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TAKING AWAY THE VOTE

Humorist Art Buchwald, in an old, old newspaper column of his, describes his tongue-in-cheek political efforts on behalf of the Bull Moose Party. That organization might ring a bell with you, linked to the name of former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt. But Art and his macho, cigar-smoking friends, all members of the Bull Moose Party, were dedicated to just one objective: they wanted to work for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.

Well, what is the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? That was the one, passed back in the year 1920, which finally gave women the right to vote. And now the Buchwald Plan – and again, this is entirely tongue-in-cheek – was that good Americans everywhere should unite to take away that right. “Women don’t need to vote,” Buchwald pointed out. “Any wise husband will consider his wife’s opinion and work it into the mix when HE votes. That’s good enough. Voting is just too much pressure for females; they can’t handle it.” He and his buddies came up with posters like: “Votes are like mustaches – for MEN only.” The Bull Moose Party wanted to take the country back to the era when women thought a voting booth was the place to change their bathing suits.

Well, it was all in fun, and if you don’t think it was THAT much fun, your objection is duly noted. But as we continue to think together, friend, about the will of God for our lives, and about the Christian principles of unity and brotherhood, Art Buchwald’s idiotic political platform does remind us of one inescapable truth: progress is to ever move forward, not backwards. IF you’re progressing in the right direction, that is.

One of our CD-ROM encyclopedias here at the office cranked out a list of famous Supreme Court decisions that ring a bell of familiarity with us. We’ve all heard of the Gideon case, Roe v. Wade, Engel versus Vitale. But in terms of racial progress, and advancing civil rights – in contrast to the Buchwald plan of turning back the clock and sending all females back to the kitchen – several legislative milestones do point the way for us.

Have you heard of Dred Scott vs. Sanford? That has a powdered-wig sound to it, and it should: it came down from the U.S. Supreme Court in the year 1857. Dred Scott struck down the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which sometimes deprived a person of his personal property – meaning a slave – without due process of law. But it gets even worse. Dred Scott also declared flatly that slaves WERE NOT citizens of any state OR of the United States. Forty-nine years later, “Plessy versus Ferguson” put a further halt to progress, as the High Court upheld state laws where railroads could provide “separate but equal” facilities for black and white passengers. That expression, “separate but equal,” continued to haunt our schools for another half-century, until “Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka” overturned “separate but equal.” Segregated education was inherently UNequal, said our nation’s nine top justices, by a nine-to-nothing decision, and was a violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Well, then we have the Voting Rights Act of 1964. Equal access laws. And year by year, election cycle after election cycle, the nation tries to move itself forward. Oh, the debate is sometimes fierce; statewide propositions turn up which appear to set us back a ways. We lurch from right to left and back again. But most good-hearted people, as they see the great sweeps of history, would say to Art Buchwald and the Bull Moose Party: “Take your posters and go home. We don’t want to turn back the clock.”

We used a rather simple anecdote all last week: a quiet baseball story where, back in 1947, a white shortstop named Pee Wee Reese walked over to first base and put his arm around Jackie Robinson, the first black player in the National League. We didn’t mention a single time Larry Doby, also black, who signed with the Cleveland Indians on July 4 of that same year, or Hank Thompson and Willard Brown, who began playing for the Cardinals, also during the 1947 season. That was progress. Today, of course, many, many minority players are dominating the world of sports at all levels . . . on the playing fields. So now the cry is for more representation in the corporate boardrooms, as coaches and owners. We all remember that embarrassing Al Campanis scandal of a decade ago, and baseball was outraged, because that attitude seemed to turn back the clock, to want to return to yesteryear.

Well, friend, we want to move beyond baseball and get to the dilemmas of our own hearts. The question for each Christian is this: am I making progress? Am I moving from darkness to light in my own attitudes, in my desire to be reconciled with all people? As I reflect in the spiritual mirror of this year, am I closer to the ideal of Christ – regarding brotherhood – than a year ago?

There’s an interesting Bible story that, in a sense, takes us from “Dred Scott” to the Voting Rights Act. In Luke chapter nine, Jesus and His disciples were taking a missionary trip into a territory where “those” people lived. They were going into the ghettoes of Samaria, to the projects on the other side of the tracks. And when the people there rejected Christ and His message, James and John were boiling mad, ready to organize a two-man lynch mob right then and there. And as they began putting on the white sheets, one of them – or maybe both of them in angry stereo – ranted to Jesus:

“Lord, do You want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?”

But it says in verse 55: “Jesus turned and rebuked them.”
All right. That’s John the fire-breathing disciple. Now go over to the epistle of First John . . . written by the very same man. But how does he speak now? Read it for yourself. He calls people “dear friends.” “I write to you, DEAR CHILDREN,” is how he begins his letters. Is this possibly the same guy? Chapter two, verse nine:

“Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness.” Or chapter four, verse 7: “Beloved, let us LOVE one another, for love is of God.”

Interestingly, the New International Version text notes for First John tell us that the word “love,” in its various forms, is used a whopping forty-three times in this brief letter! And we ask again: is this the same person? Unbelievable! John was in the Ku Klux Klan before; he was ready to destroy his enemies. He was full of hatred, dripping with vitriol, steeped in prejudice. And now everybody is “dear child,” “dear brother”? Friend, we can only conclude: something had happened to Brother John. Being around Jesus Christ for three-and-a-half years caused something called progress to take place in his life. He moved from hate to love, from prejudice to unity, from exclusion and fear-mongering to statements like: “There is no fear in LOVE. But perfect love drives out fear.”

There was a thought-provoking cover article in Newsweek magazine, dating back to June 7 of 1999. The title was this: “The Good News About Black America (And Why Many Blacks Aren’t Celebrating.) Ellis Cose did a very thorough study of the progress made in recent years, the slowly improving statistics, the gains being made in so many sectors: education, testing, health, housing, infant mortality, economic. But even progress, even success, can bring problems.

“How can civil-rights leaders,” he writes, “acknowledge the real and evident progress without encouraging complacency? How can they keep the pressure on to ‘move the glass from half-full to three-quarters full,’ in the words of Huge Price, head of the National Urban League, if they give up the language of crisis and damnation?”

In other words, the minute some arrows point in the direction of success, people on all sides of the rainbow let up. They stop striving. Generous people stop giving. Reverse discrimination creeps back in, as those who were “there first” try to reclaim their piece of the pie. And there are those who seek progress, who try to lead their followers in the right direction, but who can only seem to get anywhere by constantly reverting to the fire-from-heaven language of James and John themselves. They have to borrow from their enemies’ vocabulary book of hate in order to seek a level playing field for their team.

Well, friend, in terms of the Christian battlefield, and in terms of progress, where is OUR Promised Land? It’s heaven, isn’t it? If we’re on a spiritual continuum, and trying to always head in the right direction, the goal of God’s Kingdom should tell us that today isn’t yet time for complacency. Do I truly reflect, today, God’s Magna Carta of unity, as John describes it here? “Beloved, let us love one another”? Am I fully there? No . . . and so I need to keep asking God to give me renewed dedication to Lonnie Melashenko progress.

The same humor columnist I mentioned earlier, Art Buchwald, once wrote a satiric piece called “Is Heaven Segregated?” Would heaven be divided up? he wondered. Would Christians in the Great Beyond still want to worship separately, to have their own enclave of vanilla virtue, their church where only “their” people were welcomed? Friend, in my heart I know it’s not like that. You know it too. Heaven is a place of total unity, of perfect acceptance, of absolute, unconditional INtegration. And those who want it some other way . . . well, they simply won’t be there.

So as we think about the Dred Scott case, let’s thank our Savior for progress. And let’s ask Him for more of the same. Considering the ways of heaven, let’s ask Him for LOTS more.