This year on Sept 11th Paul Simon sang “American Tune” to
close the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The song is, in my interpretation, an
epiphany of despair, a realization of the failings of this country:
“...when I think of the road
We’re traveling on
I wonder what went
wrong…”
Paul Simon wrote American Tune
in 1973. The year before that, I remember how excited I was to be able to vote
in my first election. I was a volunteer for the George McGovern campaign, one
of those young idealistic Democrats who didn’t trust President Nixon and who
were dismayed at the turn the Vietnam war was taking. I honed my political
rhetoric by arguing with my dad every night at suppertime, The CBS Evening News
with Walter Cronkite in the background. If we weren’t disagreeing over the war,
we were arguing about the Watergate burglary in June of 1972, which was intended to
steal documents, related to the Pentagon Papers leak, from Daniel Ellsberg's
psychiatrist's office. I was sure it
would lose the election for Nixon… but he won by a landslide.
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| The Watergate Scandal: Congressional Hearings |
Before long, Congress began to hold hearings about the break-in. By 1973 the Watergate scandal was destroying
everything we thought we knew about Washington politics, and it got downright
scary in October with a full-blown constitutional crisis – on October 20th
1973, the president fired Watergate “prosecutor Archibald Cox in what has become known
as ‘The Saturday Night Massacre’."
It was one of those moments in American
history when many Americans remember where they were when they heard the
announcement, and then the next breaking news, and the next, as events piled up
furiously on top of one another. John Chancellor reported on NBC news that
evening that “Because of the President's action, the attorney general resigned.
Elliott Richardson quit, saying he could not carry out Nixon's instructions.
Richardson's deputy, William Ruckelshaus, was fired because he, too, refused to
obey a presidential order to fire the special Watergate prosecutor. And half an
hour after the special Watergate prosecutor had been fired, agents of the FBI,
acting at the direction of the White House, sealed off the offices of the
special prosecutor, the offices of the attorney general and the offices of the
deputy attorney general. More than 50,000 telegrams poured in on Capitol Hill,
so many, Western Union was swamped. Most of them demanded impeaching the
president. The following Tuesday Congress filed 21 resolutions calling for
Nixon's impeachment.”
No wonder Paul Simon felt that he was a
long way from home…all of us watching this scandal unfold felt like the Statue
of Liberty was floating away, with
all the symbolism of the country being adrift in a crisis that no one had ever
experienced before.
I begin with this recollection because
the title of my sermon this morning, “The Ultimate Justice of the People”,
gives you an idea of what did in fact prevail in the Watergate scandal. Nixon
backed down an appointed a new special prosecutor and agreed to cooperate with
the investigation, which ultimately led to his impeachment and resignation.
But that phrase comes from another time when the American nation was at
crisis point of a different kind: these are words written and spoken by Abraham
Lincoln in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861:
“Why
should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people?
Is there any better or equal hope, in the world?...By the frame of the
government under which we live, this same people have wisely given their public
servants but little power for mischief; and have, with equal wisdom, provided
for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals.”
Despite the reassurance
that he hoped to give to Southerners about his election as president, the
speech did not dissuade them from starting the civil war the following month.
Two major crises, just over a century apart, in
which the power given by the vote was challenged. But we are facing a
presidential election season this next year – in which we are already
knee-deep, with candidates, debates and campaign appearances – that may not
even allow large numbers of American citizens to cast a vote. And that is
because of restrictive legislation in many states that is a direct result of
the rollback of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in June of 2013. And
what is more, this dismantling of the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act
was orchestrated deliberately over decades, according to an in-depth article by
Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times
Magazine.
The Voting Experiment
When, as Jill Lepore says, (Rock,
Paper, Scissors, How we used to vote, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/13/rock-paper-scissors)
“the
United States was founded as an experiment in eighteenth-century republicanism…
it was understood that only men with property would vote, and publicly, since
they were the only people who could be trusted to vote with the commonweal, and
not private gain, in mind.” “In the first Presidential election, only six per cent
of Americans were eligible to vote.”
But voting became a violent ordeal by the
mid-1800s, when all white men could vote; in 1859 “eighty-nine Americans were
killed at the polls during Election Day riots.” “…the nation’s founders could
scarcely have imagined that the population of the United States, less than four
million in 1790, would increase tenfold by 1870. The revolutionary step of
providing printed ballots that voters had to read made it much harder for
immigrants, former slaves, and the uneducated poor to vote.”
You may know about the Jim Crow era, which marked
the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, and the difficulties it posed for black
Americans who wished to vote. If they were not physically attacked on their way
to the polls, they had poll taxes to pay; if they wanted to register to vote,
there were often civics or literacy tests to take, from which white voters were
exempt. Those of you who saw the film Selma
recall that the Dallas County, Alabama registrar’s office was only open during
business hours on the first and third Monday of each month, and new registrants
needed to bring someone who could vouch for them.
If blacks tried to register, just that simple act
could lose them their jobs – like employees of a nursing home in Selma in 1963,
who lost their jobs when they tried to register to vote. If blacks tried to
register to vote, they might have a loan called in or might be evicted from
their residence. And the intimidation of having your name printed in the local
newspaper as a voter applicant also was meant to keep blacks from even trying. (Teaching
Tolerance Viewer’s Guide)
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| The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, marching for voting rights |
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did away with these
practices that kept blacks from voting, and it contained special rules for
states and localities where discrimination was especially known to exist; these
places were not allowed to make any changes affecting voting without
‘preclearance’ from the Justice Department in Washington. Georgia was one of 9
entire states that qualified for this special treatment.
The Southern Strategy
The South was under Democratic control following
Reconstruction but the Voting Rights act upended the status quo, making it
almost impossible for conservative democrats to win primary elections against
progressives. Nixon saw the opportunity of more black participation in
elections to appeal on the basis of race, so that white voters in the South
elected Republicans – that’s come to be called the Southern strategy.
One of his advisors is quoted by Jim Rutenberg as
saying, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner
the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans” (p 35).
Jesse Helms in North Carolina is one politician who benefitted by the Southern
strategy.
During the decades since the original act was
passed, Congress has voted several times to reauthorize it, but in the 1980s
John Roberts came to Washington as a court clerk and slowly began making his
way up the ladder until he became chief justice. His stance on voting rights
was that justice should be colorblind, which sounds good until you realize that
race-based decision-making is necessary when preceded by centuries of
segregation and discrimination. He argued that discrimination cases should be
hard to prove, a position that Republican senator Bob Dole disagreed with: “I
don’t know where we lost track after Abraham Lincoln” (Rutenberg, p 36) he
said, referring to the Reagan White House needing to show it cared about the
votes of Hispanics and African-Americans.
There were intentional political blocks to voter
accessibility: in 1990 President Bush vetoed the motor-voter bill which would
allow registration at other government agencies like the DMV, but Clinton
signed it when he took office; “following its passage, black registered voters
increased 10% by 1998” (38).
The next blocking tactic was to clean up voter
rolls, and the result was that many people were wrongly erased by being
mistakenly designated as felons. In Florida a disproportionate number were
black, more than 90% of whom voted for Al Gore in the 2000 election; of ballots
thrown out in the Florida election, 3 times as many came from black voting
precincts as from white precincts.” (39)
In 2005 the Georgia voter-ID law was up for a vote
in the statehouse; the law diminished black voting, and “Rep Sue Burmeister
said that was because blacks were less likely to vote if they were not being
paid to do so” (46). The law was invalidated, although upheld by the Supreme
Court once revised to allow those without ID to cast provisional ballots.
After 2010, a slew of new voter ID laws were passed
in 11 states, all almost identical, and by 2012, almost all suspended or
blocked by the state courts. Less than a year after President Obama’s
re-election the Shelby decision struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,
with Chief Justice Roberts saying that the section had served its purpose and
race was no longer an issue. Justice Ruth Ginsberg fiercely disagreed, citing
Department of Justice figures since 1982 of more discrimination cases than
between 1965 and 1982. She famously stated, “Hubris is a fit word for today’s
demolition of the VRA” (47).
Our Fifth Principle
Paul Simon sings that Americans came on the ship
they called the Mayflower…and the Pilgrims and Puritans who settled in New
England so longed for a place where they could have their voices heard, their
liberties exercised and protected. The creation of the 5th principle –the right
of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations
and in society at large - arises
from that experience, and yet the definition of citizenship that informed the
Declaration of Independence excluded so many people for the privileged few.
It would have been a mystery to the founding
fathers, who wrote the immortal lines “all men are created equal” and “endowed
with certain inalienable rights”, that I was allowed to register to vote in
1972. And, as Parisa Parsa points out in her wonderful essay on the 5th
Principle (Brandenburg), our Puritan forebears, “credited with forming our
Unitarian polity, would not have envisioned the level of inclusiveness or low
threshold for membership that we do today.” They were determined to “resist
corrupt influence by ecclesiastical authority”, and so membership was
restricted to those who could testify “ to an experience of grace and full
conversion to the life of Christ”. This rule was meant to “preserve decision
making for the people who were considered most capable of being entrusted with
the well-being of society.” (76)
Parisa understands the desire behind this
restriction, because she identifies church as a place where “the democratic
process and the development of our own consciences become religious acts”. She
says that “in our religious lives, the democratic process requires trust in the
development of each individual conscience.” In the words of Theodore Parker,
“Democracy means not ‘I am as good as you are’ but ‘You are as good as I am’.
My connection with the sacred is only as precious as my willingness to
acknowledge the same connection in others.” (77)
With freedom of conscience comes accountability and
faithful unity, even in disagreement: that is our covenantal responsibility as
Unitarian Universalists; we pledge as much when we sign our congregational
covenant that hangs next to the office block. Parisa says that she values her
congregation, because they know that being fully present and showing some flaws
is infinitely more valuable than being correct in principle but disconnected
from real community.” (80)
The democratic process is messy and frustrating,
but voting – whether it is in our congregational meeting or in a precinct
voting booth - is “shorthand for taking interest in, and ownership of, the
process by which we as a community live our faith and choose to use our
collective power to shape our world in accordance with that faith.” (81)
Living my faith - that is why I drove to
Winston-Salem NC in July and in the heat of the day gathered at a Moral Monday
rally with the Rev. William Barber, Rev. Peter Morales our UUA President, Jim
Key the UUA Moderator, and 500-plus UUs among more than three thousand citizens
on the first day of a federal trial that will determine
whether parts of a controversial North Carolina voting law are constitutional.
 |
| Rev. Barber at the Winston-Salem Moral Monday Rally |
Rev. Barber says that we are in the era of a 3rd
Reconstruction, but voting laws, like the one passed in North Carolina, are an
attempt at a third deconstruction. His catchphrase is “This is our Selma now”,
because in effect the gutting of the Voting Rights Act means that there are
less voting rights now than in 1965, when Dr King led marchers to demand
justice and an end to discrimination.
What will the verdict be on this law? We can only
hope that the rights of citizens to vote will be protected, not restricted. So
far every time it looks like civil rights are being threatened, the people of this
country have shown a resilience and have risen up in protest. It is an exercise
in compassion to fight for the rights of others.
The writer Sarah Ruth van Gelder describes several
consequences of our ability as American voters to be resilient, to expand our
circle of compassion, and to live into our 5th principle.
She writes:
"Participation
in the political process does not require us to sink to dirty politics
or reduce our vision to sound bites. As our circle of compassion has
expanded, so have our capacities to keep ego from dominating our work,
to build movements based in distributed power, to listen deeply to the
fears and the hopes of those we are trying to reach, and to choose language
that communicates our common humanity and common aspirations.”
Conclusion
It is not true, despite the Chief Justice’s ruling,
that the goal of the civil rights movement has been achieved. Don’t forget
Dylan Roof’s justification for his murder of the 9 people in
Emmanuel Temple in Charleston—“You are raping our women and taking over our
country”.
James Noel reminds us in his essay that for African
Americans, there never was a period of not mourning those slain by racism.
Meanwhile black folks will continue to do what they must: “keep on keeping on .
. .” In the words of James Weldon Johnson, “We have come over the way that with
tears has been watered; we have come treading our way through the blood of the
slaughtered.”
Resilience: despite the disillusionment of what
followed, my first vote cast in 1972 was not my last, and I am committed to
help others to be able to exercise their right to vote this November and the
next and the next.
As Paul Simon ends his song, “Tomorrow is another
working day…” a glimmer of resilience, that after some rest we can go on, and
go forward, to protect the right of conscience and the democratic process.
Let
us have faith in the ultimate justice of the people.
May we be the ones who
make it so.
Gaye W. Ortiz
References:
Abraham Lincoln, First
Inaugural Address. http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html
Jim Rutenberg,“A Dream Undone”, New York Times Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/magazine/voting-rights-act-dream-undone.html?_r=0)
.
Teaching Tolerance,
“Selma: the Bridge to the Ballot”, Viewer’s Guide p. 21. www.teachingtolerance.org
Parisa Parsa in Ellen Brandenburg, ed., Seven Principles in Word and Worship,
Skinner House Books, 2007.
Sarah Ruth
van Gelder, posted
May 20, 2004 “Expanding the Circle,” http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/government-of-the- people-shall-not-perish/663
James Noel, “Judgment Day in America” July 21, 2015
https://syndicatetheology.com/commentary/judgment-day-in-america/
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