Speaking in front of TV cameras and about 15 audience members at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Route 50, immigrant advocates said the bills represent the kind of “divisive, partisan politics” that Virginia’s immigrant community has “always feared.”
“Now more than ever we cannot be silent, we have to act,” said Dr. Emma Violand-Sanchez, an Arlington County School Board member and a board member of Northern Virginia Community College. “We have to defeat all these anti-immigrant bills.”
A delegation of parishioners and Remote Area Medical volunteers will be leaving for a two-week trip to Medor, Haiti on Sunday. Together, the group will conduct a medical clinic for the cholera-ravaged town of 40,000. They will also repair roads and build an airstrip to allow air ambulances to deliver critical supplies.
“Medor has no running water, no sewage or trash disposal, impassable roads and inadequate agriculture,” the church said in a press release. “Like the rest of Haiti, the village has been devastated by a succession of hurricanes, earthquakes and now the deadly cholera epidemic this year.”
Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who died at the age of 92 last Monday, was a towering figure in the Senate, even as his health began to deteriorate in recent years. He chaired the powerful Appropriations Committee and has twice served as Senate majority leader. He was derided as the “King of Pork” for his tireless efforts to steer federal funds to his home state of West Virginia. His passionate floor speeches against the Iraq war and in support of the Constitution are the stuff of legends.
Byrd, once a local leader in the Ku Klux Klan, filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His membership in the Baptist church would later prompt him to renounce intolerance and vote for the 1968 Civil Rights Act.
Easter is traditionally a busy time for baptisms and initiations in the Catholic church. Thousands of conversions take place around the beginning of spring, a symbolic sign of Easter blessings, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
There are 428,417 registered Catholics in the Arlington diocese, which encompasses 21 northern Virginia counties.
Arlington County’s effort to build affordable housing on land owned by the First Baptist Church of Clarendon is facing tough opposition from neighbors who claim the development violates the separation of church and state. One resident has even filed a lawsuit — on constitutional grounds — against the church, the county and the Commonwealth of Virginia.
More from the Washington Post.
Arlington’s Catholic churches were busy today as the faithful arrived to receive the traditional smudge of ash on their foreheads. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, and the ashes serve as a sign of repentance.
More from the Arlington Catholic Herald.
