How Did We Get Here? Supreme Court Decisions, MAGA, and the Continued Scourge of Inequity in the United States

Jul 09, 2023

The Supreme Court in 2023 (above) and the Supreme Court at the Time of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1894 (below) only Justice John Harlan, sitting second from right dissented from Plessy.

I waited to write about most of the recent Supreme Court decisions on Affirmative Action, and allowing religiously based discrimination against LGBTQ+ people using fake evidence of a same-sex couple that never existed. The majority rulings of the Court were unspeakably horrible in regard to how they in the name of “originalism” trampled the original meaning of the 14th Amendment, overturned numerous legal precedents concerning established law, and simply invented reasons to overturn those precedents. Not only that they twisted history to suit their purposes.

The Trumpian majority of the Roberts’ Court consisting Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the Trump Trio of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett turned history and legal precedent on their heads. In effect they tried to rewrite the 14th Amendment in order to remove the rights of people that they do not feel worthy of having rights. All of them, except for Clarence “Geechy” Thomas are children of privilege, and Thomas who benefited from Affirmative Action at every point of his life including his appointment to the Supreme Court, now believes that others don’t need it.

We all know about that. But how did we get here? Truthfully, the answers go back to the bulwark of American racism and prejudice often found in the Christian religion before the Civil War. While those who support rolling back the civil and voting rights of African Americans; the civil, political, and personal medical rights of women, and the legalized discrimination and weaponization of the law against LGBTQ+ people will never admit it, the ideology, legal ideals, and prejudice they appeal to are those of Southern Slave Power minority. That minority forced its will on the new country beginning with the Declaration of Independence which the representatives of Georgia and South Carolina refused to sign unless the 181 word indictment of George III and the English Crown’s promotion of slavery in their colonies was left in it. It continued during the Constitutional convention when the Southern states refused to ratify the Constitution unless slavery and its expansion were protected. Though they didn’t consider enslaved Africans citizens, or even human beings, they insisted on counting them in the census to increase their political power. That led to Northern States compromising through the 3/5ths compromise that gave the Southern Slave states credit for each enslaved Black in being 3/5ths of a person towards counting their population for the purposes of gaining additional seats in the House of Representatives. Without that their White population would have left them in a perpetual minority in the House.

That led to unending conflict in the country leading up to the Civil War which according to every Southern and Confederate leader before and during the war who identified slavery as the primary reason for secession. Of course they all denied it following the war, even Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens who called slavery the Cornerstone of the new Confederate nation. In his Cornerstone Speech he said:

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

But we have to go a bit further back, and then forward to see how deeply this Court’s religiously based ideology and politics of racism, misogyny, and prejudice go.

I wrote this in my book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Religion and the Politics of Race in the Civil War Era and Beyond:

“Slavery divided the United States regarding the meaning of freedom and liberty. Southerners reserved freedom for whites, who occupied positions of economic power and to whom slavery was key to their economy and social philosophy. By these Americans human equality, the heart of the Declaration of Independence, was scorned. George Fitzhugh stated that equality was “practically impossible, and directly conflicts with all government, all separate property, and all social existence.” He despised the founder’s views of liberty and human equality:

“We must combat the doctrines of natural liberty and human equality, and the social contract as taught by Locke and the American sages of 1776. Under the spell of Locke and the Enlightenment Jefferson and other misguided patriots ruined the splendid political edifice they erected by espousing dangerous abstractions—the crazy notions of liberty and equality that they wrote into the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Bill of Rights. No wonder the abolitionists loved to quote the Declaration of Independence! Its precepts are wholly at war with slavery and equally at war with all government, all subordination, all order. It is full if mendacity and error. Consider its verbose, newborn, false and unmeaning preamble. . . . There is . . . no such thing as inalienable rights. Life and liberty are not inalienable. . . . Jefferson . . . was the architect of ruin, the inaugurator of anarchy. As his Declaration of Independence Stands . . . it is “exuberantly false, and absurdly fallacious.”

I continue that narrative here:

Fitzhugh believed that human beings were not equal based on race and gender, “but in relations of strict domination and subordination. Successful societies were those whose members acknowledged their places within that hierarchy.” He was caustic when he discussed the implications of his beliefs: “We conclude that about nineteen out of twenty individuals have ‘a natural and inalienable right’ to be taken care of and protected, to have guardians, trustees, husbands or masters; in other words they have a natural and inalienable right to be slaves. The one in twenty are clearly born or educated in some way fitted for command and liberty.” Fitzhugh summarized his chilling beliefs as “liberty for the few—slavery in every form, for the mass.”

Regardless of whether the protections of the 14th Amendment fully apply to the rights of African Americans, other minorities or immigrants, Women, or LGBTQ+ people the foundation of the current Court and the radical reactionaries of the MAGA Republican Party, the fact is that neither believe in the Declaration, the 14th Amendment, or the court decisions that flowed from them to help those suffering under the Cowboy boots, and Italian loafers of American Fascism, that the GOP and the Court majority represent.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court majority and the overwhelmingly White Christian base of the GOP see themselves as victims of the people that for centuries that theirs (and for accuracy sake, my) ancestors treated as less than human and used as slaves.

I go on in my book:

“A growing culture of victimhood arose in the South. Sen. Robert Toombs offered a prime example: “For twenty years past, the Abolitionists and their allies in the Northern states, have been engaged in constant efforts to subvert our institutions, and to excite insurrection and servile war among us . . . whose ‘avowed purpose is to subject our society, subject us, not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives and our children, and the dissolution of our homes, our altars, and our firesides.’”

But the fact is that what the Southern elites, much like the GOP elites, MAGA and otherwise do in policy, law and politics doesn’t help the vast majority of their base. They appeal to fear, just like those before them be it before the Civil War, during it, during Reconstruction and its overthrow, during Jim Crow and the struggle for Civil Rights.

I will close with this passage from Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory:

Southern leaders inhabited a world where “social, economic, intellectual, and political were decidedly commingled.” They embraced slavery, even though it did not benefit poor Southern whites, yet the “system of subordination . . . required a certain kind of society, one in which certain questions were not publicly discussed . . . It must commit non slaveholders to the unquestioning support of racial subordination. . . . In short, the South became increasingly a closed society, distrustful of isms from outside and unsympathetic to dissenters. Such were the pervasive consequences of giving top priority to the maintenance of a system of racial subordination.”

Does that sound familiar? Every single thing that Trump, DeSantis, the alleged “Freedom Caucus”, and the multitude of their affiliated allies at the Heritage Foundation, Mom’s for Liberty, the American Family Association, and too many more to name promote fear and the necessity of subjugating others without offering anything to them of any lasting value.

Mark Twain was right, history may not repeat, but it often rhymes.

Dedicated to the Proposition that All Men are Created Equal

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