Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Anti-Gay Teacher Censored by Catholic High School

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Ampersand

Hey, we were just discussing censorship! From the Huffington Post:

Patricia Jannuzzi, a religion teacher at Somerville’s Immaculata High School, made headlines last week after she argued that gays “want to reengineer western civ (sic) into a slow extinction” as part of their “agenda” in a post on her now-deleted Facebook profile, MyCentralJersey reported.

“We need healthy families with a mother and a father for the sake of the children and humanity!!!!!” she wrote alongside a Young Conservatives article about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights advocate Dan Savage urging Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson to prove that homosexuality is a choice.

After Jannuzzi’s remarks sparked a media firestorm, school officials reportedly placed her on administrative leave and forced her to deactivate her Facebook page, arguing in a March 13 letter to parents that the comments had been “completely inconsistent with our policy and position as a Catholic Christian community.”

Meanwhile, an online petition arguing against Jannuzzi’s statements had drawn over 1,000 signatures at the time this story was first published.

A screencap from her now-deleted Facebook page:

jannuzzi-fb-post

From NJ.com:

In a statement provided to NJ Advance Media, the school said it took “immediate action” and “mandated that the teacher involved permanently de-active her Facebook page.”

“The opinions reflected in these posts do not in any way represent the philosophy, mission or student experience of this high school,” the statement said. “… Through our investigation, we have determined that the information posted on this social media page has not been reflected in the curriculum content of the classes she teaches.”

Januzzi’s Facebook page, which was public at one point, was removed Wednesday morning.

Actress Susan Sarandon (whose nephew went to that high school and was a student of Jannuzzi’s) posted about it on her Facebook page, as did some reality show celebrity I’ve never heard of.

A few thoughts:

1) Obviously, Jannuzzi’s thoughts are homophobic, ignorant, and suggests that she could do a lot to improve as a person.

2) Let’s not forget that the Catholic Church’s official position on gays – “objectively disordered” – is also disgusting, homophobic, and wrong. What they are objecting to is not homophobia, but crudely-stated homophobia.

3) But, according to the school, the kind of thinking she posts on her Facebook page isn’t reflected in her teaching. So it’s really shouldn’t be any of the school’s business.

4) “…the school said it took ‘immediate action’ and ‘mandated that the teacher involved permanently de-active her Facebook page.'” Now that’s censorship. “Mandated.”

5) From the left or the right, this sort of intrusive attack on employee’s freedom by bosses should scare us all to death. Apparently the people who run Immaculata High School don’t understand that just because you give someone a paycheck doesn’t give you a moral right to control what your employees think or write outside of work.

Because you’re an employee doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make you a serf. And the fact that we depend on our jobs to pay our rent (or mortgage) and eat makes a boss “mandating” what we say inherently coercive. This is disgusting. In a country that really valued free speech, there’d be an enormous wave of revulsion every time a boss acts this way/

6) That Change.org petition has a little over a thousand signatures as of Thursday evening. A little over a thousand signatures is really not many signatures at all, especially for a story that’s gotten so much coverage. That the school engaged in censorship based on a tiny Change.org petition indicates that the school administrators are either spineless cowards, or they were eager for an excuse.

7) Incidentally, the Change.org petition originally seemed to be leaning for calling for censorship – the title of the petition, shamefully, is “Stop Public Hate Speech of Teachers” – but more recent edits and updates have veered away from calling for either censorship or for firing the teacher, instead asking for sensitivity training.

8) Susan Sarandon should know better than to criticize an ordinary, non-celeb citizen by name. Talk about punching down! I really like Sarandon generally, but in this case she’s been incredibly thoughtless at best and a bully at worse.

9) Although I’m not a fan of either the petition-writer’s acts or Sarandon’s, in the end I think it is the School that deserves big heaping piles of scorn for this. They should have the guts to stand up for free speech by criticizing their employee’s statements without suspending her or making her take down the Facebook page; instead, they’ve shown they have no respect at all for free speech or for the basic human rights of their employees.

Posted in Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc. | 63 Comments

Reading Journal: Verses of Forgiveness, by Myriam Aantaki — 2

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I continue to be fascinated with this book—part 1 of this reading journal is here—and with the effort Ahmed (the narrator) makes, even while he is planning a suicide attack against Israel, to imagine his Jewish father’s life. The author, Myriam Antaki, sets the two men up as almost mirror images of each other: Ahmed, the disenfranchised, exiled, oppressed, orphaned Palestinian; his father, the disenfranchised, exiled, oppressed, orphaned European Jew; each one looking to reclaim for himself and his people a land he thinks of as home. But there is another parallel as well, this one involving a woman. Ahmed loves Iman, the prostitute in whose arms his mother finds him when she reveals to him who his father was. The fact that Iman is a prostitute, a woman who survives by selling her body, is important—or, to be more precise, the fact that Ahmed does not see her prostitution as a betrayal of his love, as a rejection of who he is, is important, though I don’t know enough yet about how Ahmed became radicalized, about the actual circumstances of his life, to find this importance in more than the way Ahmed’s feelings about Iman form an interesting parallel and contrast to his father’s experience with Aline.

Aline is a women—it’s not clear to me whether or not she’s Jewish—with whom his father has a brief encounter on the beach in the midst of the Nazi occupation. That encounter means a great deal to Ahmed’s father, who thinks of Aline, “her ivory skin, her face pale with pleasure” in order to “forget [his] pain…and [the pain] of others” (39). On the very next page, however, Ahmed’s father sees Aline with Von Postel, the German in charge of the occupation. His “nobleman’s hands are touching Aline, while she comes “close to him…show[ing] him her eyes, her lips, her half-open blouse” (40). Ahmed’s father experiences this as a deep, deep betrayal on Aline’s part. For him, she “is the shimmering woman, a sea angel who crumples her underwear to give [him] a thrust of that body, that heart which [he] believe[s] to be celestial,” but, when he sees her with Von Postel, his “sadness plunges deep into [his] entrails” and the night’s stars slowly burn his heart (40).

In offering herself to Von Postel, Aline—and from this perspective it doesn’t really matter whether she is Jewish or not—is arguably doing precisely the same thing that Iman does in the brothel, selling herself to survive. So it’s interesting that Ahmed does not idealize Iman in the same way that his father idealizes Aline, that he does not feel the same betrayal as his father in the knowledge that the woman he loves also sells herself to other men. (It’s not clear whether Ahmed pays Iman, though I suspect that he does.) I don’t know exactly what to make of this yet, but there seems to be a connection between Ahmed’s father’s idealization of Aline and the idealization of “the promised land” that Ahmed attributes to his father. On the other hand, Ahmed’s colder, more realistic, even more resigned stance towards Iman—who, one might say, because of her profession and the role it plays in a male dominant culture, has quite clearly been occupied—seems to mirror what the novel depicts as the more clear-sighted stance that the Palestinians have towards their occupied land.

There is more to say about this, but I want to turn my attention to an aspect of the novel that I mentioned in the very first sentence of this post: the way it captures the effort Ahmed makes to enter imaginatively into his father’s life, to understand the circumstances—as far as Ahmed can know them—that brought his father to what was then Palestine. I was struck in particular by Ahmed’s rendering of his father’s and grandmother’s experience in one of the cattle cars the Nazis used to transport Jews to the camps:

Meant for thirty men, eighty are crammed in. To perish by smothering is one way to die. It is a shorter death, happening with the same indifference as the wind falls or the star are extinguished. The people imagine the pain in their bodies. Their eyes take on a color of peril and stone.

Father, you try to help your mother, to support her as she mounts the last step into the car. You fear that frailty that is turning her lips and eyes colorless…. Piled into the cars, going off to a place where people no longer have the strength to stand up. The Germans refuse to leave a single door ajar. To survive you have to stay in a vertical position, motionless and silent. It is a sweating, shouting free-for-all. You understand that the least dangerous position is tightly in a corner of the car where the pressure of the others is less. That is where you put your mother and you form a screen to ward off any knocks against her….

The men have swallowed the last bottles of beer and wine and drink their own sweat to fight off thirst. The latrine buckets are overflowing. People relieve themselves on the floor if they can. Some are throwing up, others shout for something to drink….

People can no longer endure their skin, their sweat, their breathing. They go naked, and some feel an erotic desire in a last unhealthy sensuality. Others vomit and die. The corpses are stacked up in the back of the car. Your mother is silent, words remain glued to her suffering, to the abyss. (45-47)

What strikes me here is Ahmed’s—and, of course, Antaki’s by extension—commitment to rendering the suffering as fully as possible, a commitment which bespeaks a desire to understand, an awareness that this kind of understanding is somehow necessary, is what underlies our ability to see an Other as a fellow human being. At the same time, understanding this kind of suffering is, in some sense, easy. After all, not to see this suffering, not to apprehend it almost immediately, is at least implicitly to excuse the Nazi ideology that underwrote it, which would immediately remove pretty much any credibility from anything else Ahmed (and Antaki) had to say.

I do not mean by this that the effort Antaki makes through Ahmed to imagine the Jewish experience of the Shoah is in any way trivial or somehow of secondary importance. Indeed, I think you can measure just how important it is by how many people in the world are unwilling to undertake that same humanizing effort on behalf of the Palestinians, whose story may not include a dictator hell bent on wiping them entirely from the fact of the earth, but whose very human suffering for the sake of their land and their national identity is no less real than that of the Jews.

This imaginative act, of course, is not by itself enough to change anything about the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, or between the people around the world who have lined up on either side of that conflict; but without this act of imagination, I do not think any real change is possible.

Cross-posted.

Posted in Palestine & Israel | 6 Comments

Why Do They Oppose Gay Marriage? Part 3 In A Very Infrequently Updated And Rather Repetitive Series

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Ampersand

From “Public Opinion, the Courts, and Same-sex Marriage: Four Lessons Learned” by Brian Powell, Natasha Yurk Quadlin and Oren Pizmony-Levy, in Social Forces (2015) volume 2 pages 3-12. (Pdf link.)

Because I don’t believe God intended them to be that way. No. I think it’s a travesty.

I follow God’s commands. It’s beastly.

It’s like sickness, some sickness you know. Mental sickness, physical sickness or something, but it is mental sickness. So it’s not natural.

I mean, two—two girlfriends can live together as long as they’re friends. You know, if they don’t have nobody and they’re friends and they’re helping each other survive, if they’re friends, that’s fine. But when they cross that line of becoming lovers, then it’s sick, I think.

Because my religion believes that’s an abomination.

Because that, marriage, is a sacred thing between a man and a woman that is orchestrated by God, and the Bible clearly says that homosexuality is a sin, it’s perverted, and deviant. That’s all.

I don’t know what promotes that kind of garbage. Well, they’re sinners.

I think the reason why gays and lesbians want recognition of their marriage as being a valid marriage is because they want their dysfunctional sexuality viewed as normal, when I don’t think it’s normal.

The study authors go on:

These comments are not the exceptions. The overwhelmingly most common response (over 65%) among opponents to same-sex marriage is religious or moral disapproval. This animus (( The study defines “animus” as follows: “Animus broadly entails moral disapproval of an excluded group or the characterization of a group as “inferior” or “of lesser worth.”” )) toward same-sex couples is so prevalent that it crowds out any other concerns. Importantly, fewer than five percent mention children, while even fewer (not exceeding one percent) articulate a position that even loosely corresponds with the “responsible procreation” argument or the claim that children fare better with a father and mother than with same-sex parents.

This more or less accords with my experience talking to opponents of marriage equality on the streets (gathering signatures in support of marriage equality) and, briefly, on the phones (as part of a campaign attempting to persuade opponents of marriage equality). Virtually all the opponents of marriage equality I spoke to were polite, and many were very nice to me, but they almost always said that they were against same-sex marriage because of God, or because they had a moral objection to gay people.

Also, this goes along with the results of a Pew poll I’ve posted about twice before: Why do they oppose gay marriage? and Why they really oppose same-sex marriage.

Posted in Religion, Same-Sex Marriage | 87 Comments

Terry Pratchett Has Died

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Mandolin

Science fiction and fantasy humor writer Terry Pratchett has died. This is not unexpected as he has been ill for some time, but it’s still sad to see the end.

As I said on my livejournal: I don’t believe in an afterlife, though I wish I did sometimes. I don’t believe in reincarnation, although I’d love for Terry Pratchett to get to come back as something ridiculous and awesome and wonderful. But I do believe in legacies, and he left wonderful books and humor, and I’m so glad to have them.

Some of my favorites:

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

TV and Movies I’ve Watched Lately: The Slap, Dear White People, Time Lapse, Tinker Bell And The Legend Of The NeverBeast, Sarah Conner Chronicles, The Hobbit

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Ampersand

The Slap. The first episode of the American TV show made me recall something Gore Vidal once wrote: “Bad books on writing tell you to “WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW”, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”

But actually, Gore Vidal didn’t say that, Joe Haldeman did. So much for the accuracy of my memory.

Anyhow, the first episode of The Slap is about Hector, a well-off liberal white guy with a great wife and kids and a 40th birthday party which he spends contemplating having an affair with his kid’s 16-year-old babysitter. But I knew that the premise of The Slap is that a guy slap’s someone else’s child in the first episode. So the only thing that made Hector interesting, to me, was that by the end of the episode he would do something completely uncharacteristic for someone of his personality and class position, and slap another person’s child.

But then it turned out that the slap wasn’t delivered by him; it was delivered by his boorish right-wing stereotype cousin Harry. (I warned you there’d be spoilers.) So, in fact, there is absolutely nothing interesting about this dude in whose tedious P.O.V. I’ve just spent forty minutes trapped.

Anyhow, boorish right-wing stereotype Harry slaps the bratty, undisciplined child of self-righteous left-wing stereotypes Gary and Rosie.

I’d bet money the writers of the American The Slap are middle-of-the-road liberal Democrats, much like Hector. And it’s just… boring and annoying that their slapper is such a cartoon of right-wingers, and Gary and Rosie are such cartoons of social-justice types. This is the sort of Aaron Sorkinesque crap that makes me sympathize with Conservatives who call liberals smug condescending assholes.

But I kept on watching, because a friend told me that the series features shifting points of view and seeing how different characters view the same events, and I love that kind of stuff. So I watched the second and third episodes, and they were better, largely because they weren’t in Hector’s perspective.

But then I found out that the Austrialian The Slap, on which the American The Slap is based, is available on Netflix. And I starting watching it, and you know what? It’s MUCH better. In the Aussie version, Hector from the start is narcissistic and a bit of dick towards his family, which makes his interest in screwing the babysitter less out of the blue. Harry, while still arrogant, is apolitical rather than right-wing. Every female character is more three-dimensional and distinct than on the US version, and the relationship between lifelong friends Anouk, Aisha (Hector’s wife), and Rosie is shown as being as central to this group of characters as that between cousins Hector and Harry.

One notable difference is that everyone seems less friggin’ rich in the Aussie version. It’s as if American TV producers just can’t imagine a story being interesting if it’s not about rich people.

Conclusion: If you like extended multi-protagonist narratives about how one bad decision can lead to a bunch of bad repercussions for a group of fairly lousy people, check out the Australian version of The Slap.

* * *

Charles and I watched Dear White People, a crowdfunded indie movie, tonight. I enjoyed it; for a political movie about anti-black racism, it was surprisingly UN-idealogical, as all the main characters ended up having to shift away from pat ideologies at one point or another. In fact, if there’s an underlying ideology in this film, it’s the director’s beliefs that Black people’s stories are interesting and worth telling. The actors were fine (lead actress Tessa Thompson, from Veronica Mars, was especially good). The story wasn’t the greatest; the script was sometimes self-indulgent (the movie theater bit was out of character and felt like sketch comedy), and the supporting characters felt more like plot drivers than characters. But the central four characters were all fun to watch, and the film’s refusal to accept simple answers to anything was refreshing.

Passes the Bechdel test by a hair – there are two lead female characters, and they talk at least once about something other than a man. But although two of the four lead characters are female, there’s a default-male trap that the director falls into; every significant supporting character in this movie is male.

* * *

I love low-budget sci-fi that has to rely more on a clever script than on special effects. I also love time travel movies. So no surprise I watched Time Lapse, a low-budget suspense movie about three roommates who discover that a camera pointed at their living room window takes pictures of what will be going on in their apartment 24 hours in the future.

The writers are clearly Hitchcock fans; the characters try to use the camera to take control of their lives (by getting wealthy by betting on sports, for example), but very quickly it seems as if the camera might be controlling them instead, and things spiral out of control. The plot gets enjoyably convoluted, seemingly irrelevant details from early in the film turn out to be crucial, and disaster looms. I enjoyed it.

The comparison to Hitchcock doesn’t do Time Lapse any favors. No one can expect first-time filmmakers on a tiny budget to be able to approach Hitchcock’s stunning cinematography, but watching this made me appreciate how expert Hitchcock was at making characters distinct and full of blood and nuance, even when they’re just there to drive the plot along. That doesn’t happen here. And sure, these actors aren’t Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, but neither the script or direction gives the actors a chance to play full characters.

Also, from a feminist perspective, this movie isn’t offensive, but it sure ain’t great – the one major female character’s participation in the plot is mostly kissing one boy or the other, and her love life seems to be her only interest.

So: A fun time-travel thriller, but one that is probably too flat to be memorable. I liked it, but I bet their next movie will be better.

I’m pretty sure this fails the Bechdel test. There are only two female characters (one very minor), and they’re never on screen together.

* * *

I watched Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast with the girls (Maddox and Sydney, now aged 9 and 11).

First of all, gotta say this for the Tinker Bell series of movies – a Disney powerhouse that mostly stays below the radar but is hugely profitable – every Tinker Bell movie passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. But this newest installment in the franchise is definitely tenser, darker and more gut-wrenching than the previous Tinker Bell movies (not a very high bar to clear, admittedly).

It was really good! The animation was good enough to be expressive and enjoyable, and to bring in some good visuals (but very basic! Don’t expect any million-dollar “Brave” hair animation here), and grown-ups will find the story familiar. But sometimes it’s fun to watch a well-done version of a familiar tale! And the character design of the NeverBeast – borrowing from both Where The While Things Are and Studio Ghibli, I think – is gorgeous (the spiral patterns on its fur work really well when animated).

I’d recommend that anyone with a 7-12 year old friend sit down and watch this with them. Especially animal lovers. But if your friend (or you) is susceptible to tear-jerkers, you’d best have tissues handy for the ending.

Trivia: Tink’s voice actor, Mae Whitman, was also the voice of Katara in “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” and played Ann Veal on “Arrested Development”, so if her choice of roles say anything about her she must be a neat person.

* * *

Speaking of time travel narratives, I’ve been rewatching the two seasons of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. A very underrated show that started out well and got smarter and deeper as it went along; I wish it had lasted longer, although at least the second season ends at a decent story-ending point.

Another easy Bechdel-test passer, although I wish there had been more than two significant non-white characters.

* * *

I saw the most recent Hobbit movie. Helped, perhaps, by my ultra-low expectations, I had fun. It was pretty, the landscapes were very pretty, the special effects were nice, a great group of actors, some of the fight scenes were well done in American blockbuster style. It didn’t feel as bloated and annoying as the second Hobbit movie.

It was all very… competent. If you enjoy seeing expert setbuilding and makeup and costuming, there’s a lot to enjoy here. But what a steep decline from how good the Lord of the Rings movies were (and those were far from perfect).

It did pass the Bechdel test, perhaps, but only barely – the Elf lady may have spoken to the little human girls about fleeing the burning city while they were, well, fleeing the burning city. Lots of “oh, the cowardly male character is wearing a dress, how hilarious” humor that stopped being funny sometime in the 1990s, I think.

* * *

So what have you watched lately?

Posted in Popular (and unpopular) culture | 10 Comments

I Find Myself Hoping That The Email Scandal Takes Clinton Down Early

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Ampersand

…In time for the Democrats to go through a primary and pick a different nominee.

Unfortunately, it’s very unlikely that Clinton will be hurt at all by the email scandal. (Vox summary here, for anyone who needs the scandal explained in a nutshell.)

I don’t like Hillary Clinton; she’s a hawk, and in the conflict within the Democratic party between the banks and the rest of us, there’s no question what side Clinton is on. As for the email scandal, while she may not have technically broken any laws, she has certainly gone out of her way to thumb her nose at the very idea of transparency (( Although there’s an argument that Clinton’s real problem is that she didn’t follow the conventions of what Ezra Klein calls Transparency Theater. But “she’s no more corrupt than any other high official in her position” isn’t a stirring argument in her favor, really. )) and public oversight – and she did so in the midst of an ongoing scandal about the Bush administration hiding their emails from the public. It’s hard to believe that Democrats can’t field someone better.

In fact, Clinton is so awful that the only way to get me to vote for her is to have her run against a Republican. Because as bad as Clinton is, anyone the Republican party would nominate would be much worse (for instance, it would be the end of US funding for UNFPA, leading to thousands of preventable deaths.)

Furthermore, the last time she ran for office – in the 2008 primary – Clinton was lousy at running a campaign, losing despite starting the primary with enormous advantages. Which is a problem, because the number one thing any Democratic nominee needs to be able to do is run a good campaign and beat the Republican. If they can’t do that, then any other advantages they have – good policy positions, good governance skills – become irrelevant.

Contested, hard-fought primaries are the best way we have of testing for that skill. When we have a contested primary election, we can at least be assured that we’ll wind up with a candidate with a proven ability to run and win a nationwide campaign. With Clinton, we won’t have that. Nor will we have the democracy that – imperfect as it is – having a seriously contested primary provides.

Bah, I say. Bah!

Posted in Elections and politics | 41 Comments

The Right To Vote Amendment

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Ampersand

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s disgusting Shelby decision, Representatives Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.) have proposed a new ~~Congressional~~ Constitutional Amendment, which has been endorsed by the Democratic National Committee. The text of their proposed amendment:

Section 1. Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.

Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation.

Although many Americans don’t realize this (although I think most “Alas” readers do), the Constitution does not explicitly protect a right to vote.

There’s no chance of the Right to Vote Amendment (RIVA?) passing Congress (let alone two thirds of Congress) anytime soon, because virtually all elected Republicans oppose it.

In Slate, Jamelle Bouie argues that Democrats should fight for a constitutional right-to-vote amendment.

…the Constitution allows voter suppression as long as it doesn’t trip any of its race or gender wires.

The goal of a right-to-vote amendment is to change the dynamic and place the burden on restrictionists. In a sense, it would make the pre–Holder v. Shelby Voting Rights Act a standard for the entire country. States and localities would have to make voting as accessible as possible, with a high standard for new barriers.

And while the odds of winning a right-to-vote amendment are low—one reason Democrats should invest more effort in state elections—there’s tremendous value in mobilizing around the issue. A movement for a right-to-vote amendment could encourage laws and norms that expand participation irrespective of an amendment in that direction.

Scott Lemieux argues that such a Constitutional Amendment wouldn’t do much good:

The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment… thought that bad judges were a much bigger problem than textual lacunae, and there’s a great deal of truth in this. It’s very likely that the Roberts Court would uphold most contemporary vote-suppression laws even if a right-to-vote amendment was passed.

Moreover, in all likelihood these vote-suppression techniques already violate the existing text of the Constitution. A federal district judge, for example, found that Texas’ draconian voter ID law was racially discriminatory in both effect and purpose, and also functions as a poll tax. If these findings are accurate, the Texas law already violates the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Twenty-Fourth Amendments.

None of this is to deny that changes in textual language could matter at the margin. I can imagine certain judges, particularly moderate Democratic nominees, who would uphold voter ID requirements under the current constitution, but not under an amended one. However, the track record of textual protections for the right to vote is generally poor.

Derek Muller, a law professor at Pepperdine, raises some interesting issues, including:

1. Can felons and ex-felons convicted of election-related crimes be prohibited from voting? The proposed amendment would probably extend the right to vote to all felons imprisoned (currently disenfranchised in 48 states) and all those paroled, on probation, or ex-felons (currently disenfranchised to varying degrees in many states), extending the right to vote to five or six million new voters. […]

2. Could the state prevent the mentally handicapped from voting? Most states have some kind of rule preventing the mentally handicapped from voting. Once voting is deemed a “fundamental right,” will these laws, as they presently exist, stand? What kind of rewriting or retailoring would be necessary?

A couple of thoughts:

1) How infuriating is it that one of the two major parties will not support a Constitutional Right to Vote?

2) Even though the Amendment can’t pass in the immediate future – and that’s a shame, I’d love to see felon disenfranchisement ended – it is still worth fighting for, as a mobilization tool to help build support for state-level voting-rights laws.

Posted in Elections and politics | 26 Comments