CSotD: We are the people our parents warned us about
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Candorville, with a question about voting rights and eating rights.
When I was little — I'm gonna guess about third grade — we were all brought down to the auditorium for an assembly. A couple stood up on stage and told us how important it was to protect our freedom, and how, if the Communists took over the country, it would be like living in the Soviet Union.
Little kids like us would be encouraged by the police to inform on our parents, the government would tap our phones, and police would stop us on the street and demand to see our papers. And we would need travel papers: We'd have to carry government-issued identification cards, just like in the Soviet Unions.
I believe the standard joke on the topic is to say that they told us all this would happen if we didn't stand up and fight the Soviets, and we didn't, so …
But I'm not laughing.
There may be reasons for insisting on ID at polling places, but signatures have been sufficient up to now and I don't see how that has changed.
We're in a bit of a situation that pits the Middle Ages against the Enlightenment, in that we've got one body of people who think "proof" consists of rounding up the information that supports what you know to be true, while the other side thinks you start at zero and weigh the evidence to see what conclusions it supports.
It's obvious in arguments over creation/evolution, more nuanced when the topic is something like "Will providing birth control to young people encourage more responsible choices, or simply encourage more sex?" And we've just seen the release of the first "serving junk food in schools is good for kids!" scientific study.
But this kind of medieval argumentation goes completely off-track in this sort of discussion, where conservatives use the ACORN scandal not to prove that some voter registrators got paid for false registrations, but that Fred Flintstone and Mickey Mouse actually showed up at the polling place and were permitted to cast ballots.
And that they did so in sufficient numbers to swing an election.
It would be funny in a Peter Sellers movie. It's not so funny when you realize that people sincerely believe this because it confirms their beliefs about "them."
I'm not going to get into a discussion of who "them" consists of. You only have to watch the phony gotcha videos to see who is being targeted as "them."
And, while I object to requiring ID cards at the voting booth on a philosophical basis, I particularly object to voters having to pay for them (or for the documentation required to obtain them, which is, as Darrin Bell notes here, a distinction without a difference).
Voter registration is a cost of carrying out elections. Carrying out elections is required by the Constitution.
It's like taking the Census and then, after you've counted the people in the household, charging them five bucks a head.
I pay for a driver's license, but driving is a privilege. Fair enough.
And the cost of a driver's license is chickenfeed next to the cost of having a car to drive. You can get half a dozen or more driver's licenses for what it costs to fill your gas tank.
But voting is not a privilege. It's a right, guaranteed in the Constitution and recognized by the Supreme Court.
Yes, it's even a right for "them."
End of discussion.
Speaking of discussions we're not having:
Every year at this time, Tank McNamara polls readers to select "The Sports Jerk of the Year." It's a humorous way to pillory athletes, owners and others for their regretable actions of the past year, and it's something readers look forward to.
Millar and Hinds decided this year to draw a line, however, and are to be congratulated on it.
The timing of this strip and of Joe Paterno's death is, of course, completely coincidental. I wish it had run maybe tomorrow or the next day, though, because the Paterno obit cartoons are just beginning to show up. There's a serious discussion to be had, and I'd like to be able to combine the two.
But that doesn't mean we won't return, like the proverbial dog, to this topic.
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