July 4, 2021 - "Independence Day"

Today we celebrate Independence Day, the anniversary of our country’s founding.  We should appreciate our freedom to worship as we desire, while we aspire to build a more perfect union, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare.   It is important for us to see where we need to keep working and persevere in that task.  Let’s talk about something that has been talked about in the papers and on social media.
 
Racism and voting has been much discussed in the news in recent weeks and months.  It is timely to look at some remarks that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) made on this topic in Open Wide:  The Enduring Call to Love, their 2018 pastoral letter against racism.  The USCCB has issued a well-written background sheet on “Racism and Voting” that will be my source of information for what I say in this column today.  Here is the link for the background position paper for those who wish to consult it directly:  racism-and-voting.pdf (usccb.org).
 
In the November 2018 pastoral letter against racism, Open Wide Our Hearts, the Catholic bishops of the United States urge all Catholics to acknowledge “the scourge of racism” that still exists in our hearts, words, actions, and institutions. Racism can be individual, when persons fail to recognize certain groups as created in the image and likeness of God and equal in dignity, or it can be systemic, where practices or policies treat certain groups of people unjustly. One example of systemic racism is lack of access to the vote for some communities of color.
 
The Church teaches that all persons have both a legal right and a responsibility to have their voice heard in the public square to promote human dignity and the common good of society. As people of faith, we have the obligation to help shape the moral character of society by voting and other acts of public participation. We also must act to ensure that the right to vote is protected for all citizens. This has often been threatened for many minorities in the U.S.
 
Sixty years ago, the United States Commission on Civil Rights documented a history of pervasive discrimination toward minorities in all aspects of voting, despite the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment that prohibits denying citizens the right to vote because of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Since the 1870s, threats of violence and actual violence, especially in the South, had been used to discourage African Americans from voting. Government officials openly opposed minority voting. For example, U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi called for Klansmen to visit African Americans the night before elections to send a message that they should not try to vote. Poll “taxes” became a part of the election system in many states, requiring money from poor sharecroppers for voting privileges. Literacy tests were another systematic attempt to deny voters of color access to the voting booth: in states where educational opportunities for minorities were very limited, many African Americans had little or no literacy skills. Some of these tests were designed so no one could pass, such as demands to recite the entire U.S. Constitution or to count the bubbles in a bar of soap to prove math abilities. Gerrymandering, the practice of redrawing voting district boundaries, was historically used to suppress the African American vote.

These injustices prompted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was initially successful in eliminating many of the barriers to voting for minorities. However, a 2018 Report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights detailed a decline in the Act’s enforcement. The report suggests Latino Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans are facing new barriers to voting. Some Catholic voices are raising concerns about voter identification laws seen in many states in recent years. The Maryland Catholic Conference opposed one such legislative proposal in 2017, which would “make voting more difficult for people with disabilities, the elderly, and the poor,” who “have already established their identities via voter registration.”
 
State Catholic conferences have also been vocal about other issues related to access to voting, including gerrymandering and restoration of voting rights. Others raise concerns about restrictions on early voting, lack of local and accessible registration opportunities and precinct voting locations (especially true in the South and on Native American reservations), and illegal purges of voting rolls, which disproportionately affect African-American and Latino American voters. One in ten Latinos have been harassed at polling places.
 
Today, too many barriers to the right to vote remain for minorities. In response, we are called to work to ensure that all are able to exercise their rights, as faithful citizens, to raise their voices in the public square.
 
Let me end my column today with this thought:
 
“Racism can only end if we contend with the policies and institutional barriers that perpetuate and preserve the inequality – economic and social – that we still see all around us.” – U.S. bishops, Open Wide Our Hearts.
 
Until next week,
Fr. John