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President Biden will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, to 17 people in a variety of endeavors on Thursday, including gymnast Simone Biles, Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington, and posthumously, inventor Steve Jobs and former senator. John McCain.
Biden’s list of recipients, his first as president, includes hardliners in politics, sports, entertainment, religion, civil rights, labor and the military.
“President Biden has long said that America can be defined in one word: possibilities. These seventeen Americans demonstrate the power of possibilities and embody the soul of the nation: hard work, perseverance and faith,” he said. said the White House in a statement last week.
The honorees range from Biles, 25, the most decorated American gymnast in history who has defended victims of sexual assault, to former senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), 90, on sharp-tongued politician and son of the governor who served for 18 years in the Senate and was openly on the issue of fiscal responsibility.
Other tributes include Sister Simone Campbell, former director of Network, a Catholic social justice organization, which was instrumental in passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Biden once joined her tour “Nuns in the bus”.
The president is also recognizing Washington, an actor, director and producer who has been the national spokesman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America for more than 25 years; and Megan Rapinoe, a member of the U.S. women’s soccer team since 2006 who has won an Olympic gold medal and two World Cup championships. She is also captain of OL Reign, a Seattle-based professional team in the National Women’s Soccer League.
Rapinoe’s feats on the football field are matched by his activism outside of him. She has played a prominent role in promoting equal pay for women’s selection and has spoken out on issues of social justice and LGBTQ.
Rapinoe has been with the U.S. women’s national team in Mexico as she tries to qualify for the World Cup, but is expected to attend the ceremony.
During his four years in office, President Donald Trump paid tribute to 24 people, a list populated by practitioners of his favorite sport of golf — Tiger Woods, Gary Player and Annika Sorenstam — and some of his fiercest political allies, such as the presenter. of radio Rush Limbaugh and Deputy Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Biden’s list of political honorees includes Republicans and Democrats. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) Co-founded Giffords, a nonprofit organization focused on preventing armed violence, after being shot in the head at a constituent event in Tucson in January 2011 and seriously injured. She is married to former astronaut Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Who will be re-elected this year.
Biden served in the Senate with McCain (R-Ariz.), The 2008 Republican presidential candidate and veteran decorated in the Vietnam War who died in 2018 of brain cancer. McCain’s widow, Cindy, backed Biden in 2020 when the Democrat reversed the party’s fortune in Arizona, winning the state. Cindy McCain is now the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Food and Agriculture Agencies.
Jobs, who died in 2011 of cancer, was the co-founder and CEO of Apple, whose inventions revolutionized the lives of billions of people around the world with their Mac, iPhone computers and iPod.
The list also includes Khizr Khan, a Gold Star father who has been an advocate of the rule of law and religious freedom while working on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom; and Wilma Vaught, one of the most decorated women in the history of the U.S. military.
Biden will honor Fred Gray, one of the first black members of the Alabama legislature since Reconstruction, and a lawyer who represented civil rights activists such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, along with the NAACP. Other honorees include Raúl Yzaguirre, a civil rights defender who served as executive director and chairman of the La Raza National Council for 30 years, and Diane Nash, a founding member of the Nonviolent Student Coordination Committee.
- Juliet García, the former president of the University of Texas at Brownsville and the first Mexican-American woman to serve as university president.
- Father Alexander Karloutsos, former Vicar General of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.
- Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse from New York who served at the forefront of the pandemic response.
- Richard Trumka, the late president of the AFL-CIO.
Steven Goff contributed to this report.