The Washington Post - 02.11.2019

B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 , 2019

The brother of 33-year-old victim said the family had consid- ered giving up his niece for adoption, but that his grandmother had decided against it. He said the family loves the girl deeply. “My grandmother feels it’s her life purpose to be a positive light,” the brother said. “She is an ex- tremely strong woman. She’s raised a few generations.” The girl is already walking and is adventurous and curious about the world, the brother said. The girl’s first birthday is next week. The theme of the party will be lemonade. “You have to turn lemons into lemonade,” the brother said. [email protected]

November of last year. Betts-King was arrested in February after a DNA test proved he was the father of the second victim’s baby. Another DNA test showed he was the father of the first victim’s baby, too. Betts-King, who appeared in court Friday in a green Fairfax County jail jumpsuit, rose and read an apology before he was sentenced. His attorney said Bet- ts-King had told him he was depressed during the period he carried out his crimes. Betts-King had spent 22 years working with the intellectually disabled. “I am deeply sorry for what I’ve done,” Betts-King read in court. “I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me.”

saulted at seven times the rate of people without disabilities, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The same disturbing pattern would play out again in 2018. The second victim went to the doctor to have a mole removed, but the doctor discovered she was also five months pregnant. Freeman said during the July plea that the second victim told police a man named “Bernard” had touched her and that she didn’t like it. Freeman said the woman had the intellectual ca- pacity of a 12-year-old and had never been taught about sex. The first woman’s baby was born in February 2018, while the second woman’s child arrived in

plain what it meant to be pregnant, but the woman did not comprehend because of her disability, Freeman said. Months later, after the woman went into labor, doctors were forced to perform a Caesarean section because she did not understand their requests for her to push. Fairfax County police said they investigated the first rape, but the woman was unable to say how she became pregnant, so the case initially did not go any- where. Advocates said such prob- lems are common and are one of the reasons people with intellectual disabilities are sexually as-

caring for her child. Prosecutors had previ- ously described the victim as having the mind of a 5-year-old. The first case came to light with a jolt in Octo- ber 2017. The 29-year- old victim went in for a checkup, but the doctor quickly discovered the woman was five months pregnant, Free- man told the court before Betts- King pleaded guilty to two counts of rape in July. “This came as a surprise to her mother,” Freeman said in court then. The woman “did not indi- cate in any way to her mother that this was the case.” Attempts were made to ex-

generally does not name victims
of sexual assault or provide infor-
mation that could identify them.
The brother said the family
has embraced the child, although
care and finances have been a
struggle. He said his sister, 33,
who has autism and Down syn-
drome, still does not fully com-
prehend what it means to be a
mother.
“My sister, because of her men-
tal state, doesn’t have maternal
instincts,” the man said. “We are
trying to get her to understand
how to care for the child.”
The family of the second vic-
tim, 29, did not come to the
hearing Friday, but they, too, are

SENTENCING FROM B1

tobacco pipe. They used facial reconstruction techniques to cre- ate a portrait of the man they believe is probably Price, com- plete with a tobacco pipe sticking out of his mouth, the same way it would have as he walked the streets of Annapolis two centuries ago. On Friday, the 155th anniversa- ry of Maryland abolishing slav- ery, that portrait was on display in the church sanctuary. Nine dark-suited pallbearers flanked the caskets. Pittman recalled that his ancestors had owned slaves and noted that though the coun- try had moved far forward, it still had far to go. Schablitsky, who was also at the ceremony, marveled in an interview Thursday at the number of people drawn together for the project and to witness the bones again being laid to rest — even as many others remain in storage at the museum. “This child and this man brought an entire community together to remember who they are,” Schablitsky said, “and hope- fully remind them of who they could be.” [email protected]

She can’t explain why she never looked for the missing bones there before. When she arrived that day, she blurted out a question. Do you have any bones from Annapolis? “When they said, ‘We have the Smith Price graveyard,’ I almost passed out,” Hayes-Williams said “I hadn’t thought of him for a decade. At all.” The rediscovery of the bones inside a small cardboard box, on a shelf beside an old cannon, set in motion a rush of wrangling to get them analyzed and turned over to the church for burial. Hayes-Williams turned to Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman (D), her current boss, for help, plus the city’s mayor and the office of Gov. Larry Hogan (R). She leveraged local contacts to find Price de- scendants willing to take a DNA test to positively identify the remains. The results are still pending. A team led by state archaeolo- gist Julie Schablitsky concluded that the bones seem to belong to a 6-year-old child and a man between 45 and 55 who had arthri- tis and a tooth worn down from a

nated her to serve on a few committees. Four days after Busch died in April, Hayes-Williams drove to her final event as his representa- tive — a commission meeting at the Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum in Calvert County, a multiuse state facility that also happens to house 8 million ar- chaeological artifacts.

She spent a lot of time trying to figure out where the bones had been taken. But the Internet was in its infancy back then, and so were her skills as a researcher. Over time, she let it go. She became a well-known local history buff, working in local politics. Eventually, then-Mary- land House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) desig-

any resources to do follow-up.” After the bones were rediscov- ered, the Rev. Carletta Allen, pastor at Asbury United, asked longtime members why they did not object at the time to their being cast aside rather than re- buried. She said her parishioners an- swered: “Pastor, what were we supposed to say? We had no power. So they did what they did, and we watched.” Hayes-Williams had just start- ed researching African American history in Annapolis in the early 2000s when she learned about Price and his connection to her church. She says she was disheartened by the disregard for his graveyard — and surprised to learn that post-revolutionary Annapolis had a thriving community of black people even as enslaved Africans were still being unload- ed from ships in the Annapolis Harbor. “This is my story, my people,” Hayes-Williams said. “I mean, these guys were leasing lands, running shops and taverns, buy- ing their own people out of slav- ery. And nobody knows.”

Maryland’s chief state archaeolo-
gist, who stumbled into finding
them. He visited the construction
site the day the graves were sliced
in half during a basement excava-
tion.
The skeletons were lodged in a
dirt wall, close to coffin nails that
appeared centuries old. He sus-
pected other remains might have
inadvertently been sent to a land-
fill with construction debris.
“I have a habit of checking
construction sites around town,”
Clark, 69, recalled in an interview
this week. “I was shocked and
upset that there was no archaeol-
ogy done on this area.”
He pulled together an emer-
gency team to salvage what he
could and boxed up the bones to
keep them safe. Then he did some
research, learning about the
graveyard where Smith Price and
others had been interred. The
bones were sent to storage.
“My intent in removing the
remains was to save them from
the disrespect they had been
given,” Clark said. “There was no
funding, and I did this on an
emergency basis. We didn’t have

BONES FROM B1

RELIGION

BY MICHELLE BOORSTEIN

All year, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo has made news for efforts
that critics worry are crossing
church-state separation lines. In
July, he launched a Commission
on Unalienable Rights, created by
religious conservatives who have
bemoaned growing LGBTQ
equality. Then in October, a pri-
vate Pompeo speech, “Being a
Christian Leader,” was advertised
across the top of the State Depart-
ment homepage.
Less noticed was the creation of
the State Department’s first-ever
faith-based affinity group.
GRACE, announced in Febru-
ary, was founded “to highlight the
value added by the perspective of
people of faith in general, and
Christians in particular to the
Department and its mission.”
Using government email ac-
counts, department portals and
meeting spaces to organize and
advertise, GRACE was, according
to the mission statement of the
group on the department website,
created to advocate religious free-
dom and expression within the
department. It has hosted events
with evangelical speakers and
runs a “mentorship ministry” that
brings together pairs of employ-
ees to focus on “how being a
disciple of Christ impacts your
professional experience at the
State Department.”
The existence of a faith-based
professional group doesn’t itself
stick out in Washington, where
Bible-study groups gather all
around Capitol Hill and prayer
breakfasts for politicians are com-
mon. But as an official part of an
administration that has consis-
tently emphasized the concerns
and rights of one segment of
American religion — social con-
servatives and, in particular,
white evangelicals — this first-ev-
er Christian-specific employee
group is being watched by church-
state experts, former leaders of
faith-based work at State and
some employees.
Jack Moline, executive director
of the Interfaith Alliance, said the
group is problematic because, by
using government resources dur-
ing working hours, it appears to
violate the constitutional ban on
the government establishing — or
favoring — a particular religious
group. That, Moline says, is what
makes it different from other af-
finity groups.
“The Constitution doesn’t pro-
hibit bowling leagues, but it’s very

clear about religion,” said Moline, whose group works to protect boundaries between religion and government. On its website, the group describes itself as an “alter- native voice to the Religious Right.” “There needs to be caution any- time government comes near pro- motion of a faith tradition or faith in general,” Moline said. “We’ve been concerned about lots of officials in the Trump administration. This is not helped by the State Department homepage fea- turing Secretary Pompeo talking about being a Christian leader.” Pompeo’s Oct. 11 speech to the American Association of Chris- tian Counselors was featured on the department’s homepage that day. The talk in Tennessee includ- ed a section on how faith guides his leadership decisions, including to find “every dollar” of government funding that might sup- port abortion overseas and end it. GRACE is one of 14 affinity groups at the State Department, including ones organized for black, LGBTQ and disabled employees, among others. Trump officials’ handling of religion has been a subject of con- troversy in some quarters. The White House has worked diligent- ly to woo Christian social conservatives, many of whom say religious freedom is a major priority. At the same time, questions are being raised by other religious groups who say they are being harmed. Since President Trump took office, travel from multiple Muslim-majority countries has been restricted, and concerns about anti-Semitism are rising. More than two dozen of the 176 people from the State Depart- ment’s staff on a GRACE distribu- tion list didn’t return requests to speak with The Washington Post, including its leadership. The sole response came from a woman who wrote back to say she had been moved overseas and couldn’t comment. Some leading advocates who normally focus on the way religion affects policy at the State Department declined to comment for this story, including Tom Farr at the Religious Free- dom Institute and staff with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independ- ent government agency that works to elevate the religious as- pects of U.S. foreign policy. After The Post asked the agency to reconsider its response, its chairman, Tony Perkins, a leading

Christian conservative, agreed to an interview. He said an increase in expressions of faith at State is positive because it shows the huge swath of religious people around the world that American foreign policy actors are empathetic. In the 1990s, he said, he was a con- tractor with the State Department and was investigated after invit- ing some people to come to church with him. Pompeo is in a better position to understand religious people elsewhere, Perkins said, because he is open about his faith. The secretary’s speech on Christian leadership is “more transparency — just saying: ‘This is who I am; this is what I believe.’ Everything is on the table.” The department declined to make Pompeo available, and spokesmen declined to answer questions about the group, the role of religion in the department and whether GRACE raises legal issues — including with the group’s mission statement, which says its outreach extends to con- tractors. Some church-state legal experts say this could be problematic and appear religiously coer- cive if those are people seeking to secure funding from the State De- partment. In a brief written statement by an unidentified spokesman, the department said affinity groups have grown in number in the past

decade at State. Their primary mission, the statement reads, is “to promote diversity and inclu- sion.” Groups are approved (or denied) by the chief diversity offi- cer. “GRACE bylaws show they are open to all employees regardless of religious affiliation and their reported election procedures meet the same standard,” the spokesman wrote. The spokesman said no other faith-based group has submitted a petition for approval, though Shaun Casey, the head of a 30-person religion office created under President Barack Obama within the State Department and largely shuttered under Trump, said a group of Muslim employees during his tenure did discuss the possibility of such a group with civil rights officials with State. Casey was U.S. special repre- sentative for religion and global affairs and director of the State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs. He wasn’t certain if a formal request was made by Muslim staffers. Until a decade or two ago, it was common to hear conservatives in particular worry that religion was unwelcome at the State Depart- ment — in the culture of the place and in conversations about its role in foreign policy. Christian conservatives in particular felt that persecuted Christian minori- ties in Muslim countries didn’t get

enough attention or help. That changed, some experts say, with developments including the 2006 publication of a memoir by former secretary Madeleine Al- bright, one of Bill Clinton’s leaders at State, about the powerful and important role of faith in world affairs. Also important were the creation, under Clinton, of the Office of International Reli- gious Freedom within the State Department in the late 1990s and the 2011 creation by then-Secre- tary Hillary Clinton of an expand- ed dialogue with civil society groups, in particular religious ones, around the world, said Chris Seiple, a global policy adviser to the World Evangelical Alliance who co-chaired sidebar events at two recent international religious freedom meetings Pompeo con- vened. Seiple said the State Depart- ment is in the midst of a “golden age,” with people from various faiths working together to protect international religious freedom — including for people who reject religion. He praised Sam Brown- back, the department’s ambassador at large for international religious freedom for engaging faith- based civil society groups and for meeting often on Capitol Hill with religious liberty groups. “All of this is beyond positive” but comes with an asterisk, he said, noting the perception that

the Trump administration is working only for one faith community, a segment of white evangelicals. “My personal view is when State has [the piece about Pompeo’s faith] on its homepage, that crosses the line,” Seiple said. “It’s a very fine line, but it’s there.” The posting of the speech could raise questions about whether government officials are promot- ing certain policies because those policies jibe with their religious views — not because they are in the interest of the general public, Seiple said. “That’s not good,” he said. Casey disagreed with Seiple’s “golden age” description, point- ing to what he says is the shrink- ing of State’s general religion department — meant to educate dip- lomats about the role of religion and religious players in various foreign affairs issues — from 30 staffers to fewer than five, he said. “The primary design of all this is to keep fundamentalist Chris- tians happy,” he said. Rabbi David Saperstein, the department’s international religious freedom ambassador under Obama, praised Brownback for “bending over backward” to make sure that religious freedom efforts aren’t “Christian-centric.” “He’s done a really good job,” Saperstein said. As far as Pompeo’s private speech to the meeting of the American Association of Chris- tian Counselors, Saperstein said the key for a religious government official is to be clear about how you present yourself. He said when he was ambassador and spoke to Jewish groups, he always clarified he was there as an individual person, not as ambassador. “You don’t lose your right to be a religious individual when you go into government service.” The question for Pompeo, he said, is: “Are you going as secretary of state, or as an individual who happens to be in government service, and how are you seen by people you’re speaking to?” As for then posting the speech on the State Department website, it depends on the intention be- hind showcasing it, Saperstein said. Is Pompeo emphasizing “being a leader who is inspired by Chris- tian values? If it’s, like, being a leader of Christians, it’s problematic.” [email protected]

State Department’s Christian faith group underscores Pompeo’s influence

GEORGE WALKER IV/ASSOCIATED PRESS Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent speech to the American Association of Christian Counselors, which discussed how faith guides him as a leader, was featured on the State Department homepage.

A black Md. leader remembered, decades after his grave was disrespected

Care worker gets two life terms for raping, impregnating two disabled women

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST Janice Hayes-Williams, left, talks with a friend at Asbury United Methodist Church on Friday before the memorial for Smith Price.

Betts-King

The Washington Post - 02.11.2019

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