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Desana Neal’s 7-year-old son ended his oath of allegiance to the American flag at school, questioning whether the United States of America really stands for “liberty and justice for all,” as the oath says.
“He said, ‘I’ll only stand up when Black lives matter,'” said Neal, a 40-year-old Delaware native who is black, a queer mother of two transgender girls and also Had a son she described as gender nonconforming. Neal is also a candidate for a state House seat. With much of the country taking a day off from backyard barbecues, high street parades and fireworks displays, some Americans believe democracy is in danger, while others believe it’s on the rise.
Another American interviewed just before the holiday on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, was in a more festive mood. “Conservatives who don’t cite have been on the losing side for a long time,” said CJ Grisham, founder of gun rights group Open Carry Texas. “Losing badly? Put things in perspective. So obviously I’m happy.” Conservatives are enjoying a string of U.S. Supreme Court wins in landmark rulings that ended constitutional abortion rights, expanded gun rights and weakened government regulation of power generation Plant emissions power.
Meanwhile, testimony is being offered at congressional hearings that former President Donald Trump and the violent thugs supporting him could be very close to overthrowing the November 2020 election that brought Joe Biden to the White House on January 6, 2021 . Jodie Patterson, a 52-year-old black mother of transgender children from Brooklyn, believes the dominant heterosexual, white, wealthy culture is too easy to ignore the rest of the country. She is a board member of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which supports lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans in the United States at a time when legislation in states across the country would prevent access to health care to help young people transition and limit transgender Gender athletes participating in sports.
“I will not turn my back on America,” Patterson said. “This country belongs to me and my family, and to those who look like me, like everyone else.” Only whites signed the Declaration of Independence, and most, like its lead author Thomas Jefferson, owned black slaves . The slave owners were also among the whites who signed the Constitution in 1787, when persuading slave states to unionize took precedence over black freedoms. The Civil War, constitutional amendments, and Supreme Court rulings extended rights to minorities and women.
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Today, some conservatives believe liberal criticism that extremists are threatening democracy is overblown, noting that Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress. “Don’t blame it on these boogie guys,” said Chuck Warren, a Republican strategist from Arizona. “I don’t think the Supreme Court justices are just sitting there and saying, ‘We have to protect white people.’ I simply don’t believe that’s happening.” The concerns are so great that Biden created a committee to look at reforming the Supreme Court .
Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, a member of the committee, advocates for courtroom expansion to counter current conservative tendencies. “The odds that we’re really going to decline like other democracies are very real,” Tribe said.
Harvard legal colleague Charles Fried, who argued cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of Republican President Ronald Reagan’s administration, favored a different change: term limits, which would change Supreme Court lifetime appointments to 18 year. “There are people around, I’m afraid some of them are in this Supreme Court, and they want to abolish the 20th century,” Freed said.
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