Former Civil Rights Chair Mary Frances Berry says Obama needs new gay and human rights Commission

[Laughing Mirror]

From her op-ed today in NY Times:

To help resolve the issue of gay rights, President-elect Obama should abolish the now moribund Commission on Civil Rights and replace it with a new commission that would address the rights of many groups, including gays.

....

In the 1950s, race relations in America generated escalating tension and strife. As Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told President Dwight Eisenhower, other nations vilified us for our treatment of “negroes” as less-than-first-class citizens. It was in this context that Congress, in 1957, granted Eisenhower’s request for an independent civil rights commission to “put the facts on top of the table.”

...

There is no need to analogize the battle for the rights of gay and lesbian people to the struggle of African Americans to overcome slavery, Jim Crow and continued discrimination. But as Coretta Scott King said to me as she tried to imagine what position the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would take on “don’t ask, don’t tell”: “What’s the yardstick by which we should decide that gay rights are less important than other human rights we care about?”

The Commission on Civil Rights has been crippled since the Reagan years by the appointments of commissioners who see themselves as agents of the presidential administration rather than as independent watchdogs. The creation of a new, independent human and civil rights commission could help us determine our next steps in the pursuit of freedom and justice in our society. A number of explosive issues like immigration reform await such a commission, but recommendations for resolving the controversies over the rights of gays, lesbians and transgendered people should be its first order of business.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/opinion/16mfberry.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Mary Frances Berry, remember, is the person the Bush administration had removed from the Commission on Civil Rights in 2004. You can see why.

This is important, coming from someone in her position.

[Jamastiene]

1. She was also very active in 2000 when so many nonfelons were

not allowed to vote in Florida simply because their names were similar.

Her voice means a lot when it comes to civil rights.

[AntiFascist]

2. K&R, this is the really meaningful type of action Obama could be taking n/t