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![\"Activist](\"\/home\/graphics\/activist_beat.JPG\")
The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents. <\/em><\/p>\nTwo very different religious groups are taking their messages directly to the people.<\/p>\n
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops recently started a two-week crusade, claiming religious liberty is under assault. These are the same men who get a national platform on a regular basis to air their views on the healthcare bill, abortion, birth control. It\u2019s amazing to watch them spew nonsense about religious liberty while children continue to suffer from abuse<\/a> in the Church.<\/p>\n
And then there are the Catholic nuns, also referred to as radical feminists by the Vatican. They\u2019re on the road standing up for economic justice and equality. <\/p>\n
More specifically, they are speaking out against Republican Representative Paul Ryan\u2019s budget, which would raise taxes on 18 million low-income families while cutting taxes for millionaires and corporations. It would also push two million children into poverty and kick eight million people off of food stamps.<\/p>\n
They kicked off their Nuns on a Bus<\/a> tour two weeks ago in Des Moines, Iowa. Since then, they\u2019ve visited shelters, food pantries, community centers, and congressional offices in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. They\u2019re also planning to visit Maryland and Virginia. They\u2019ll end their tour in Washington DC on Monday. <\/p>\n
Last Wednesday, the Nuns on the Bus arrived in Congressman Paul Ryan\u2019s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, where Sister Simone Campbell told a crowd of supporters that it\u2019s wrong to give tax cuts to the rich and $8B more to the military. <\/p>\n
She also went after politicians who claim that churches can take care of the hungry. She said that the cuts that have been passed by the House would require every house of worship in the United States to each raise $50,000 a year for the next 10 years. <\/p>\n
Representative Ryan\u2019s staff met with the nuns, but he was in Washington. <\/p>\n
Sister Campbell is the executive director of NETWORK, the organization sponsoring the bus tour. They\u2019re a progressive national Catholic social justice lobby. <\/p>\n
We rarely hear from nuns working for social justice in this country. The only religious people we hear from in the national media are the extremists. Progressive religious groups, of which there are many, are rarely, if ever, given a voice and they deserve to be heard. <\/p>\n
In April, the Vatican praised the Leadership Conference of Women Religious for \u201cpromoting social justice\u201d but slammed them for promoting \u201cradical feminist themes\u201d and their silence on abortion and gay marriage. This a group of 57,000 nuns, and the Vatican wonders why it\u2019s losing support around the world? <\/p>\n
The bus tour is getting extensive coverage in the local press, but not much in the national press, the same press that sent multiple reporters to cover Tea Party protests. Kudos to Bill Moyers for sending his producer Andy Fredericks on the road with the nuns to provide regular updates<\/a>. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s heartening to read so many positive comments on the local stories. We\u2019re often led to believe that small town America wholeheartedly embraces the Republican\u2019s radical agenda, but that\u2019s clearly not true. <\/p>\n
In Janesville, Wisconsin, Sister Campbell said, “The truth is we have to speak up for the people who are suffering in our society. That’s our mission. That’s our goal.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m Rose Aguilar for Uprising. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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