This Day in History: Loving v. Virginia

These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men [sic].

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 (1942). See also Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190 (1888). To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

 Chief Justice Earl  Warren

This Day in History: Brown v. Board of Education

Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP leaders holding an anti-racism poster. By New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Al Ravenna [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms….

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Chief Justice Earl Warren

Justice Scalia, Voting Rights, and Racial Entitlement

Demonstrators walk down a street during the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. (Peter Pettus. 1965. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Lot 13514, no. 25. More about the photograph)

[updated below]

The Supreme Court, according to many, seems poised to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which would make it far easier for states and localities to engage in all manner of disenfranchisement knowing full well that it will take forever for a federal court to rule against them via the normal litigation process.  Creativity in such things is not a rare quality.

This should have been settled a long time ago.  As Justice Frankfurter said:

The reach of the Fifteenth Amendment against contrivances by a state to thwart equality in the enjoyment of the right to vote by citizens of the United States regardless of race or color, has been amply expounded by prior decisions. Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 , 35 S.Ct. 926, L.R.A.1916A, 1124; Myers v. Anderson, 238 U.S. 368 , 35 S.Ct. 932. The Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination. It hits onerous procedural requirements which effectively handicap exercise of the franchise by the colored race although the abstract right to vote may remain unrestricted as to race.

Ironically, the Court (via Chief Justice Warren) used Selma, Alabama to illustrate the necessity of Section 5:

No, Jeb Bush, Schools are not Like Milk

[Update 7-3-13 Steve Hinnefeld addresses Albert Hirschman vs. Milton Friedman and education reform. “Here’s another way of saying it: The contempt that school choice advocates commonly express for public schools is, at its root, contempt for democracy itself.”]

At the GOP convention, Jeb Bush argued in favor of voucher and school choice using the frame of civil rights.  Bush, brother of failed president and education reformer George W. Bush, went further, offering an even more inapt metaphor.

“Everywhere in our lives, we get the chance to choose,” he said in a prepared version of his remarks sent to reporters. “Go down any supermarket aisle – you’ll find an incredible selection of milk. You can get whole milk, 2% milk, low-fat milk or skim milk. Organic milk, and milk with extra Vitamin D. There’s flavored milk— chocolate, strawberry or vanilla – and it doesn’t even taste like milk. They even make milk for people who can’t drink milk.”

“Shouldn’t parents have that kind of choice in schools?” Bush said.

This perfectly encapsulates what’s wrong with the corporate ed position.  It conflates something as important, complex and far reaching in its consequences as an education with milk, a simple consumer good.  That frame justifies turning public education into a profit making opportunity.  It supports the deprofessionalization of teachers.  It focuses our attention on individuals instead of the ways we systematically provide a different quality to education based on class and race.  Choosing 2% one week and whole milk the next is no problem, but shifting your child between schools even once is a huge decision. The choice of milk depends purely on taste while education is a skilled profession.  While the analogy has surface appeal, its implication are gross and  most people would recoil from them it they were made explicit.  Most people, that is, who believe that providing a quality education to all is a basic requirement in a democratic society that is committed to the idea that all people are equal.

How can you say on the one hand that education is a civil right and at the same time it’s like shopping for groceries?