‘Moral Monday’ protesters return to Raleigh quietly, but outspoken

[struggle4progress]

By Anne Blythe
Posted: Monday, May. 19, 2014

RALEIGH Demonstrators trying to raise a ruckus about the North Carolina legislature’s swing to the political right put tape across their mouths and paraded quietly through the statehouse Monday ...

“We’re going to spend some time in deliberate silence,” Barber said, reacting to the new rules that prohibit visitors from being loud enough to disrupt conversations. “You ought to have a little righteous indignation. For you to be able to expose what they’re doing, you’ve got to put tape on your mouth ...

Sen. Floyd B. McKissick Jr., a Democrat from Durham and a lawyer, questioned the constitutionality of the new building rules ...

After 945 arrests, at the series of Monday protests last year, no one was charged Monday night ...

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/05/19/4920043/moral-monday-protesters-return.html

[struggle4progress]

1. As Moral Mondays resume, leaders seek to block NC voter suppression law for upcoming election

... Following speeches by protest leader and N.C. NAACP President Rev. Dr. William Barber and others decrying the extremist policies of the Republican-controlled legislature, the protesters broke pieces of bread from loaves passed through the crowd as part of a love feast, an ancient Christian ritual carried out to symbolize the protesters' moral conviction that there is more than enough to meet everyone's need. Among the policy changes the protesters are calling for are Medicaid expansion, restoration of the state earned income tax credit, a reversal of cuts to unemployment benefits, and restoration of curtailed voting rights ...

The same day Moral Mondays returned to Raleigh, the N.C. NAACP and other plaintiffs in an ongoing lawsuit against a restrictive voting law passed last year (House Bill 589, the Voter Information Verification Act) filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in federal court to block the law from being enforced for this year's election, claiming that it would cause "irreparable harm." Analyses have shown the new law would disproportionately affect women, people of color, the elderly, and the poor ...

Last week, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that North Carolina lawmakers involved in crafting the state's new voting law must turn over some of their correspondence and email messages to the plaintiffs. The legislators, who include Tillis and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, had claimed they were protected by legislative immunity. The N.C. NAACP and other groups involved in the lawsuit over the voting law had sued Gov. Pat McCrory, state legislators, and state election board members for the records.

Also last week, a Superior Court judge in Wake County struck down a law passed last year that eliminated tenure for veteran public schoolteachers, ruling that the law violated the U.S. Constitution's contract clause and amounted to the illegal taking of property under the state constitution. At the final Moral Monday protest held last year in Raleigh, teachers showed up by the thousands in red T-shirts to protest the new tenure law and other legislative attacks on public education ...

http://www.southernstudies.org/2014/05/as-moral-mondays-resume-leaders-seek-to-block-nc-v.html

[struggle4progress]

2. Why We’re Back: Rev Barber on Why Moral Mondays Have Come Back to Raleigh

... Despite the state constitution’s mandate that citizens have the right to “assemble to consult for the common good” and “apply to the General Assembly for redress of grievances,” the General Assembly authorities ordered seventeen of us arrested for violating the vague and unconstitutional building rules. Eventually, tens of thousands joined our protests. By the end of the session, the authorities had jailed 945 protestors on the same shaky charges. The whole nation took notice of our moral stand, and citizens organized similar protests in many other states ...

We have come back to call upon Thom Tillis and his extremist “super-majority” to repent from their attacks on our public schools and our teachers, to repeal the shutdown of the Earned Income Tax Credit for 900,000 lower income families and the fat tax cuts for the rich and to restore North Carolina to its traditional moral values of kindness, decency and fairness. We have come back because our religious traditions and moral reasoning lead us in a different direction, away from the unwise and inhumane policies being pushed by the extremists in the General Assembly ...

Make no mistake about it: this has become the making of something new in the Old North State. We are calling together a coalition of goodwill, a nonviolent volunteer army of love, to oppose this legislature’s heartless, ideologically driven agenda. We call on all people of good will to join us, that we might build the bridges of understanding, not the walls of division. We call on all residents of North Carolina who believe in the common good to pray and partner with us as we use the tools of protest to illuminate for the nation the shameful acts taking place here. We are not alone. We shall speak and we shall act. We will become “the trumpet of conscience” and “the beloved community” that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called upon us to be, echoing the God of our mothers and fathers in the faith. Now is the time. Here is the place. We are the people. And we will be heard.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jonathanwilsonhartgrove/2014/05/why-were-back-rev-barber-on-why-moral-mondays-have-come-back-to-raleigh/

[Supersedeas]

5. thank you for that link too

[struggle4progress]

3. ‘Moral Monday’ protests to return to Raleigh

Katelyn Ferral
9:53 p.m. EDT May 18, 2014

RALEIGH – Last year Terry Van Duyn stood in the halls of the Legislative Building protesting, but now she’ll stand on the Senate floor representing Buncombe County. At her new desk in the back corner of the Senate chamber, she’ll hear the voices of the opposition she helped amplify last year ...

Van Duyn, a Democrat who was appointed following the death of Sen. Martin Nesbitt, was arrested during a protest last summer and due to appear in court this July.

“We disagreed with a lot of legislation, but the pace of it was so fast that we had no opportunity to even contact our legislators about it, it was like we’d find out about it and the next day it would pass,” she said ...

http://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2014/05/18/moral-monday-protests-return-raleigh/9265305/

[struggle4progress]

4. What Went Wrong in North Carolina

05/20/14 01:44 PM—Updated 05/20/14 02:49 PM
By Jeremy Slevin

In 2012, Republican Pat McCrory ran for North Carolina’s governorship as a reformer, vowing to “forget about politics” ... The last Republican Governor – Jim Martin – was elected in 1988 – over two decades earlier ...

But, as Governor McCrory soon learned, you can’t exactly “forget about politics” when you work in the field of politics. In less than two years since he took office, McCrory’s colleagues in the North Carolina legislature have passed the most dramatic array of right-wing legislation in the country. Under McCrory, North Carolina has ended the state’s tax credit for the working poor, made deep cuts to unemployment benefits, and passed a right to carry concealed guns in bars and parks.

It doesn’t end there. The state now has what many believe is the most restrictive voter suppression law in the country. Attacking reproductive rights – something McCrory vowed not to do in office – has become a hallmark of the North Carolina legislature under his watch ...

Things got so extreme that thousands began to attend weekly protests at the state legislature called “Moral Mondays.” So how has the legislature responded? By crushing it. Last Thursday, the state revived the “North Carolina Legislative Services Commission – ” a group that hasn’t met since 1999 – to restrict where protesters can gather in the General Assembly and ban, “singing, clapping, shouting, playing instruments or using sound amplification equipment.”

http://www.msnbc.com/now-alex-wagner/what-went-wrong-north-carolina