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the
“The basic philosophy of westward expansion has been, ‘look, there’s an unspoiled area –let’s go spoil it.’”
A REGION RECKONS WITH DECADES OF UNCHECKED GROWTH.
by kyle dunphey
by mya jaradat
HOME RANGE
MEET
COWBOYS
ivan m c clellan
by meg walter
ethan bauer
“There’s pain and difficulty in bringing a story into creation that torments me. To think that a
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Deseret Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 22, ISSN PP324, is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in January/February and July/August.
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ALL FENCED IN
Ever since Meriwether Lewis and William Clark brought back tales from their eponymous expedition to the Pacific Ocean, the West has captivated the American mind and shaped how Americans see themselves — and perhaps even more, how the rest of the world sees Americans. Boots and cowboy hats. Pickup trucks and solitary highways. The rugged individualist making his way through wide-open spaces to build something new. Fed by books and movies and the belief in opportunity, the West is a vessel for America’s dreams about itself.
That image has shaped this land at least as much as reality, but it is largely a myth — a vision of limitless possibilities and endless resources. “The basic philosophy of westward expansion has been, ‘Look, there’s an unspoiled area – let’s go spoil it,’” Dan McCool, professor emeritus at the University of Utah, told staff writer Kyle Dunphey for this month’s cover package, “State of the West.” “It’s uncrowded — so let’s make it crowded. It’s clean — well, let’s go make it dirty. There’s no traffic — let’s increase the traffic.”
The West is America’s fastest-growing region and its economy is booming. But it’s no longer what it appeared to be when my ancestor William Hyde arrived in Salt Lake City in 1849, or even the 1940s, when William’s great-grandsons sang “Home on the Range” and “Don’t Fence Me In.” The fences were all built long ago; the outer limits of this land defined, demarcated, parceled and zoned. Now the questions are more about preservation than expansion, about water and air, a sort of reckoning with a century and a half of unchecked development.
For this issue, we set out to explore the region we call home,
how it is changing, and the future we face. An exclusive poll for Deseret Magazine conducted by Harris X revealed a seismic shift in public opinion. As Dunphey writes, “for decades, policymakers and business leaders have pushed a no-brakes growth mentality, but residents are beginning to question that philosophy.” Only one-third of respondents across the West approve of how their elected officials are managing population growth. About 60 percent think their state’s economic trends are harming residents. More results from this poll can be found on page 30 and online at Deseret.com.
At the same time, some would argue the West has never been more dynamic and diverse. There are reasons to be excited about what comes next, including a few strong leaders you might not have read about, whose work outside the spotlight is shaping the future of this region. Meg Walter goes behind the scenes with Utah’s first lady, Abby Cox, whose compassionate brand of politics could offer conservatives a new way forward (page 44). Mya Jaradat introduces us to Aden Batar, a Somali refugee who is redefining what it means to be a citizen of the new West (page 38); and Ethan Bauer takes us to the Navajo Nation to meet Buu Nygren, the nation’s youngest-ever president (page 52).
The new West can feel daunting to folks who grew up here, and the old West may have never existed quite like we remember it. Both myths play out on a complex terrain that doesn’t give up its best secrets easily. I happen to think that’s a good thing — a little mystery never hurt anybody, and that’s half the reason the West is still where America goes to dream.
Galicza is a fellow for Deseret Magazine whose work has been published in the Miami Herald, Pulitzer Center, Flamingo Magazine and Miami New Times. A Florida native, her journalism has won state, regional and national recognition, including a Hearst Award while at the University of Florida. Her piece about artificial intelligence creating fine art is on page 76.
McClellan is a photojournalist and designer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, i-D Magazine, Black Enterprise, Elle and The Moth — among others. With several national exhibitions, McClellan was awarded The 30: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2022. His photography on Black cowboys in the West appears on page 58.
Mangual is head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, as well as a member of the Council on Criminal Justice. He is a contributing editor of City Journal and has authored several books. An excerpt from his latest book “Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most,” is on page 70.
Robbins, an emeritus General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is chairman of the church’s JustServe Steering Committee and an adviser of the Welfare and Self-Reliance Services Department. Before his full-time church service, Robbins was a co-founder and senior vice president of Franklin Quest. His commentary on the lost art of civic virtue is on page 13.
Walter is a features writer and editor for the Deseret News. Prior to joining the Deseret News, she was executive editor of the online storytelling website The Beehive and marketing director for the online tech and startup community hub Silicon Slopes. A lifelong Utahn, her profile of Utah’s first lady Abby Cox is on page 44.
Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He is a former executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution and vice president at the Cato Institute. His essay on politics polluting appointments to the Supreme Court is on page 66.
LYNN G. ROBBINS
ILYA SHAPIRO
MEG WALTER
IVAN M C CLELLAN
NATALIA GALICZA
RAPHAEL A. MANGUAL
FOR DECEMBER’S “Good Works Issue,” sharon eubank, head of humanitarian initiatives for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and former first counselor in the church’s Relief Society general presidency, wrote about the powerful force of charitable giving (“Not Everything is Lost”). Eubank noted, “Study after study shows that positive giving in any measure with any currency lifts us personally and lifts our society as a whole.” Many readers agreed, including Paul Greenwood who shared the story and tweeted, “Once I gave a brand new pair of tennis shoes off my feet to a homeless guy; he smiled and put them on his bare feet. My heart softened towards my neighbor as it always does when I share.”
OUR READERS RESPOND
STAFF WRITER mya jaradat reported on the 988 mental health crisis line and who answers that call in our darkest moments (“End of the line”). With a 45 percent increase in overall volume of calls, texts and chats, the need for accessible mental health care is evident. Jaradat notes, “the weight of the work is a delicate thing to balance. But, it’s scientifically proven to be lifesaving for many who call.”
aaron sherinian, senior vice president of global reach for Desert Management Corp., and alumni of the State Department, tweeted the story to his 21k followers, “a look at #988 and the complexities of care in the times of crisis, this is a key story for our time.”
AUTHOR AND documentary producer william doyle conveyed the unlikely story of how the oddest couple of American politics saved religious liberty (“Brothers in Arms”). In the excerpt from his biography of the late Sen. Orrin Hatch, Doyle detailed the evolving relationship of Hatch and Sen. Ted Kennedy. Hatch admitted
one of the reasons he ran for the Senate was to fight Kennedy. Yet, the two were willing to compromise and work together for the betterment of the country. Reader rich barton, assistant director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, tweeted, “It’s sad that more politicians can’t set aside differences for the greater good as these two did.”
ALEXANDRA RAIN wrote about finding solace in the life she lost (“The Prodigal Mother”). A personal account on the impact of addiction, Rain discerned, “This story is about my experience, as I remember it. But it’s also just one
example among millions.” bill white, former board chair of Recovery Communities United, remarked the piece was eloquent and powerful, adding, “It poignantly captured the heartache and struggling hopes of living with an addicted parent.” The Texas District and County Attorneys Association tweeted the story, reflecting, “This emotionally raw, beautifully written snapshot of life as the child of a meth addict is a good reminder of how the negative impacts of drug abuse and addiction ripple through families and communities.”
IN OUR Last Word, staff writer lois collins talked to clinical psychologist Lisa Miller about the science behind spirituality as an antidepressant (“Finding the Light”) Miller states, “Despair and disorientation is the trailhead for spiritual awakening and we have the opportunity of a lifetime right now to help adolescents awaken their natural spirituality.” Reader brian chambers tweeted, “Insightful article on the importance of spirituality.”
NATURE’S LUNGS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHEN DUPONT
from “Are We Dead Yet?”, an ongoing series of works centered around our planet’s climate crisis focused on recent disasters and events in the photographer’s home country, Australia, including one of the worst droughts in living memory, catastrophic bush fires and the destruction of native forests.
IMAGE COURTESY OF VITAL IMPACTS
THE LOST ART OF CIVIC VIRTUE
THE FOUNDING FATHERS LIVED BY IT
BY LYNN G. ROBBINS
George Washington was the most heroic figure in our nation’s founding and the foremost of the Founding Fathers. As great as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others were, it was the “Father of Our Country” who led the way — not only as the commander in chief of the Continental Army, and as president of the Philadelphia or Constitutional Convention — but as an exemplary gentleman and a champion of civility. He was a leader and hero in every sense of the word — a giant among men.
Washington lived his life by a set of principles, which he first came across at the age of 16 in the 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” a book which originated from a French etiquette manual written by Jesuits in 1595.
Below are a few of the 110 rules of civility that helped shape Washington’s character and public manner and earn him the love and admiration of generations.
1. Every action done in company, ought to be with some sign of respect, to those that are present.
19. Let your countenance be pleasant but in serious matters somewhat grave.
22. Show not yourself glad at the misfortune of another though he were your enemy.
58. Let your conversation be without malice or envy.
89. Speak not evil of the absent for it is unjust.
It is unsettling that Washington’s “Rules of Civility” have become a lost art in the public square, replaced by cynicism and a contagion of vicious incivility. Will our country survive the moral pandemic witnessed in modern-day politics, news outlets and social media?
Our country desperately needs leaders like Washington, whose example of civility helped overcome the political divisiveness of his day to unite the 13 colonies.
As a rule, most people are civil and kind — most of the time. The test of a truly great man or woman is how they act under pressure in a crisis
and in stressful situations. The great 20th century author C.S. Lewis shares this wise insight on “rats in the cellar”:
“When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected: I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself. … On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: It only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man: It only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.”
Because none of us are perfect, we each have “rats in the cellar.” It is painful for each of us to reflect on this quote attributed to the actor and comedian Groucho Marx, “If you speak when angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.”
For our public servants, and for each of us, it would be wise to “consider your ways” and behavior to see how far we may have strayed from the example of the Founding Fathers.
Like Washington, Franklin desired to pattern his life based upon a set of principles he believed would make him a better man and public servant.
In 1726, at age 20, Franklin had identified his “Plan of Conduct.” Two of the principles of civility he wanted to live by were:
“To endeavour to speak truth in every instance; to give nobody expectations that are not likely to be answered, but aim at sincerity in every word and action — the most amiable excellence in a rational being.
I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and upon proper occasions speak all the good I know of everybody.”
As we consider civility in our public discourse, consider these additional quotes by two more of the other founders:
James Madison: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”
Samuel Adams: “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.”
These insights of the founders are not only wise advice to maintain the stability of our country, but a warning that we cannot remain strong in the absence of virtue, morality and civility. It is imperative that we return to our roots of civility. The founders would never have reached a compromise in the Constitutional Convention without them, and neither can we survive going forward without them.
LYNN G. ROBBINS IS AN EMERITUS GENERAL AUTHORITY SEVENTY FOR THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS.
HOW THE WEST WAS WON REINVENTED
BY MARC NIELSEN
The Intermountain West is booming. From Phoenix to Boise and Denver, descendants of pioneers and Indigenous peoples are seeing their homeland take on new forms. Cranes tower above skyscrapers and apartment buildings. Burgeoning subdivisions stretch the seams of smaller towns on the outskirts. It’s easy to blame California and the tech industry, but what does all this change really look like? Here’s the Breakdown.
THE BOOM
Utah is America’s fastest-growing state, per the 2020 census, with 22.8 percent growth in adult population over 2010. Idaho, Colorado and Nevada round out the top five (along with Texas), while Arizona ranks eighth at 16.4 percent. Overall, the U.S. grew by just 10.1 percent in that same period.
MEGAS’
Even before the latest wave of growth, as much as 90 percent of the population in Utah, Arizona and Nevada lived in urban areas, per the U.S. Census Bureau.
A 2016 Brookings report coined the term “Mountain Megas” for large metropolitan areas like Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver and Albuquerque, characterized by their relative isolation from each other between large stretches of rural land — unlike their often clustered counterparts on the coasts.
“Rural gentrifiers can be seen as, in effect, ‘permanent tourists.’” — J. Dwight Hines, a cultural anthropologist and professor of literary arts and social justice studies at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Even in rural areas, growth has been uneven. A pair of BYU professors have found that “New West” counties, largely characterized by outdoor recreation, have grown both economically and demographically, with new arrivals earning 6 percent higher per-capita income than locals and 21 percent higher than outgoing migrants. But “Old West” counties, built around farming and mining, have lost both population and buying power. These contrasts underscore political conflicts — like choosing between extractive land use and preserving natural beauty.
The region is experiencing massive growth in its Hispanic population, echoing a nationwide trend toward increased diversity. According to a Brookings census analysis, this trend reaches beyond the “megas” to smaller but growing communities. From 2010 to 2020, the number of Hispanics grew by 39.6 percent in Idaho Falls, 38.7 percent in Colorado Springs, and a whopping 51.9 percent in St. George, Utah. One likely driver is booming construction, an industry where 30 percent of workers are Hispanic, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
GROWING DIVERSITY
Asian Americans are America’s fastest-growing racial group, increasing 35.6 percent from 2010 to 2020. While they remain largely concentrated in a few large coastal cities, “megas” like Boise, Denver and Las Vegas have seen more than 40 percent growth; that number exceeding 50 percent in Phoenix and Salt Lake City. This group’s raw numbers may be smaller, but they still enrich an increasingly diverse population.
Asian American population growth from 2010-2020:
35.6% United States
40%+ Boise, Denver, Las Vegas
50%+ Phoenix, Salt Lake City
OK, BLAME CALIFORNIA
As of 2018, Utah was not among the top 10 destinations for those fleeing the Golden State, but California was already the top source of in-migrants to Utah at 16.6 percent, according to the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. That was before the COVID-19 pandemic sparked the rise of remote work, freeing many workers to live wherever they can find Wi-Fi — the state’s natural beauty is a popular draw — and an influx of tech companies to the “Silicon Slopes.” About half the people who move to Utah come from elsewhere in the West.
THE WATER PROBLEM
The region has always been a harsh environment for people, but some worry that this latest growth is pushing the limit of its resources. According to a joint study from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (a Massachusetts think tank) and the Sonoran Institute (a conservation nonprofit based in Tucson), demand has already outstripped the supply of water in the Colorado River system. About 75 percent goes to agriculture, but it’s the increase in municipal and industrial users that has driven demand over the edge.
A NEW SWING REGION?
Growth and new voting patterns could lend the Intermountain West more political power. Not only has the region gained 14 seats in the U.S. House since 1980, but challenges to its conservative tradition could — perhaps surprisingly — make it more influential in national elections, which have become increasingly focused on swing states. That has long cast a spotlight on the Midwest, but recent cycles have seen Colorado, Nevada and Arizona join their ranks. The latter proved crucial in the last presidential election, choosing a Democrat for the first time since 1996.
“Overall, rather than allout change, the western United States has and is likely to continue experiencing a layering — a keeping of the old while adding the new.” — Donna Lybecker, political science chair at Idaho State University, in “The Environmental Politics and Policy of Western Public Lands,” published by Oregon State University.
REIMAGINING IMMIGRATION
BEHIND
THE
HEADLINES, LEADERS ON BOTH SIDES FIND PATHS FOR WELCOMING IMMIGRANTS
IMMIGRATION is always a hot-button political issue, with a constant flow of migrants and refugees crossing the 1,952-mile southern border. But even amid ongoing battles over policies like Title 42 — which prevents asylum-seekers from entering the United States before their cases are resolved — leaders from both political parties are weighing reforms, acknowledging the role these newcomers play in the economy. In 2021, for example, House Democrats passed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act with some GOP support — and compromise. Meanwhile, some thinkers advocate for a broader reimagining of both the system and how we view it.
LET STATES COMPETE >
THE GREAT IMMIGRATION challenge of our era is not at the borders but inside them. It’s not who gets in, but what happens once they’re here. As Congress remains gridlocked, why not let states decide how the foreign-born get to belong? Consider education, abortion, health care, gun control and marijuana. States blue and red are going their own way on all these issues, often in conflict with one another and sometimes with Washington.
It is already happening, but the question is how much power over immigration will eventually devolve to the states. They can create a fragmented landscape of places that welcome immigrants and others that close their doors. And within that patchwork, we might eventually end up with a federal policy that works.
States differ in the access to health care and safety-net programs they make available to immigrants. Dreamers — unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children — are welcomed into public higher education in some states but shunned in others. Some make it easier for professionals trained abroad to get licenses; others make it harder. As states diverge further, immigrants would choose to settle in welcoming places and avoid unfriendly places.
The United States can have only one form of citizenship, but states can compete over access to the world’s best brains, to the people who will care for aging boomers and to young adults with years ahead of them to pay taxes and bear children. Americans and their marketplaces have a way of sorting these things out.
ADAPTED FROM AN OP-ED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BY ROBERTO A. SURO, A PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM AND PUBLIC POLICY AT USC ANNENBERG, SPECIALIZING IN IMMIGRATION AND THE LATINO POPULATION.
< FOCUS ON FARM WORKERS
THE FARM WORKFORCE Modernization Act passed in 2021 by the House — not the Senate — treats immigration as a practical matter, incorporating hard-fought compromises that address conservative values and concerns. Democratic support is a given, but there are compelling reasons why 13 Republicans co-sponsored the bill.
For one, it could help address rising food costs that contribute to inflation. A report issued in September 2022 by the Cato Institute detailed how the bill’s reforms would reduce agricultural labor costs by about $1 billion in the first year and $1.8 billion in the second, “which would lead to more workers hired, more productivity and lower prices for consumers.”
It would also make E-Verify — the web-based system that lets employers confirm that hirees are eligible to work in the U.S. — mandatory for all agricultural workers. Further, certified agricultural workers would remain ineligible for many forms of federally funded public benefits, even as the bill brings many more workers into the tax-paying world.
Finally, the bill would directly benefit rural America, increasing tax revenue in some deeply red states, stimulating rental and real estate markets in rural communities with 10 years of farmworker housing vouchers and grants, and funding new housing developments.
This act honors the idea that immigrants should “get in line and wait their turn,” but also acknowledges the crucial undocumented workforce that is already here, establishing serious residency and work requirements before immigrants can gain a safe and stable place in society.
ADAPTED FROM AN OP-ED IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BY DW GIBSON, A RESEARCH DIRECTOR AT IDEASPACE.COM, A NONPROFIT FOCUSED ON BIPARTISAN IMMIGRATION POLICY, AND AUTHOR OF “14 MILES: BUILDING THE BORDER WALL.”
ALL FOR ONE
HOW MOMS BECAME A POLITICAL FORCE
BY MYA JARADAT
Cherri Foytlin didn’t set out to become an activist. She is a mother of six, married to a man who worked on an oil rig in south Louisiana while she worked at a small-town paper, writing features about things like who grew the biggest cauliflower that year.
But when the BP oil spill happened in 2010, killing 11 and releasing almost four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP invited Foytlin, like all of the state’s press, to go out on a tour of the disaster.
“It was a little show for us,” she recalls. BP took her and the other journalists out on boats and then-Gov. Bobby Jindal came to speak to the press. “I wanted to talk to somebody who’s a fisherman or a person that has to clean up.”
So she went back later on her own. After tooling around a bit, she finally convinced a “big Cajun fisherman” to take her out on his boat, along with the man’s five-year-old son. As they idled through the blob of oil, the father cried. He’d lost his livelihood; his ability to take care of his family.
That night, when she went home, she looked in the mirror “and I remember very clearly saying, ‘Wow, what have I done to contribute to this? How can I change that? And how can I even imagine giving the children a world that’s like this?’”
Perhaps without even fully realizing it at that moment, Foytlin became a part of something much bigger: a legacy of American women — and, more specifically, mothers — who have come together for generations to move the needle on social, political and environmental issues that affect us all.
We see it in the news cycle every generation. Women in general — and moms, in particular — compose a huge part of the
“AS A MOM, DON’T I HAVE A DUTY — A MORAL DIRECTIVE — TO GET INVOLVED?”
electorate, making the “mom vote” highly sought after. Women were credited with fueling a blue wave in the 2018 midterms. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, Politico called women over 50 the “most important voting bloc” to the election, explaining that the group is not only the largest bloc of voters but the largest bloc of swing voters.
The activism of women, as much as their
votes, can impact our country. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America now has a chapter in every state; and the group claims numerous political wins on both the local and federal level, from California’s new law that is intended to stop the spread of unlicensed guns to the Biden administration’s “Safer America Plan.”
But the first steps for these big movements that mothers create are often relatively small.
FOR 18 MONTHS, Mary Alice Hatch stood by, devastated, as her daughter experienced so much physical pain from a mystery illness that she was, at one point, suicidal. She missed school, social events and some of the most important years of her young life.
Desperate for answers, Hatch turned to the Yellow Pages. She found a pain specialist who knew immediately what the problem was: endometriosis. Soon thereafter, Hatch’s daughter had a diagnosis; eventually, she had surgery that led to a recovery. With the right information, the winding and difficult path her family journeyed felt much clearer. But if it was this challenging for a family with the resources to find a way forward, how impossible might it feel for others?
Determined to help, Hatch has worked
relentlessly to fund endometriosis research and spread awareness of the disease. “We saw an attorney in the D.C. metro area who told us that endometriosis wasn’t on the Department of Defense’s list of diseases,” Hatch recalls. “That’s a massive deal because the list allows federal funds to be allocated to research.” Hatch’s father-in-law, the late Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, reached out to Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Together, they spearheaded a bipartisan effort to get research funding for endometriosis from the Department of Defense.
Now, Hatch aspires to create legislation that will make women’s health procedures
more accessible. “It’s important for me to say that I couldn’t have done any of this alone,” she says. “No matter what resources you have, you still can’t affect change without a community.”
Foytlin has also worked to create a community to affect change. After the oil spill, she hosted a fundraiser in her home, which included the photos Foytlin had taken of the disaster. The proceeds went to help those impacted by the oil spill, including the Cajun fisherman who’d taken her out on his boat. Foytlin and other locals began to coordinate with the Environmental Protection Agency to bring speakers to southern
Louisiana to talk about the issues affecting them.
The small injustices many people experienced added up to a much larger injustice, she realized, which primarily impacts communities of color. Many rural, poor and minority communities “have some sort of chemical plant or leftovers from bombs and ammunition from the military,” says Foytlin, because “they don’t have the social capital to protect themselves.” The ironically named Rolling Hills “pit,” a landfill near Pensacola’s Wedgewood community — a predominantly Black neighborhood in Escambia County, Florida — is a prime example. Locals reportedly suffer from higher cancer rates than the national average, which locals attributed to the ongoing dumping of various toxic chemicals before, during and since the 2010 BP oil spill.
Foytlin went on to partner with other Native American women to co-found the L’eau Est La Vie (Water is Life) camp in hopes of preventing the Bayou Bridge Pipeline from being built on the land. “As a mom, don’t I have a duty — a moral directive — to get involved?”
MOTHERS ARE OFTEN at the forefront of activism both in the United States and internationally, says Danielle Poe, the University of Dayton’s dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and author of the book “Maternal Activism: The Ethical Ambiguity Faced by Mothers Confronting Injustice.”
“I can’t think of any culture that doesn’t have a special respect for mothers,” she says, explaining that maternal activism works for a wide range of reasons in a variety of settings: authorities are less likely to use violence against moms and, because everyone has a mother, they’re highly relatable.
Mary Harris Jones — who later became known as “Mother Jones” — led millions of workers in the late 1800s to demand fair labor laws. Jones protested on behalf of labor rights and against child labor across the country — even spending time in Utah and
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LAURA SEITZ
MARY ALICE HATCH SHOWS THAT POLITICAL ACTIVISM IN THE NAME OF PROTECTING FUTURE GENERATIONS CAN BE A UNIFIER AMONG MOTHERS.
“I REMEMBER VERY CLEARLY SAYING, ‘WOW, WHAT HAVE I DONE TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS? HOW CAN I CHANGE THAT? AND HOW CAN I EVEN IMAGINE GIVING THE CHILDREN A WORLD THAT’S LIKE THIS?’”
Colorado to do so. This movement led to riots and a federal holiday we all now know and observe on the first Monday of every September.
Mothers were also instrumental in gaining American women the right to vote. The suffrage movement was effective, in part, because it played on the idea of “women’s role as nurturers and a belief in women’s moral superiority,” according to the Library of Congress, using both as “arguments to convince the American public that women should have the right to vote.”
This emotional reasoning wove its way through the generations. In 1973, Carolista Baum stood in the path of a moving bulldozer to stop it from destroying the Jockey’s Ridge sand dunes — the tallest sand dune system on the Atlantic Coast. The landmark, which is 7,000 years old, was threatened by the development of condominiums at the time. But the impetus for Baum’s activism wasn’t to control corporate development. It was much simpler: Her three children loved climbing and exploring the dunes, and she didn’t want them, or other children, to lose that opportunity. After Baum’s 1973 protest, the dunes were declared a national natural landmark and, in 1975, it became a state park, guaranteeing its preservation for generations to come.
This legacy has led to larger mother-led organizations that have become some of the most politically effective groups in American history. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is a perfect example, Poe says. The organization was founded in 1980 by Candace Lightner after her daughter was killed by a drunken driver. It quickly grew into a large nonprofit organization that is funded in a variety of ways, including individual contributions, government grants and corporate donations. The organization successfully advocated for higher drinking ages in all 50 states. MADD was also instrumental in getting stricter drunken driving laws passed throughout the country. A recent success is the inclusion of a device in all new cars that will prevent people from
driving drunk, a provision included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in November 2021.
RELINQUISHING THE ACTIVIST title and centering one’s identity as a mother — intentionally or not — is often a powerful tactic that ultimately makes these women more sympathetic, Poe explains. Mothers, says Poe, are “uniquely positioned to be witnesses to loss. … When we hear their loss, it also brings to light social issues and harms that we otherwise don’t see.”
In the beginning, Foytlin didn’t think of herself as an activist, though she later came to embrace the label. And while she and other activists weren’t successful in their attempt to stop the Bayou Bridge oil pipeline from being built in Louisiana, Foytlin believes her work has made a lasting impact on the world. “When you stand up — when people witness your courage and your mission and your focus and your passion — it’s not a failure.”
Today, Foytlin is focused on training the next generation of activists, namely her own children. Two of her daughters are currently in college, one majoring in environmental science and the other in filmmaking — a powerful medium for raising awareness and bringing about change.
During her journey to create better access to health care options for people experiencing endometriosis, Hatch has also found how important it is to use the opportunities one has to create opportunity for many. “For anyone who feels passionate about an issue or feels a need for change, don’t give up,” she says. “You don’t have to feel alone. Find an organization, call them up and ask, ‘What can I do?’” From her experience, Hatch has found that a path will open up from asking that question. And often, it’s a path that can leave the world better for the next generation.
“We won’t create the perfect world for them,” Foytlin resolves. “But we can give them a chance to create their own. And that’s where my goal is: to create those steps so that they can carry the light forward.”
THE PROFESSOR OF HAPPINESS
ARTHUR BROOKS ON THE SECRET OF CONTENTMENT
BY DOUG WILKS
Arthur Brooks has no shortage of stories. He dropped out of college, chased a dream to Spain (her name is Ester), and brought along the French horn he thought would be the focus of his life, landing a spot in the City Orchestra of Barcelona. But the stories are incidental to the foundation of faith and family that makes Brooks one of the nation’s most sought-after writers and speakers.
Harvard has him now, decades removed from his untraditional path to a Ph.D and one-time leadership of one of the nation’s top think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. Today he teaches some of America’s finest students concepts like “human flourishing” and “thriving.” He’s an academic concerned about America, the family, the role of faith, education and the need for connection.
Simply put, he’s on a mission to teach happiness and he uses the power of science, faith and love to share the wisdom he’s gained from thoughtful scholarship and experience. The path he walks comes with equal parts warning and optimism. Here then is my conversation with the professor of happiness.
YOU’VE COMPARED AMERICA TO A MARRIED COUPLE GOING THROUGH A BAD STRETCH. WHAT DID YOU MEAN BY THAT?
One of the interesting things about all conflict, whether it’s people who can’t get along politically or a couple on their way to divorce court is it’s all based on the same kind of conflict. And that conflict is this mistaken idea that I love but you hate. That’s called motive
WHEN PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO SAY WHAT THEY REALLY THINK, IT’S BETTER. THEY CAN’T REALLY FIND THEIR WAY BACK TO BITTERNESS AND POLARIZATION AFTER THAT.
attribution asymmetry, which is a real fancy, complicated sounding thing for a very simple idea that there’s an error in the way that we communicate. Most conflicts are based on this error. For example, someone in a political disagreement might be thinking, “You know I love this country. I love it and you hate it. Obviously, you’re unpatriotic and your values are weakening my country.” And
the other person says, “No, I’m the one who loves this country and this people and you’re the one who hates it and is not acting in the right way.”
Couples do the same thing. Research shows when couples are on their way to divorce court, one might say, “I love our family, but he hates me. He actually hates me,” and the husband is like, “Are you kidding me? She’s the one who hates, I’m the one who loves.” If you can resolve that it’s a huge opportunity for people to actually express how they really feel. Unfortunately, most people don’t. And that’s what’s going on in America today.
I do a lot of public opinion work and I’m privileged to see a whole lot of data on people’s attitudes about this country. The vast majority of Americans don’t want to live anyplace else. They’re proud and they love living in this country.
SO HOW DO YOU IMPRESS UPON AMERICANS THAT THEY NEED TO CHANGE?
When people actually understand what the nature of the conflict is, you can do a lot better. One of the things we find is that couples can reconcile if they can be willing to say what they really think. Most people
think that you’re going to ruin a marriage if people actually say what they think. The truth is the opposite. Because most married couples love each other. But they think that the other one hates them and so they’re very defensive and their defensive reaction makes the other person think that their partner hates them.
When people are willing to say what they really think, it’s better. A lot of experiments that I’ve done on public policy are bringing people together. I’ll bring Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump supporters together to talk about their common loves, which activates parts of the brain that are dedicated to affection, love and positive emotion. And they can’t really find their way back to bitterness and polarization and hatred after that.
So for example, I’ll bring people together who are on opposite sides of the most contentious debates of the time — abortion, guns, immigration, whatever it happens to be — and I’ll say, “We’re going to talk about this stuff, don’t worry. But in the meantime, I’d like you to tell each other about your kids and grandkids.” And oh, man, I mean, it’s like they grew up together. You never hate somebody who’s telling you about their kids and their grandkids and the problems that they’re having with their teenagers.
And after that, they can talk about abortion and they want to understand each other in an entirely different way. And this is a lot more of what we need to do. We need leaders that are willing to do this as opposed to leaders in politics and media
and academia and the schools and even corporations who are dining out on setting us against each other.
Hate is very profitable. Anger is profitable. Fear is unbelievably profitable. And we have a motive in our outrage industrial complex in this country, and the political system and the media that feed it, to get us to not really express what’s written on our hearts. And the result of that is that more than 90 percent of Americans hate how divided we’ve become. We don’t like our politics. We don’t respect what’s going on in most of the media and that’s a big opportunity. That’s even a profit opportunity, quite frankly, and we just need to figure out a way for people to understand how to do it and how to run with that opportunity.
YOU TEACH AT HARVARD. CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR COURSE AND WHAT YOU’VE OBSERVED AMONG YOUR STUDENTS?
I teach at the Harvard Business School and I have a class called Leadership and Happiness, which sounds kind of weird, you know, how is that a business subject? But as far as I’m concerned, it’s a core competency to worldly success. We have this conception that if I’m successful, I have money, power, admiration. And if I’m successful, then I’ll get happiness and it’s actually not true. According to data, the truth is exactly the opposite. What you find is that people who pursue their happiness in the right and healthy way, they tend to be more successful in terms of the other things.
And so what I’m trying to do is change the direction of causality with my students to help them understand what they really hunger for is faith and family and friendship and service to other people. They want love and to be loved. And that’s what I talk about in a very scientific way.
This is not just self-improvement or counseling or psychotherapy or woowoo. We’re talking about cutting-edge neuroscience and social scientific evidence on how their romantic life can be healthier, how the relationship with their parents can be better, how they can be less lonely and have more enduring friendships, and how they can have a transcendental metaphysical walk in their life. Perhaps that’s the religion
of their childhood, and how all of this can be put together like bricks into a wall that can make them into a complete person who also not incidentally winds up being very successful in business.
ARE YOUR STUDENTS CYNICAL ABOUT THIS OR ARE THEY EAGER TO EMBRACE IT?
It’s not a requirement. They don’t have to take this class, but I have about 400 students on the waiting list. There’s also an illegal Zoom link they think I don’t know about. So this is a popular class.
They’re not cynical about it at all. Look, if I came in and said, “Let me give you my opinion on what your family is supposed to look like,” nobody’s going to take or get college credit for that. This is the real stuff on what research is telling us. I’m talking to them about the neurophysiological structure of the brain, on how neurotransmitters are actually the reason that they feel the way they do, or how the limbic system can be managed by the prefrontal cortex of the brain so you can manage your emotions and they don’t manage you.
How do you manage you? It really starts with knowledge, it starts with science.
YOU WERE A PROFESSIONAL MUSICIAN. BUT YOU’VE SAID THERE WAS A MOMENT YOU STOPPED GETTING BETTER, AND IT WAS A TURNING POINT IN YOUR LIFE.
As a kid, I thought I was going to be a professional musician for the rest of my life. My ambition was to be the world’s greatest French horn player. And for a while it looked like there was actually a chance that I could do a lot with it. I was pretty proficient. I went professional when I was 19. I was in a very good symphony orchestra and I was starting to get a lot of work that was, by my own judgment, where I wanted to be.
The trouble is that by about my mid 20s, I wasn’t getting better anymore. It was a very alarming thing. And I couldn’t quite figure out what’s going on. Now, subsequently, I’ve studied this a little bit more and a lot of classical musicians and athletes and people pursuing interests that require a lot of skill early on in life find that they have
an early turn in their skill and they don’t get better. It’s quite mysterious, but it’s very common as it turns out. And for me, it was just the end because what else can I do as a college dropout?
All I cared about was the horn. Music was everything. But my wife saved me. And the reason is because she didn’t marry me because I was a French horn player. She married me because of the man that I was and the man I was going to be. And she said, “You know, you’re my husband and you’re a complete person. And you’re a hard worker, and you care about doing things that really matter. And you can do that.”
DO YOU DESCRIBE THAT AS FAITH? AND WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?
I don’t know. Where does that kind of faith come from? I don’t know. I mean, you need to have somebody who loves you and believes in you. It’s really important. I chalk this up to the fact that I had a team, me and my wife, we were a team. And you know, she really believed in me. It was the most amazing thing.
ONE MORE ABOUT MUSIC: WHAT IS THE BEST MUSIC?
My favorite composer is Johann Sebastian Bach. He’s sometimes called the fifth evangelist. And the reason is because he was somebody who used music to express his faith in a more effective and penetrating way than probably anybody ever has. He was a very devout Christian. His family Bible was dog-eared and he was writing in the margins. At the end of every single score of the 1,000 pieces he published he would write, “to the glory of God.” When asked before the end of his life why he wrote music, he said, “The aim and final end of all music should be nothing more than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.”
He knew something about the cosmic nature of how these harmonies affect us. So what’s the best sound? Bach, man, it’s Bach. If I’m going to listen to one thing for the rest of my life, I hope I’m listening to Bach when I pass on.
HOW DOES THE GLORIFICATION OF GOD INFORM YOUR LIFE?
The most important thing in my life is my
Christian faith. And it’s funny because a lot of people, they sort of believe that, but it takes a little bit of focus to say that right? But it’s really true. I grew up in a Christian family. I’m a very lucky man in this way that my parents passed on their faith to me. I was raised in a Christian home and I converted to Catholicism as a teenager as an act of teenage rebellion and my parents quite wisely were not that alarmed. They probably acted a little bit alarmed to give me the satisfaction, I suppose, but they were happy I was still going to church.
And I married a Catholic girl from a nonpracticing family, who subsequently pursued graduate education in theology and is teaching to immigrant women in native Spanish on Christian teaching. And to us, this is just, fundamental. It’s who we are as people. We raised our kids as Christian people, and they love God a lot. And they’re working to refresh the souls of others in different ways. I got one who is a middle school math teacher, I have one who’s in the U.S. Marine Corps. And I have one who is still in college, and they’re all glorifying God in their own ways. And it’s the most important thing in their life, too. And I’m really, really grateful for that.
THAT’S REALLY LOVELY. IT LEADS ME TO MY FINAL QUESTION. ARTHUR BROOKS, ARE YOU HAPPY?
Happiness is not a destination. It’s not a destination in the mortal coil. I believe that happiness is only a destination in the supernatural, in the eternal sense. While we’re alive on this earth, happiness is a direction. The promise that I can give to my students is not that you’re going to find happiness like some mythical Shangri La, some city of Eldorado. I believe that you will, but not in this life.
However, I can promise that you can get happier if you understand what happiness is and how to pursue it. If you commit yourself to good and healthy practices that involve faith and family, love of others and service, and if you commit yourself to sharing these ideas, you will get happier.
Am I happy? Not yet. Am I happier? Every year.
THE FIGHT OVER TWO FREEDOMS
WILL A SUPREME COURT RULING ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE RESHAPE THE FIRST AMENDMENT?
BY KELSEY DALLAS
Around seven years ago, Lorie Smith was ready to take a professional leap. She wanted to expand her web design business into the world of weddings and start offering custom website services to engaged couples.
There was just one problem: Smith had a feeling that particular leap would get her in trouble with the law.
That hunch stemmed from news reports about another Colorado business owner and Christian who, like Smith, believes marriage should be reserved for unions between a man and a woman. By 2016, Jack Phillips, a baker, had already spent four years in court defending his decision not to design a custom wedding cake for a gay couple.
If Smith began offering wedding websites but turned away members of the LGBTQ community, she seemed destined for a similar fate. She was so torn about what to do that she turned to her pastor for help and then, after praying about it, to a famous group of religious freedom attorneys.
As a result of those conversations, Smith held off on expanding her business. Instead, she filed a lawsuit, which, almost seven years later, has become one of the most
contentious battles of the U.S. Supreme Court’s current term.
With the case, Smith is fighting for protection from Colorado’s public accommodations law, which prohibits discriminating against customers because of their sexual orientation, among other protected traits. She argues that being forced to design websites for gay couples would violate her free
“THIS CASE IS ABOUT WHETHER THE GOVERNMENT CAN FORCE ARTISTS TO SAY THINGS THEY DON’T BELIEVE.”
speech, since, in her mind, such a business transaction would represent a message of support for same-sex marriage.
“Lorie serves everyone, but she cannot express every message through her custom artwork,” says Jake Warner, senior counsel for Smith’s law firm, the Alliance Defending Freedom. He noted that Smith does serve LGBTQ customers in other contexts.
Smith’s supporters, including gay rights activist Dale Carpenter, filed amicus briefs arguing to protect artistic speech. Some supporters have argued, for example, that a Black tattoo artist shouldn’t be forced to provide racist symbols for customers.
Smith’s opponents object to the case for multiple reasons, not least of which is the fact that Smith filed the lawsuit before she started selling wedding websites. Unlike Phillips’ legal battle, which involved a gay couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, describing what it felt like to be turned away, Smith’s features a hypothetical scenario that’s more difficult to debate.
“(The case) doesn’t offer real LGBTQ people as sympathetic characters to demonstrate the harm,” says Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which filed a Supreme Court brief opposing Smith’s position. In their absence, Smith and her attorneys can control the narrative, making it seem as if it’s unreasonable to ask a business that’s open to the public to actually serve all members of the public, she added.
Laser and others, including Colorado officials, claim that a Supreme Court win for Smith could threaten civil rights laws
across the country, making it harder to guard against discrimination based not just on sexual orientation, but also race or religion. Smith’s supporters, on the other hand, say a win for Smith would strengthen everyone’s free speech rights, ensuring that LGBTQ business owners, for example, could control what messages their own products send.
“This case is about whether the government can force artists to say things they don’t believe. In this way, a win for Lorie is a win for all Americans, including those who disagree with her on marriage and other issues,” Warner says.
LIKE THE COLORADO baker case before it, Smith’s case, which is formally known as 303 Creative v. Elenis, involves a
complicated mix of competing protections. In order to declare a winner, judges have had to and will have to determine how to balance a business owner’s rights with a customer’s rights, a conservative religious person’s rights with a gay person’s rights and state-level civil rights laws with the First Amendment.
Since she filed her lawsuit in September 2016, Smith has argued that Colorado currently gets the balance wrong. She claims the state’s public accommodations law, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, tramples the free speech and religious freedom rights of business owners, forcing them to choose between following the law and following their beliefs.
“The First Amendment protects people
JUDGES WILL HAVE TO BALANCE A BUSINESS OWNER’S RIGHTS WITH A CUSTOMER’S RIGHTS, A CONSERVATIVE RELIGIOUS PERSON’S RIGHTS WITH A GAY PERSON’S RIGHTS AND STATE CIVIL RIGHTS LAWS WITH THE FIRST AMENDMENT.
like Lorie and people who disagree with Lorie. The government shouldn’t force everyone to say something they don’t believe,” Warner says.
Colorado officials reject Smith’s characterization of the state’s legal landscape, arguing that the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act was not designed to punish or otherwise interfere with the work of business owners. Instead, the goal has been to ensure equal access to the marketplace for members of marginalized communities, including LGBTQ Americans, they say.
“The act requires only that the company sell whatever product or service it offers to all regardless of its customers’ protected characteristics. The act does not, as the company claims, compel a Hindu
“EVERY RULING THAT GRANTS AND VALIDATES A LICENSE TO DISCRIMINATE FURTHER JEOPARDIZES NOT JUST LGBTQ PEOPLE, NOT JUST RELIGIOUS MINORITIES, BUT REALLY ALL OF US.”
calligrapher to ‘write flyers proclaiming “Jesus is Lord.’ ’’ It requires only that if the calligrapher chooses to write such a flyer, they sell it to Christian and Hindu customers alike,” Colorado officials wrote in a Supreme Court brief.
In the lower courts, judges expressed sympathy for Smith’s plight but ultimately ruled against her. They accepted the state of Colorado’s argument that Smith’s free speech and religious freedom rights could be limited in the service of protecting customers from discrimination.
“(Smith’s) free speech and free exercise rights are, of course, compelling. But so too is Colorado’s interest in protecting its citizens from the harms of discrimination. And Colorado cannot defend that interest while also excepting (Smith) from (the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act),” explained the July 2021 ruling from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Smith appealed to the Supreme Court soon after this ruling was handed down and, in February 2022, the justices agreed to hear her case. The court likely saw 303 Creative v. Elenis as a good opportunity to revisit questions left unanswered in the Colorado baker case, which the Supreme Court ruled on in June 2018. (Phillips won 7-2, but the ruling was narrow in scope and based on the behavior of Colorado officials during legal proceedings.)
DURING ORAL ARGUMENTS in December last year, the justices and attorneys for both sides, as well as for the Biden administration, which joined the case to defend Colorado’s policy, debated a wide range of concerns, as well as a dizzying array of hypothetical scenarios. Some of the key questions raised included whether a wedding website truly represents speech, whether there’s a difference between refusing to sell a wedding website to a gay couple and refusing to serve gay customers at all, and whether it’s possible to rule for Smith without undermining civil rights laws nationwide.
The discussion seemed to confirm more liberal court watchers’ fear that Smith
would have no problem winning the votes of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. At oral arguments, most of the justices appeared convinced that the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act needed to be adjusted, although they shared no clear solutions for how to update it without opening the door to many more varieties of service refusals.
“Many of the justices were asking the advocates to help them identify lines and limits. It is unlikely that any of the justices believes that public-accommodations laws never implicate First Amendment rights and also unlikely that any of them believes that they always do. What, then, is the principle, factor or consideration that judges and regulators can use to distinguish between impermissible and permissible uses of such laws?” says Richard Garnett, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, to the Deseret News in December.
The court’s ruling, which is expected by the end of June, will likely boost protections for business owners like Smith while trying to minimize the possibility of future conflict. But it remains unclear whether such an effort will be successful, or whether the justices are dooming themselves to dozens of future cases centered on the need for further clarification.
Laser is among those who believe the latter outcome is more probable and that a win for Smith will hurt the LGBTQ community and others. Any ruling that allows for customers to be turned away invites more bias, not less, she says.
“Every decision that grants and validates a license to discriminate further jeopardizes not just LGBTQ people, not just religious minorities, but really all of us,” Laser says.
But Warner and others who support Smith’s arguments remain confident that the country’s civil rights framework is not about to collapse. Past lower court rulings in favor of creative professionals who object to same-sex marriage have resolved conflict, not fueled it, Warner says.
“If you look at where this freedom has been upheld, what has been the result? That all artists can thrive,” he says.
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FOR DECADES THE WEST HAS EMBRACED UNCHECKED GROWTH. IS A RECKONING COMING?
BY KYLE DUNPHEY
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW COLIN BECK
N APRIL 1890, JOHN WESLEY POWELL STOOD BEFORE A ROOM FULL OF U.S. SENATORS TO DELIVER A MESSAGE AS TIMELESS AS THE LANDSCAPES HE MAPPED. THE 56-YEAR-OLD DIRECTOR OF THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY WAS A MILITARY MAN WHO HAD LIVED A LIFE OF ADVENTURE
unlikely experienced by his audience of well-heeled politicians. The son of English immigrants and a Union Army lieutenant in the Civil War, Powell was the first white man to lead an expedition down the Colorado River. A rugged explorer and the last of an iconic generation of frontiersmen, he sported an unkempt beard that covered his weathered face and was often dotted with ash from his cigars. His right arm was reduced to a stump by a Confederate bullet. He stood only five feet, six inches tall, but commanded the room, speaking slowly and thoughtfully with each word carrying more weight than the last.
Powell was nearing the end of his life, and in his final decade, starting on that spring day in Washington, D.C., he became a counterweight to the prevailing narrative at the time.
The West, he warned, could not sustain the country’s grandiose plans of development and expansion.
“It would be almost a criminal act to go on as we are doing now, and allow thousands and hundreds of thousands of people to establish homes where they cannot maintain themselves,” he told the senators. They were infuriated, and for more than a century after, the federal government ignored his warning.
Now, Powell’s prophecy is coming to pass. The West has been subjected to decades of drought, or depending on who you ask, aridification. The Colorado River, which feeds life to 40 million people and billion-dollar industries, has been reduced to a fraction of its former self. Utah’s Great Salt Lake is shrinking, with large clouds of toxic dust billowing across Salt Lake City in the summer. Wildfires, accelerated by invasive beetles that turn entire forests brown, fill the region with smoke.
All the while, the Mountain West, or the region we at the magazine think of as Deseret, is buckling under explosive growth
in places like Bozeman, Boise and Boulder.
And that is causing a generational sea change in public opinion. For decades, policymakers and business leaders have pushed a no-brakes growth mentality, but according to a new poll conducted by the national polling firm HarrisX and Deseret Magazine, residents are beginning to question that approach and what it has wrought.
“The basic philosophy of westward expansion has been, ‘Look, there’s an unspoiled area – let’s go spoil it,’” says Dan McCool, an author and professor emeritus at the University of Utah who researches public land policy and water resource development. “It’s uncrowded — so let’s make it crowded. It’s clean — well, let’s go make it dirty. There’s no traffic — let’s increase the traffic.”
According to the poll, which surveyed 1,764 adults in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and eastern Oregon and Washington, only one-third of respondents say they approve of how their elected officials are managing population growth, while half disapprove. And about 60 percent think their state’s economic trends are harming residents — a sentiment held by 69 percent of rural respondents.
In Utah, nearly half of respondents have considered moving to a different state because of housing prices, and across the region, the majority say their state is growing too quickly.
Encouraging growth and expansion, which in turn strain resources, are an affront to what Aaron Weiss calls the “Western way of life.”
“It’s different from life on the California
coast or the East Coast, or Florida. And holding on to that Western way of life, that Western identity, is really important to people,” says Weiss, the deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities based in Denver. And growth is only one half of a double-threat. “Folks are suddenly recognizing that climate change is in fact, an existential threat to the Western way of life,” Weiss adds.
Still, politicians of all stripes see the region’s growing population and economy as a byproduct of good policy and foresight.
When Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox was recently asked if his state is too developer friendly, he pushed back. “We need development,” he said. “Like, there is no other way.”
But the Deseret Magazine survey identifies a disconnect between policymakers and voters. It found 68 percent of Westerners say they prefer to protect land and water from development, even if that hampers economic growth.
“It’s still basically the political third
“THE BASIC PHILOSOPHY OF WESTWARD EXPANSION HAS BEEN, ‘LOOK, THERE’S AN UNSPOILED AREA —LET’S GO SPOIL IT. IT’S UNCROWDED — SO LET’S MAKE IT CROWDED.”
ABOUT 80 PERCENT OF WESTERNERS SAY WATER SUPPLY IS A TOP CONCERN AS PRIMARY SOURCES LIKE THE COLORADO RIVER SHRINK.
rail to say growth is not good,” says McCool. Even if that growth is completely at odds with issues like water conservation, which according to the poll, is increasingly top of mind.
About 80 percent of respondents say water supply is of primary concern, a sentiment heightened in arid states like Utah and Arizona. Roughly the same percentage of people surveyed think access to water will continue to be an issue in 2030. Over 30 percent say Lake Powell — the nation’s second largest reservoir created by a dam along the Colorado River — should be drained. About 40 percent oppose the idea, and 30 percent aren’t sure.
“That shows that folks are very aware that climate change and drought are huge problems in the West,” Weiss says, “and there’s obviously an awareness of that across parties, across demographic
groups, across urban and rural areas.”
It’s hard to ignore the drought when you turn on your faucet and no water comes out, which happened to residents near Scottsdale, Arizona, in January; or when a dire forecast warns that the Great Salt Lake could vanish in five years, according to a recent report; or when 500 homes are destroyed and 30,000 people are evacuated during an unprecedented December wildfire in Colorado.
So, how should policymakers respond? In a free-market economy, government is reluctant to put the brakes on growth, as McCool points out, “but we could certainly stop subsidizing it.”
“If a company wants to come here and says ‘we need a million gallons of water,’ the response should be ‘you’re going to have to pay to conserve a million gallons of water someplace else,” he says.
3 in 5 Westerners believe agricultural uses of water should take priority during drought.
1
IN 3
SUPPORT
DRAINING LAKE POWELL INTO LAKE MEAD AND NEARLY 40% OPPOSE THE IDEA. NEVADANS HAVE THE STRONGEST SUPPORT AND UTAHNS THE WEAKEST SUPPORT FOR THE PROPOSAL.
That message could have come from Powell himself. Given his hard line at the time, one wonders if the legendary explorer would have been surprised that the West’s unfettered growth has continued to this point without utter destruction. Powell’s warnings drew the ire of Congress, who after his testimony in 1890 slashed funding for his work and continued to promote new settlements in the West.
Powell was disheartened, but persisted. In 1893, he spoke at a conference in Los Angeles, with a perspective that remains timeless.
“There is not enough water to irrigate all the lands,” he said. “It is not right to speak about the area of the public domain in terms of acres that extend over the land, but in terms of acres that can be supplied with water.”
GLEN CANYON DAM CREATES LAKE POWELL ON THE BORDER OF UTAH AND ARIZONA, WHERE RESIDENTS FEAR ACCESS TO WATER WILL BE AN ISSUE FOR MOST OF THIS DECADE.
OF WESTERNERS PREFER TO PROTECT LAND AND WATER FROM DEVELOPMENT, EVEN IF IT HAMPERS ECONOMIC GROWTH.
Believe affordable housing in their communities is a problem
Voters are split on whether the federal government owns too much or just enough land in the West, with very few saying it should own more
NEARLY 3 IN 5 WESTERNERS BELIEVE THEIR STATE’S POPULATION IS GROWING TOO QUICKLY
A slight plurality believes the federal government is spending too little on conserving natural resources, led by 47% of Democrats
Water rights is a top 10 state level issue among Westerners
and 4/5 Democrats believe
Nearly half of Westerners want less development in their local area, while the remainder are split between wanting more development or keeping the current rate
CLIMATE CHANGE PLAYED SOME ROLE IN THE CURRENT DROUGHT
SURVEY AREA INCLUDES : ARIZONA, COLORADO, IDAHO, MONTANA, NEVADA, NEW MEXICO, UTAH, WYOMING, AND EASTERN OREGON AND WASHINGTON.
TOP
FIVE STATES IN EACH CATEGORY
ARIZONA AND WYOMING RANK HIGHLY FOR AFFORDABILITY; COLORADO AND MONTANA RANK HIGHLY FOR NATURAL BEAUTY.
COLORADO AND ARIZONA ARE HIGHLY REGARDED IN MANY ASPECTS OF QUALITY OF LIFE.
SURVEY METHODOLOGY:
This survey was conducted online by HarrisX between December 15-22, 2022, among 1,764 adults. The sampling margin of error is +/- 2.3 percentage points.
A FORMER REFUGEE IS REDEFINING WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A NEW CITIZEN OF THE WEST
BY MYA JARADAT
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK OWENS
HEN SOMALIA ’S
civil war erupted in 1991, Aden Batar was in his early 20s and married. He’d just finished law school; he and his wife had recently welcomed a baby boy. Overnight, everything changed. “The government collapsed, all the infrastructure was gone, the running water, the electricity,” he says, recalling the earliest days of the conflict that led to the death of more than half a million
Somalians. “There was no place to buy food … everything was in chaos.”
In addition to a wife and baby to provide for, Batar was also caring for his widowed mother and elderly grandparents. For almost two years, survival meant staying in motion. He and his family would move to one part of the country, thinking it was safer, only for the war to spread to that area — forcing them to flee again. Though the war would eventually lead to the displacement of over two million people, there were no services for the internally displaced at that time.
At first, emigrating was unimaginable to Batar. His hometown of Baidoa was known as janaay in Somali — just a letter off from the original Arabic jannah, meaning heaven. Baidoa was lush, spotted with waterfalls, the towers of mosques pointing like fingers towards the sky.
He’d grown up there among a large extended family of aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and cousins, passing the days playing soccer with his friends.
But then, amid all the moving, Batar’s two-year-old son was injured, burned by an accident in an overcrowded home. “There was nothing we could do to save him,” Batar says. “There was no adequate medical care at the time. None of the hospitals were functioning; they were only taking care of wounds and so forth. He only survived about a week.”
After standing over his son’s grave, he knew it was time to leave Somalia.
Concerned that he, his wife and their second son — Jamal, a baby boy just a few months old — wouldn’t survive the journey, Batar told his wife, “Let me try the road to see what it looks like. And if you don’t hear
KRISTIN MURPHY/DESERET NEWS
REFUGEES FIND A SYMPATHETIC EAR IN BATAR, WHO KNOWS FIRSTHAND HOW EMIGRATION CAN BE LIKE A SORT OF DEATH, HOW IT OFTEN MEANS GIVING UP A LANGUAGE, A HARD-FOUGHT-FOR EDUCATION, A BUDDING PROFESSIONAL LIFE.
from me, you know that I didn’t make it.” But if he reached safety, he promised his wife, he would get her and their surviving child out of there.
It took him several weeks to make the journey to Kenya. There were military roadblocks and he had to pass through different tribal lands, putting his life in danger, but he knew multiple dialects and pretended to be a local.
He mostly traveled under the cover of night, in part because the weather was so hot. When he finally reached the Kenyan border, he was without any documentation — no ID, no passport, no visa, nothing. But he had hidden money on his body. And so he bribed his way into the country and then rode in on a truck transporting livestock, hiding in the back among the cows.
There, in a town near the border, he found a military radio and sent word back to his wife, who was waiting anxiously at a relative’s home outside Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu, that he was alive.
Once Batar made it to Nairobi, he arranged for a small airplane that was departing from Mogadishu to pluck his wife and their baby son out of the war-town country and bring them to Kenya. “That day was the happiest in my life,” says Batar. “To reunite with my family.”
Two years later, the family was on another plane — this one was headed to Salt Lake City.
THIRTY YEARS LATER and the world continues to struggle with many refugee crises. Somalia, which still grapples with outbreaks of violence, is plagued by drought and hunger; people stream out of the land, which is, itself, home to refugees from
Yemen, other African countries and the internally displaced. The United States’ sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan triggered a governmental and economic collapse that continues to create waves of refugees today. There’s Ukraine, where conflict with Russia has spurred millions to leave. There’s the Rohingya who have been victims of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.
Since 1975, the United States has opened its doors to over three million refugees. Of those who made their way to the Intermountain West, most ended up in Arizona, Colorado and Utah. Today, Utah is home to approximately 60,000 refugees and the state ranks in the top half nationally for refugee resettlement. But refugee resettlement plummeted under President Donald Trump and Utah’s numbers reflected the national trend. In 2016, the state took in 1,555 refugees; in the four years that followed, just under 2,084 new refugees arrived.
In 2021, the Biden administration raised the national cap on refugees to 125,000. The amount of those who have actually managed to resettle in the United States in recent years, however, falls far below that line. In 2022, the United States took in about 25,000, meaning that 80 percent of the spaces allocated went unaccounted for. Experts say that the Trump administration’s policies decimated the country’s immigration infrastructure and continues to impact our nation’s ability to absorb newcomers. By early 2022, Utah had taken in 900 Afghan refugees. It was estimated that the state would take in about 300 refugees from Ukraine, as well.
All of Utah’s refugees pass through Salt
“HE KNEW WHAT THEY NEEDED BECAUSE HE HAD JUST GONE THROUGH IT. HE KNEW WHAT THEY NEEDED WITHOUT THEM TELLING HIM.”
Lake County, making the area a sort of way station. Many refugees end up congregating in West Valley City or western Salt Lake City where, at Catholic Community Services, they find a sympathetic ear and a helping hand in Batar, who knows firsthand how emigration can be like a sort of death — how leaving one’s country isn’t just about leaving the land and the family that sprung from it. Emigration often means giving up a language, a hard-fought-for education, a budding professional life. It means losing one’s identity. But it also means gaining a new story. Utah wasn’t entirely foreign to Batar. When he was in high school, he’d met some folks from Utah State University who had come to Baidoa to do some agricultural projects with locals. Batar had been studying English at the time and was keen to practice with native speakers; he’d spent some time with the USU crew. So he knew Utah by name. But he was unprepared for
what he saw when he got off the plane: a land so different from his own.
“Luckily, we didn’t come in wintertime,” he jokes today.
That spring, Catholic Community Services helped resettle the family. Case manager Lina Smith remembers the first time she saw him, in a conference room with his extended family, which numbered, she estimates, 17 people.
She could tell he was the backbone of the family, despite his youth (he was still in his 20s) that he was “the leader of the group.” She also noticed immediately a silent strength about him.
Unable to use his law degree in the U.S., Batar’s first job in Logan was at a factory, assembling exercise equipment, including treadmills. What was this strange land, this land of plenty, where people needed machines to exercise? Where people ran in place, inside their houses? This place with such bitter cold, with no mosques, no call to prayer setting the rhythm of his day, punctuating his worldly concerns and helping him keep his thoughts trained on God.
No matter, Batar was happy to be here, to be safe, to have a job and to support his family. He worked hard during the day and took college classes at night. As more Somali families arrived, Smith asked Batar to serve as an interpreter. “He was very confident but had such a kindness, such a loving heart,” Smith says. He had a calming effect, imparting this same quiet strength to those around him. She soon offered him a job as a case manager. Batar accepted and started the job immediately, beginning with a group of Somali families who came to the office that very day.
His deep understanding of what it means
BATAR REGULARLY SPEAKS ON BEHALF, AND IN SUPPORT, OF IMMIGRANTS IN THE REGION.
RAVELL CALL/DESERET NEWS
to flee one’s home and to find oneself, suddenly, in a new country enabled Batar to meet refugees’ needs, even those that went unarticulated. “He knew what they needed because he had just gone through it,” says Smith. “He knew what they needed without them telling him.” This wasn’t just true of the Somalis whom Batar helped resettle but of the Bosnians, Vietnamese and Sudanese who characterized immigration to Utah in the ’90s.
For Batar, working with refugees has been part of an attempt to pay back “this community that welcomed me and gave me my life back and provided all the support my kids and my family needed.”
Finding employment is one of the most frustrating aspects of the resettlement process, says Kearstin Cantrell of Catholic Community Services. Refugees are eager to immediately start reinventing themselves and building a life here but have to jump through many hoops to get authorization to work. And then they have to find the job itself. But Batar and other staff — many of whom are former clients, notes Cantrell — are there to help. In 2021, the organization managed 607 resettlement cases; most of which were families.
Batar offers more than bureaucratic help, of course. Before the paperwork begins, the refugees benefit merely from being in Batar’s presence. In Batar they see a shining example of who they might become here in America. Not only has Batar successfully reinvented himself by embracing his role at Catholic Community Services of Utah, he has been a leader of the region’s Muslim community — estimated at 60,000 — playing a critical role in its growth. As president of the local Islamic Society, he’s overseen the building of a mosque and the creation of a Muslim cemetery.
His family has thrived, as well. His eldest son, Jamal, is an engineer who graduated from Columbia University. Batar’s other son has a bachelor’s degree and is working. Batar’s two daughters are educated as well, and one is becoming a pharmacist — something that would have been impossible had
Batar stayed in Somalia, he says. There are things, though, about his first home that are irreplaceable. Batar lost his father when he was just five years old and there — in his hometown of Baidoa — everyone had known his father. The elder Batar was legendary — he’d been one of the city’s first police officers after the Italians left Somalia. And everywhere the young
Batar went people recognized that he was his father’s son. When he left Somalia, he left behind all those people who knew his family and his history.
But now, it’s Batar who is legendary — known for his calm, for imparting to all who cross his path, that here, in America, in the Intermountain West, everything is going to be OK
IN HIS ROLE AS A DIRECTOR AT CATHOLIC COMMUNITY SERVICES, BATAR SPEAKS OUT ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF RACIAL EQUITY IN POLICING.
BLACK SUBURBAN
with tinted windows parks outside a gabled, yellow farmhouse. Spencer and Abby Cox emerge from the vehicle and two herding dogs run from around the back of the house to greet them. Abby scans the horizon, surveying a rusted tin lean-to that shelters towers of hay and the acres of crops browning in the October chill.
She wears joggers, sneakers, a Carhartt sweatshirt that drowns her thin frame and a baseball hat atop her long, curled hair. The Coxes have returned to their rural hometown to help prepare their family farms for the winter and briefly escape the state’s capital, where they’ve held the position of governor and first lady for the past two years. It’s the first time the couple has been back to Abby’s parents’ home since her father’s funeral a month earlier.
Ken Palmer bought the house in 1974, when it was half the size it is now. The 10 Palmer children shared three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms while Ken and his wife Charlene slept on the floor. Abby’s childhood was one of hard, manual labor and economic uncertainty, with her father’s failed business ventures and a diagnosis that ultimately left him unable to perform the work necessary to maintain the farm. But Abby and her dad had a special bond. When Abby felt lost in a sea of siblings, it was Ken who most often connected with her and made her feel understood.
Now Abby, sitting on a worn couch in her parents’ unassuming living room, starts to say something about her late father, but her voice breaks. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m looking around and having a lot of emotions because he’s not here.”
Abby inherited from her father his empathy and a tenacity that defines her work as Utah’s first lady. While Spencer has made national headlines — for defeating presidential hopeful, ambassador and former Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. in a gubernatorial election, for vetoing a bill drafted by fellow Republicans that would prevent transgender girls from competing in school sports and for maintaining consistently high approval ratings — Abby has served as his adviser and sounding board. She’s also launched her own initiatives aimed to increase empathy among Utahns.
But she longs for the life on the farm they left behind. Two years into Spencer’s term, she still doesn’t feel at home in the Governor’s Mansion, or what she calls “the apartment above the museum.” She insists she and Spencer are there not because they want to be, but because they are called to govern. They’re not as interested in reelection, she says, as they are in making their state a better place.
And the compassionate conservatism with which they lead may very well set the course for other Republican leaders in the West and beyond. “Conservatism in general has a bit of a question mark around it at the moment,” explains University of Utah political science professor Matthew J. Burbank. “It’s not clear where the Republican Party is anymore.” The unknown provides the Coxes an opportunity to redefine the political movement as adaptive and pragmatic.
In a time when many in the party seem to embrace extreme rhetoric and policy for political points, 60 percent of Utahns approve of Spencer Cox’s job performance, according to the latest Deseret News/ Hinckley Institute of Politics poll. The young couple with their empathy-based conservatism are well-positioned to spend
ABBY AND SPENCER
“IF PEOPLE DISAGREE WITH US, THAT’S THEIR PREROGATIVE. THEY CAN VOTE FOR SOMEBODY ELSE AND WE GET TO GO HOME TO OUR FARM.”
another six years in the state’s capital.
That is, they may be the new faces of conservatism in the West. If only they wanted it.
FROM THE TIME Spencer Cox announced his run for governor, he made it clear he was running with his wife.
The campaign kickoff video released in 2020, for example, begins with Abby saying “We are parents. We are community members.” “We are farmers,” Spencer adds, and the remainder of the video alternates between the two of them making “we” statements about who they are and what they value most. Spencer declares, “We’ve decided to run for governor of the great state of Utah,” while his wife nods. He wanted Utahns to understand he and his wife are a package deal, and by voting for him they would be voting for a team.
“(Abby and Spencer) function like a left arm and a right arm,” a source close to the family told me.
After Spencer won the election, Abby immediately got to work. She and her advisers spent months talking with members of the community. “Abby doesn’t believe in fluff,” says Sarah Allred, deputy director of first lady initiatives. “She’s not looking for the shiniest or easiest thing to do. She wants to do what’s most helpful.” In April 2021, the team launched Show Up, addressing issues important to Abby: foster care, community service, support for athletes with intellectual disabilities and educator wellness. Her efforts in these areas, Spencer says, have made such a large impact that people stop him in the grocery store not to talk about his work, but to thank him for Abby’s.
At any given time there are 2,700 children in the state’s foster system, but just 1,300 foster families are able to provide them homes, according to Utah Foster Care. Through her Show Up initiative, Abby
hopes to reverse that, with foster families waiting for children and not foster children waiting for families. She also wants every school in the state to participate in Unified Sports, a program that pairs athletes with intellectual disabilities with their peers without intellectual disabilities to compete in sports training and team competitions. It’s one of the antidotes to what Abby calls our “national empathy crisis,” as is community service, another area of focus. Utah has the highest rate of volunteerism and charitable giving in the nation, and service, Abby says, is one of the best tools we have to combat our worrying global mental health statistics — according to the World Health Organization, mental health conditions and substance use disorders have risen 13 percent in the last decade. To combat the crisis, she challenged Utahns to show up and collectively serve one million times in
2022. She also hopes to elevate the teaching profession and support educators in the midst of Utah’s teacher shortage, spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic. Abby and her team hosted the Show Up for Teachers conference for over a thousand educators earlier this year, and have received hundreds of letters and emails thanking them for their support.
While Abby’s initiatives are nonpartisan by design, she’s not afraid to share her opinions on policies and legislation. In 2018, when Spencer was still lieutenant governor, Abby testified in a Senate committee meeting against a bill that would have outlawed surrogacy, a cause personal to her as a former gestational carrier. The bill did not pass. More recently, she has shared her opinions on the state of education, a cause near to her heart, having earned her degree in special education from Utah State
COX’S STATEWIDE INITIATIVE, SHOW UP UTAH, ANNOUNCED IN 2021, FOCUSES ON FOSTER CARE, MENTAL HEALTH AND OTHER ENDEAVORS AIMED AT ADDRESSING THE “NATIONAL EMPATHY CRISIS.”
JON HUNTSMAN HAD THE NAME ID, THE MONEY AND THE PRESTIGE. THE COX CAMPAIGN WAS OUTMANNED AND OUTGUNNED. BUT THEY WERE NOT OUTWORKED.
COX,
WAS
HER
University. She says she was disappointed by a bill introduced during the last legislative session which would have required teachers to upload every lesson plan for the entire school year online to be evaluated, before school even started. “It’s discouraging,” she says, explaining that the bill, which was the brainchild of a loud and vocal group from the far right of the Republican Party, signaled that teachers are not being treated as professionals.
In the spring of 2022, with Abby’s support, the governor vetoed a bill that banned transgender children from competing in school sports, citing the mental health impact on transgender youth. He became the center of the national spotlight, and the ire of many on the far right. More recently,
though, in January 2023, he did sign into law legislation that bans puberty blockers and surgery for trans youth. But Abby seems unconcerned by the potential political consequences of any legislation Spencer signs. “We’re never going to apologize for doing what’s right,” she says. “If people disagree with us, that’s their prerogative. They can vote for somebody else and we get to go home to our farm.” According to sources, Abby’s candor is one of her most consistent characteristics. She even adds a few choice “farm girl words,” when expressing some of her stronger opinions. “I think people have an image or an idea or a stereotype of what a first lady is, or should be or should care about,” Abby says. “Who I am is real, who I am is a farm girl. Who I am is my daddy’s girl who taught me how to work and be who I am and be strong and connect with people.”
KEN PALMER WANTED a large family and he wanted to raise them on a ranch, undeterred by knowing nothing about ranching beyond what he’d seen on “Bonanza.” In 1974, when he found a plot of land in Mount Pleasant, Ken and Charlene moved with their four kids 120 miles south of their life in Davis County and began teaching themselves the ways of the farm.
A few years later, Abby was their first child born in Mount Pleasant and the fifth of the family’s eventual 10. The two older brothers helped run the ranch while the eight girls were spared the manual labor of farm chores. After the brothers left home, Ken was diagnosed with transverse myelitis, an autoimmune disease that made it difficult for him to move. Finances were already tight after a processing company Ken launched had failed. The family needed someone to be his arms and legs on the ranch, and Abby, who was in middle school
WHO
RUNNING
FAMILY’S RANCH OPERATIONS BY AGE 14, JOINED HER HUSBAND LAST YEAR ON A CATTLE DRIVE THROUGH SALT LAKE CITY TO CELEBRATE THE DAYS OF ’47 COWBOY GAMES AND RODEO.
at the time, was just the right age to take over the majority of the responsibilities. From the time she was 14, she was running the ranch operations, managing 300 head of sheep and 30 head of cattle, horses and pigs. She baled hay, branded calves and docked lambs.
According to her mother, Charlene, Abby took to farm life naturally. She recalls a day when Abby was 10 and Ken placed her on his tractor to bale straw on their 25-acre field. Pushing the clutch in was a physical challenge for a child, and Abby had to stand for each gear shift. It was at least six hours before Abby finally returned inside, her face covered in mud and dirt except for the two clean circles where glasses had covered her eyes. Beaming, she handed her mother a bouquet of maple leaves.
As she entered her teen years, Abby woke up at 3 or 4 in the morning to bale hay in the frigid February air. “That’s not fun for anybody. But especially not teenage girls,” says Abby’s sister, Hayley Andrus. Abby would return from her away basketball games, bundle up and go out to feed the sheep, she says. “We were a little abnormal,” Andrus says. The sisters were embarrassed to be seen in their farm clothes, fearing no boy wanted to ask out a girl who spent her time milking cows.
But at least one boy did.
Spencer and Abby shared a group of friends who all dated each other. But for Spencer, there was something different and special about Abby that set her apart from the rest. The two eventually married and left Sanpete County for Virginia, where Spencer attended law school and the couple had their first two children — Gavin and Kaleb. They returned to Utah and bought a home just north of Salt Lake City, a quick commute to Spencer’s law firm downtown. But after the delivery of their third son, Adam, Abby suffered from severe postpartum anxiety. She realized she had no idea how to raise three boys on a fourth of an acre when she had been raised on 600. “I really didn’t think in a million years I’d move back,” Abby says, explaining that she took great pride in having spread her wings
to pursue a life of her own when so many people never left the hometown where she was raised. But the more she and Spencer talked about what kind of future they really wanted for their family, the more they realized the quieter country life was calling. So they returned to Sanpete County to help run CentraCom Interactive — Spencer’s parents’ telecommunications company — and the Cox family farm.
They had not been back long when Spencer was approached by the Fairview mayor and some city council members about a vacancy on the council, begging him to run. He was elected in 2004, and became mayor the following year. Each position was part time, allowing their family to stay in Fairview while he continued building his career at CentraCom, but Abby was seeing her husband even less than when he was working at the law firm.
They were, at least, nearer to family. Abby became especially close with Spencer’s sister Emilee Pehrson and her husband Ben, who hoped to have a second child. Pehrson has cystic fibrosis and her first pregnancy
nearly killed her. A second pregnancy would likely actually kill her. So Abby volunteered to become a gestational carrier for Pehrson. Abby’s first four pregnancies had been routine. Her fifth, however, was fraught almost immediately. Three months in she began hemorrhaging and was placed on bed rest. At 34 weeks she began leaking amniotic fluid, and when her doctor tried to stop labor, she began hemorrhaging again. She delivered the baby boy, Lawson, two months early, in November 2010.
Abby describes the experience as one of high anxiety “like driving someone else’s Ferrari.” Those close to her shared her anxiety and marveled at her selflessness. Her mother told me it took her a while to come to terms with her daughter having a baby who would not be her grandchild. “Behind the scenes, it was really tough,” Andrus, her sister, said. She was pregnant with a daughter while Abby carried Lawson. “I got to bring my baby home and she didn’t, and that was really hard.”
While Spencer served as a Sanpete County commissioner, then, in 2012, was elected
COX, LEFT, HER SISTER, CENTER, AND HUSBAND ASSEMBLE THANK-YOU KITS FOR FOSTER FAMILIES IN SUPPORT OF ABBY’S STATEWIDE INITIATIVE, SHOW UP UTAH.
JEFFREY D. ALLRED/DESERET NEWS
to the Utah House of Representatives, Abby devoted herself to her children and the farm and looked forward to more time for herself in the future when all her kids would be in school. She might use her teaching degree in a classroom, she thought. But nine months into Spencer’s term as a legislator, Gov. Gary Herbert asked him to be his lieutenant governor. The couple had to decide whether or not they would make full-time politics their future. Things were going well at CentraCom, their kids were thriving in Fairview and they had enough experience with politics to understand how nasty it can be. “It just wasn’t in the plans,” Abby explains. “It wasn’t anything we thought about or wanted.”
Spencer was sure he was going to decline. Abby encouraged him to accept. “Maybe the
fact that we don’t want this means we’re supposed to do it,” she told her husband. So he took the job on the condition that their family would stay in Fairview out of the political fray, and he would commute to downtown Salt Lake City every day. It became clear to Abby that the time to herself of which she had dreamed would not materialize for a long while. She pushed her teaching ambitions aside and dug into being the parent at home — a role in which she thrived, according to friends and family — while Spencer spent long days in Salt Lake.
Three years into Spencer’s term, in 2016, 49 people were murdered at Pulse nightclub in Florida in what appeared to be a shooting targeting members of the LGBTQ community. Spencer was invited to speak at a Salt Lake City vigil. According to Abby, Spencer rarely writes out remarks, but he wrote a full speech for this occasion. While Abby feared Spencer would be attacked by the far right for the speech, she told him she knew speaking was the right thing to do. In his remarks, Spencer apologized for previously held beliefs and actions toward the queer community. Spencer’s tearful and heartfelt speech quickly traveled through the internet and the national news networks, setting the course for his political career. A while later, Abby was at a ballgame in Fairview with her son. A friend, whose father is gay, approached her. In tears, he thanked her for the speech. “It’s about empathy,” Abby says. “It’s about listening to somebody that has a different story, and really trying to understand where they’re coming from.”
As Herbert’s second term neared its 2020 conclusion, the Coxes found themselves, again, wondering if they would pursue politics further. Abby says they wanted the answer to be “no” when they prayed about whether or not they should run. “We would really have loved to go back to the farm and continue raising our kids and doing whatever it was that came next,” she says. The calculation was not what they wanted to do, she says, but what they were supposed to do. And they felt they were supposed to run for governor. “We’re going to
do this together,” she told Spencer.
The 2020 campaign was even more difficult than anticipated. Covid-19 not only made physical visits to voters nearly impossible; it further polarized the electorate. “People we knew and loved turned on us,” Abby says. Spencer, who as lieutenant governor at the time oversaw the state’s Covid-19 response, was scrutinized at every turn. If he tried to help businesses stay open, he was called a murderer. If he encouraged people to wear masks and practice social distancing, he was told he was taking away freedoms.
Like most everyone else in the state, the Coxes expected Jon Huntsman Jr. — Utah’s former governor, son of one of the state’s most prominent businessmen and philanthropists, and a former U.S. ambassador to Singapore, China and Russia — to win the Republican primary. Three other candidates ran — former Speaker of the Utah House Greg Hughes, previous chairman of the Utah Republican Party Thomas Wright, and Huntsman. The Coxes set out to run a campaign focused on positivity, while, Spencer claims, Hughes, Wright, and Huntsman chose to attack the Cox campaign and only the Cox campaign.
Huntsman had the name ID, the money and the prestige. The Cox campaign was outmanned and outgunned. But, Abby says, they were not outworked. They visited all 248 towns and cities in the state. Staffers remember Spencer and Abby connecting between stops, Abby’s words seemingly giving Spencer the confidence and energy he needed before visiting the next city.
For the majority of the race, Spencer and Huntsman led the polls. Spencer won the Republican convention, but Huntsman gained momentum among independent voters. The night of the primary election on June 30, 2020, Spencer led with 37 percent of the vote and Huntsman barely trailed with 34 percent. Six days later, The Associated Press called the race for Spencer. He handily beat the Democratic challenger in the general election four months later.
“There’s no way we should have won,”
ACCORDING TO FRIENDS, FAMILY AND COLLEAGUES, COX’S CANDOR IS ONE OF HER MOST CONSISTENT CHARACTERISTICS.
THE COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM WITH WHICH THE COXES LEAD MAY VERY WELL SET THE COURSE FOR OTHER REPUBLICAN LEADERS IN THE WEST AND BEYOND.
Abby tells me. “I mean, a kid from Fairview?” she says, eyebrows raised, then concludes, “It’s one of the answers that we’re supposed to be here.”
SPENCER IS UP FOR reelection in 2024, and while his approval ratings are good and climbing, Abby isn’t making any premature plans for the next five years. “Maybe I’ll be done before I know it,” she says. “But while I’m here, I want to make the biggest impact possible and I have the energy and I have the time. I’m ready to do it.” A source close to Spencer and Abby tells me the impact she’s already had on the people cannot be overstated. “No one expects the first lady to be such a force,” they say. In the past
year and a half Abby and her team have organized, facilitated and participated in 75 service projects. They’ve expanded Unified Sports from 30 schools to 200 schools. And teachers across the state continue to express their appreciation for Abby’s efforts to support their profession.
The Coxes may not be the darlings of the most conservative wing of the Republican Party, but according to Burbank, the U of U political scientist, being the darling of the conservative wing is not how politicians have historically won statewide races. Instead, Utah voters tend to vote for pragmatic politicians, and the Coxes are both pragmatic in keeping with the traditions of the Republican Party while “being adaptive
to the fact that the world is changing,” Burbank says, making them well-positioned to stay in the Governor’s Mansion.
Abby still has two years to go, or six if Spencer is reelected. But when the time comes, she’ll be ready to be done. “(Spencer) and I never had ambition for this type of position,” Abby says. “I don’t think either of us wanted this.” She says she’s trying to teach her kids that the right path is not always the easy path. Often it’s the hardest. “This was certainly the hardest path,” she says.
They say they have no political ambitions beyond the governorship. They’ve given up the best years of their lives in “the apartment above the museum.” They say they can’t wait to get back to the farm.
THE COXES STILL DREAM OF RETURNING TO THEIR RURAL UTAH ROOTS.
CAN THE NAVAJO NATION’S YOUNGEST-EVER PRESIDENT IMPROVE THE PATH OF THE LARGEST RESERVATION IN THE U.S.?
BY ETHAN BAUER
PHOTOGRAPHY
BY MARK OWENS
HIS IS THE PLACE
where the climb began. Window Rock — the capital of the great Navajo Nation, some 100 miles due south of the Four Corners. Here, atop a chestnut steed, with turquoise on his belt buckle, on his ring finger and on his wrists; with his traditional necklace rattling ’round his neck; and with a black, domed cowboy hat bobbing with each clip-clop, Buu Nygren declared what he’d long waited to declare: “My family, upbringing, education and experience have humbled me and molded me into the person I am today. It has prepared me to take this next step on my path and run for Navajo Nation president.”
His words echoed through Veterans Memorial Park back in early April, bolstered by the 200-foot sandstone amphitheater behind him. This formation is where Window Rock, Arizona, gets its name: A 47-foot hole interrupts the otherwise flat orange wall, with the blue sky shining through like an azure eye. It almost appeared to stare down at Nygren and his 50-some supporters that day. As if the whole Navajo Nation was watching.
They watched as Nygren, at only 35 years old, laid out his vision — one that’s been laid out again and again over the decades: Infrastructure. Education. Economic development. But why would he be the one to make good on such promises, When so many past leaders of the Diné, as the Navajo prefer to be called, haven’t? He relied on a one-two punch of a backstory for the answer. First, he grew up like many of his people: Financially poor, in a home without running water or electricity, born to a single mother who raised him Christian. He knew the struggles of the average Diné. But he also had the perfect background to bring about the desired changes: a bachelor’s degree in construction management
from Arizona State; an MBA; a doctorate of education from USC, and a decade of work experience.
Plus his campaign was predicated on firsts: He’d be the youngest leader of the Navajo Nation, and his vice president, Richelle Montoya, would be the first woman to serve as either president or vice president. And if he could achieve those firsts, why stop there? His critics call him naive, but so do his friends. Like Arlando Teller, a fellow politician who’s known Nygren for years. “I think naivete will be not only a breath of fresh air,” he says, “but also could be his (biggest) challenge.”
Nygren himself accepts that challenge. “There’s never been a person like myself, as young as I am, in this position,” he tells Deseret Magazine. “But I don’t think there’s ever been someone with the same experience in this position, either.”
And that, Nygren believes, places his ultimate goal within reach: Deliverance from the conditions that have caused 36 percent of the Navajo Nation to live below the federal poverty line, compared to 13 percent of Americans overall. Deliverance from the oppression of what author Tommy Orange calls the “stray bullets and consequences” of colonialism that “are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.” Deliverance from a brain drain that’s sucking the best of the Navajo Nation off the reservation in search of opportunities unavailable there, leading to a culture teetering on the brink of erasure — with the Diné language imperiled, ceremonies forgotten and lagging standards of living.
Only 66,229 citizens voted in November’s election — in a nation of some 400,000. Nygren beat his uber-polished opponent, incumbent Jonathan Nez, by just 3,551 ballots. For Nygren, this was vindication enough: With zero experience in
BUU NYGREN WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE NAVAJO NATION IN NOVEMBER 2022 AT THE AGE OF 35.
MANY IN THE NAVAJO NATION LEAVE THE RESERVATION IN SEARCH OF OPPORTUNITIES UNAVAILABLE THERE, LEADING TO A CULTURE TEETERING ON THE BRINK OF ERASURE.
elected office, he managed to defeat what he calls the Nez “political machine” in a major upset. “He had to prove himself — that he’s capable of doing this job. That he’s capable of being a leader,” explains Donovan Quintero, a Navajo Times reporter who covered Nygren’s campaign. “And even then, over 30,000 people chose otherwise, and even more people chose (to stay home). So the majority of the Navajos don’t really believe in him.”
But now, two months into his presidency, they’ll at least be watching. If his administration unfolds according to plan, they’ll have no choice. The presidential complex rests in direct view of Window Rock. The eyes of the nation are indeed upon Buu Nygren, and he believes they’ll like what they see. Now, like the Diné leaders of old, he just needs to make them believe, too.
THIS IS THE place the Diné call home: 27,000 square miles of mountains and canyons in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico — the largest Indian reservation in the United States. Yet the Diné, most scholars believe, haven’t actually lived in the Four Corners region all that long. They are not, like their neighbors the Hopi and Zuni, descended from the Ancestral Pueblo people who built the famed cliff dwellings. Rather, many modern scholars believe the Diné arrived in the Southwest sometime in the 1400s. Soon, though, the region permeated their spirituality, with creation stories placing their homeland between “four sacred mountains” in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.
In the era of European colonization, the most famed and feared Navajo leader emerged from Bears Ears, Utah. His people called him “Holy Boy” or “Warrior Grabbed Enemy,” but the name that stuck was Manuelito. Despite his best efforts to the contrary, by the mid-1860s his people were
in the midst of their own “Trail of Tears,” known as the “Long Walk,” where they were marched to Fort Sumner in New Mexico and held prisoner until the Treaty of 1868 allowed them to return to their homeland. Manuelito signed that treaty, and he eventually began to promote the American view of education as the “ladder” through which his people could regain their independence. He even sent two of his sons to a Pennsylvania boarding school — where one died, and one became sick and returned home, only to die soon after. An irate Manuelito spent the last decade of his life certain he’d led his people astray. “He did voice a shift in his view about the necessity or the need for American education,” explains Jennifer Denetdale, a professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico and a leading expert on Diné history. Still, his legacy is most often attached to education
— including through the prestigious Chief Manuelito Scholarship program, of which Nygren was a recipient.
Diné government of Manuelito’s day was scattered and regional, which made negotiations difficult for the U.S. government. The Department of the Interior changed that in 1922 by establishing the Navajo Business Council to arrange natural resource extraction on Navajo land. The council evolved into new iterations over the decades, until 1989 brought the advent of a three-branch system that closely resembles the U.S. government — though some constants remain. Namely, promises of modernization. “You can see them in documents from the 1880s,” Denetdale says. Over time, Navajo leaders have fallen back on familiar excuses when they haven’t delivered. “What they say … is, ‘Well, it just takes a long time because of the Navajo Nation’s
WHILE NYGREN HAD NEVER HELD ELECTED OFFICE, HIS WIFE JASMINE BLACKWATER-NYGREN HAS SERVED IN THE ARIZONA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES SINCE 2021.
THE EYES OF THE NATION ARE INDEED UPON BUU NYGREN, AND HE BELIEVES THEY’LL LIKE WHAT THEY SEE.
NOW, LIKE THE NAVAJO LEADERS OF OLD, HE JUST NEEDS TO MAKE THEM BELIEVE, TOO.
relationship with the federal government,’” Denetdale explains. And they’re not wrong. The Navajo Nation is supposed to be sovereign, but in practice, red tape abounds. “The bureaucracy is just incredible,” she adds. “It’s just this crushing machine that never goes anywhere.”
Nygren has listened to these frustrations at events across Navajo Nation — channeling a more modern Manuelito. Nygren wasn’t born in Bears Ears — but he was born in Blanding, Utah, making him the first Utah-born leader of the Diné since Manuelito himself. And even if Manuelito wavered on his belief in education as a ladder, Nygren climbed anyway, hoping to prove that it can be more than a ladder alone.
THIS IS THE place where the ambitions began. A 14-foot travel trailer down a jowl-rattling road in Yellow Rock Point, Utah. You’d struggle to find this place on any map. It’s not a city or a municipality — but it’s where Nygren grew up. His father was South Vietnamese, which is where his name comes from, but the younger Buu Nygren never met him. His mom raised him here, alone. Facing difficult circumstances, she never discouraged his pursuits. And young Nygren showed an aptitude for many things.
In middle school, he was a quarterback on the football field and a pitcher on the baseball diamond. In high school, he helped the Redskins (the mascot isn’t controversial here) of Red Mesa High to a runner-up finish at the state cross-country meet during his junior year. A trophy case in the school’s lobby still bears Nygren’s signature, along with a promise: “Next year.” He also started a skateboarding club and helped secure an in-school skatepark. That undertaking introduced him to the grinding pestles of bureaucracy, and its aversion to change. “I found out real quickly,” he says, “that
people really looked down on people who skated.” So he proposed a literal contract to the school’s administration: “We’ll make sure we maintain good grades and make sure that we stay out of trouble,” Nygren recalls. In return: “You guys just let us skate.”
He showed an interest in carpentry and construction, working with his uncle to build houses. It’s a wonder he had time. The ride from Yellow Rock Point to Red Mesa High School, just across the Arizona state line, is about 40 miles by car, but the route was never direct. Nygren and his sister caught the bus each morning around 5:30 and didn’t arrive on campus until about two hours later. He often returned home after cross-country practice around 7, in time to do his homework by the flicker of a kerosene lamp. “It was just normal. I didn’t really know the difference,” he says. “But now, I think about it, and I don’t know if as an adult I could handle that.” Perhaps his lengthy commute explains why, when asked in his senior yearbook questionnaire who his favorite bus driver was, he wrote “none.”
That yearbook offers many clues about the mythology of Buu Nygren. It tells of a young man well-liked by his classmates: He was voted toughest, most likely to succeed and “best body,” complete with a snapshot of shirtless flexing. He was his junior class representative in student government, his sophomore class president and graduated as valedictorian. And his advice to those who’d come after him proved prophetic: “Start looking and apply to colleges early. Think BIG!”
He certainly did that himself, according to his college counselor, Alvina Tsosie, who still works at Red Mesa. She remembers Nygren as extremely ambitious, with an interest in math and science. He spoke fluent Diné bizaad — better than her, she
admits — and was always a natural leader. Tsosie also remembers he set a clear goal for himself throughout his years there: “Ms. Tsosie,” he’d tell her time and time again, “I’m going to be Navajo Nation president someday. You just watch.” His campaign’s triumph was, therefore, no surprise to her. But as Arizona Republic reporter Arlyssa Becenti observed following his victory, he also won by “running the campaign his way.” Sometimes, that meant stepping back onto a skateboard at a parade and performing a pop shove-it. Sometimes it meant stopping to take videos with voters at gas stations, as he did with his old PE teacher’s niece. Henrietta Haven recently pulled up that video on her phone and beamed. “Special shoutout to Ms. Haven! Good morning!” he says toward the end. “I’m staying healthy and fit like you told me!” But most of all, it meant remembering what his mom taught him. She died of alcoholism in December 2020, and she always told Nygren that life would be difficult. “But as long as you put in the work,” she added, “and have a good attitude, the results should be good.” Results to her didn’t mean the accumulation of wealth or power, but simply to “be good and be kind,” according to a Facebook post Nygren published on the one-year anniversary of her death. “I think about that when I think of mom,” he wrote.
THIS IS THE place where Buu Nygren chose to celebrate his victory: The “Wildcat Den,” a first-rate gymnasium on the campus of the Navajo Nation’s Chinle High School, for a community college men’s basketball clash between Eastern Arizona College and the College of Southern Nevada. The game had been scheduled months earlier, with absolutely no thought given to the presidential election taking place the
day before. But shortly after Nygren was declared the winner, his people contacted Eastern Arizona’s people, telling them he wanted to make an appearance.
Stories of Nygren’s hustle became legendary. “Throughout the campaign,” recalls Allie Redhorse Young, a Navajo activist, “I saw him in every. single. community.” So his stop at the basketball game felt like more of the same — and the crowd of some 1,200 loved it. “He walked into the auditorium,” recalls Eastern Arizona President Todd Haynie, “and really, the mood changed dramatically.” A line of people wanted selfies. Nygren obliged. Others just wanted to talk and he engaged. This was his campaign distilled: He knew Nez, his opponent, was polished in a way he was not. So his approach was to make himself available, personable. To be different. Always with one eye toward the Navajo Nation, and one eye toward its place in the larger world.
This strategy was on display during his halftime speech. “He wasn’t dressed in a three-piece suit,” Haynie recalls. Nygren, in contrast, wore his distinctive domed cowboy hat. He often pins an eagle feather to the band, to symbolize safe travels. He also wears his long, black hair in a traditional way, with a headband made from arrowheads, symbolizing protection. Everything about his wardrobe, he insists, is deliberate at a time when few Diné still wear traditional jewelry. “We can still be modern, but also not forget where we’ve come from,” he says. “We can seek the education, we can seek the jobs. But at the end of the day, let’s not forget who we are.”
him will be learning the strengths and weaknesses of each delegate, and figuring out how to work with them. Though he’s already something of an expert on compromise.
Given his Christian upbringing, he says advisers pressured him to declare his allegiance to Christianity throughout his campaign. Nygren refused. “When it came to religion,” he says, “I never really entertained it, even though I did grow up Christian.” He means no disrespect toward Christians, nor to members of the Native American Church. But on a personal level, he’s more interested in worldly questions than eternal ones. “We’re all in it together,” he says. “We’re all up against poverty. We’re all up against washboard roads. We’re all up against family members that have been asking for water and power for decades. And we’re all up against not having adequate public safety. ... That’s what I’m against, and that’s what I believe in.”
In short, he believes in balancing the old and the new. In bringing the outside world in without sacrificing everything that makes the Navajo people unique. “(He’s) the bridge,” Yazzie says, “between two worlds.”
THIS IS THE place Buu Nygren now calls home. He built it himself, down a dirt road near Red Mesa High School. He just moved here in December. Nygren used to run trails in this area as part of his cross-country regimen; he used to look up at the vast open spaces and, if his college counselor is to be believed, he saw in those red rocks, brown meadows and blue skies what the Navajo Nation could become. And that vision remains central. “He is blowing back into the politics on Navajo a refreshed concept of, ‘Come home. Let’s do something together. Let’s fix home,’” Teller explains.
Nygren’s tried to do that by making Diné cultural identity a core part of his messaging. “He really was doing it differently,” says Tyson Yazzie, a Navajo prosecutor who attended Arizona State at the same time as Nygren. “And I think that really speaks to the future of the Navajo Nation. The people are ready for a change.” What that will look like in terms of policy proposals, and whether those proposals will pass the Navajo Council, is still very much in flux. Aside from electing a new kind of president, the Diné also recalibrated their legislature; two-thirds will be new members. Nygren says the most difficult challenge awaiting NYGREN FREQUENTLY CONNECTS WITH
That’s where his vision starts: With economic reforms that’ll make opening businesses in the Navajo Nation easier, to bring the best of the Diné back to their ancestral lands. But that’s in service of something bigger. “Our own senator, our own congressional representative,” he explains. “Maybe even the president.” At the very least, he wants the nation to be a place a U.S. presidential candidate must visit during a
campaign. He wants his homeland to have that kind of clout. That kind of hope. Perhaps his critics are right that he’s naive. Even his most optimistic supporters would agree that the future he wants is a long way off. “I’m not gonna lie, he has a huge challenge in front of him,” says Young, who endorsed Nygren despite having worked extensively with Nez. “There’s been a lot of talk about change and vision for change. And it’s been a little bit slow,” she adds. “And I have no idea what’s gonna happen with Buu. I don’t have any idea if he’ll be able to make the changes that he was talking about in his campaign.” But his embrace of education — not as a tool of assimilation, as it was wielded by the American government in the days of Manuelito, but as a way to learn practical skills that can benefit his people — could be just the tool the Navajo nation needs to inch its way back from the brink.
“We’ve got a lot of attorneys. We’ve got a lot of engineers. We’ve got a lot of business people that haven’t come back together to really build a future that we can all enjoy,” Nygren says. “Fifty years from now, it’d be nice for my grandkids to say, ‘I’d rather live on Navajo.’”
IVAN M C CLELLAN’S INTIMATE PORTRAITS OF THE BLACK COWBOYS OF THE WEST
CALF ROPER
KEARY HINES
WALKS HIS HORSES TO THE ARENA FOR A ROPING PRACTICE
JA’DAYIA KURSH, ARKANSAS’ FIRST BLACK RODEO QUEEN, FIRST BEGAN RIDING HORSES WHEN SHE WAS ONLY SIX YEARS OLD. IN HOPES OF PASSING ON THE FREEDOM THAT SHE FOUND ATOP A HORSE, SHE CREATED AG FOR KIDS, AN ORGANIZATION TO HELP CHILDREN LEARN ABOUT AGRARIAN WORK AND LIFESTYLES.
ERHAPS ONE OF
the most romantic notions about cowboying and ranching is a belief that there’s work hard enough to afford one’s true freedom. Heels dug into the ground, churning dust, a rolling sweat, hands cracked with weather and wear — all on account of making the earth a little closer to what you want it to be. In a notably Western way, that freedom doesn’t come easy. But no one epitomizes that perspicuity more than the Black cowboys, ranchers and riders of the region.
According to historians’ estimates, one-quarter of all cowboys working during the time we so often hear called “the Wild West” were Black. The earliest African American cattle herders were enslaved men from Senegal — specifically brought to America against their will for their unique skills with herding and roping. As white Americans moved West and established ranches and cattle operations in what’s now Texas, they brought enslaved men and women with them illegally. According to the Smithsonian, by 1825, nearly 25 percent of the Texas settler population was enslaved people. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 — and the news of Emancipation reaching Texas two years later on what we now call Juneteenth — white ranchers found themselves dependent on the skills and grit of Black cowhands, hiring them for roundups and ranch maintenance.
In his biography, written in 1907, Black cowboy Nat Love wrote: “A braver, truer set of men never lived than these wild sons of
the plains whose home was in the saddle and their couch, mother earth, with the sky for a covering.”
Today, Black Westerners remain as a pillar of the identity of our region’s culture; riding, ranching, and working the land they have known — and will continue to know — for generations. There’s Kortnee Solomon, a fourth generation Texas cowgirl, who made history when she rode as an 11-year-old in the first nationally televised Black rodeo last year in partnership with the Professional Bull Riders organization. There’s Charlie Sampson, one of the most celebrated and winningest bull riders of the ’80s and ’90s, who now, at age 63, is competing as a team roper. And there’s Rachael and James Stewart, who, when work dried up and so did financial opportunities, bought land and started a ranching operation in the high desert of southern Arizona, which they hope to pass down to their children someday.
Their lives and their stories have been documented by Ivan McClellan, a Black photographer originally from Kansas City, Kansas, who has been traveling the country for more than seven years, documenting the lives of Black cowboys, cowgirls and ranchers. The project is an opportunity to transform the narratives we have heard, and that we will tell — even for McClellan himself. “It changed my definition of home from a place of pain and poverty to a place of pride, grit and independence.”
— LAUREN STEELE
CHARLES “CHARLIE” SAMPSON, PRO RODEO HALL OF FAMER, ONCE COMPETED IN EIGHT RODEOS BETWEEN OREGON AND TEXAS IN A FIVE-DAY WINDOW. HIS IDEA OF SLOWING DOWN LOOKS LIKE THIS THESE DAYS.
AMERICA’S OLDEST BLACK RODEO, THE OKMULGEE ROY LEBLANC INVITATIONAL RODEO IN OKLAHOMA, BEGAN IN 1955, WHEN THE LEBLANC FAMILY DECIDED TO HOST AN ALL-BLACK COMPETITION. TODAY, IT STILL DRAWS IN COMPETITORS AND CROWDS FROM ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. “THE THING ABOUT THE OKMULGEE RODEO, THE REASON WE KEEP IT AN ALL-BLACK INVITATIONAL RODEO IS THAT SO MANY PLACES WE WENT HAD BLACK COWBOYS,” SAYS KENNETH LEBLANC. “PEOPLE DON’T REALIZE NOW THAT THERE ARE BLACK COWBOYS AND THAT’S THE THING I WANT TO KEEP ALIVE.”
KORTNEE SOLOMON, 12, IS A FOURTHGENERATION COWGIRL, AND THE DAUGHTER OF 11-TIME INVITATIONAL CHAMPION KANESHA JACKSON. “I’VE BEEN TRAVELING FROM STATE TO STATE RODEOING SINCE THE AGE OF THREE,” SHE TOLD PHOTOGRAPHER IVAN M C CLELLAN. “LIFE FEELS LIKE HOME ON THE ROAD. GOD’S CREATION OF THE EARTH IS INDESCRIBABLE.”
KORTNEE AND KANESHA RIDING NEAR THEIR HOME IN TEXAS.
RACHAEL AND JAMES STEWART LEFT THEIR JOBS AND THE CITY IN 2020, IN HOPES OF CREATING A BETTER FUTURE FOR THEIR FAMILY OF SIX BY LIVING OFF THE LAND. “IT’S A ROUGH LIFE, BUT THE GOOD OUTWEIGHS THE BAD,” RACHAEL TELLS M C CLELLAN. THE FAMILY FOUND FRESH AIR AND SPACE IN ARIZONA, AND THEIR FOUR KIDS — JAMES, ZINAYE, ZENAYA AND JAVON — HAVE TAKEN TO THEIR NEW WAY OF LIFE. “THEY’RE THINKING MORE CRITICALLY AND STRATEGICALLY AND DOING DIFFERENT THINGS EVERY DAY. THEY’RE NOT THINKING OUTSIDE OF THE BOX, THERE IS NO BOX, AND EVERYTHING THEY DO IN LIFE IS LEARNING.”
THE STEWART FAMILY NOW RAISES CHICKENS, DUCKS, PIGS, TURKEYS, GOATS AND STEERS ON THEIR SMALL RANCH.
ORDER IN THE COURT
DOES THE SUPREME COURT NEED TO BE REFORMED?
BY ILYA SHAPIRO
The battle to confirm Brett Kavanaugh in the fall of 2018 showed that the Supreme Court is now part of the same toxic cloud that envelops all of the nation’s public discourse. Ironically, Kavanaugh was nominated in part because he was thought to be a safe pick, with a long public career that had been vetted numerous times. He was firmly part of the legal establishment, specifically its conservative mainstream, and had displayed a political caginess that still make some on the right worry that he’s too much like John Roberts rather than Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. As it turned out, of course, 11th-hour sexual assault allegations transformed what was already a contentious process into a partisan Rorschach test. All told, Kavanaugh faced a concerted opposition campaign unlike any seen since Robert Bork in 1987.
Senate Democrats had warned President Ronald Reagan that nominating Bork to the Supreme Court would provoke a fight unlike any he had faced, even after Scalia had been confirmed unanimously the year before. And so, on the very day that Reagan announced Bork as his pick, Ted Kennedy went to the Senate floor to denounce “Robert Bork’s America,” a place that featured a truly horrible parade.
It went downhill from there, as the
brusque Bork refused to adopt the now-common strategy of talking a lot without saying much. A few years later, Ruth Bader Ginsburg refined that into a “pincer movement,” refusing to comment on specific fact patterns because they might come before the court, then refusing to discuss general principles because “a judge could deal in specifics only.”
Confirmation processes weren’t always like this. The Senate didn’t even hold public
WHAT’S SUPPOSED TO BE THE MOST DEMOCRATICALLY ACCOUNTABLE BRANCH HAS BEEN AVOIDING HARD CHOICES SINCE LONG BEFORE THE CURRENT POLARIZATION.
hearings on Supreme Court nominations until 1916. So is the toxicity all about TV and Twitter, the 24-hour news cycle and the viral video? Is it that legal issues have become more ideologically divisive? No, the confirmation process hasn’t changed beyond the framers’ recognition, and political rhetoric was as nasty in the 1820s as it is in the
2020s. All these parts of the current system that we don’t like are symptoms of a larger phenomenon: As government has grown, so have the laws that courts interpret, and their reach over more of our lives. Modern confirmation battles are all part of, and a logical response to, political incentives. When judges act as super-legislators, the public wants to scrutinize their ideologies. The imbalance between the executive branch and Congress has made the Supreme Court into the decider of both controversial social issues and complex policy disputes. Congress doesn’t complete its work and instead passes the political buck to a faceless bureaucracy, and to a judiciary that has to evaluate whether what these alphabet agencies come up with is within spitting distance of what the law allows. What’s supposed to be the most democratically accountable branch has been avoiding hard choices since long before the current polarization.
Is there anything we can do to fix this dynamic, to turn down the political heat? Reform proposals abound: term limits, changing the size of the court, not having permanent justices but a rotating cast of circuit judges, setting new confirmation rules and more. At the tail end of the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden pledged
to appoint a bipartisan commission to consider reforming the Supreme Court “because it is getting out of whack,” although he hastened to add that “it’s not about court-packing.” In April 2021, he followed through on that promise — and the commission dutifully held hearings and produced a 294-page report that diligently covered relevant issues but studiously avoided making policy recommendations. Indeed, it couldn’t have given any consensus advice because of clear divisions that quickly became apparent: The left-leaning professors didn’t always agree with what the far-left activists wanted, and two of the more conservative members resigned before the final product was delivered. In the end, all this reform talk boils down to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic — which vessel isn’t the appointment process, but the ship of state. The fundamental problem we face is the politicization of the product, not of the process. If nominations were depoliticized, that would likewise depoliticize the exercise of judicial power. But the only way confirmations will be detoxified, and the only way we reverse the trend where people see Trump and Obama judges, is for the court to make itself less important by returning decision-making power to legislators — rather than bureaucrats — and the people in their respective states.
ULTIMATELY, JUDICIAL POWER is not a means to an end, but an enforcement mechanism for the strictures of a founding document intended just as much to curtail the excesses of democracy as to empower its exercise. In a country ruled by law, and not men, the proper response to an unpopular legal decision is to change the law or amend the Constitution. Any other method leads to a sort of judicial abdication and the loss of those very rights and liberties that can only be vindicated through the judicial process. Or to government by black-robed philosopher kings — and, as Scalia liked to say, why would we choose nine lawyers for that job?
Party-line votes for Supreme Court
nominations are unhealthy for the republic and suggest that nobody can now be confirmed during divided government. But that unfortunate dynamic is unsurprising at a time when the judiciary is all-powerful and justices have contrasting jurisprudential theories that track party preferences.
Although the confirmation process may not have always been the spectacle it is today, nominations to the high court were often contentious political struggles. For the republic’s first century, withdrawn and postponed nominations, or those upon which the Senate failed to act, were a regular occurrence.
More recently, there’s Merrick Garland, the first nomination the Senate allowed to expire since 1881 — but then the last time
IN THE END, ALL THIS REFORM TALK BOILS DOWN TO REARRANGING THE DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC.
a Senate controlled by the party opposite the president confirmed a nominee to a vacancy arising in a presidential election year was 1888. As we now know, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s gamble worked: Not only did it not hurt vulnerable senators running for reelection, but the vacancy held Republicans together and provided the margin for Donald Trump in key states. Trump then rewarded his electoral coalition with the nomination of Neil Gorsuch, who was confirmed only after the Senate decided, on a party-line vote, to exercise the “nuclear option” and remove filibusters.
Opportunities for obstruction have continued — pushed down to blue slips, cloture votes and other arcane parliamentary procedures — even as control of the Senate remains by far the most important aspect of the whole endeavor. The elimination of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees was the natural culmination of a tit-for-tat
escalation by both parties.
More significantly, by filibustering Gorsuch, Democrats destroyed their leverage over future, more consequential vacancies. Moderate Republican senators wouldn’t have gone for a “nuclear option” to seat Kavanaugh in place of Anthony Kennedy, but they didn’t face that dilemma. And they again didn’t face it when Trump got the chance to replace Ginsburg so close to the 2020 election, which heralded an even bigger jurisprudential shift.
Given the battles we saw over Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson, too many people think of the justices in partisan terms. That’s really too bad, but not surprising when contrasting methods of constitutional and statutory interpretation now largely track identification with parties that are more ideologically sorted than ever.
Senatorial brinksmanship is symptomatic of a larger problem: the courts’ self-corruption, aiding and abetting the expansion of federal power, and then the shifting of that power away from the people’s legislative representatives and toward executive-branch administrative agencies. The judiciary affects public policy more than it ever did — and those decisions increasingly turn on the party of the president who nominated the judge or justice.
That’s why the public increasingly sees the court as political. Hand-wringing over the court’s “legitimacy” is both overwrought and partisan — the court is still respected more than most institutions at a time of lower societal trust overall — but there are lessons to be drawn from our long sweep of confirmation battles.
First, politics has always been part of the process. Presidents have long tried to find people in line with their own political thinking. Look at the judicial battles of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, with the Midnight Judges Act — the original court-packing. When nominees got to the Senate, they faced another gauntlet, particularly when the president’s party didn’t have a majority. Historically, the Senate has confirmed
fewer than 60 percent of Supreme Court nominees under divided government, compared to about 90 percent when the president’s party controlled the Senate. Timing matters too: Over 80 percent of nominees in the first three years of a presidential term have been confirmed, but barely more than half in the fourth (election) year.
Second, confirmation fights are now driven by judicial philosophy. To a certain extent, the politicization of appointments has always tracked national political divisions. But the reasons for such controversies are now largely unprecedented. Pre-modern disputes tended to revolve around either the president’s relationship with the Senate or factors like geography and patronage. That dynamic is markedly different from what we see today. Ideological litmus tests cause more of a problem than past criteria. With the parties adopting incompatible judicial philosophies, it’s impossible for a president to find an “uncontroversial” nominee.
The entire reason candidate Trump released his list of Supreme Court potentials was to convince Republicans, as well as cultural conservatives who may otherwise have stayed home or voted Democrat, that he could be trusted to appoint the right kind of judges. This was a real innovation, and we could see lists become standard practice, even if candidates from the two parties might use different criteria for shaping them, with more concern for demographic representation from Democrats.
Third, hearings have become Kabuki theater. Public hearings have only been around for a century and weren’t regular practice until the 1950s, when they became an opportunity for Dixiecrats to rail against Brown v. Board of Education. Otherwise, they were perfunctory discussions of personal biography. John Paul Stevens, the first nominee after Roe, wasn’t even asked about that case. Things changed in the 1980s, not coincidentally when the hearings began to be televised. Now all senators ask questions, but nominees largely refuse to answer, creating what Elena Kagan once called a “vapid and hollow charade.” The nominees speak
in platitudes: Roberts and his judicial umpire, Sonia Sotomayor saying that fidelity to the law was her only guidepost, Kagan accepting that “we’re all originalists now.” After the fiascoes that were the Barrett and Jackson hearings — the nominees coming out unscathed as senators from both sides collected video clips for their political campaigns — maybe we should get rid of hearings altogether. They’ve served their purpose but now inflict greater cost on the court, Senate and rule of law than any informational or educational benefit. Given the voluminous and instantly searchable records nominees have these days, is there any need to subject them, and the country, to a public inquisition? At the very least,
SENATORIAL BRINKSMANSHIP IS SYMPTOMATIC OF A LARGER PROBLEM: THE COURTS’ SELFCORRUPTION, AIDING AND ABETTING THE EXPANSION OF FEDERAL POWER.
the judiciary committee could sit entirely in closed session.
Fourth, every nomination can have a significant impact. The actual hearings, and the confirmation spectacle more broadly, have very little to do with being a justice.
As former White House counsel Don McGahn put it, “it’s a Hollywood audition to join a monastery.” After all the nomination hoopla, the Supreme Court is still a court, albeit with a new composition that affects both internal dynamics and external results. Not all historically significant cases would’ve turned out differently if a single justice were replaced, but some would have. And not simply by changing the party of the president making the appointment. Until very recently — last term, really — we’d gotten used to various justices serving as swing votes.
But another reason why filling each vacancy is such a big deal is that justices now
serve longer. In the late 1700s, when life expectancy was under 40 — skewed by infant mortality, of course — the average age of a Supreme Court nominee was about 50. In the last few decades, when life expectancy is just under 80, the average age of a Supreme Court nominee is still about 50. In the last half-century, only one justice was over 55 at confirmation: Ginsburg.
To put it another way, before 1970, the average tenure of a justice was less than 15 years. Since then, it’s been more than 25. Thomas, who was 43 when appointed and has already served more than 30 years, could serve another decade!
Fifth, the hardest confirmations come when there’s potential for a big shift. In addition to divided government, the most contentious nominations are those that threaten to change the court’s jurisprudence. Replacing the centrist Lewis Powell with the conservative Bork provoked a firestorm, but putting another moderate (Kennedy) in that seat was easy. Would Kavanaugh or Barrett have faced such strong opposition had they been nominated for Thomas’ seat? Wouldn’t Biden have faced a bigger battle if he were replacing Samuel Alito rather than Stephen Breyer?
At base, the reason we have these heated court battles is that the federal government is simply making too many decisions at a national level for such a large, diverse and pluralistic country. Let federal legislators make the hard calls about truly national issues like defense or (actually) interstate (actual) commerce, but let states and localities make most of the decisions that affect our daily lives. Let Florida be Florida, California be California, and Utah be Utah. That’s the only way we’re going to defuse tensions in Washington, whether in the halls of Congress or in the marble palace of the highest court in the land.
ILYA SHAPIRO IS THE DIRECTOR OF CONSTITUTIONALSTUDIES AT THE MANHATTAN INSTITUTE AND AUTHOR OF “SUPREME DISORDER: JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS AND THE POLITICS OF AMERICA’S HIGHEST COURT,” ON WHICH THIS ESSAY IS BASED. HE ALSO WRITES THE SHAPIRO’S GAVEL SUBSTACK NEWSLETTER.
BOTH SIDES OF THE BARS
IS THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM MOVEMENT HURTING FAMILIES?
BY RAFAEL A. MANGUAL
As grown up as I felt at nine, whenever my parents let me walk to school, the corner store or Prospect Park with friends, I’d have been lying through my teeth if I denied sometimes feeling afraid — even in the little slice of Brooklyn I called home. But it wasn’t the New York Police Department or endemic racism that made me anxious. In the 1990s, getting mugged or beaten up in my own neighborhood always felt like more than a remote possibility. That sense of wariness was dull and could easily be forgotten if I was distracted. But it was always there, just under the surface.
That anxiety disappeared when we moved to a mostly white town in suburban Long Island. At school, no one looked like me. And as a half Dominican, half Puerto Rican kid with, uh, different hair, “the new kid from Brooklyn” got teased a bit — even racially taunted on occasion. It was a heartbreaking transition in 1996: I hadn’t wanted to leave our two-bedroom apartment on Ocean Parkway, between Church and Caton. I didn’t care that my sister and I would have our own rooms and even a swimming pool in the backyard. And as
much as I loved baseball, I was unmoved by the fact that Nassau County’s Little League fields were in far better condition than the Parade Ground’s fields near Prospect Park. While I wasn’t thrilled about my new life in the burbs, I quickly learned that I could ride my brand-new chrome GT Dyno without even the slightest hint of fear that some-
THE IDEA THAT CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY SHOULD KEEP CRIMINAL OFFENDERS INVOLVED IN THE LIVES OF THEIR FAMILIES RESTS ON AN UNPROVEN ASSUMPTION.
one might snatch it out from under me. Eventually, I grew to both understand and appreciate the decision my parents made to move my sister and me out to what they felt would be a safer, more nurturing environment. I also grew to realize that I was a fortunate beneficiary of an incredible privilege: Being born to parents that, albeit by the skin of their teeth, could afford to leave
a high crime city for a low-crime suburb meant that I could live my most formative years in a place where violent crime just wasn’t something people worried about. Decades later, I would make the same decision for my son: In the months before he was born, my wife and I often found ourselves discussing the quality of life in our slowly gentrifying East Harlem neighborhood, which at the time was getting harder and harder to imagine pushing a baby stroller through. So we decided to move farther away from our workplaces to the safer, cleaner neighborhood of Forest Hills, where our family was far less likely to encounter the sort of crime and disorder we’d seen in East Harlem.
Though things in Harlem weren’t anywhere close to as bad as they were in mid-1990s Brooklyn, I found myself thinking again about my family’s move to Long Island and the reasons behind it. I also found myself thinking about how many families living in neighborhoods far more dangerous than the one I moved away from have no choice but to stick it out. Whatever that number was, it was too high.
I think a lot about policing and criminal
justice; I’m the head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute. I am also the son of an NYPD detective who worked in Brooklyn’s Robbery Squad. His experiences on the job were, in many ways, an extension of the mess he had grown up in while being raised by a single mom in the (now highly desirable) neighborhood he always derisively yet affectionately referred to as “Park Slop — I mean — Slope.” My father saw a historic drop in crime under William “Bill” Bratton, New York City’s police commissioner in the 1990s, but our proximity to some of Brooklyn’s worst neighborhoods was enough to sustain a real fear of crime despite the progress.
As much as my childhood and upbringing inform my work, I make a point of relying on data, not anecdotal examples or emotional arguments. All of which has led me to conclude that the dominant narratives about criminal justice are wrong.
There is one narrative in particular that has dominated the public discourse the last few years, namely that the United States can aptly be described as an oppressive carceral state that has expelled justice from every corner and crevice of its law enforcement apparatus. More specifically, the U.S. is said to be in the midst of an “over” or “mass” incarceration crisis driven by unjustifiably aggressive overpolicing, unduly “coercive” overprosecution, and racism directed primarily at Black and Latino people living in the poorer, “underserved” neighborhoods in and around America’s cities.
Such criticisms have been leveled at this country’s criminal justice system for at least half a century. But a growing chorus of professional advocates are forcefully pushing this dangerously false narrative further into the mainstream.
As a result, we are on the cusp of a generational shift in how our society approaches the core government duty of securing the public against criminal violence, theft and disorder.
BACK IN 1983, on the PBS show “Firing
Line,” Thomas Sowell said the following to the show’s original host, William F. Buckley, during a discussion about his brilliant book “The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective”: “If you are born into … a family, where there are certain values — and particularly if they are families that really insist upon those values, where it’s not a matter of doing your own thing — then you will grow up with those values; and you will have whatever the benefits that happen to come along with those values.”
My reading of the available evidence led me to conclude some years ago that he was
exactly right. In that “Firing Line” segment, Sowell was talking specifically about the values, attitudes and behaviors associated with economic and social advancement. But what if his argument also holds true as to values, attitudes and behaviors associated with all manner of observable phenomena, including economic and social decline?
In other words, if the prosocial behaviors typically engaged in by the family someone is born into will almost certainly be engaged in by that person, it stands to reason that a family in which antisocial behaviors are engaged in at high rates will be more likely to fail to properly socialize the children within
it, increasing the likelihood that those children will become antisocial adults.
ONE OF THE most rhetorically potent arguments in favor of drastically cutting incarceration is that incarceration deprives families — particularly children — of the economic and emotional support of the parent(s) or sibling(s) removed from their homes or everyday lives.
In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, many of the Democratic Party candidates echoed that sentiment. Then-candidate Joe Biden suggested allowing “nonviolent offenders who are primary care providers for their children to serve their sentences through in-home monitoring.”
Understandably, arguments about the potential effects of parental incarceration on children have resonated with some Republicans and conservative-leaning thinkers too. In a 2015 speech delivered at the Heritage Foundation, Republican Sen. Mike Lee observed that “a majority of prisoners are also parents — most of whom lived with their minor children before they were arrested or incarcerated.” He found fault with a “penitentiary approach to punishment” that “severs the offenders’ ties to their family.” Writing in a National Affairs piece titled “The Conservative Case for Jail Reform,” Arthur Rizer (then the R Street Institute’s director of criminal justice) noted that “incarceration separates offenders from their families, which increases rates of homelessness and single parenthood.”
“Approximately 17 million children are currently being raised without a father, a growing social problem that only perpetuates cycles of violence and crime,” Rizer wrote.
These ideas are also subscribed to by some who operate much closer to America’s criminal justice system than pundits and federal lawmakers — indeed, by many working at the very center of the system. Brooklyn District Attorney and self-styled “progressive prosecutor” Eric Gonzalez assured Brooklynites in a document laying out his office’s Justice 2020 initiative that
his approach would reflect his belief that incarceration has “had the effect of destabilizing families.”
And yet, as hard as it may be for some to read, the idea that criminal justice policy should by default aim to keep criminal offenders involved in the everyday lives of their families rests on a yet unproven assumption: that the sort of people who tend to find themselves behind bars by and large are (or can be) good parents — that is, reliable sources of economic and emotional support whose presence in a child’s life produces benefits that outweigh the costs of that parent’s absence.
The evidentiary basis for this assumption
WE ARE ON THE CUSP OF A GENERATIONAL SHIFT IN HOW OUR SOCIETY APPROACHES THE CORE GOVERNMENT DUTY OF SECURING THE PUBLIC AGAINST CRIMINAL VIOLENCE, THEFT AND DISORDER.
is shaky. In fact, considerable evidence suggests that the struggles of children whose parents get incarcerated — whether in school or in other areas of their lives — have less to do with their parents being incarcerated than with the underlying behavioral patterns that led to the incarceration. If that’s true, then decarceration motivated by concerns about parental separation might turn out to be a move with serious unintended consequences that actually end up hurting the very children reformers say they’re trying to help.
Think of it this way: Being raised by both Philip and Vivian Banks — the model parents played by James Avery and Janet Hubert (and later Daphne Maxwell Reid) on the 1990s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of
Bel-Air” — would be clearly ideal for most kids. Falling far short of that ideal would be a virtual certainty if you replaced Philip Banks with, say, Tony Soprano — the ruthless, narcissistic gangster at the center of HBO’s hit series “The Sopranos.” In other words, are the reform advocates correct to assume that, on net, the presence of even a criminal parent is beneficial enough for their children that the presumption of judges and prosecutors ought to be against that parent’s incarceration?
Whether a parent’s presence in a child’s life is beneficial seems heavily dependent on whether that parent engages in high levels of antisocial behavior — behaviors generally reflecting, among other things, a failure to conform to social norms, deceitfulness, impulsivity, reckless disregard for others, high levels of irritability and aggressiveness, and remorselessness in the wake of misbehavior. The literature on the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior suggests that the presence of parents who engage in such behavior may be even worse for a child than the absence of a pro-social parent. “Fathers’ antisocial behaviors predicted growth in children’s externalizing and internalizing behavior problems, with links stronger among resident-father families,” according to a study published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. These results, the study’s authors warned, “suggest caution in policies and programs which seek to universally increase marriage or father involvement without attention to fathers’ behaviors.”
That finding squares with earlier work led by Sara Jaffee, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and lead author of a paper published in the journal Child Development, which found that the “quality of a father’s involvement matters more than his mere presence,” and that children who live with fathers who “engage in very high levels of antisocial behavior” will go on to behave “significantly worse” than “their peers whose fathers also engage in high levels of antisocial behavior but do not reside with their children.” Jaffee and
her co-authors added that the “advantages of growing up in a two-parent family may be negated when one or both parents are characterized by a history of antisocial behavior.”
This makes perfect sense and probably strikes most people who take a few moments to think about it as intuitively obvious. Intuitive as it may be once you’ve heard it explained, the logical appeal of this idea escapes many.
Exposure to highly antisocial parents increases the likelihood that a child will develop serious conduct problems, which, according to Jaffee and her co-authors, “are the strongest predictor of a range of adverse outcomes in adolescence and adulthood … including school dropout, teen childbearing, crime and unemployment.” As researchers Zachary Torry and Stephen Billick put it in a research paper published in Psychiatric Quarterly, antisocial parents can damage “a child’s emotional, cognitive, and social development” and leave them “traumatized, empty, and incapable of forming meaningful personal relationships.” Such exposure seems to also be criminogenic for children — that is, it increases the likelihood that they’ll later engage in criminal behavior, feeding an all-too-visible cycle of crime and violence plaguing so many of the country’s most vulnerable neighborhoods.
Consider a 2018 study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which looked at 227 sets of identical twins and found that “the twin who received harsher parenting had higher aggression and more (callous unemotional) traits,” and that “the twin receiving warmer parenting evidenced lower (callous unemotional) traits.” This is important insofar as it responds to the argument that such behavioral disorders in children are driven mostly by genetics. While genes obviously play a role (as they do in so many aspects of life), the evidence seems to overwhelmingly support the conclusion that the environment can both
mitigate and exacerbate the risks posed by children predisposed toward aggression. A paper published in the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology in 2000 strongly linked physically aggressive parenting with childhood aggression. The paper went on to suggest that parenting practices were predictive of “oppositional and aggressive behavior problems.” And the predictiveness of parenting practices, according to the study, “were fairly consistent across ethnic groups and sex.”
The next question, then, is whether there’s significant overlap between the kinds of men who engage in high levels of antisocial behavior and those who often find themselves behind bars. The answer
“CONTRARY TO CONVENTIONAL WISDOM, PARENTAL INCARCERATION HAS BENEFICIAL EFFECTS ON CHILDREN, REDUCING THEIR LIKELIHOOD OF INCARCERATION BY 4.9 PERCENTAGE POINTS.”
appears to be a resounding yes. As Jaffee and her co-authors observe, “high-antisocial fathers were significantly more likely to meet” the criterion for a clinical diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). And ASPD, it turns out, has long been common among prison inmates.
According to a 2002 article in The Lancet, nearly half of just under 19,000 male prisoners surveyed across 12 countries had ASPD. That survey found that prisoners were “about ten times more likely to have antisocial personality disorder than the general population” — an estimate that might understate the prevalence. A 2016 article in Translational Psychiatry noted that while only between 1 and 3 percent of
the general public have ASPD, the disorder has a prevalence of “40-70 percent in prison populations.”
An interesting thread in the research on ASPD among prisoners is the prevalence of comorbidity with — that is, the simultaneous presence of — substance use disorders. A study published in the Annals of Clinical Psychiatry found that “offenders with ASPD are much more likely to have other types of mental illness,” including high rates of substance use. Moreover, offenders with ASPD and comorbid substance abuse disorders seem to have worse outcomes than offenders with only ASPD. A Spanish study suggests that inmates with both ASPD and a substance abuse disorder exhibit a “tendency to carry out more aggressive crimes.”
A 2008 study of patients making threats against others found that the “highest risks (for subsequent violence) were in substance misusers.” Another notes that psychiatric patients with “various personality disorders and comorbid substance abuse … represent a high risk group for violence within forensic psychiatric facilities, and repetitive violent behavior in the community.”
What makes these findings so important is that drug offenders (especially users) have been such a keen focus of anti-incarceration reformers, who argue that responding to addiction and its outgrowths through the criminal justice system is wrong. A 2016 report titled “The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States” by Human Rights Watch “recount(ed) how harmful the long-term consequences of incarceration and a criminal record that follow a conviction for drug possession can be.” First among the harms listed was “separating parents from young children.” What the paper doesn’t seem to consider is the possibility that separating young children from at least some drug offenders can help children more than it hurts them.
SO FAR, I’VE highlighted evidence that exposure to highly antisocial fathers is extremely
detrimental for children and associated with a host of negative life outcomes, from the development of behavioral disorders and other psychological problems to poor educational outcomes and criminality in later life. I’ve highlighted studies showing that ASPD is very common in carceral settings and that when ASPD is accompanied by a substance use disorder, the mix can be especially dangerous. All of this makes for a pretty good reason to be suspicious of the claim that incarceration should be universally assumed to be detrimental for the children of those placed in the state’s custody. What makes that suspicion even stronger, however, is a developing body of research testing this very question.
“Contrary to conventional wisdom,” according to a 2021 paper published in the American Economic Review, “parental incarceration has beneficial effects on children, reducing their likelihood of incarceration by 4.9 percentage points and improving their adult socioeconomic status.” The authors also found that “sibling incarceration leads to similar reductions in criminal activity.” The paper, “The Effects of Parental and Sibling Incarceration: Evidence from Ohio,” was co-authored by researchers at the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California. They studied a sample of children with parents on the margins of incarceration — that is, whether they were incarcerated depended heavily on the leniency or severity of the judges handling their cases. They measured not only the life-outcome differences between the children with incarcerated parents or siblings and those without, but also the portion of those differences attributable to the incarcerations.
The authors highlight several potential explanations for why children might benefit from a family member’s incarceration, which differed depending on whether the incarcerated family member was a parent or a sibling. The study found that the benefits of parental incarceration for children owed less
to the parent’s removal than to the deterrent effect on the child of witnessing the levying of criminal sanctions firsthand. That finding could, however, reflect that the parents in the sample were mostly facing lower-level drug and property offenses; the removal effect — that is, the impact attributable to the parent’s absence — in cases involving more serious criminal conduct could be more pronounced. Contrasted with the effects of parental incarceration, the positive effects of a sibling’s incarceration were “concentrated almost exclusively in the short term” — that is, “while the sibling is still incarcerated.” This, the authors noted, “reflects that the removal of a criminogenic influence — as opposed to deterrence — is the more im-
REMOVING NEGATIVE POTENTIAL ROLE MODELS THROUGH INCARCERATION BENEFITS CHILDREN — PARTICULARLY IN TERMS OF THEIR PERFORMANCE AND BEHAVIOR AT SCHOOL.
portant mechanism (in cases of sibling incarceration), potentially because siblings can strongly influence one another towards or away from criminal activity.”
These findings resemble those from other studies done in the United States and elsewhere. In a study of incarcerated parents in North Carolina, University of Colorado professor Stephen Billings found that “removing negative potential role models through incarceration benefits children” — particularly in terms of their performance and behavior at school. A paper looking at data out of Norway estimated “a 32-percentage point reduction over a four year period in the probability a younger brother will be
charged with a crime if his older brother is incarcerated.” In a 2018 study of incarceration in Colombia, economist Carolina Arteaga found that “conditional on conviction, parental incarceration increases years of education by 0.8 years for children whose parents are on the margin of incarceration.”
And while the apparent psychological effects of antisocial and criminal parents on children’s life outcomes are compelling, we should remember that sometimes the system’s failure to separate a criminal parent from their children can lead to physical harm due to both abuse and neglect.
At the very least, the research outlined in this essay undermines the assumptions of those who oppose parental incarceration, insisting that it causes harm to the children of criminal parents. Yet mass decarceration advocates seem as resolute as ever. Indeed, when the study of parental incarceration in Ohio was published in the American Economic Review in the spring of 2021, it caused what Bloomberg opinion writer Noah Smith described as “a torrent of negative reactions” from academics and the broader Twitterverse. According to some of them, ethical considerations should outweigh whatever benefits might attend the publication of findings that undermine the push for decarceration.
But this is the sort of disposition at the root of much of the criminal injustices American cities have seen more and more of in the last few years — that is, at the root of the countless examples of innocents paying for the second, third and 15th chances of offenders with their lives. Unless they are stood up to, a more moderate approach will be hard to implement — which could very well mean, perhaps ironically, that more children will suffer more than they otherwise would have.
A. MANGUAL IS HEAD OF RESEARCH FOR THE POLICING AND PUBLIC SAFETY INITIATIVE AT THE MANHATTAN INSTITUTE. THIS ESSAY IS AN EXCERPT FROM HIS BOOK “CRIMINAL (IN)JUSTICE,” PUBLISHED BY CENTER STREET, HACHETTE BOOK GROUP INC., COPYRIGHT 2022.
RAFAEL
ART OR ARTIFICE
IS AI TAKING THE HUMAN OUT OF HUMANITIES?
BY NATALIA GALICZA
Jason Allen carried three canvases onto the Colorado State Fairgrounds in Pueblo last August with as much confidence as he could muster. The 39-year-old had never considered himself an artist, but a recent discovery had emboldened him to enter a small art contest: a new artificial intelligence software called Midjourney, capable of creating novel images based on the user’s input. The fair was as ordinary as you can imagine, with carnival rides and fried food, monster trucks and a mullet contest, but Allen’s submissions turned out to be more revolutionary than he expected.
Using AI as his medium, instead of a paintbrush or stylus, he generated a series of images reflecting his interest in fantasy worlds; he also runs a fantasy games company and writes AI -fueled science fiction. He thought of each visual, typed a string of words into a chat box, conjured up an image within seconds and repeated the process — tweaking descriptors — until he was satisfied. After more than 80 hours and nearly 1,000 iterations, he chose three for his “space opera” series: otherworldly scenes of robed figures communing among the cosmos. The outcome was remarkable. One judge, an art historian, compared them to renaissance paintings. A critic at The Washington Post said they evoke the style of 19th century
symbolist painters like Gustave Moreau. His method could well become a new model of artistic creation. While AI has been developing for decades, its capabilities in the arts have come to a head in recent years, embodied by Midjourney and numerous other art generators launched in the past year or so. There are now cellphone applications that turn selfies into illustrated avatars; text-to-image apps that render photorealism; robots with more of a penchant for the abstract; and chat bots capable of
Across social media, artists have split into factions: those who decry AI art as a form of cheating, a sign of laziness, a harbinger of “literal hell on earth” versus those who defend it as evolution in style and accessibility, or at least a useful tool.
In Allen’s view, the question is utilitarian. “I think art is just bringing vision into form, and I believe that using artificial intelligence tools accomplish that,” Allen says. “There’s something inside of us that’s happening. And then we want to tell other people about it or show other people what that thought or feeling or expression is. We’re all people. And we’re all imaginative and we’re all creative and we all want to express ourselves.” But in a larger sense, his work is a window into deeper questions about the nature of art and humanity itself.
writing anything from haikus to academic papers and even novels.
Allen’s submission took first place in the Colorado state fair’s amateur “digitally manipulated photography” category and made national news several times over. The concept wasn’t exactly new; world class institutions now proudly display AI art. But as an outsider, Allen’s win ignited controversy.
LAST FALL, AI made its debut at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, a few blocks south of Central Park. In “Unsupervised,” an exhibit by a Refik Anadol, a video installation flashed floor-to-ceiling murals of dreamscapes: soft beige ripples akin to curves on marble, fibrous lines that look like pencil strokes strewn to connect amorphous shapes. A machine created these dizzying distortions by sifting through data of the museum’s own archived collections. It reimagined art history just four floors
beneath pieces that exist to preserve it — like Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” and Salvador Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory.”
If there is one thing AI excels at, it’s imitation. Like humans, AI learns through neural networks. But where people learn from experience, AI generators are fed and trained on terabytes of data. They pull from what humans have created and shared online, then analyze patterns to make associations and predictions. The goal is to mimic human talent and skill — and maybe one day surpass it. But the tool is still an amalgamation of human creativity.
Imitation may sound like a pejorative term, but it has been part of how we define art since the age of ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Both defined art as imitation, but Plato believed that imitation to be superficial, a cheap dilution of the natural world — itself an inferior
THESE IMAGES WERE PRODUCED USING MIDJOURNEY, THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APP CITED IN THE STORY. WE TESTED IT USING PROMPTS THAT DESCRIBED FAMILIAR WORKS, RUNNING MULTIPLE ITERATIONS TO SEE HOW CLOSE IT COULD GET WITHOUT SIMPLY COPYING THE ORIGINAL. THE RESULTS ARE STRIKING, BUT THE AI STRUGGLED WITH CERTAIN DETAILS, LIKE EYEBALLS, FEET, AND – ODDLY ENOUGH – A PITCHFORK (SEE PAGE 78.)
REPLICATION OF GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING (LEFT), BY JOHANNES VERMEER AND TRIPLE SELFPORTRAIT (BELOW) BY NORMAN ROCKWELL.
expression of the ideal — some may say divine. On the other hand, Aristotle — Plato’s former student, a voice of a younger generation — saw art as a way to pay reverence to the temporal lives we live. A way to make sense of the experience and hold onto it for longer: “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
Plato and Aristotle also saw creativity as a gift from the gods, the result of divine inspiration. And there is something deeply human — some may say spiritual — in the drive to create, to craft something, to bring intention to life. The first cave paintings some 40,000 years ago are believed to have been made for symbolic or religious functions. From Egyptians to Romans, from Buddhists to Christians, humans have built and sculpted and painted to express reverence for the sublime and curiosity for what was possible beyond their ordinary lives.
AI’s methods of emulation are more advanced than marble statues and terracotta pots. But if art is a tool we use to commune with the divine and make sense of our lives, can algorithms perform the same function? Can a computer grapple with mortality, or touch the human heart? To seek the same results while bypassing the human component seems to risk cutting out the reason we create at all.
Hayao Miyazaki, the mind behind Studio Ghibli’s internationally acclaimed animated
films like “Spirited Away” and “Howl’s Moving Castle,” doesn’t think so. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” he said, speaking of AI-generated animation in a documentary about his work. “We humans are losing faith in ourselves.” Guillermo del Toro, an Oscar-winning filmmaker who most recently directed a stop-motion version of “Pinocchio” that won the Gold-
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE SAW CREATIVITY AS A GIFT FROM THE GODS. AND THERE IS SOMETHING DEEPLY HUMAN — SOME MAY SAY SPIRITUAL — IN THE DRIVE TO CREATE, TO CRAFT SOMETHING, TO BRING INTENTION TO LIFE.
en Globe for best animated feature, echoed Miyazaki in a December interview. “I consume and love art made by humans,” he said. “I am completely moved by that. And I am not interested in illustrations made by machines and the extrapolation of information.” Even Elon Musk once suggested artificial intelligence was like “summoning the demon.”
Anadol disagrees. “For me, art reflects humanity’s capacity for imagination. And if I push my compass to the edge of imagination, I find myself well connected with the machines, with the archives, with knowledge, and the collective memories of humanity,” he said in an interview for MoMA. “There’s a collaboration between machine and human. With the same data, we can generate infinite versions of the same sculpture, but choosing this moment, and creating this moment in time and space, is the moment of creation.”
On a more practical level, artists, writers and other creators around the world are struggling to determine what it means for them.
CHATGPT, A POPULAR AI text generator, has mastered human-sounding speech. Emily Silverman, creator of the California-based medical storytelling community The Nocturnists, found the chatbot could write something as intimate as a haiku about a colonoscopy:
The cold, sterile room
A long, flexible tube explores My insides on display
“There’s a vulnerability to that last phrase,” she says. “Maybe it knows that a colonoscopy can be an embarrassing thing for people. Or maybe it knows that,
AI-PRODUCED REPLICATIONS OF (LEFT TO RIGHT): AMERICAN GOTHIC BY GRANT WOOD, THE GREAT WAVE OFF KANAGAWA BY HOKUSAI, AND CLOUD GATE — COMMONLY CALLED THE BEAN — BY ANISH KAPOOR.
generally, when people get sick they’re in a hospital gown and feeling kind of vulnerable. Maybe it played into that.”
When I took the experiment a step further, asking ChatGPT to analyze its own poem, the program echoed Silverman’s conclusions. “The last line ‘My insides on display’ highlights the vulnerability of the patient during the procedure,” it wrote. “The procedure is invasive and the patient is exposed both physically and emotionally as the doctor examines the inside of their body. The haiku uses imagery to convey the feelings of vulnerability and exposure that may come with having a colonoscopy.”
Silverman admits that the technology is impressive, but she still fears how it might impact the way humans create and learn, especially in a society where few readers take the time to explore poetry or literature for deeper meaning. Searching text, she believes, should be an exercise in discovery. Using AI is a shortcut that could miss out on that. “There’s pain and difficulty in bringing a story into creation that torments me,” she says. “And to think that a robot could do it, that just felt threatening to me.”
As a buzzword, AI is often associated with that kind of panic, especially among people whose jobs it could threaten. But the technology has long hidden in plain sight — often operating innocuously. Similar technology is at work in our manufacturing plants, our cellphone’s facial recognition,
our email text predictions and social media advertisements. Proponents have long preached that it can boost industry. Others are now suggesting its prowess in imitation might even be able to take the arts and humanities as we know them to new levels.
ELIZABETH CALLAWAY, AN assistant professor of English at the University of Utah, received an award last year from the National Humanities Center to develop a class on responsible AI. She is part of a cohort representing 15 universities around the country, and among the optimists who maintain their faith in humanity when it comes to the AI art conundrum.
Her incoming class on AI will incorporate lessons with ChatGPT where students critique the program’s prose, advancing the next generation of human writers in tandem with technology. Callaway doesn’t believe AI art will replace human creations, but she does believe human art can grow because of it. She’s begun imagining new lesson plans: students grading essays generated by AI, fielding analyses of writing style with side-by-side comparisons of famous authors.
“I think what’s really cool about it is that it is a tool for playing,” she says. Callaway gave an example of asking for two sonnets from ChatGPT, one in the style of Shakespeare and the other in the style of John Keats. “You can then have a fantastic
discussion about where it succeeds, whether the two sides are different. Students can figure out how language works with it.”
The same could hold true for visual art. AI can be a hindrance, or it could become a learning tool. Regardless of utility, it’s already changing the artistic landscape. That has happened before. Machines completely transformed the textile industry in the industrial revolution. Photography became a faster and more affordable alternative to portraiture in the 19th century. Buttons and levers in lieu of human hands. Yet centuries later, people still sew and sit for paintings. Technology is bound to bleed more into the art world regardless of public outcry. The MoMA, for one, already plans to expand its acquisition of digital art. Exhibits like Anadol’s could soon become more frequent, from taboo to norm.
I missed Anadol’s installation, but as I looked over the images online, my eyes were drawn to an etching. Or what looked like an etching. Smears of scarlet blobs screamed against a bright blue background. The colors and shapes felt distinctly separate, worlds away from one another, yet they were tethered together with strands thin enough to mimic spider’s silk. The more I looked the more I thought of that silk, how dainty it seems for a substance that’s stronger than steel. How something can appear impossible to construct then turn out sturdier than you could ever imagine.
AI-PRODUCED REPLICATIONS OF (LEFT TO RIGHT): STARRY NIGHT BY VINCENT VAN GOGH, ABRAHAM LINCOLN BY DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH AND ANCIENT CHINA’S TERRACOTTA ARMY.
STANDING UP FOR WOMEN
BY LOIS M. COLLINS
In her memoir, which includes letters to her young daughters, Fawzia Koofi suggests audacious goals: “Don’t die without achieving something,” she tells them. “Take pride in trying to help people and in trying to make our country and our world a better place.”
At least three times, assassins have tried to kill Koofi, an Afghan politician and one of four women to participate in peace negotiations with the Taliban. She fled her homeland after the Taliban returned to power, but Koofi still fights for women’s rights in a nation where no such rights are assured. The Taliban recently decreed — again — that females cannot attend school or work in certain fields. Women are restricted in what they can wear. And victories Koofi helped to win — like including the names of women on their own vital identification documents — could be at risk.
She was born in 1975, into a country in turmoil. Her father, also a politician, was murdered by rebels in 1978. Her mother died when she was 17. Koofi was the only daughter her family allowed to go to school. After Taliban rule in the late 1990s dashed her dream of becoming a
doctor, she eventually earned a master’s degree in business and management from Preston University in Pakistan.
She sees no disconnect between her Muslim faith and equality for women.
“True Islam accords you political and social rights,” she writes in her memoir. “It offers you dignity, the freedom to be educated, to pursue your dreams and to
LEADERS ARE CREATED AS EVENTS AND LIFE UNFOLD, BUT WOMEN SHOULD NEVER WAIT FOR THEIR CHANCE. THEY SHOULD CREATE IT FOR THEMSELVES.
live your life. It also asks that you behave decently, modestly and with kindness to all others.”
In a wide-ranging discussion with Deseret Magazine, Koofi expressed disappointment — even sorrow — that America and its allies had pulled out of her country, leaving Afghan women to lose all the ground they had gained. But she also
talked about leadership, courage and fighting for a country’s destiny.
ARE THERE WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP WITH THE TALIBAN IN POWER?
Zero. In a matter of a few hours, women lost everything they had.
WHAT DO SOCIETIES LOSE WHEN FEMALE VOICES ARE EXCLUDED?
To have policies and programs friendly to all citizens in a country, you need to hear from both genders. In Afghanistan, surveys indicated that people were happy with female politicians. Women are especially good at managing small things. They don’t talk about big issues. They talk about people’s daily needs and then deliver those small things. They’re accessible to the people. They bring diversity and wisdom and knowledge to the table. When we were negotiating with the Taliban, they initially believed we were adopting positions to accommodate the West, not because it’s what our people want, what our country needs, what we deserve or are qualified for. But over time, even the Taliban realized that we were there because as women we were
AN AFGHAN EXILE LAMENTS HER COUNTRY’S LOST FREEDOMS
FAWZIA KOOFI
much more aware of the situation in our country.
SO, WOMEN KNOW THE PULSE OF FAMILY LIFE IN A DIFFERENT WAY THAN MEN?
Absolutely. For instance, when it comes to the needs of a family, whether policies will benefit women and children and education, women have much different experiences. As mothers, we understand what it means to have a developed community, a school with safe drinking water, a road that is safe for our girls to take to school. Those things come from personal experience, as well.
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE POLITICS?
Politics was in my genes. My father was a member of parliament. People have always expected me to solve their problems or help them at different stages of life. But I actively chose to get into politics when the Taliban excluded all women from all social and political spheres during their first time in power. Politics is not about pressuring people and whipping women in the streets, killing men and depriving society of progress and development. I was a young student then, but I knew it was wrong. That gave me more passion.
YOU CHOOSE HARD ROADS. WHY?
Certain experiences and challenges in my life shaped me. I realized that as a woman in this world, you have to work harder to access the same space that a man occupies. But some of it also comes from my parents. My father was a tough, outspoken politician. My mother was very, very nice. She lost everything. She lost her husband and her children, her house, and we had to start from scratch — like I did. I lost my father, I lost my mother. I lost brothers. Several times, I lost my home. I lost my husband. I had to start over again when I left Afghanistan. I don’t know where she was able to find that strength to always be graceful.
AS A MOTHER, DO YOUR DAUGHTERS DRIVE YOUR PASSION?
I was basically raised by a single mother. Then three or four years after I got married, my husband passed away and I became the single mother of two girls. Many people in the community and my family, my friends would tell me this is a tough country for a woman, you need to get married, you need a son to complete your life. How else can you cope with all these social barriers? And that gave me more reasons to fight for women’s space. I always wanted to protect my daughters. When you are a public figure, of course, there are people who hate you for what you do. I wanted to give my daughters a better chance because I always faced discrimination.
HOW CAN COUNTRIES BUILD STRONG WOMEN LEADERS?
Leaders are created as events and life unfold, but women should never wait for their chance to come. They should create it for themselves and for others, and have the courage to take the opportunity, even if it’s not there, being decisive in what they want to do and believing in themselves. That’s when you can be truly honest to yourself and motivate others to believe in you.
YOU’VE SAID WOMEN ARE NOT IN THE SAME POSITION AS MEN EVEN IN THE MOST DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
Look at the United States. Have you had a woman president? Look around the world. Maybe 22 countries are led by women. And they’ve had to go through such adversity to get to where they are. They have the guts, I would say, and the shoulders and the arms to be able to face that situation. So, yes, I think gender imbalance and gender-driven politics are common phenomena. It’s not only in politics. There are certain professions that the world still sees as a man’s job, not a woman’s job.
HOW IMPORTANT IS EDUCATION?
It’s the deciding factor. I had to struggle every minute of my life to get educated. When I was going to school and university, there were days my brothers would tell me to quit. You can read and write, they said, and that’s enough for a girl. But my mother was always there to support me. If I was not educated, my destiny would have been in some village in Afghanistan, raising children. That’s a good thing, but we have enough mothers who can stay at home. How many women are changing the game? That’s why the Taliban target girls’ education. They are afraid that if more women are educated, they will not allow their boys to be radicalized.
BUT IT’S BIGGER THAN ONE COUNTRY, ISN’T IT?
Women in Afghanistan ask me, what is the world doing about our situation? Do they know? Yes, they know. But information moves so fast that people hear it today and forget it tomorrow, when there are other priorities. But if the world forgets and doesn’t help Afghan women to return to a normal life, the consequences of a repressive regime will impact global security. I left almost a year ago. I could just live peacefully in a different country and ignore what’s happening, but I believe that gender apartheid for them means discrimination for any of us anywhere. American women should not forget that no matter where our sisters are living — in Iran, in Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world — if they are suffering from gender discrimination, it can get to our workplace, to where we live, to our homes, if we don’t stop it there.
ANY LAST WORD?
Never turn anyone away from your door because you never know when the day will come that it is you who will need to throw yourself at the mercy of another’s door.
INTENSITY
“a red fox peacefully observed me for a few seconds before continuing its evening hunt. A brief moment of joy and sense of no time.”
BY PHOTOGRAPHER KONSTA PUNKKA
COURTESY OF VITAL IMPACTS
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