Democracy

Dear Editor,

No government composed of people can be perfect.  However, democracy is the best form in existence.  Collectively citizens make better decisions than individuals/government agencies.  Constitution signers intentionally divided power, knowing it would cause gridlock, to protect voters from tyranny.  They devised the amendment process to allow future generations to grant protections to behaviors unknown to the signers.

Civil rights legislation was created to protect individuals, racial minorities, that cannot hide, cannot self-identify, cannot change their mind, and cannot be convinced to live in denial.  Racial groups were not created by social pseudo scientists/arts for political gain. You cannot argue someone out of being African American.  Society cannot prevent Asian Americans from knowing who they are.

Over the past decade, a growing number of groups marketed themselves as protected minorities.  Many have been granted protection from opposition exercise of constitutional civil rights.  Freedom of speech and the right to vote are threatened.  Rights should be granted by constitutional amendment, not the court.  It is not the courts job to protect voters from “bad” decisions.  It is not the courts job to act when elected officials are gridlocked.

Both sides in the census question case can claim the others reasoning is “contrived.”

However, we know that African Americans are at greatest risk from illegal immigration.  These jobs “nobody want” are often held by African Americans. Representative John Lewis (D-GA), a civil rights leader, released a commercial supporting increased boarder security due to illegal immigration’s disproportionate effect on African Americans. Voters deserve to know the full extent of illegal immigration.  This is not contrived.

The other side claims to be protecting a “minority.”  What is this minority group?  Most Hispanics are legal citizens.  Many agree with the question.  It is extremely unlikely that legal immigrants will be too frightened to respond to the entire census.  The only effected group are individuals that intentionally broke lawful legislation passed by democratically elected legislators.  If they are frightened, they can simply refuse to answer that specific question.  If illegal immigrants is a protected minority, by comparison, all groups that lose an election can claim to be a minority requiring SCOTUS protection.  One unpublished un-reproduced research project on a hard drive containing thousands of unreleased documents from a man unable to defend himself is extremely weak evidence.

This is a case of an actual protected minority group being threatened by another group’s abuse of civil rights legislation.

Alan Burke