Over the past few months, there have been several cases of Christian small business owners complaining about having to serve gay customers. Apparently, they believe that not allowing them to discriminate against a particular group of people is itself a form of discrimination. Here's why it's not.
Let's imagine a couple of different scenarios to make the point clear. I'll use a baker for my example, but it could be a pizza maker, a mechanic, a florist or anyone else.
Scenario one: A couple comes into the bakery, looks around at the display cases and tells the baker, "I'd like a cake shaped like a penis for my wedding."
The baker says, "I'm sorry, I don't make those kinds of cakes, but you're welcome to choose something from the catalogue."
The customer insists that he wants a penis cake, and the baker replies, "look, I just don't make penis cakes. I won't make one for you or for anyone else, but like I said, if you pick a different cake, I'll be happy to make it for you."
Scenario two: A couple comes into the bakery, looks around at the display cases and tells the baker, "I'd like a cake exactly like that one for my wedding."
The baker says, "I'm sorry, but I won't make that cake for you. In fact, I won't make any cake for you."
See the difference? In the first case, the baker is refusing to make a particular cake. It could be because he has strong beliefs against it or because he simply doesn't know how to make a cake shaped like the Eiffel Tower. Either way, he's perfectly within his rights to tell the customer, "Hey, just what you see in the display cases, OK?"
In the second case, the baker is willing to make that exact same cake for other people, he just won't make it for the person in front of him. That is the definition of discrimination. And it isn't persecuting Christians to call them out on it.
In my last post, I wrote about the Voting Rights Act and the way it is supposed to prevent disenfranchisement. Turns out you don’t need to require picture IDs or restrict polling hours to take away people’s vote. You can let the prison system do it for you.
Right now, twelve states permanently disenfranchise people who are convicted of a felony. In 19 more states, you lose your right to vote during not only your incarceration, but also during any parole or probationary period as well. Only two states (Maine and Vermont) allow felons to vote by absentee ballot while in jail. This means that if you want to limit voting in a certain demographic, you can’t do better than to ensure that large numbers of that group end up in jail. And that’s exactly what some states are doing.
In 2010, 7.7% of African American citizens could not vote in the U.S. due to a felony conviction. In Florida, 10.4% of all potential voters and 23.3% of African Americans were permanently disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. That’s stunning! Nearly a quarter of the African Americans who live in Florida will never be able to vote.
Okay, so black people who are convicted of crimes lose their right to vote. That doesn’t mean there’s any racism involved, does it? I mean, the same laws apply to everyone, right? You know where this is going.
Take a look at the following two charts. The first is marijuana usage:
And the second is the arrest rate for using marijuana.
Notice anything striking?
There are far too many other examples of overt racism in the justice system to mention them all, so I’m just going to highlight two more.
In New York City, thanks to the Stop-and-Frisk program, a police officer who reasonably suspects a person can stop that person, question him and even search him. Stop-and-Frisk may soon be overturned in the courts due to a class action lawsuit citing racial profiling. Let’s see if the racial profiling argument has any merit.
In 2012, NYC police used Stop-and-Frisk over 500,000 times. 89% of the people they stopped were innocent of any wrongdoing. Of the people stopped, 55% were black, 32% were Latino and 10% were white. To put this in perspective, in 2010, 33.3% of NYC residents were white, 25.5% were black and 23.6% were Hispanic. This means that while blacks only make up about a quarter of the population, more than half the people stopped by police were black. I just showed you the marijuana usage rates comparing blacks and whites. Does it make sense that five times as many black people were up to no good as white people? If you selectively pick on and screen minorities, you’re going to end up convicting mostly minorities.
Finally, let’s talk about Stand-Your-Ground (SYG) laws. In essence, these laws remove a person’s ‘duty to retreat’. If you’re in a potentially dangerous situation and you can defuse it by safely removing yourself, you normally have a duty to do so. With SYG, a person is no longer required to retreat from a situation even if doing so would have prevented bodily harm. I think SYG is a terrible idea that gives bullies and would-be vigilantes free reign to pick fights and then kill people, but that’s not the point I want to make here. The question is whether there’s a racist element in SYG. One more graph for you guys showing how likely a killing is to be found justifiable.
Minorities, and in particular blacks, are much more likely to be stopped by police, more likely to be convicted, and face longer prison sentences than whites. As a consequence, they are much more likely to be stripped of their voting rights. If that wasn't the plan all along, it's certainly working out that way.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently decided to eviscerate a crucial part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). The VRA was renewed four times in 1970, 1975, 1982 and most recently in 2006 when it passed the House of Representatives 390-33 and the Senate 98-0. Yet, our Supreme Court saw fit to strip it away. You won’t be surprised to learn that I think it was a terrible decision.
First, some background. Prior to the VRA, states could and did enact a variety of discriminatory tactics such as imposing poll taxes or literacy tests. In case you think a literacy test is a reasonable requirement for a voter, here are some examples of tests administered selectively to black applicants in Alabama.
- Naming all sixty-seven county judges in the state.
- Naming the date on which Oklahoma was admitted to the Union (remember this test was for Alabama residents).
- Declaring how many bubbles are in a bar of soap.
The VRA prohibited these kinds of schemes.
So what exactly did the Supreme Court decide? Their ruling was actually devastatingly pointed, eliminating only one critical section of the VRA.
Section 4 of the VRA provides a formula for deciding which regions of the country require closer scrutiny when it comes to election laws. Districts with a history of discriminatory voting practices are put on a list. Section 5 of the VRA states that any districts that fall under Section 4 jurisdiction cannot change their voting laws without pre-clearance from the U.S. District Court. If a state fitting the Section 4 criteria wanted to suspend early voting, require voter ID or change voting districts, they had to submit those changes for Federal approval before enacting them.
In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4, claiming that the rules for determining which counties are subject to preclearance were outdated. Note that Section 5 still holds. That is, there is still a provision for requiring some counties to get pre-clearance before changing their election laws, it’s just that there are currently no counties on that list. Of course, Congress could easily fix this problem. They just need to pass new laws establishing which regions should have pre-clearance. Laugh along with me.
Here’s a little sample of the ‘logic’ the five Justices (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito) used to overturn Section 4.
Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, “[v]oter turnout and registration rates” in covered jurisdictions “now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.” The tests and devices that blocked ballot access have been forbidden nationwide for over 40 years.
This reminds me of Rand Paul claiming that we no longer need a Clean Air Act because, thanks to that Act, the air is now clean.
Leaving aside the ridiculousness of the argument, were the Justices correct in stating that “40 year-old facts [have] no logical relationship to the present day"? Tell that to the states chomping at the bit to push through new voting laws. As of last month, six states required photo ID to vote. Thanks to the Supreme Court ruling, that number will double by 2014.
Like literacy tests, requiring ID to vote doesn’t sound that bad until you dig a little deeper. Let's look at an example.
The day of the Supreme Court ruling, Texas announced that they would immediately pass the voter ID requirements that had previously been stalled by the VRA. Among the acceptable types of ID are driver's licenses, passports, personal ID cards, election certificates and even handgun licenses, if issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), but not school or college ID.
Two things about this. First, while a non-driving voter ID card is often free, the certificates you'll need to get that ID are not free. Driver’s licenses, birth certificates and passports all cost money. Just to be clear, it is still illegal to impose a poll tax on prospective voters.
Second, the people needing these voter IDs do not have driver's licenses and presumably cannot drive. They have to find a way to get to an office that might be many miles away and is only open weekdays from 8-5. Even collecting the paperwork required to get a voter ID can be a quagmire. Before the 1970s, many rural people were born at home with the assistance of a midwife who didn’t issue a complete (or sometimes any) birth certificate. Sorting issues like this out can take a lot of time and visits to many far flung offices.
But really, how many people could voter ID laws impact? Doesn’t nearly everyone have some type of acceptable ID? I'm glad you asked.
According to the ACLU,
- 11% of US citizens – or more than 21 million Americans -- do not have government-issued photo identification.
- As many as 25% of African American citizens of voting age do not have a government-issued photo ID, compared to only 8% of their white counterparts.
- 18% of Americans over the age of 65 (or 6 million senior citizens) do not have a government-issued photo ID.
In Texas, nearly 800,000 registered voters do not have a valid driver's license, 38% of them Hispanic.
By the way, in case anyone was laboring under the delusion that these laws, while unfair, do serve a purpose, consider the results of recent study:
In-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent. Only 10 such cases over more than a decade were reported.
In Texas alone, 800,000 people could be disenfranchised to prevent imaginary crimes.
Requiring voter ID is just one type of discriminatory tactic that states with Republican legislators and governors are jumping to enact. States can and do redraw voting districts to favor one party, decrease or eliminate early or extended voting opportunities, reduce the number of polling places in minority districts in the hopes that long lines will discourage voters, and make it harder to register new voters. All of these practices were subject to VRA pre-clearance rules before the Supreme Court's ruling.
Thanks to our Supreme Court, it's now open season on voting rights.
Over the past few months, there have been several cases of Christian small business owners complaining about having to serve gay customers. Apparently, they believe that not allowing them to discriminate against a particular group of people is itself a form of discrimination. Here's why it's not.