re: #59 Political Atheist

I’m not disagreeing with the fact the judiciary can sometimes go wrong, or complaining about 8 going down. I was addressing what Lidane said, that we would still have those laws, and I think the courts would have ruled them out.

Do you disagree with that? That’s a double fail, the people and then the judiciary. That’s kinda rare.

Not rare enough. A few famous cases that come to mind:

Dred Scott v. Sandford

” … We think they [people of African ancestry] are … not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States… .” — Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, speaking for the majority

Plessy v. Ferguson

“The object of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” —Justice Henry Billings Brown, speaking for the majority

Korematsu v. United States

“As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without trial or hearing. I would like to see the government admit they were wrong and do something about it, so this will never happen again to any American citizen of any race, creed, or color.” —Fred Korematsu (1983), on his decision to again challenge his conviction 40 years later

I don’t mean this to sound snarky or in any way to imply that your heart isn’t in the right place, because I know that it is, but as a white man things are different for you. What I mean by that is that whether you’re consciously aware of it or not, this country was founded with you in mind, with protecting your rights. The rest of us—women, people of color, other ethnic minorities, etc.—not so much. We’re keenly aware of that and therefore not really inclined to trust the system.

I think that same issue is part of why you got such a bad reaction to your comment about people using terms like “redneck” and the n-word, which I read through earlier today. You simply cannot divorce the the n-word from its painful historical context and compare it to an epithet for whites that has no such baggage, even if you’re only trying to point out that they’re both derogatory because they’re not derogatory to the same degree—to use the n-word is to deny a person’s very humanity. IOW, you don’t get to redefine what that word means or how people (of color) feel about it, especially as a white man.

I hope that makes sense and doesn’t offend you or hurt your feelings as that’s not my intent.