources at the Interior Ministry, the outlet reported that the Orwellian plan has been in discussion since last year after Russia’s Supreme Court outlawed the so-called “international LGBT movement” as an “extremist organization” at the urging of President Vladimir Putin.

Related:

Life for LGBTQ+ Russians is getting more & more dangerous

Raids and arrests at LGBTQ+ clubs have become commonplace across the country.

The database will be a “large-scale” system to track members of the LGBTQ+ community at large, according to sources.

The plans were corroborated by Dmitry Chukreyev, an official with the Civic Chamber of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city. He said police have been keeping informal lists of LGBTQ+ individuals since the Supreme Court ruling was announced.

In 2024, police conducted at least 42 raids on LGBTQ+-friendly venues across Russia, according to an investigation by independent news outlet Current Time and human rights organization Sphere. Beatings, forced confinement, and sadistic humiliations based on sexual and gender identities are regular features of the sweeps.

Russian officials and state-aligned media regularly describe Russia’s LGBTQ+ community as a network of “paramilitary groups” calling for an “open gender war,” who engage in “dehumanization” and “devil worship,” the outlet reports. Officials and media credit security forces’ actions with “suppressing” anti-state activity.

The raids, in addition to intimidating the queer community at large and forcing the closure of several venues, have provided security officials with information that would supply an electronic LGBTQ+ registry.

An employee at a Siberian queer establishment told Meduza, “Security forces copied the entire database from the computer where we keep track of reservations,” obtaining information about hundreds of clients. Fingerprints and mouth swabs were collected from visitors during a raid the Eden club in Chelyabinsk, and employees and patrons at the Orenburg club Pose were forced to state their registered residential address on camera.

At a house party raided by security forces in Leningrad Oblast, guests were forced to surrender their passports and unlock their phones; if someone refused, the others were subjected to collective punishment and forced to squat.

According to human rights activists, such raids are also aimed at exposing LGBTQ+ government officials. The organizer of one queer-friendly event in the Urals region revealed police who raided the venue hoped to “catch deputies [officeholders] and other significant individuals” at the event.

While security forces continue to collect data in ever-more sadistic operations, progress on a full-scale LGBTQ+ registry has been hampered by Putin’s other current obsession: the expansion of Greater Russia through his war on Ukraine. Forces assigned to that conflict are draining the ranks of police who would otherwise be hunting down members of the “international LGBT movement.”

But the raids continue to produce results.

One sweep at a restaurant and club in Gorno-Altaysk last year yielded data on 80 patrons and staff alone, an employee said.

“We know all of you now,” security forces repeated as the raid dragged on.

Open Windows

Trump medicine by Ann Telnaes

A spoon full of poison makes America go down Read on Substack

True, This-

The Real Scandal of Yemen Bombing Is Not That They Used the Wrong App

(I’ve had trouble opening Oliver Willis’s “Breaking News USA” page for 2 days. Yesterday it opened not at all, but showed fatal error. Today, it’s broken, but there are ways to get around some; I’ve read a few from there. I thought I’d make a note of it here, for a record or in case someone else is having trouble, too. I have no idea what’s up. Now back to Yemen.)

Peace & Justice History for 4/7

April 7, 1979
Thousands protested against the nuclear industry in Sydney, Australia. The country is by far the world’s largest exporter of uranium (and thorium ores and concentrates), the radioactive heavy metal necessary for the power generation and weapons industries.
The marchers were from groups concerned about many related issues: the link between the uranium industry and weapons proliferation; the environmental destructiveness of nuclear power; the impact of uranium mining on Aborigines and workers in the industry; weapons testing in the Pacific, and the secret history of the British nuclear weapons tests in the region; and the Cold War nuclear arms spiral and Australia’s contribution to it through the hosting of U.S. military bases, allowing nuclear warships to use Australian ports through the ANZUS alliance (among Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.); weapons testing in the Pacific, and the secret history of the British nuclear weapons tests in the region.

Sydney anti-uranium protest, Photo: Paul Keig
Today’s Australian Nuclear Free Alliance 
April 7, 1994
Genocide in Rwanda began. Over the following 90 days at least a half million people were killed by their countrymen, principally Hutus killing Tutsis.
This day is commemorated annually with prayer vigils in Rwanda.
Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, head of the U.N. Peacekeeping Force in Rwanda, a tiny African nation formerly a Belgian colony, had warned of impending slaughter, but was ordered not to attempt to intervene.

PBS interview with General Dallaire, what he knew and what he watched happen
  

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april7

Man tackled by parishioners, handcuffed at Kansas church after Jesus-like prayer | Opinion Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/article303075424.html#storylink=cpy

https://www.miamiherald.com/article303075424.html

Reverend Ed Trevors did a video on this.  He liked the guys message but thought the way he did it was wrong.  For me it is amazing that in Florida he was not seriously hurt by the police that came to the scene.  They read his message and did not use their authority to harm him for it.  As you know in Florida the authorities are not respectful or kind to those who are expressing a message of kindness, tolerance, and acceptance of others.  Hugs

========================================================================

By Melinda Henneberger Updated March 31, 2025 6:57 PM

“I wasn’t preaching hate or using profanity,” says Jimbo Gillcrist. Then he was thrown to the ground. Melinda Henneberger

A man who walked up to the pulpit at the church he’d grown up in, Holy Spirit Catholic Church in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, a few minutes before last Sunday’s 11 a.m. Mass was soon wrestled to the ground by four parishioners.

Jimbo Gillcrist had just started to recite his own version of the “Our Father,” and to say how we’re all God’s children. He had intended to talk to his fellow Catholics about care for the migrant, but he didn’t get to before being taken down, marched out and handcuffed by OP police.

“I thought the worst that could happen is maybe they’d try to shout me down and ask me to leave,” Gillcrist told me in an interview on Friday.  “I in no way thought I’d be tackled in a church.”

When one of those who removed him called the police, they reported, “He has long hair and a beard.”

I know that because I listened to the 38-minute audio of the whole thing that was recorded on Gillcrist’s phone, which his removers took away from him but failed to stop from recording.

So I can also say that the police who responded were a lot more chill than the church folk, one of whom asked the others, “Is anybody armed?” “Mine is in my car,” one responded.

“Mine is, too,” said another. All the better to protect followers of Christ from someone quoting Christ? Some horrible things have happened in churches throughout history, actually, so I could understand safety being a concern.

But the back-and-forth between Gillcrist and those who made him leave suggests they were more focused on propriety.

Holy Spirit’s pastor, Fr. Justin Hamilton, did not respond to a Friday message asking about what happened.

If Gillcrist’s name sounds familiar, he’s the theology teacher fired from Kansas City’s Rockhurst High School last November after telling his students that it would be their moral duty as Catholics to stand up against mass deportations. So here he is, doing that, or trying to.

‘Brother, you need to leave’ After he started his prayer, a priest approached him at the pulpit: “Come with me. Turn the sound off! Brother, you need to leave.”

And then, after the sounds of a very quick takedown came this: “Stay still. We’re not going to hurt you.”

“You already used violence against me in a church.”

“You’re trespassing.” “Trespassing? I’m a baptized Catholic.” “It’s inappropriate.” “To pray?” “There’s an appropriate time.” “It is the appropriate time.”

“No, you have to listen to your authorities, which is your pastor.”

As Gillcrist was taken out, he raised his voice for the first and only time, “Love your neighbor as yourself! And who is my neighbor?”

When police arrived, an officer asked those who had marched him out, “Did he do anything physical?”

“He pushed our priest off the steps” one answered, “but he didn’t fall or anything.”

A second officer arrived and said, “Is he the one who pushed the priest? Put him in handcuffs.”

“But I didn’t,” Gillcrist insisted.

We’ll figure it out, one of the officers said. And they did, while Gillcrist sat in the back of the patrol car in cuffs.

Video shows the moments before Jimbo Gillcrist was taken down at Holy Spirit Catholic Church. ‘So I see you mention Gaza and Ukraine’ Officers asked Gillcrist some questions as telling as his answers, so I’m just going to let the recording play:

“Why are they saying you pushed a priest?”

“They were trying to pull me away from the pulpit. I grabbed the pulpit and just held on. I didn’t push anyone. They had four guys grabbing me and dragging me off there.”

“What made you want to preach today?” “I’m worried about human beings, our brothers and sisters who live within our midst and are being targeted by the government.”

“What do you consider to be targeted by the government? What class of people are you …”

“Undocumented immigrants.”

“So you don’t agree with deportations and things like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you say anything like that?”

“I didn’t even get there.”

Looking at a copy of Gillcrist’s prepared remarks, the officer said, “So I see you mention Gaza and Ukraine in here. What’s your message with that?”

“They’re our brothers and sisters. When we stop seeing people that way it’s so easy to start making laws or enacting policies that harm them.”

In the end, another officer said he had talked to the pastor and there wouldn’t be any charges for now, but “if you do return here, you will be charged with trespassing.”

So was this a pointless provocation or an important disruption?

I understand those who say church needs to be a refuge from politics. At the same time, I don’t see how you could take Matthew Chapter 25 seriously — “for I was a stranger and you gave me no welcome” — and register no protest right now.

Where is American Oscar Romero?

Jesus spoke a lot about care for the stranger, who is these days being snatched off the street without any due process and used by smiling Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as a prop — with a shaved head and few clothes, looking shamefully for us not unlike a prisoner in Dachau.

If you’re an actress from Canada, maybe things will eventually be made right, but if not, who knows? The danger everyone ought to see is that if you can be picked up and shipped out without any hearing for supporting Palestinians — and without due process, we really don’t know that it’s any more than that — then you can also be sent away for supporting Israel, or Ukraine.

Or Jesus, or even Donald Trump.

Gillcrist belongs to a different, less conservative parish now. But what he was thinking in going to Holy Spirit, he said, is that those in his original faith home may not hear his point of view very often. If he could move even one person who doesn’t like what’s going on a little closer to speaking out about that, he had to try.

Of course, his effort might also have had the opposite effect. He went, too, because he sees the Catholic Church in the U.S. as silent when it should be strong.

“Where is the American Romero?” he asked, referring to Oscar Romero, the sainted Salvadoran archbishop assassinated in 1980 for standing up against a repressive regime.

Gillcrist had just started speaking when he was stopped, so I don’t know that he had the chance to change that one mind, or that he would have even if he’d been allowed to finish.

I do know, however, that many are wondering how to make this country a place where both people and the rule of law matter again. They’re not sure how to stop our slide into autocracy.

I’m not, either, but we do know we have to try and then try some more. Whether or not Gillcrist went about it the right away, I give him credit for looking for different ways to express his straight-from-Jesus dissent.

Because for those of us revulsed by what’s going on, smiling along like we’re still in the “before times” is no longer possible. This story was originally published March 30, 2025 at 8:05 AM.

Article – https://www.miamiherald.com/article303075424.html Church Update – https://spirit.flocknote.com/note/30890986