Grace Ross: Will You Remember Where You Were On June 26th?

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

June 26, 2013 is going to be one of those days that sticks in the minds and hearts of a subsection of the United States. The kind of day when someone says to you “where were you when you heard the news?” And every person can remember what they were doing, who they were with, what was going on around them – like a lightening flash in their mind. It’s only true for a section of the population, but it’s the day on which the Supreme Court ruled that gay and lesbian relationships deserved the same legal recognition as any other romantic couple.

By 5:45 in the afternoon the lawn and stairs in front of Cambridge City Hall was filled with a mass of people celebrating. As one of speakers said, “something we’ve known all along was just affirmed by the top court of the land which is that we are as worthy as any other people and so for us the decision at some level was just a “duh, we knew that”.

It is still critically important whenever any group of people are recognized as carrying as great a depth of humanity as any other group of people. Just as an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere – an end to injustice for any group is a boost to Justice for all of us.

The Supreme Court ruled that marriages between gay and lesbian couples recognized in any state, give the couple access to the same federal benefits as married straight couples have anywhere. On procedural grounds they struck down the California law that tried belatedly to establish marriage as between one man and one woman after the top court in California had ruled that marriage was between any two consenting adults in a romantic relationship was legal.

Perhaps for a different U.S. population, Tuesday, June 25 will go down as one of those days where people remember where they were. After the hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands fighting for equal rights during the Civil Rights Movement, the Supreme Court came down with a decision that gutted the key provision of the Voting Rights Bill – one of the cornerstones of the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. Other parts of the law are still in effect, but the one perhaps leaned on the heaviest in lawsuits was this: in states identified by Congress at the time of the ACT to tend to pass laws that made it harder – especially for African Americans – to participate equally in elections, their voting law changes must be scrutinized before they went into effect.

The Supreme Court decided that while having a check up before a state voting law becomes effective is not a problem, the original list of states needing that check up on was out of date. Some of the states that were on the original list from the Voting Rights Bill are states that now have not had a challenge to a voting law change in a long time. Some of the states that have had challenges are still on that list, but there are also unlisted states that have changed voting rights laws in ways proven to disadvantage the participation of people of color, younger folks, etc. Those states were not on the list.

Now it’s not up to the Supreme Court, everyone would agree, to decide for the legislature who a law should apply to. Still, they felt a responsibility given that this law now targets the wrong mixture of states. The Court majority threw out the list of states. Functionally, no one can access that part of the Voting Rights Acts that has been critical to protect equal voting rights of African Americans and other constituencies.

What rights could be more fundamental an institution to our democracy than voting? Just as marriage could hardly be a more fundamental institution to human families and lives.

Supreme Court decisions all come down at this time of year. Some years, these decisions seem more critical. But now they play a special role at this time of flux in our society; we seemed to flip flop between understanding that we’re a civic society based on human connection and the value of every voice and the far extreme where it seems to be ok to completely wipe out and ignore the humanity of whole groups of peoples even to the very basic right to a means to eat or keep a roof over their heads or participate in our democracy. These court rulings lacked not only consensus but expressed the same flux as in the rest of our country’s recognized leaders.

One court observer pointed out the remarkable fact that the Court includes no policy people. It has all lawyers and lawyers who came up to the top court as judges except one. Without a policy background, the Justices don’t necessarily see laws as part of the long march of policy change in our democracy nor the real machinations of crafting law of legislative and executive branches.

If the court agreed that it still made sense for states to be checked up on when they tried to change their voting laws, they had other options besides simply striking down a section of the Voting Rights Act. For instance, they could have given Congress a time period during which they needed to enact a new list.

Courts have incredible power to change our lives for good and for bad. It is not enough to say that folks are appointed for life, then wipe our hands and walk away and hope that they do the right thing. The mix of who’s on the court matters. Witness the difference of the gender divide in the decision that was made on voting rights (all the women and one man on the side of continuing protections even with an imperfect list). Or look at past times when the Chief Justices have been policy people instead of judges by background. Or even lift up the curtain now on the political contributions and financial standing of the different judges and how that is impacting their decisions.

We are all of us humans. Major events are marked in our memories in different ways or depending on who we are. Trying to pretend that there is no human element only leads to bad policy at whatever level.

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Grace Ross: Will You Remember Where You Were On June 26th?

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