Post by addisona on Jun 4, 2022 8:38:43 GMT
L. Rex Sears: Utah’s Sen. Lincoln Fillmore doesn’t live up to his anti-slavery presidents’ names
An open letter to Utah state Sen. Lincoln Fillmore:
We’re coming up on Juneteenth, which HB238 made a Utah holiday this year. It commemorates the Union army bringing to enslaved Americans, in the last holdout of the Confederacy, the deliverance promised two years earlier by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Whatever our other divisions, this is something for all Americans to celebrate.
You share the names of two antislavery presidents, Lincoln and Millard Fillmore. But you’re one of only five state senators who did not vote for the Juneteenth holiday. You didn’t vote against it — no senators did — but you’re one of the few identified as “absent or not voting,” either for it or not. Maybe you just missed that vote.
I’m writing you because last year, you sponsored SR901, the Senate Resolution on critical race theory (CRT) in Public Education. Whatever your non-vote on the Juneteenth bill says about your personal views, most of your colleagues, at least, see no conflict between that bill (now law) and your CRT resolution: 16 state senators who voted for your SR901 also voted for HB238.
I think I understand how your colleagues reconcile suppressing CRT with celebrating slavery’s ending. But I disagree, for reasons I can most easily explain by quoting Lincoln.
www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2022/06/02/l-rex-sears-utahs/
An open letter to Utah state Sen. Lincoln Fillmore:
We’re coming up on Juneteenth, which HB238 made a Utah holiday this year. It commemorates the Union army bringing to enslaved Americans, in the last holdout of the Confederacy, the deliverance promised two years earlier by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Whatever our other divisions, this is something for all Americans to celebrate.
You share the names of two antislavery presidents, Lincoln and Millard Fillmore. But you’re one of only five state senators who did not vote for the Juneteenth holiday. You didn’t vote against it — no senators did — but you’re one of the few identified as “absent or not voting,” either for it or not. Maybe you just missed that vote.
I’m writing you because last year, you sponsored SR901, the Senate Resolution on critical race theory (CRT) in Public Education. Whatever your non-vote on the Juneteenth bill says about your personal views, most of your colleagues, at least, see no conflict between that bill (now law) and your CRT resolution: 16 state senators who voted for your SR901 also voted for HB238.
I think I understand how your colleagues reconcile suppressing CRT with celebrating slavery’s ending. But I disagree, for reasons I can most easily explain by quoting Lincoln.
www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2022/06/02/l-rex-sears-utahs/