blogme24.com

by M.V. Jantzen

Ninety Years Ago Women Won the Right to Vote

Christopher Walken (one of the greatest actor’s of all time) famously stated on Inside the Actor’s Studio that his favorite line in all of literature is Shakespeare’s “Who’s There?” the very first line of Hamlet.  Today, the possibilities implied by those two words, are ironically effervescent.  August 18th 2010 marks the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment! 

Feminism, has always been a subject of interest to me.  In fact, the first play I produced and directed for my company was a feminist piece.  It’s rather unfortunate that feminism today as a whole has been equated to man-bashing.  There is so much more on the topic that is still elusive, especially to the majority of young Americans.  My fascination in regards with feminism has to do with history and symbolism.  As we all know women are symbols of nature, life, and sex; interestingly enough, historically our roles abide by these same symbols.  Here we are ninety years later, and it seems more often that not, that women are the symbolic pillars of balance. 90 years after winning the right to vote, women are not only voting in huge numbers (54% of women voted in 2008), they are having families, and working full-time jobs. 

This brings me back to Shakespeare’s “Who’s there?”  In terms of women as individuals or as a collective, does anyone really know?  But at this point, on this day, I do believe it’s safe to say one thing for sure, whoever is there, is one hell of a fighter!

What happened before, during, and after the fight for the 19th Amendment happened.

More 19th Amendment Articles

The Right to Vote, a Patriotic Gift

How much do you appreciate your right to vote? Is it something that you truly cherish, or is it something that you just take this for granted? Consider this fact; throughout our American history, many average citizens like you and me fought for this right, and in some cases, even died for the right to vote! This is a patriotic gift from the struggles of many patriotic citizens that we should never be taken for granted.

Did you know that there are no laws for “the right to vote” in our United States Constitution? These rights were added only in the Amendments to the Constitution. Each state’s standards have evolved separately, unless federal laws were passed that applied to every state. When our country was founded, only white men with property were routinely permitted to vote, (although freed African Americans could vote in four states). White working men, almost all women, and all other people of color were denied this right, that some take for granted today.

At the beginning of the Civil War, most white men were finally allowed to vote, whether or not they owned property, due to the efforts of those who championed this cause for frontiersmen and white immigrants, (who had to wait 14 years for citizenship and their right to vote, in some cases). Literacy tests, poll taxes, and even religious tests were used in various states, and most of the white women, people of color, and Native Americans still did not have the right to vote.

Black Suffrage; The patriotic gifts of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were passed following the Civil War, in the later 1860s. Besides outlawing slavery, these Amendments extended civil rights and suffrage (voting rights) to former slaves. Even thought the right to vote for African-Americans was established, there still were numerous restrictions that kept many black Americans from voting until the 1960s Voting Rights Act was passed. Thanks to the pressures of Dr. Martin Luther King and a powerful civil rights movement, the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned literacy tests and provided federal enforcement of voting registration and other rights in several Southern states and Alaska. Five years later, the patriotic gift of the Voting Rights Act of 1970 provided language assistance to minority voters who did not speak English fluently. Asian Pacific Americans and Latinos were major beneficiaries of this legislation.

Women’s Suffrage initiatives to promote voting for women have been traced back as far as the 1770s, but the modern movement for a vote for women traces its beginning to the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, when supporters of a Constitutional Amendment to allow women to vote finally came together. While this movement was slowed during the Civil War years, the two major suffragist organizations united after the war and pushed forward with a movement that culminated, and after many difficult years, the patriotic gift of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920.

Native Americans had to become American citizens, and give up their tribal affiliations for the right to vote in 1887, but many did not become U. S. citizens until 1924. Most of the Western states continued to deny the right to vote through property requirements, economic pressures, hiding the polls, and condoning of physical violence against those who voted.

Asian Pacific Americans were considered “aliens ineligible for citizenship” since 1790. Interim changes to naturalization and immigration laws in 1943, 1946, and 1952 give the right to vote to some but not all immigrant Asian Pacific Americans. Because citizenship is a (precondition) for the right to vote, immigrant Asian Pacific Americans did not vote in large numbers until 1966 when the immigration and naturalization laws were changed.

Asian Pacific Americans born on American soil were American citizens, and had the right to vote. When 77,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were put in American concentration camps during World War II, their right to vote was withheld during there captivity.

Mexican Americans in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas were supposed to get voting rights along with American citizenship in 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ended the Mexican American war. Property requirements and literacy requirements were imposed in those states to keep them from voting. The Sons of America, founded in 1921 fought for equality and the right to vote, but all Mexican Americans did not receive the right to vote until 1975.

Americans under the age of twenty-one in the late 1960s protested over their lack of suffrage. Many truly felt that if they were old enough to be drafted into service and go to Vietnam, then they should be able to vote. A series of protests ensued, most notably at the Chicago Democratic Convention, where protestors screamed and chanted many slogans of President Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War, and the right to vote. In 1971, President Johnson signed our patriotic gift of the 26th Amendment granting Americans the right to vote at age eighteen.

I hope you now realize that even in “The land of the Free”, the evolution for the right to vote in the America has cost a heavy price for many, and should always be considered a true patriotic gift from those that struggled, endured and gave their life for this privilege that we have today.

Please click HappyPopy.com to watch full video for free
Video Rating: 0 / 5

Damn Right I’m A Libertarian

As the march toward November 2nd, 2010 continues, it really turns my stomach to see more and more political rhetoric where candidates are now claiming to be MORE “constitutional” than their opponent. For example, during the primaries in Utah’s U.S. Senate race, both candidates Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater laid claim to the Constitution as their guide. Please explain how EITHER of these guys call themselves fans of the Constitution yet oppose birthright citizenship?

And where in the Constitution does it talk about Social Security? But constitutional “expert” Mike Lee offers the unconstitutional solution of simply raising the retirement age but isn’t that a bit like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? You don’t have to tweak already doomed institutions. For example, as an entrepreneur, I helped to found the leading consulting firm in the Reverse Mortgage space to help create market-based solutions to the problem of senior funding.

How can these Constitutional Experts support the unconstitutional War on Drugs (remember, Prohibition? You need a Constitutional Amendment to make prohibition the law of the land and last I checked, we never ratified an Amendment to prohibit drugs).

And interesting Constitutional aside for Utahns, the Twenty-first Amendment, which ended prohibition, was ratified when Utah became the state to cast the deciding 36th vote to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment on December 5, 1933. Utah’s subsequent infamous and unusual liquor laws were a direct result of its decisive vote to end the government enforced prohibition of alcohol.

Recently, a headline at the satirical Onion website read: Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be. I call these types “A La Carte Constitutionalists”. You know the type, they pick and choose the parts of the Constitution they like and disregard the rest. Their piecemeal approach may be truly deceitful or merely done for expediency’s sake (e.g., being a “constitutionalist” makes a great sound-byte) but either way it is wrong.

“[i]t is true that, in the United States, at least, we have a constitution that imposes strict limits on some powers of government. But, as we have discovered in the past century, no constitution can interpret or enforce itself; it must be interpreted by men. And if the ultimate power to interpret a constitution is given to the government’s own Supreme Court, then the inevitable tendency is for the Court to continue to place its imprimatur on ever-broader powers for its own government. Furthermore, the highly touted “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” in the American government are flimsy indeed, since in the final analysis all of these divisions are part of the same government and are governed by the same set of rulers.” – Murray Rothbard

While I do think a move back toward our Constitution and toward truly limited-government of the Founding Fathers is an important goal, I don’t like to call myself a “constitutionalist” because it really isn’t a very clear term. I mean, Barack Obama is a Constitutional Scholar too but we couldn’t be further apart with regards to policy. Now while I favor constitutional government there are things about the U.S. Constitution that I don’t like, for example the 16th Amendment. Often when I suggest to self-described Constitutionalists that they must then favor the institution of the IRS they often counter by saying with a smug smile, “No, I favor the original Constitution”.

My response then usually sounds something like:

“oh so you support the 3/5th Clause which effectively says that each slave is equivalent to 3/5th of a free man when apportioning how many Representatives each state received (also in the Electoral College)?”

or

“oh so you don’t support the right of women to vote and feel that the 19th Amendment which prohibits the state from denying people the right to vote based upon gender?”

Incidently, Utah was the second territory in the U.S. to grant women suffrage in 1870, under the impression that, if given the right to vote, that Utah women would vote to make polygamy illegal. However, in 1887 the women of Utah were disenfranchised by the United States Congress under the Edmunds–Tucker Act when Utah women exercised their right to votes in favor of polygamy. Women’s suffrage in Utah was restored a few years later when Utah’s constitution restored woman’s right to vote since the original U.S Constitution didn’t offer this right until the passage of the 19th Amendment).

In the sense that there are two main political parties in the United States, broadly speaking, there are two main types of “Constitutionalists”; those that subscribe to “Originalism” and those that believe in a “Living Constitution”. The funny thing is that there has been a term being thrown around, “strict Constitutionalist”, that I believe means being an “Originalist” with regards to interpreting the Constitution. The term “strict constitutionalist” is likely a mutation of the term “strict constructionist”, a term with too many interpretations to digress into for the purposes of this essay.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer would fall into the Living Constitution camp while Justice Antonin Scalia would be considered an Originalist. Living Constitution folks hold that the Constitution’s boundaries are plastic and should serve the needs of society as it evolves. This means that the Constitution’s meaning can shift to include both of Isiah Berlin’s concepts of negative and positive liberty. “Living Constitution” judges are often perjoratively called “Activist judges” by their opposition. Ultimately the Living Document interpretation of the Constitution whither when it is understood that “If the constitution can mean anything, then the constitution means nothing”.

Originalist judges try try to interpret the Constitution as the Founders would have. As Justice Scalia said in a recent 60 Minutes interview:

“…it isn’t the mindset. It’s what did the words mean to the people who ratified the Bill of Rights or who ratified the Constitution,”

This is tantamount to saying that he and other “Originalist” have some sort of postcognitive psychic ability to channel the Founding Fathers and somehow know what they meant (maybe they all wear bracelets that read “WWFFD”). Understanding the meaning of words across time is a difficult enough task for trained etymologists and historians but I think it is fair to say that it is really impossible to know how the Founders would think about technology like stem-cell research, nuclear missiles, or the internet until someone invents a time-machine. I mean how does one really determine if someone knows better than other what the words of the Founders mean in situations that the Founders could have never imagined?

The other logical flaw with Originalism is the fact that the Ninth Amendment does establish a rule of constitutional interpretation since it clearly protects those rights which the founders had not thought to list explicitly:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Terms have meaning (which ultimately ends up how they are used in language). The problem is that the language of politics is sometimes sloppy and applied with very little intension. This allows words like “Liberal” to be changed to eventually mean their exact opposite. Unfortunately, the term liberal is now largely synonymous with ‘progressive’ and when Hayek calls himself a classical liberal, not a conservative, too few people understand the true meaning he wanted to convey. Likewise, “conservative” now is generally used to convey neo-conservative policies, not paleo-conservative ones. So now, through misuse of terms the people are offered a Morton’s Fork of big government Social Democrats and big government Conservative Republicans.

Kind regards,
Jake Shannon
Libertarian for U.S. Congress
Utah’s 3rd Congressional District

For more information visit http://www.jakeshannonforcongress.com.