Black Lives Matter is a great slogan for social justice. The Black Bill of Rights is a terrible thing for a government whose purpose isn’t racial apartheid. Either we are all equal under the law or we aren’t.
We can’t rely on generic civil rights laws. We already tried that with the Equal Protection Clause, which provides a blanket ban on all forms of government discrimination. We already tried what you propose. In practice, when you want to protect civil rights, you have to ban specific categories of discrimination. Generic bans are toothless.
Laws are toothless if society doesn’t care about them being enforced, and if politicians benefit from not enforcing them. Do you actually think that we’d be in a better situation if the Equal Protection Clause had an addendum that said “especially black people?”
Sure. History has proven that civil rights laws that are very specific and explicit are much more resilient to legal challenge than broad ones. They probably should have been a hell of a lot more specific in the Reconstruction amendments.
Black Lives Matter is a great slogan for social justice. The Black Bill of Rights is a terrible thing for a government whose purpose isn’t racial apartheid. Either we are all equal under the law or we aren’t.
We can’t rely on generic civil rights laws. We already tried that with the Equal Protection Clause, which provides a blanket ban on all forms of government discrimination. We already tried what you propose. In practice, when you want to protect civil rights, you have to ban specific categories of discrimination. Generic bans are toothless.
Laws are toothless if society doesn’t care about them being enforced, and if politicians benefit from not enforcing them. Do you actually think that we’d be in a better situation if the Equal Protection Clause had an addendum that said “especially black people?”
Sure. History has proven that civil rights laws that are very specific and explicit are much more resilient to legal challenge than broad ones. They probably should have been a hell of a lot more specific in the Reconstruction amendments.