On June 25, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled, 5 to 4, that parts of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act were against the Constitution. Even though Congress looked at how well the steps taken to stop racial barriers to voting were working on a regular basis, the majority opinion was that the Voting Rights Act “imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs.” In contrast to this assessment, the Constitution gives Congress a lot of power to make laws about voting, but the last time they looked at the Voting Rights Act was in 2006, which is only seven years ago. “Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically,” the majority opinion said, implying that racial discrimination has become much less common. On July 13, 2012, eighteen days later, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing the black teenager Trayvon Martin. In a strange turn of events, the court of public opinion put a dead teenager on trial to defend himself against a white Hispanic man who had a restraining order against him for domestic abuse. Whose voice gets to stay? Who makes the decision?
Within six weeks of the Voting Rights Act being weakened, six Southern states passed or put in place new rules about who could vote. And we should remember that, according to The Nation, “Section 5 of the VRA has been used by the Justice Department to block at least 1,150 discriminatory voting changes since 1965.” When asked about the attack on voting rights, Rev. William Barber, president of the NAACP in North Carolina, said, “In some ways, these are not Jim Crow tactics. They don’t have Night Riders or sheets on them. In fact, this is James Crow, Esq. Jim Crow’s tools were not sharp. James Crow, Esq. cuts out the heart of black political power by using surgical tools, consultants, highly paid consultants, and lawyers.”
On Dec. 14, 2012, 26 people were shot and killed at Sandy Hook, which was a terrible event. The next year, there were 23 more mass shootings in the U.S. where four or more people were killed at the same time. The Daily Beast says that during the same time period, there were “at least 24 school shootings that killed at least 17 people.” The New York Times said that on the Tuesday before, “a 12-year-old boy opened fire with a shotgun at the middle school he goes to in Roswell, N.M., hitting two of the dozens of students waiting in a gym for the first bell to ring.” A court and law columnist for Slate, Dalia Lithwick, wrote, “We just decided to treat armed killers in schools the same way we used to treat fires and tornadoes: as natural disasters instead of legislative and moral failures. So, this is what we have tacitly agreed to do: we tell our kids that “freedom” looks like them huddling together in silence in their classroom closets.”
A question that’s going around social media asks, “How did it become more offensive to ask minorities to show photo ID to vote than to ask white people to pass background checks to buy a gun?” Why does the fact that minorities can get the same power as everyone else scare some people more than the fact that anyone can get a gun? How did being a citizen scare us more than killing a lot of people?
Everyone has the right to fair and equal treatment. Everyone has the right to be heard and have a fair say. In our society, everyone has the right to be safe. This is what my faith and our shared values tell me to do. All of these problems are easy to ignore, and we can blame the public’s lack of interest or commitment to doing their civic duty or their preference for reality TV over educational documentaries.
I think that in some ways, the problem is a lack of interest in education, bad information, and putting education down. But none of these reasons are enough to stop the power of corporations. We have a gun lobby that tells us how to keep our kids safe. People often say that the Second Amendment is the main reason why the gun lobby is so strong. However, I think that the strength of the gun lobby has more to do with money. In the year after the Sandy Hook shooting, gun companies made 52% more money. Big businesses have to pay money for our kids to go to safe schools. It doesn’t help a select few to make decisions based on common sense.
And as long as minorities tend to vote in ways that support the interests of the working and middle classes or just basic human decency, their votes become dangerous to special interest groups that don’t care about basic human decency.
I find it horrifying that our country will celebrate the life of Nelson Mandela, a leader who fought to make sure everyone had the right to vote and helped his country move past a time when voting centres in black communities had to deal with bomb threats and actual bombs, and then we will get rid of our own bill of rights for the same reasons that Mr. Mandela spent his life fighting against.
Freedom is really about realising that we all depend on each other and living with compassion because of that. It’s not about letting go of our fears. It’s not about not being responsible. It’s not about pretending not to know what our actions will lead to. Freedom, real freedom, is living your life and letting others live theirs. Sometimes, being free means giving up a little bit of what we think we deserve so that others can have a fair chance at the same freedom. Freedom is another way of saying that a group has grown up.