Greetings all!
This post comes amid some of the greatest triumphs and
failures of the United States Supreme Court this week. The triumph, of course,
being that the Court essentially ruled that DOMA
and Proposition 8 were unconstitutional. To be specific, the Court stated
that in the case of DOMA, the federal government must recognize same-sex
marriages performed in the states which allow them. This also means the federal
government can give federal benefits to same-sex married couples that move to
states without legalized same-sex marriage. In the case of Proposition 8, the
Court stated that those in support of it had no legal standing, and therefore
the lower court ruling finding Proposition 8 unconstitutional stood as correct,
thereby allowing same-sex marriages to resume in California. This simply means
that the burden of allowing marriage equality has shifted to the states; not
the final step, but one we desperately needed. The failure of the Court comes
from its ruling on the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, which I will discuss tonight. This week’s quote comes from Lyndon
Baines Johnson, the American president whom signed it into law in the first
place.
The Voting Rights Act was a method of setting a stern
legal framework for ensuring no disenfranchisement of minorities, no matter
what state they lived in. The permanency of Section 2 ensures that literacy
tests and other “qualifications” for voting can never be placed upon people,
regardless of race, gender, religion, or creed. Section 5 ensures there is a
process for keeping states from enacting discriminatory laws, by enforcing
preclearance for changes of voter laws. But it is not these sections which have
been gutted by the Supreme Court. Instead, the Court found Section
4 unconstitutional, mostly on the basis that Congress had continued its
provisions based on an older data set.
The Supreme Court has changed the United States in the
single greatest bastardization of our laws seen in several decades. Even though
the Court did not rip apart Section 5, preclearance is now moot because no
states, counties, or townships must seek it to change their voting laws.
Indeed, Texas gleefully
changed its voter laws nearly immediately after the ruling came into
effect. The other states, counties, and townships formerly covered by
preclearance will be likely to follow suit shortly, like Georgia
for example.
The Court kicked new responsibility for making the law “fair”
towards modern circumstances to Congress. If we want to protect minority
voters, we must now depend on them to review our country and ensure the areas
needed for preclearance deserve that treatment. We must ask the House of
Representatives which repealed
Obamacare 37 times and the Senate which voted
down bipartisan gun control measures to pass a new Voting Rights Act. We
are absolutely, without a reasonable doubt, screwed.
While we wait for a do-nothing Congress to solve this, in
the meantime any changes to voter laws in any state must be challenged legally
and solved on a case-by-case basis. This was the very thing which frustrated
LBJ in the first place and convinced him of an absolute need for comprehensive
laws which would ensure minority voter rights. We could make and resolve these
cases again and again for a century, and we’d still have places
disenfranchising minorities. We are no longer and equal democracy. We are now
one of the worst in the world.
The very reasoning behind finding Section 4
unconstitutional is ridiculous. The notion that America has somehow “changed”
and that we therefore don’t need the Voting Rights Act as before is insane.
Even if we had become a post-racial society, we only
did so because the Voting Rights Act made us do it. Whether we liked it at
the time or not, the Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Act forced us to
integrate racial minorities equally into our society in all aspects. As a
result, some things have changed for the better. It is very rare for politicians
to declare that people need to pay poll taxes or pass literacy tests these
days.
But that does not mean we have changed entirely. Let me
be clear that racism still exists quite healthily in most of the United States.
From Alaska to Massachusetts, you can be certain that racists still live and
breed in America and likely will for a very long time. You don’t need to look
very hard to find that racists are still trying to restrict the vote among
minority voters. Don’t for a second let yourself be fooled by proponents of voter
ID laws. These people are not legitimately concerned about voter fraud, a
problem which essentially does
not exist. All they want is to keep minorities and people likely to vote
for their opponents from voting. They can’t win the vote simply by being
honest, so they rig the game instead, satisfying their racist dreams at the
same time.
The thing that troubles me the most is the way the
Supreme Court invalidated all the progress we as a nation and as individuals
have made. Back in elementary and middle school, the accomplishments of Martin
Luther King, Jr. were drilled into our minds incessantly. We read his speeches,
watched movies about him, read books about him, everything. My teachers
stressed how he was the perfect example of an American who made progress happen
without violence. That was the most important factor during my education. I soaked
it up like a sponge, just like all students should do. MLK was an iconic leader
who deserves that kind of praise. Later on, I learned of Malcolm X, a man who
fought for similar goals in different ways. In his final years, he became just
as important to civil rights as MLK was, condemning the mistakes of his past.
With their work, they changed the United States for the better in some of the
single most correct judgments we have ever made.
We may as well stop teaching our children the good
example MLK set back then. With Section 4 taken down, none of his work matters
now. None of Malcolm X’s work matters either. We are once again the nation of
bigots and fools that existed prior to the Civil Rights Movement.
This past week, president Obama visited
the prison cell which held South African civil rights icon Nelson Mandela
in jail for 27 years. Mandela is one of the single most accomplished living civil
rights and South African leaders to ever exist. While South Africa still has
work to do, his vision is within sight and within grasp there. Unfortunately,
it seems his health has been failing him as of late. For all we know he may
survive this to live another day. However, I’d hate to see him die knowing the
United States adopted the example of the system he worked his entire life to
defeat.
That’s all for this week, and as always I can be reached
through the comments here, my email at zerospintop@live.com,
or any of my various accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Steam, Google+, Reddit,
Tumblr, DeviantArt, and now Youtube. Good night, and this is KnoFear, signing
off.
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