Ayesha Kreutz takes advantage of the good weather to lead her homeschooling lessons on the front lawn of her Carling Street house. She works with, from left, Kezia Latin, 14, a ninth-grader at Charles Finney School and her children Leviticus, 9 and Shalom Kreutz, 8. / Jamie Germano Staff Photographer

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But now it is an “overwhelming trigger.”

“I go home and pretty much isolate during that time frame.”

“Freedom to me means my son, who also happens to be gay, won’t live with the same constraints in the second half of his life that I have had to live with in mine.”

That is the optimism of Tom Privitere, a Pittsford man who spent his career in labor relations — working to secure or protect benefits that he often was denied.

He also marched, rode buses, went to rallies. He negotiated the first domestic partner benefits in New York state in the 1990s. In 2006, the Rochester Labor Council became the first such council in the state to pass a resolution in favor of marriage equality.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo made it law in 2011.

Then, last week, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act.

“For the first time in my almost 65 years, I felt like a whole citizen in my country. I don’t know if that makes sense to you, but the Supreme Court decision did something visceral for me that, actually, the marriage vote didn’t.”

The difference, he said, was the recognition that the federal government had, in DOMA, instituted discrimination.

Privitere turns 65 this month and plans to retire as director of field services for Western New York with the New York state Public Employees Federation.

“Until last week, I still felt … less than, and not as free as, and not as entitled as my next-door neighbor.”

“I suppose it depends on somebody’s definition of free. I think we are a lot more free to be foolish … (but the politicians) they don’t seem to be afraid of ‘We the people’ anymore. It is almost like we don’t have any power to control our government.”

She is a stay-at-home, home-schooling mother of three living in the city, an African-American, a volunteer, a conservative Republican, strong in her convictions about limited government, gun rights and wary about the future.

Ayesha Kreutz, 40, worries that high taxes, which already limit her ability to see family out of state, or help her neighbors in need, are only going to be more restricting on her children. She is concerned about the expanding reach of government, and what might happen down the road.

oo many seem complacent, “until we get the wrong person in office, and you are not equally applying the Constitution, you just let someone use the Constitution any way they want,” and then there is no stopping it because it has happened for several administrations.

She believes there is no more free press. She doesn’t think colleges are preparing the next generation to think critically. She sees a breakdown of families, the role of churches.

The news brings word of a constant push against individual freedoms, and it has been going on for three or four generations. “Liberty,” she said, “is a two-way street. You have to be willing to think through these things and say, ‘Hold on.’ ” And in those moments, she sees that what she wants and what her neighbors want are the same things.

“In the truest sense, I believe that being able to be free means that we have the ability to be successful. We have the ability to make mistakes. We have every opportunity before us to do whatever it is that makes us be in pursuit of happiness.”

“Freedom is how a community has an appreciation of one another, of cultures or religions living together in peace and harmony. That is the real freedom — if we can have it.”

Those are the words of Muhammad Shafiq, former imam of the Islamic Center of Rochester, who works as executive director of the Brian and Jean Hickey Center for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue at Nazareth College.

He teaches Islamic and religious studies.

The United States has been his home since 1976, and, in that time, has become much more diverse as advances in technology and globalization brought the world to its doorstep. Yet education, awareness and understanding of other cultures and religions has not kept pace.

Islamophobia is increasing, he says.

A recent example came in Boston. In the aftermath, one man was attacked and two others falsely identified as the search for “dark skinned” suspects played out in media reports. With an arrest, attention focused on the suspects being Muslim, though they violated many tenets of the faith.

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Similar things have happened, in fact bigger than this in our country, in other countries also,” Shafiq says. “We never associated religion with that. We took it as an individual doing a horrendous act.”

On the global stage, there are the drone attacks and Guantanamo Bay. The standing of America — which he calls great, honorable and high civilization — is slipping, he says: “I think our model of freedom for human rights is getting sort of oblique, or darker. … It is diminishing, that role, if you look into the world.”

In the years before and immediately after 9/11, Shafiq would return to his native Pakistan and be greeted with press conferences and television appearances. Now, he goes back quietly, secretly.

“Now I go there, I hide — so people don’t know. I’m not talking anything about America. … I am fearful of my life. I am just saying to you, this is very, very true. … I come from that part of the world. They should respect me. But that is gone now.”

“What I cherish most about this country is that I can stand up, and I can speak my mind. … We have opportunities within this country that no other group of people have on the globe. We have been very fortunate.“

In her 85 years, Constance Mitchell has witnessed riots, welcomed civil rights leaders including Malcom X into her home, and made history as the first African-American elected to public office in Monroe County. She was, at that time in the 1960s, as a member of the Monroe County Legislature and the highest-serving black woman in the nation.

“I look at Rochester as a whole. Here is a community that certainly has been through, well, we have been through it all within this community. And yet we still have people that find they cannot get along with each other because of race. They can’t get along with each other because of someone’s skin.

“It doesn’t mean we aren’t moving forward.“

That her experience would be here, in a city that was home to Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, makes voting rights that much more significant.

BDSHARP@DemocratandChronicle.com
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