Rehumanize Chicago

Sunday, November 10, 2:30-4:30 -- Oppose Oath Keepers in CPD

The Oath Keepers are an insurrectionist terrorist organization which boasts significant law enforcement membership, including CPD. A coalition of concerned groups from around the city will be hosting a panel discussion about this problem, and Rehumanize Chicago will be there to support them.

Join us on Sunday, November 10, at Movement on Montrose (2951 W. Montrose Ave.)! Doors open at 2pm. Event starts at 2:30.

Join us for the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Foundation Fundraiser in December

We have several tickets to give away for the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Foundation's "Making History, Forging a New Future" fundraising event on Tuesday, December 3, from 6pm-9pm at Overflow Coffee at 1449 S. Michigan Ave. It will be nice to have several Consistent Life Ethic friends there to celebrate and support reparations for and education about torture by police in Chicago.

If you're interested in joining us, please send an email to [email protected] or reach out to us on Keybase or through any of our social links listed at the bottom.

Petition President Biden to protect death row inmates before President-elect Trump takes office

We're grateful to live in a state with no death penalty, but we still worry about federal executions. The previous Trump administration carried out a slew of executions in his final days, and on the campaign this year he has openly fantasized about carrying out more.

Our friends at Death Penalty Action are sponsoring a petition to convince President Biden, an opponent of the death penalty, to take several actions to protect those on death row. Sign here to show your opposition to killings in your name.

Some thoughts on the 2024 election

Rehumanize has never and can never endorsed candidates or parties, and nor would we want to do so. We've all known for a long time that neither major party embraces the Consistent Life Ethic.

But this past election was a particularly tough one. The Democratic Party dropped their opposition to the death penalty, and the Republican presidential candidate ran on opposition to banning abortion and on mandating funding for IVF. There is every reason to believe that, from a strictly electoral standpoint, he was wise to do so, as voters in 7 in 10 states passed referenda to protect abortion in their state constitutions, and, on top of all those, Illinois voted completely overwhelmingly in favor of requiring insurance companies cover in vitro fertilization despite the violence of IVF. It's clear that a stunning number of people are happy to embrace racism and xenophobia and misogyny and any number of other forms of dehumanization and legalized violence as long as that violence includes elective abortion. Our friends at the Consistent Life Network would call this the seamless shroud.

So what are we, as consistent lifers, to do about this? As far as I can tell, people are dealing with finding out their policy positions are wildly unpopular in three ways.

We could simply lie.

Lots of people right now who are being confronted with evidence that their policy positions are electorally toxic are dealing with it by lying both to themselves and other people. We could spin all the ballot referenda as "better than expected" or something. We could join the pro-choice movement in pretending Trump ran as an anti-abortion candidate. We could act like the data show Harris would've won if only she'd embraced more progressive policies on immigration or police demilitarization or something.

The data from exit polling and post-election polls is still coming in, and the narratives are still being written, but all these claims range from ridiculous to just untrue. It would feel good to fool ourselves, and maybe we could even fool a few others, but it's not a strategy. It's not a way of changing what the next election will ultimately bring if we don't do something different.

We could abandon our principles.

"Don't blame the voters!" the cry rings out, and, for what it's worth, this at least has the structure of a strategy. At the same time that the Republican Party is giving a full-throated defense of IVF and attacking abortion bans, many Democrats are floating adopting dehumanizing language and policies against LGBT+ people, especially against trans rights, adopting "America First" immigration policies, or disavowing the progress women have made against sexual violence in the #MeToo movement.

On top of being morally odious, these tactics carry more risks than many advocates admit--our opponents are likely to paint us with the most extreme versions of all our positions whether we adhere to them or not, and it's always a gamble whether any given message will actually break through.

This is a fool's game. It's both extremely uncertain and far too costly to us and to the ones we hold dear.

We could just keep doing our jobs.

In the post-election madness, we all seem to have forgotten some pretty fundamental facts.

• Voters (and people who choose not to vote) are moral agents who make choices, not an immutable force of nature.
• Most of us do not run national or statewide electoral campaigns. People who do this for a living aren't going to take our advice on how to win elections, and if we're not political scientists or data analysts, they probably shouldn't.
• Activism is an ongoing process into which one quadrennial Tuesday is mostly a minor interruption.

Monday-morning quarterbacking campaigns is dull and mostly useless. It's a way for spectators to pass the time. We're not spectators. We're activists, and we're going to keep doing all the things we do whether or not it's an election year. We continue to work to persuade people that our worth is not based on circumstance but on our shared humanity

• by keeping people informed about consistent life issues and goings-on in the Chicago metropolitan area.
• by pressuring elected officials every year and in all seasons to recognize and protect our human rights.
• by connecting with consistent life ethic organizations around the city and in the region.
• by boosting the good work of other human rights organizations and helping them wherever we agree.
• by living our lives nonviolently.

And if we do that work every day for four years solid, maybe the next quadrennial election won't go quite as badly as this one. Or maybe it will, but either way it won't feel as bad because we'll look back on our own accomplishments and know we don't depend solely on elections for change.

And thank you for voting, anyway.

I don't want to drop the subject without saying: thank you to everyone who found some way to make yourself known on (or before) election day. There aren't many of us, but that only makes it more important, not less important, that the few of us there are be counted.

As a gesture of my gratitude, I promise not to write long and dull opinions like this very often. ☺️

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