Voting Rights

I am a white male in my sixties as of this writing. I have never had trouble voting, although I have met older folk who were threatened for wanting to vote. Inevitably those souls were in bodies with darker skins.

Throughout my lifetime political leaders have tried (with varying degrees of success) to maintain power for themselves and their cohorts by cheating. It has rarely been subtle. Parties extolling law and order strip felons of that citizenship right casually because no one cares that it is unconstitutional, jailed citizens not having much sympathy. Districts are drawn every ten years explicitly to support the ruling party who controls those maps.

In my childhood a lot of this came to a head: incredibly brave people risked their lives and livelihoods to say that they were citizens and not second-class ones. As nothing gets better for any group without access to voting, their focus was on getting the vote as a color-blind right of citizenship. There was a time when shame of who we were as a people led to freer elections, and one of the main tools was the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

I have yet to meet an act that I didn't wish was a law. Acts need periodic renewal or they expire. It is not clear how anyone who knows anything about our country can believe that we are past the need of voting rights to be enshrined in federal law.

No matter; the Roberts court has given it another death blow as of yesterday's ruling in Louisiana. The Louisiana governor is already advocating to re-draw the district maps in that state before November in a rush to eliminate the power of black votes in his state. He smiled a lot in the news reports.

When the Roberts court in 2013 (Shelby v. Holder) first gutted the VRA, within 24 hours a number of Southern states revealed plans to dilute black voting, directly refuting the majority opinion that states would never ever ever do that again.

Back as a child in the 60's, I was driven by emotions. I looked around, in my neighborhood and in politics, at the people who hated people of color and wanted to do anything they could to oppress them, and I decided that I didn't like the bigots. I didn't know who I wanted to be as an adult but I knew that I didn't want to be them. I'm 64 now and I never want to be them. 

In 1859 Abraham Lincoln wrote to H.L. Pierce: 

"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it."

I take this as my credo, both in opposing this evil and wanting to work on behalf of a just God. May it be so.