Bloody Sunday in Selma happened, when the Alabama State Police and a civilian posse (legalized thugs) attacked a peaceful civil rights march with clubs. The protestors were protesting the lack of voting rights in the South.
Clergy members around the country came to Selma for another march two days later. The cops let them pass, but a group of thugs beat James Reeb, a white minister who had participated in the second march, to death that evening. The usual result happened afterwards, with an all-white jury acquitting the killers.
The thugs lost, for the time being. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law five months later.
Self-styled conservatives have never given up trying to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act with fictional claims of voting fraud. In private, they have admitted that their goal is to make it harder for poor folk and minorities to vote.
Spanks, But No Spanks
1 hour ago
6 comments:
I object. As the very model of a modern conservative, I only want to make sure that only those who are US citizens can cast ballots and that each person only votes one time. Liberals seem to object to those ideas for some reason though. Any thoughts on why?
You would seem to be asserting that (a) foreigners are voting in significant numbers; (b) people are voting multiple times in significant numbers; (c) liberals are OK with that. Citations for all three, please?
Absent that evidence, why do conservatives want fewer eligible voters to vote at all?
I pointed out to a Republican, "if you want to make sure each person only votes once, why aren't we doing the purple thumbs thing like in Afghanistan and Iraq?" He had no answer.
Heck, we didn't even HAVE such a thing as voter registration in the United States until around 1870, when it was imposed in order to keep black people from voting in the aftermath of the Civil War. We went almost ONE HUNDRED YEARS without voter registration in this country -- you showed up at the polling place where one of your neighbors was an election commissioner, he recognized you as one of his neighbors that lived in the district, you voted, you went home.
Yet now not only are we supposed to register in order to exercise a fundamental right guaranteed in the Constitution, but, we're also supposed to have government-issued credentials too? That's like requiring a government license in order to exercise freedom of speech, or a government license in order to exercise freedom of religion! Do you *really* want to get into the business of requiring government licenses to exercise fundamental Constitutional rights? What about a government license before you're allowed to comment on a blog? Would you be on board with that?
You don't have to look very hard to find Republicans admitting that voter ID laws are designed to suppress minority voter turnout.
(There are lots more, I just linked to two.)
Oh, and if registering voters and making them prove their identity every time they exercise a constitutionally protected right, doesn't the same argument work for gun registration? Or the sale of ammunition?
Why not demad ID to allow free speech, eh?
The same reason apples to all these situations. Requirements to provide documents to exercise Rights, fundamentally restrict those rights to those the document issuer elects to recognize. But anyone can get a Drivers License you say, and you can't do anything without ID these days. Well, a substantial population continue to prove both these axions false. People can and do live without ID or DL's...and often because they are unable to get these government mandated "papers". It's funny how State Offices for issuing such documents are never open outside the hours most people work...and how the poorest can't afford to take time off work or don't have an entitlement to time off...and how extended voting hours (those outside traditional work hours) keep getting cut...and how "citizens" start showing up and demanding proof of elgibility to vote in excess of requirements or threatening people who look foreign...
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