#nondiscrimination

When you can see your partner as not separate from you, not better or worse or even equal to you, then you have the wisdom of nondiscrimination. We see the happiness of others as our happiness. Their suffering is our suffering.

Look into your hand. The fingers are like five brothers and sisters from the same family. Suppose we are a family of five. If you remember that if one person suffers, you all suffer, you have the wisdom of nondiscrimination. If the other person is happy, you are also happy. Happiness is not an individual matter.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

Syracuse University denied an application for Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) to become a Registered Student Organization (RSO), stating, as one of its reasons for doing so, that requiring students to believe in the U.S. Constitution is “exclusionary to international students.”

Some people are wondering why this is a big deal, why not just go somewhere else to make your purchase. “It’s just a cake.” If the bigots believed it was "just a cake" they wouldn't have taken it all the way to the Supreme Court. They know just as well as we do what this is about.

A look at history shows denying services to others is a way to oppress them. Queer people, people of color, religious minorities, and disabled people have all not been welcome to enter the front door, sit at the counter, order a meal, and eat in peace. This is an attempt to use discrimination to humiliate them, deny their dignity and reject their worth. It’s a way to keep people out of jobs, homes, and public life, to silence and dismiss them.

51% of #LGBT adults live in states with hostile laws and little legal protection for #trans people

To The Editor:

More than four hundred people have joined the hunger strike in the NWDC in Tacoma that started Monday. What are they demanding? Edible food, access to medical care, expedited immigration hearings, and pay of more than $1 per day of labor. These demands are not only utterly reasonable, it is horrifying that they are not already standard practice and that people detained in the NWDC have to take such extreme measures to demand basic rights and necessities.

This is not the first time the NWDC has drawn attention for it’s questionable practices. Last fall, we heard about the detention of a man who was adopted from Korea as a toddler and lived in the U.S. his entire life, simply because his adoptive parents didn’t fill out the proper forms. He was torn away from his wife and kids and locked up in the NWDC to be deported to a country he knew nothing about.

It seems clear that our current system of detaining undocumented people is a gross violation of human rights. And yet the Trump administration is asking for billions of additional tax dollars to implement mass detentions and deportations of undocumented people. What about America being “the land of the free,” “the land of opportunity?” Are these values we care about at all as a nation or are they just intended as cute catch phrases? Sen. Patty Murray, Sen. Maria Cantwell, and Rep. Dave Reichert should reject this unreasonable request.

But this is a bare minimum. These injustices have been going on for much longer than the current administration has been in power, and simply preventing them from getting worse doesn’t make them better. There should be an immediate investigation into the shady practices of the NWDC, and for long term solutions to this crises we must work towards comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for undocumented Americans.