It’s been a rough seventeen months for Americans whose calling is to fight for the rights of people who’ve been stripped of them by force—young men and women beaten to death in full view of the world by the agents of their oppressors for daring to demand that their votes be counted; others hacked to death with the complicity of the autocrats in power over them for having been born the wrong color or to the wrong tribe; girls subjected to the lash, or, worse, murdered by their own mothers, fathers, or brothers for appearing in public in the wrong company; believers imprisoned for professing faith in the wrong god or the wrong political system; non-believers sentenced to death for “wronging” a wrathful, vengeful religion. And it’s been a dreadful period for the victims themselves, left as they have been to ask themselves in silent desperation what has become of their champion. At the despot-happy opening act of his presidency the current occupant of the Oval Office announced that these people weren’t going to be his business, and though his secretary of state might have seen to them—it being actually within her reach to become the voice of the world’s voiceless, with a whole Human Rights Bureau designated for that very job just down the hall—she never has managed to get really full-throated about it.
Until now. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have found some victims of rights-transgression who are of very great interest to them – indeed, since, some of them are here at home, and sinned against by America herself!
