Selling Out Individual Rights

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Philosopher George Santayana, 1905

It’s pretty clear that the United States is reversing decades of individual freedoms – the first time since Prohibition that such a national trend has transpired – most of those judicial rulings and statutory restrictions flying in the face of the clear majority of voters. If you want to understand what the criteria are for such unpopular restrictions, just look at three contemporary metrics of support for this trend: evangelicals, White supremacists and the National Rifle Association.

So, let’s start with bills that make it harder to vote. Effectively, racially motivated voter suppression. Eliminating “vote by mail” while moving polling stations into distant almost exclusively white neighborhoods. Or preventing any means of facilitating voters, particularly helping those who are not yet comfortable voting. Or asking for IDs that minorities are not likely to have. Birth certificates even where the birth was a private at-home delivery. Or a driver’s license where people are not likely to own cars, where even a state issued ID requires people to travel to a distant government office. While legislatures and courts know they cannot out-and-out designate clear language in proposed bills that openly target protecting class of minorities, if they are clever about their discrimination, they can get away with it.

In 2018, the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (in Brnovich Vs Democratic National Committee) held that a newly enacted Arizona statute barring get-out-the-vote operatives from collecting and delivering ballots – passed under the guise of protecting against what appears to be non-existent voter fraud – discriminated against minorities, particularly people of color. But in 2021 Supreme Court, noting that such proscribed classes of voters were not specifically mentioned in that offending bill, reversed that appellate court stating that thus the law “was not enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose.”

Writing for the 6-3 conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito concluded: “Fraud is a real risk that accompanies mail-in voting even if Arizona had the good fortune to avoid it… the modest evidence of racially disparate burdens caused by HB 2023, in light of the State’s justifications, leads us to the conclusion that the law does not violate §2 of the VRA [Voting Rights Act of 1965 as amended in 2008].” With one fell swoop, the Supreme Court vitiated the dwindling hope of keeping the last vestige of the Voting Rights alive, §2 which made discriminatory voting laws illegal, after lifting all remaining sanctions against states that had imposed voting restrictions against minorities (in the 2013 case of Shelby County vs Holder). The effect of the Brnovich ruling was that if lawmakers use the right words and avoid the wrong words in the text of a voter suppression bill, especially if employing justifying words like “fraud” and “election integrity,” they can suppress!

On to NRA-supported resistance to gun control. In the 1970s, the NRA was a gun safety non-profit advocacy group. In the mid-1970s, facing a vast reduction in government orders for firearms with the end of the Vietnam War, American gunmakers convinced the NRA to launch a new, pro-gun ownership lobbying arm. “After 1977, the organization expanded its membership by focusing heavily on political issues and forming coalitions with conservative politicians. Most of these are Republicans.” Wikipedia. They were wildly successful.

When this NRA effort began, the notion of a ubiquitous American right to gun ownership did not exist. The Second Amendment, with its “well regulated militia,” clause never contemplated that interpretation. But money poured into the NRA, which used those funds to attack anyone who mounted efforts to impose any gun controls. By 2008, the NRA’s efforts led to a right-wing assumption that gun-ownership was an absolute right. A radical right-wing Justice, Antonin Scalia, writing the majority opinion for the Supreme Court in Heller vs District of Columbia, codified that interpretation for the first time since the nation was founded. The new law of the land.

Since then, Republican legislators went crazy enabling gun ownership, stripping away restrictions against even owning semiautomatic firearms. Yet – in the midst of a public “do something” outcry after the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings which created tighter federal red flag and background requirements but failed to take the worst weapons off the streets – the Supreme Court (in June, New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., INC. v. BRUEN) ruled that New York’s permit requirements for concealed guns was unconstitutional. I wonder if cops in big cities are now worry that with minimal risk, almost anyone over 21 (maybe 18) can carry a concealed weapon… legally?

Anti-CRT laws, discrimination against those not towing the line in traditional gender and sexual orientation and other “cancel culture” issues are wending their way through the courts, with a harsh realization that they ultimately face the Supreme Court which embraced extreme evangelical values by reversing Roe v Wade last month in Dobbs vs Jackson, a 6-3 right-wing sweep against the wishes of an American majority. I’ve written much about that reversal that I will not repeat here, but after the massive protests across the country, even as other blue states are making their abortion rights available to non-residents, the threat of criminal and civil liability in red states – making criminal what was legal for almost half a century – is even rendering free speech under the First Amendment a risky business. Red states are out for blood. Separation of church and state is eroding fast.

Amanda Seitz, writing for the June 29th Associated Press, tells us: “Facebook and Instagram have begun promptly removing posts that offer abortion pills to women who may not be able to access them after a Supreme Court decision that stripped away constitutional protections for the procedure… Such social media posts ostensibly aimed to help women living in states where preexisting laws banning abortion suddenly snapped into effect on Friday [6/24]. That’s when the high court overturned Roe vs. Wade, its 1973 decision that declared access to abortion a constitutional right.

“Memes and status updates explaining how women could legally obtain abortion pills in the mail exploded across social media platforms. Some even offered to mail the prescriptions to women living in states that now ban the procedure… Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of these posts, just as millions across the U.S. were searching for clarity around abortion access. General mentions of abortion pills, as well as posts mentioning specific drugs such as mifepristone and misoprostol, suddenly surged Friday [6/24]morning across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and TV broadcasts, according to an analysis by the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.”

And so it begins. So many repressive anti-democratic regimes, including Hitler’s WWII Germany, began under very similar sequences. Looking at the alarming increase in racially, gender and ethnically based hate crimes lets you know where such decisions are taking us. Democracy is deeply in peril… if it still exists in the United States.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we allow racists, religious extremists and powerful special interests to determine the limits of our personal rights, absolutely no one is safe from what happens when the arrow points at them.