“I think it would be quite a statement if the Circuit Court removes her from the case, but I think in this instance it would be warranted,” said Cheryl Bader, a Fordham University law school professor and former federal prosecutor. “There does seem to be a pattern of Judge Cannon bending over backwards to create delay and obstacles.”

Unfortunately, the numbers don’t necessarily affect elections in the way one might expect, said Faye Ginsburg, Ph.D. and Rayna Rapp, Ph.D., professors of anthropology at New York University and founders of the Council for the Study of Disability. The two took turns reading from prepared remarks, while a transcript of the lecture flashed across a screen, and an interpreter provided a translations in American Sign Language.

The researchers made their remarks at the Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disabilities, delivered on April 27 at the Rose Hill campus. The lecture, “Disability Publics: Toward a History of Possible Futures,” examined how the presence of disabilities is dramatically increasing and transforming national consciousness. It was initially thought that growing numbers might wake a “sleeping giant,” during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Given the stark contrast between the Clinton and Trump campaigns around disability issues, we nonetheless assumed . . . that the disability vote would indeed rally for Clinton, whose policy recommendations addressed areas of key importance to this constituency,” they said.

The speakers said they had been optimistic because of the increased visibility of the community through social media, including a campaign called “#cripthevote” which rallied the disability vote.

Candidate Trump’s mocking of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, seemed to shore up the disabilities vote for Clinton, they said. And the Clinton campaign capitalized on the gaffe by running an ad in which a teen age cancer survivor with a limp watches footage from the rally and tells viewers: “I don’t want a president who makes fun of me, I want a president who inspires me.”

A month later disability activist Anastasia Somoza was a featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention. Ginsburg and Rapp said the infrastructure of the convention was notable for its attention to accessibility.

“For a brief moment, it seemed as if political arithmetic might work to alter the electoral process,” they said.

However, the two said they were stunned when Trump won the electoral vote. “We had to revisit our overly optimistic assumptions about a unified disability constituency and scrutinize what actually happened.”

It turned out that the disability vote was split along party lines, as it had always been—despite Trump’s egregious behavior, they said.

The speakers said they’re profoundly concerned about enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, particularly after Secretary of Education Betsy deVos’s confirmation hearing revealed a lack of knowledge of the legal entitlements to special education.

While Attorney General Jeff Sessions is more knowledgeable, they said, he has shown “contempt” for the legal guarantees for free and appropriate public education of American children with disabilities. They said it’s time to make the political platforms on disability rights more transparent, so that the entire voting block understands what’s at stake.

“Clearly, we cannot take longstanding federal legislation for granted; the ADA is under threat as is the very recognition of the personhood of those with disabilities,” they said. “As scholars and activists, we need to understand what happened, as we collectively imagine how we might move forward.”

Twenty years later, however, Americans have come to realize that democracy—even their own—doesn’t necessarily equate liberalism, said journalist Fareed Zakaria on April 6 at Fordham.

The CNN host made the remarks in a lecture, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” marking the centennial of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS).

A polarized America

Zakaria spoke against the backdrop of a polarized America with a populist government in power, and the deterioration of liberal democratic values in post-cold-war democracies like Russia, which voted for an authoritarian regime. He contextualized the shift within history, noting that things like the rule of law, rights for minorities, and separation of church and state do not exist in all democratically-elected governments.

“In the Western world we really think of democracy in a way that is not historically grounded,” he said. He referenced the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who foresaw the pitfalls facing the new democracies.

“Holbrooke recognized the real challenge and asked ‘What if they elect fascists and separatists?’” said Zakaria.

Historically, he said, the tension between liberal ideals and populist leanings has led to both liberal democratic outcomes such as the Magna Carta’s check on government power in 1215, and conservative movements such as the 19^th-century election of Viennese Mayor Karl Luger, an anti-Semite who appealed to rural voters.

“He was a precursor to Hitler; and remember—Hitler was himself elected,” he said.

He cited the Arab Spring as another example where civil societies democratically voted for “intolerance” via the Muslim Brotherhood, pitting Sunni Arab majorities against Shiite minorities, and vice versa. And in Africa, he pointed to democratic elections whose leadership is “happy to take away the rights from gay people.”

Reminding the audience that women and minorities didn’t always have a voice in our U.S. democracy, Zakaria said that today’s “happy utopian notion of democracy” is actually a post-1945 phenomenon in which liberal values have prevailed.

“This has left us unprepared to watch today’s tensions play themselves out,” he said.

Weakened political parties

While political parties used to stand for certain values, he said, today they have become “empty vessels that serve as fundraising arms for the most popular candidate.” Last year, the traditional Republican ideals of free trade and aggressive American foreign policy fell by the wayside amidst the president’s populist “America First” agenda.

“The Trump celebrity juggernaut was too powerful, and the party just collapsed,” he said.

Weakened American political parties mean the courts and a constitutionally-protected free press play a larger role in balancing power, he said; therefore, the ongoing attacks upon judges and news outlets by the president “is a worrying story.”

“The assault on the judiciary worries me the most.” Zakaria said. “If you batter its approval ratings, it is very hard to go back up—[and]there are many countries where courts are not looked at as impartial.”

He said he is optimistic that Americans will realize that our democracy is something that has to be fought for.

“It has forced the larger civil society and institutions, such as universities and grad schools, to . . . understand that they have to act.”

The campaign is called “American Values Religious Voices: 100 Days” and four Fordham theologians have been tapped to participate. For the first 100 days of the new administration, the project will send one letter per day to President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Cabinet secretaries, and members of the House and the Senate.

Karina Hogan, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology and one of the participants, helped recruit scholars during the early stages of the project. Hogan, whose letter was published on Feb. 4, said that the scholars had to break out of their academic comfort zones, as well as their scholarly tones, to make their letters effective.

“We need to represent the broadest views of theology to the general public,” she said.

The campaign is the brainchild of Rabbi Andrea Weiss, Ph.D., an associate professor of the Bible at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. Rabbi Weiss said some of the letters are combative, while others are hopeful. She has sought to modulate the tone daily. In addition to Hogan, three other professors from Fordham’s Department of Theology have been invited to write: Associate Professor Michael Peppard, Ph.D., Professor Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., and Professor Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture.

Rabbi Weiss said that finding a diversity of viewpoints was a major part of the effort to portray a “collective wisdom of our faith communities and their sacred texts.” She noted that scholars of all stripes often find themselves cloistered among colleagues who share their area of expertise. For that reason, an advisory committee sought to include scholars of many facets of Christianity, from Orthodox to Protestant to Catholic, as well as denominations within Islam and Judaism. They also sought out scholars from all regions of the country, with writers hailing from 21 states.

But with events unfolding at such an extraordinary clip, the project has become all the more important, she said. Letters sometimes need to be updated moments before being published, as was the case with a letter written by Papanikolaou.

That letter, published on Feb. 1, initially pleaded that the president retract a campaign “declaration” that would be “blocking Muslims from entering this country.” By press time the “declaration” had become an executive order.

“The letters often need a subtle tweak of language, because things that people wrote about as theory a week earlier may be the reality today,” Rabbi Weiss said. “I have a stack of 40 letters ready to go, and they all seem so pressing.”

Hogan and Peppard also address the issue of immigration their letters.

Peppard’s Jan. 26 letter spoke of researching his family tree back to when his family fled the Irish Famine. He noticed that there was no reference to the family’s religion. When he asked a librarian why, she told him that in the United States, the government does not keep a record of the religious affiliations. He said she told him “It’s a principle of religious freedom, and the potential for abuse of such records is too dangerous.”

In her letter, Hogan noted that though it is often overlooked, the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Ruth is also a story about the sacrifices immigrants make. She writes that after Naomi and her two Moabite daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah, have been widowed, Naomi decides to leave Moab and return to her hometown of Bethlehem. She urges her daughters-in-law to go back to their families, but Ruth refuses to abandon her mother-in-law. Hogan quotes Ruth from the scripture:

“Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.’”

Once in Bethlehem, Ruth takes work in the fields harvesting grain to help support Naomi. There she meets her future husband, Boaz, who treats the foreign-born woman with kindness. They eventually marry and she gives birth to Obed, the grandfather of King David.

Hogan said that Ruth’s sacrifices parallel those of immigrants here who leave the comforts of home to take low-wage jobs in the United States in the hopes of creating a better life for their families.

In her letter Hogan urged the leaders to be as welcoming to immigrants as the people of Bethlehem were to Ruth. In discussing the letter writing campaign she stressed the importance of reading religious texts closely, regardless of religion, in order to better understand contentious issues we face today.

“It’s more important than ever, in this time of racism and intolerance,” she said, “to think about what it means to be a human being—and that’s what theology is all about.”