Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Clergy decry new voting laws
Faith leaders rallying at capitols, threatening boycotts
In Georgia, faith leaders are asking corporate executives to condemn laws restricting voting access — or face a boycott. In Arizona and Texas, clergy have assembled outside the state capitols to decry what they view as voter-suppression measures targeting Black and Hispanic people.
Similar initiatives have been undertaken in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and elsewhere as many faith leaders perceive a threat to voting rights that warrants their intervention in a volatile political issue.
“It is very much in a part of our tradition, as Christians, to be engaged in the public square,” said the Rev. Eric Ledermann, pastor at University Presbyterian Church in Tempe, Arizona, after the event outside the Statehouse.
“When people say, ‘Let’s not get political in the church’ — Jesus was very political,” Ledermann said. “He was engaged in how his culture, his community was being shaped and who was being left out of the decision-making process.”
Georgia already has enacted legislation with various restrictive voting provisions. More than 350 voting bills are now under consideration in dozens of other states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy think tank. Among the proposals: tightening requirements for voter IDs, reducing the number of ballot drop boxes and curtailing early voting.
African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Reginald Jackson, who oversees African Methodist Episcopal churches in Georgia, has been urging corporate leaders to do more to fight voting restrictions. So far, he’s dissatisfied with the response, and says he may call for boycotts of some companies.
Rabbi David Segal, Texas organizer for the Religious Action Center for Judaism Reform, said such efforts in Georgia is helping Texas organize.
“The backlash against Georgia passing legislation is actually helping us in Texas,” he said, “because we’re able to point to that and organize the anger around those laws to try and stop it here. … People of faith stand for inclusion and stand for respect and stand for acceptance and a different kind of justice.”
In numerous states, voting rights activism is being led by multifaith coalitions that include Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups.
Rabbi Lydia Medwin of The Temple in Atlanta touched upon history to explain why she is involved.
“The Jewish community has responded to the call of our African American brothers and sisters since the Civil Rights era began,” Medwin said. “When our partners and people that we care deeply about say to us, ‘We’re hurting, we’re being treated unfairly,’ we have no other response but to step up.”
The Rev. Dr. Cassandra Gould, executive director of Missouri Faith Voices, said she has gotten involved because voting rights is “very personal” to her.
“I’m from Alabama, a little town called Demopolis,” she said. “It’s 47 miles west of Selma, where my mother fought for rights, went to jail on Bloody Sunday [in 1965]. … So those are the stories that I grew up with. I never imagined that I would still be fighting the same fight.”
Gould continued: “There is a playbook to suppress votes, to shrink the electorate. And we believe fundamentally, as a tenet of faith, that it should be expanded so that people are included, not excluded.”