LEILA FADEL, HOST:
For weeks now, we've been talking to Americans about whether they feel freer or more silenced as President Trump reshapes the federal government and implements a series of executive orders to root out diversity, equity and inclusion, target state laws to fight climate change, to work to ban transgender athletes from women and girls' sports. And to try to comply, federal agencies are scrubbing hundreds of images and words from government websites, words like diversity, equity, minority, women.
What we found in response to that question is that there are some people who say they now feel freer to speak, but many people trying to comply with these orders to keep their jobs, their federal funding, or to avoid government scrutiny feel a chilling. So today, on our MORNING EDITION series, The State Of The First Amendment: The Right From Which All Rights Flow, we're going to talk to a person who's refusing to be quiet.
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FADEL: Her name is Karen Ortiz. She's an administrative judge in the New York District Office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and she says she started speaking up just after President Trump signed this executive order...
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WILL SCHARF: Protecting women from radical gender ideologies.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Ooh.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Mr. President...
FADEL: ...Decreeing there are only two biological sexes. Where she works, the EEOC, is where Americans go when they feel they've been discriminated against at work on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, disability and age. When the order came down, she says she felt the effects almost immediately.
KAREN ORTIZ: The acting chair of the commission quickly parroted the executive order in a press release, and we were starting to get directives to hold back on cases that alleged discrimination based on LGBTQIA status and particularly trans people. I was seething. The more I thought about it, the more outraged I became. And that's when I decided to send my first email. The subject line was, this is not normal - in all caps.
FADEL: She hit reply all to about 200 people and wrote...
ORTIZ: It's time for us to embody the civil rights work we were hired to do and honor the oath to the Constitution that we all took.
FADEL: And you sent that to the entire New York District Office?
ORTIZ: Yes.
FADEL: And what happens?
ORTIZ: I noticed about an hour later that it had been deleted out of my outbox, so I couldn't even retrieve it. And that's when I said, oh, I need to yell louder.
FADEL: She wrote another email and, this time, sent it to nearly the whole agency.
ORTIZ: I will not compromise my ethics and my duty to uphold the law. I will not cower to bullying and intimidation. If, upon reflection, you feel like now would be a good time to take a vacation and resign from your position, please reply all to this email and put, I'd like to occupy Mars in the subject line. We will take this as notification that you are resigning your position as acting chair. P.S. - happy Black History Month, sincerely Karen M. Ortiz. And I also put my pronouns in my signature block.
FADEL: Why did you think, you know, I'm just going to reply all?
ORTIZ: I think about the trans people, particularly, that walk through life in this country every day, being vilified, and they keep on keeping on. And how cowardly would it be for me not to speak up on their behalf? Keeping that in mind, it's actually been easy. I just need to say the truth. Honestly, I'm not scared of Elon Musk or Donald Trump. I'm just not. Because they want you to be scared. That's what bullies do.
FADEL: Are you still in your job?
ORTIZ: I am. I make it a point to be in the office as much as possible, to show my face so my colleagues can see I'm still standing. And when people in leadership are cowering and too scared to say anything, it's OK for rank and file to speak up.
FADEL: Now, we've seen other high-level federal employees quit when they've been asked to comply with orders they deem illegal or morally questionable. And you choose to stay. Why?
ORTIZ: If I go, then the hundred or so cases I have before me right now, where are those folks going to go? They're just going to wait longer. Also who is going to stand up for the agency? If we just leave, he'll install people who will adopt his cockamamie framing of DEI, and the agency will be the exact opposite of what it was intended to be.
FADEL: What does that mean?
ORTIZ: It will be used to discriminate rather than root out discrimination. It's already happening. They're already targeting trans people and trying to dehumanize trans people and basically saying that it's OK to misgender them and harass them.
FADEL: We reached out to the EEOC, and they said no comment.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
So, Leila, you know, we've been hearing stories like this, individual stories like this, and you've brought them all together in one place. Was there anything that really stood out to you or surprised you?
FADEL: Yeah. I mean, how many Americans in a country that prides itself on free speech didn't feel safe using their full name to say what they thought. We put out a call out to listeners and readers asking who feels freer to speak, who feels they're being forced into silence. And this is after the president declared free speech is back. And so far, more than 500 people have written to us, and the vast, vast majority of those who replied say they feel less free. They feel silenced. Though some conservatives feel freer, as we've heard in the series.
And there is one voice that sticks with me. He's a pastor in Florida who goes by Maynard (ph). It's his middle name. And that's what he asked us to do - just go by his middle name for fear of backlash against his family or the churches where he preaches. He's retired, fills in when other pastors go on vacation, and he sent us this voice memo.
MAYNARD: I have, on more than one occasion, been approached by someone who didn't like what I was preaching. And they've told me that they are putting me on a list.
FADEL: Now, he finds this intimidating. He doesn't know if a list exists, but fellow citizens saying that to him. And he was giving a sermon on a central Christian teaching recently, and I'm just going to play you what he says happened.
MAYNARD: I was talking about Christ's command that we love our neighbors, including loving our enemies. After the service, this elderly woman came up to me and said, nowhere in the Bible does it tell me that I must love my enemies when, in fact, Scripture is clear about this. And then she surprised me by spitting at me. She got me right smack in the face. Things are different in this culture, and it is difficult to speak about things that used to be very acceptable. If we cannot speak up, though, if we let ourselves be too intimidated, then we are going to lose our country. We're going to lose our culture. We'll lose all of our freedoms if we don't use our freedoms.
MARTIN: Wow.
FADEL: I think we learned in this series on The State of the First Amendment that we can't capture everything in the conversations you and I have shared with listeners in seven days on this program. So we're just going to keep talking to people and keep airing them here on MORNING EDITION.
MARTIN: I think we should.
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