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If crazy ol’ Keith Olbermann was still hosting is MSNBC news and commentary show these days, you can bet that former Arkansas Governor-turned-semi-permanent-Presidential-candidate Mike Huckabee would be a strong contender for the today’s “Worst Person in the World” award.

As Associated Press reported yesterday via WRAL.com:

“Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Sunday said being gay is akin to choosing to drink alcohol or use profanity — lifestyle choices he says are appealing to others but not to him.

The former Baptist pastor, who is weighing a second run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, also claimed that forcing people of faith to accept gay marriage as policy is on par with telling Jews that they must serve ‘bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.’ That dish would run afoul of kosher rules in the same way Huckabee sees asking Christians to accept same-sex marriages.”

Sadly, this kind of hateful and ignorant talk appears to be exactly what some on the far right are looking for. Witness the latest glowing Huckabee reviews from the “nonpartisan” Pope-Civitas Institute, which brought Huckabee to speak at a church in Charlotte last week (with a fee for admission, with those who paid more getting better seats) and then posted a pair of glowing reviews of the man and his likely candidacy (here and here) on its blog.

The bottom line: We’ve come a long way fast in recent years when it comes to overcoming fear, ignorance and discrimination in this country, but if Mike Huckabee and his ilk were to have their way, that progress would come to a screeching halt.
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MP-Tobacco

Members of British parliament tour an NC tobacco field

How bad is the situation for farmworkers in North Carolina these days? This ridiculously bad: A member of the British parliament gave a speech yesterday in the House of Commons in which he spoke about his fact-finding mission here and likened what he found to “modern slavery.”

It’s hard to know what’s worse: that we’re rightfully being treated as some kind of third world country or that it takes someone from Great Britain to do the job being ignored by our own leaders.

This is from the good people at the Farm Labor Organizing Committee:

MP POINTS TO ABUSES IN NORTH CAROLINA TOBACCO FIELDS DURING HOUSE OF COMMONS DEBATE AS A MODERN SLAVERY RISK

December 16, 2014 – In an Adjournment Debate in the House of Commons this morning on human rights abuses in UK company supply chains, Ian Lavery, MP from Wansbeck, spoke to the conditions he found on a fact finding visit to the tobacco fields of North Carolina in July of this year as a “modern slavery risk.” The debate was in support of the Modern Slavery Bill, which would investigate and monitor modern slavery risks in UK company supply chains, is presently going through Parliament.

British American Tobacco, based in London, is a major customer and largest owner of Reynolds American Inc., which contracts with North Carolina tobacco growers.

Lavery said “the working conditions that we saw were absolutely atrocious, with unbelievably long hours of manual labour in unbearable heat; squalid living conditions, which mean workers have a lower quality of life than inmates in UK prisons; and employers showing a total disregard for basic health and safety regulations … which meant that many of them develop green tobacco sickness, an affliction with symptoms including nausea, intense headaches, vomiting and insomnia.” Read More

Commentary
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When my family first started attending Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh several years ago, there was a little boy who was about the same age as our youngest daughter. His name was Max and he had a younger sister named Erin. The kids stood out a little because both Max and Erin were African-American and their two dads, Nathan and Dave, were white. I learned at the time from a close friend who knew the family well that the two kids had been adopted out of extremely rough, impoverished circumstances. The term “crack baby” was used.

By all appearances, though, the kids seemed pretty doggone normal and the parents were clearly loving and attentive. I have a vivid memory of one of the dads holding a wriggling Erin, dressed in her finest holiday dress, as Max portrayed one of the animals in the children’s Christmas play.

As the years went on and Max and his family moved away, I heard occasionally through my friend that they were doing well (Max had actually been admitted to West Point!) and took it as a remarkable testament to the power of love to overcome some of the worst things that society has to dish out — namely the grinding poverty from which the kids were rescued and the absurd and hateful discrimination that I knew the family still found itself subjected to regularly.

And then last night, my Pullen friend passed along this amazing story from writer S.L. Price of Sports Illustrated that fills in a lot of the details I had missed in recent years. Unless you are one of the shrinking number of troubled souls still clinging to a closed heart and mind on the question of LGBT equality, I promise you will be unable to read it or watch the accompanying video without feeling a lump in your throat. Indeed, it may happen even if you are — I sure hope so.

News
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UnknownAt a meeting held yesterday, two members of the British Parliament, Ian Lavery and James Sheridan, released their fact-finding report about the conditions of farmworkers working in North Carolina tobacco fields.

The report, A Smokescreen for Slavery: Human Rights Abuses in UK Supply Chain, exposes a horrific list of human rights violations including child labor by children as young as seven, substandard housing with no ventilation and bug infested mattresses, and exploitation of workers by having them work inhumane hours for very little pay. Other areas of concern identified by the report include a lack of access to clean drinking water for workers and a lack of protective clothing to prevent infection from pesticides and even from the tobacco plant itself. The report also explains that some of the inhumane living and working conditions are permitted by lax labor standards. For example, under North Carolina law, it is legal for thirty men to share two toilets with no dividers. Read More

Commentary
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Gay marriage 2So, if the “religious beliefs” of a public official (like, for instance, a register of deeds) cause him or her one to oppose interracial marriage or, say, marriage between heterosexuals who are incapable of procreation, should that public official have the right to decline to issue marriage licenses to such couples?

According to the ironically-named North Carolina Values Coalition, the answer to that question is, by all appearances, “yes.” How else to explain the group’s efforts late last week to “inform” public officials throughout the state that they are free to decline to issue licenses to same-sex couples if to do so would violate “their conscience”?

Happily, the good people at Equality NC are speaking up to refute this nonsensical propaganda. This is from a release the group distributed late last Friday: Read More

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