In times of injustice, a nation must accept the necessity of change and embrace new ideas that will create justice in the system. For the United States, some of these changes have occurred through the process of amending our Constitution to match the changing times. In 1789 it was the rights of the people, in 1865 it was the abolishing of slavery, and in 1920 it was giving women the right to vote. However, those ideas did not stop there. For example, abolishing slavery was not the end of the fight for the rights of African Americans, and a Bill of Rights did not stop the people from arguing for more rights, such as same sex marriage.…
Race in the American Political System: The Jacksonian Paradox When the Declaration of Independence was drafted, the statement ‘all men are created equal’ was not a blanket statement that supported the equality of all mankind; rather it was a proclamation referring to the natural rights and freedoms of franchised voters, in other words, white property-owning males. Written about a decade later, the Constitution operated under the same basic assumption. Initially, this left other white males, women, Blacks, and American Indians excluded from our nation’s political system in a tradition of inegalitarianism. According to the writers of American Government in Black and White, Paula D. McClain and Steven C. Tauber, one of the three pillars of our national government is inegalitarianism, or the “. . .…
Merriam Webster defines equality as the quality or state of having the same rights, social status, etc., but who is included in this “equality,” and can the U.S. really have equality among its people? Johnathon Dunn defines equality as not being the same, but being treated equally no matter your race, social status, or sexuality. Everyone should have the same rights available to him or her. Several works of literature have struggled to define equality over the years including “Harrison Bergeron” and the 14th amendment. These two pieces of literature have their similarities as well as their differences, but, by assessing these, I will be able to side with one of these viewpoints.…
Anti-Slavery Are all men treated equally? This America was created on equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, wasn’t it? Well at least that is what is stated in the “Declaration of Independence” which was created in 1776. Equality is the state of being equal, whether it is included in rights, status, or opportunity it symbolizes that two or more things are no different than each other.…
Copulation, formation, and gestation, are the stages needed to create an entirely original individual. Inside the mother’s womb, the fetus is holds boundless potential. All men are created equal, but not all men are treated equal. As soon as the baby pops out, it is shackled and branded with labels of sex, religion, race, region, labels that cast babies into the minority or the majority just after birth. The baby then grows up into a world where it may discriminated against, shunned away, treated unequally.…
There have been several times within American politics where the rights of groups of people have been fought over. These types of fights have been spread over the course of America’s history the most well known being the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. One of the most recent of these fights was the repeal of California’s Proposition 8, originally titled the “California Marriage Protection Act,” which only affected same-sex couples. Proposition 8 was a proposal for an amendment addition to the California constitution stating “only marriage between a man and a women is valid or recognized in California,” creating controversy between groups. The California Supreme Court saw that “limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples,” was violating…
From his extensive observations of the American people and their regime, Alexis De Tocqueville wrote the “the principle of equality has quietly penetrated deep into the institutions and manners of the country” (Tocqueville, 630). Tocqueville’s focus on the principle of equality in Democracy in America conveys his belief that the pursuit of equality lies deep in the soul of America, manifesting itself in many forms and ways in both theory and practice. Thus, the principle of equality greatly shapes and morphs life in the United States creating a unique form of people and institutions. The American pursuit of equality amongst its citizens cultivates a constant drive for greater material acquisition and furthers a desire for social mobility. As…
“It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals. ”- Felix Frankfurter. This quote supports Megan B. Wyatt’s argument in her article “Harrison Bergeron an Analysis and Discussion on Dystopian Themes and American Trends,” that the world is slowly, but surely, moving towards a dystopia. I agree, because based on what we experience today, it is possible that the government will gain too much control over society and eventually become a world where our rights as individuals will be overlooked.…
Throughout American history, equality has always been held in focus. The American people strive for equality rights, and work towards an even and balanced life for all. Many people envisioned today’s America long before it was achieved. One of the visionaries was James Madison. Madison was a federalist that helped write the Federalist Articles.…
Countless stories, books, articles, and documentaries have been written and told about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been shown to what happened after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, I hope not only to discuss what happened after the act was passed, but also give insight into the injustices that are still happening today. The United States Constitution was drafted in part to protect every American citizen and to further ensure equal rights. However, it is well settled that States have abused “equal sovereignty under the 10th amendment to the Constitution to subvert Federal laws an advance discriminatory practices. The Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder disregarded the constitutional intent…
As you may know, America consists of a very diverse population. With such diversity, it is a given that there are many different opinions on how our government functions. For example, there are people who support waging war on other countries, but there are also others who protest against it. Since there are so many people in this country, many disagreements and problems arise. This country is extremely divided because people have strong opinions on social matters such as LGBT rights, and other civil rights.…
Future Applications of the Equal Protection Clause The Equal Protection clause in the United States of America’s Constitution has long been a harbinger for controversy, in which events for the lesser of the two opponents always deteriorates before it remotely improves. With this in mind, flashback to the days of the writing and ratifying of the 14th amendment. The Caucasian people of that past world, would not and could not refer to themselves as anything other than superior to their African-American counterparts. When the oppressed and elite came to terms as equal, the elite could not stand it.…
“We the people of the United States…” so starts our Constitution. And what an eclectic and motley group of people we are. So it is that the framers of the pre-eminent law of our land saw fit to build rules into our democratic game of government that would protect us all from a simple majority formed from any group conveniently aligned hell bent on having things their way at the expense of the current majority. Despite their significant proportion of US population, particularly in cities and at one time throughout the South, blacks have not played a significant role in setting the national political agenda within our two-party system of government. In his book, Uneasy Alliances, political scientist Paul Frymer put forth his theory of electoral…
The American Temperament of Exceptionalism and Egalitarianism Egalitarianism in the United States of America has not always been a philosophy that has been met with much popularity. Minority groups like African Americans, Latinos, homosexuals, women, the poor and others, have all had to fight to gain access to an equal territory regarding rudimentary civil liberties. America was established on Thomas Jefferson’s idea of unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Hypocritically, however, slavery was one of the major monetary capitals in the United States, women could not vote or own assets if they were married, and outed homosexuals were imprisoned. That kind of paradox in the American government is what has led to the…
#5 The U.S. Constitution assumes that it is protecting all individuals through its legislative, which historically has not been true. The legal system wants equality between both sexes, yet uses the difference between men and women to produce unequal results for the latter. The legal system doesn’t recognize these biological differences and how the law affects men and women in different ways due to their gender. In Christine Littleton’s article titled, “Reconstructing Sexual Equality”(1987), she believes that inequality between the sexes result from when society devalues women because they differ from the male norm.…