Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

by Elie Mystal

People think that the continued mass murder of innocent civilians will, one day, shake Republicans loose from the thrall of the NRA. That will not happen. Republicans will not make the killing stop, because they still think that near-unfettered access to guns is the only thing keeping them safe from Black people.

THIS, right here, is why we still don't have sane gun laws in America even now, nearly a decade after 20 small children were massacred in Newtown, CT by a homicidal maniac with THREE weapons he never should have been allowed anywhere near, and still more such mass killings have happened since. And considering what we white folks have done to Black folks over the past four centuries or so, it's the wonder of the ages that they haven't arisen en masse to kill us all in retribution.

the entire conservative legal project, since ratification of those amendments during Reconstruction to the present day, has been to limit the scope and effectiveness of this “new” Constitution.

William F. Buckley Jr., the late conservative pundit and founder of NATIONAL REVIEW magazine, famously described the role of a conservative as being one who "stands athwart history, yelling, 'Stop!', at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." The past century and a half of American history has basically been white, Christian, heterosexual males fighting a desperate rear-guard action to stop or slow the march of progress and preserve their historic place at the top of the social order. That they've been as abominably successful as they have is a searing indictment of the abject failure of the rest of us to do our part in stopping them.

But the better legal frame is “Forced birth is some evil shit that can never be compelled by a legitimate government. The end.”

Make no mistake: the religious right's fervor to end abortion is NOT, and never has been, about saving the lives of women or soi-disant "potential humans." It has always been about maintaining the threat of pregnancy as a deterrent to people having sexual intercourse of which evangelicals do not approve. You can see it in their language: "Giving kids condoms is giving them permission to have sex." (That's an actual, verbatim quote, by the way.)

Putting aside the issue that an actual draft which fairly called upon all citizens and didn’t exempt rich white boys with bone spurs might be the only thing that could arrest this country’s habitual global warmongering,

Amen, Brother Mystal. If the rich white boys of this country had been forced to go to war along with the rest of us, the last four decades might have played out very differently than they did...and an awful lot of people would still be alive and unharmed who are now dead or maimed.

We have not lived one day in this nation, we have not passed through one election, where all four of the voting rights amendments were made real by Congress and enforced by the executive branch to their fullest potential.

This stopped me in my tracks when I read it. As a white man, the thought would never have even occurred to me; and yet, looking back over our history, the truth of Elie's words is inescapable.