Week Three of 30 Days of Love focuses on Healing :: Decriminalization
In this week’s reflection, Side With Love Field and Programs Director Nicole Pressley writes:
Cornell West famously reminds us that justice is what love looks like in public. As Unitarian Universalists, our work for justice is an expression of deep belief that all people are worthy of love and liberation. Today, that work often looks like resisting the criminalization of people’s identities, their bodies, and their communities.
In recent years, this has looked like Unitarian Universalists supporting people seeking, aiding, and performing abortions in Texas, Kansas, Michigan and Kentucky when abortion has been criminalized. We’ve raised money to bail out Black mothers and Water Protectors. We’ve supported ballot initiatives to decriminalize marijuana in Oregon and Colorado, and paid off fines so returning citizens can vote in Florida.
As a strategy, decriminalization sets us on course to heal, to be held accountable, and to be fully human with one another. Decriminalization cultivates the conditions for wider and deeper transformation.
Decriminalization is a crucial response to the horrors of the prison industrial complex – the web of forces including the legal system, policing and law enforcement, and mass incarceration whose main goal is the oppression of many for the benefit of a few. Increasingly, our laws make it a crime to be fully human – to be homeless, to seek and provide healthcare, to ask for asylum or to migrate, to be Black or brown, to honor our children’s evolving genders, to teach the real history of this nation. In the US, the criminal-legal systems collude to diminish the power and autonomy of the body politic, whether by disenfranchising entire communities through mass incarceration and voter suppression, or literally wiping people out of existence through both death sentences and extra-judicial killing.
But decriminalization isn’t only about policy wins; it is about the victory of literally being with our people once again.
The theme of our third week of 30 Days of Love explores the intersection of Healing and Decriminalization. We have moving offerings that we hope will educate, inspire, and refuel you as you explore what it means to heal communities and families. We have a prayer from Rev. Jason Lydon, a blessing by Rev. Kierstin Homblette Allen, a body practice from Rev. Sky Williams-Tao, a grounding meditation from Side With Love Fun and Nourishment Squad Member Lora Powell-Haney, as well as a Time for All Ages story by Erica Shadowsong. Find all of these here.