Welcome friend!
Consider this your online Steve-and-Adam's room! Traber 611 Online! So kick back, grab your favorite SAGA-esque snack, turn down the lights, and get ready to relive the good old days!
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Voting Rights Act
Do we need more evidence that the House Republicans are fascists?
A certain faction inside the Republican party is currently opposing the renewal of the voting rights act (an act passed in the mid-1960s to protect the voting rights of minorities). It's not all the Republicans in the House of Representatives, but it's enough to stall out the legislation. Everyone thought that the vote was going to be a mere formality before the 4th of July break, but a couple of factions decided to oppose it.
One group says it's outdated and unnecessary because there's no real racism in the US anymore. This though the Supreme Court this week ruled that the DeLay redistricting in Texas unconstitutionally infringed on the voting rights of Latino/a voters in the Rio Grande valley. That and over 1000 suits have been filed using the act since the last time it was renewed in Congress. On a general note, we should also consider that during our parents' lifetimes, there were still people alive in this country who were born as the property of white men. Segregation has only been illegal for about 50 years. New York, DC, Chicago, LA and... oh, EVERY American city have large racial ghettos. Have we made progress? Yes. Can we go ahead and stop worrying about laws to protect minorities? Not by a long shot.
The other group wants to amend the bill so that ballots don't have to be provided in any language other than English and no translators need to be provided at polling places. The excuse is "naturalized citizens have to pass a language competency exam, so they should be able to read a ballot in English." Even if that were the whole story, it would still be essentially racist. The problem is that not all Spanish-speaking citizens are NATURALIZED citizens. If you're born on US soil, you're a US citizen and should be able to vote without undue burdens. That includes people born into Spanish-speaking (or Korean or Hmong or Italian) families for whom English is not their primary language and who are not really comfortable operating in English.
They're both not-so-suddle flashes of American=Anglo sentiment. They both smell a bit like goose-stepping. (And if the House majority leadership can't rein in their members, it's going to be a massive black eye in November.)
I don't know... can you think of a legitimate reason for it?
hyperbole, admittedly (but we do live in a country with racial slavery, genocide and concentration camps in our history, so an extreme wariness towards political xenophobia isn't entirely inappropriate)
3 comments:
Huh?
A certain faction inside the Republican party is currently opposing the renewal of the voting rights act (an act passed in the mid-1960s to protect the voting rights of minorities). It's not all the Republicans in the House of Representatives, but it's enough to stall out the legislation. Everyone thought that the vote was going to be a mere formality before the 4th of July break, but a couple of factions decided to oppose it.
One group says it's outdated and unnecessary because there's no real racism in the US anymore. This though the Supreme Court this week ruled that the DeLay redistricting in Texas unconstitutionally infringed on the voting rights of Latino/a voters in the Rio Grande valley. That and over 1000 suits have been filed using the act since the last time it was renewed in Congress. On a general note, we should also consider that during our parents' lifetimes, there were still people alive in this country who were born as the property of white men. Segregation has only been illegal for about 50 years. New York, DC, Chicago, LA and... oh, EVERY American city have large racial ghettos. Have we made progress? Yes. Can we go ahead and stop worrying about laws to protect minorities? Not by a long shot.
The other group wants to amend the bill so that ballots don't have to be provided in any language other than English and no translators need to be provided at polling places. The excuse is "naturalized citizens have to pass a language competency exam, so they should be able to read a ballot in English." Even if that were the whole story, it would still be essentially racist. The problem is that not all Spanish-speaking citizens are NATURALIZED citizens. If you're born on US soil, you're a US citizen and should be able to vote without undue burdens. That includes people born into Spanish-speaking (or Korean or Hmong or Italian) families for whom English is not their primary language and who are not really comfortable operating in English.
They're both not-so-suddle flashes of American=Anglo sentiment. They both smell a bit like goose-stepping. (And if the House majority leadership can't rein in their members, it's going to be a massive black eye in November.)
I don't know... can you think of a legitimate reason for it?
hyperbole, admittedly (but we do live in a country with racial slavery, genocide and concentration camps in our history, so an extreme wariness towards political xenophobia isn't entirely inappropriate)
Post a Comment