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CHAPTER 16 Civil Rights: The Struggle for Political Equality 497 It is evident that the struggle over gay and lesbian rights will remain an important part of the American political agenda for a long time to come, the eventual outcome being very much in doubt.20 Recently, for example, the Court ruled that the Boy Scouts of America, and, by implication, other private “expressive or advocacy” organizations whose association was protected by the First Amendment, were within their rights to exclude gays from leadership positions. Several other important cases on gay and lesbian civil rights await action by the Supreme Court, including the constitutionality of bans on samesex marriages. Civil Rights in the United States PROPOSITION: Civil rights were not a prominent feature of the original Constitution nor has the promise of equal citizenship (which goes hand-in-hand with political equality) been realized over the course of our history. AGREE: There is no provision in the original Constitution ensuring equality of citizenship for women, African-Americans, and Native Americans. Women were denied the vote well into the twentieth century; most African-Americans were slaves until passage of the Thirteenth Amendment and were not admitted into full citizenship across the nation until at least 1965 after passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Even today, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians continue to be discriminated against in a wide range of institutions and fail to play a role in the political process commensurate with their numbers in the population. THE AUTHORS: DISAGREE: While it is true that the framers largely ignored the issue of equal citizenship, the story of the United States is the story of the gradual inclusion of all identifiable groups into the political process as equal citizens. Although the levels of political participation and political power are not the same for all groups, this has more to do with inequalities in the distribution of income, wealth, and education than with formal mechanisms of exclusion. Political equality is one of the three pillars of democracy, equal in importance to popular sovereignty and political liberty. For most of our history, political equality was not a very high priority in the United States, and the quality of democracy was less than it might have been. The advance of civil rights protections since the end of World War II has enriched American democracy because it has helped make political equality a reality in the United States. It is no longer acceptable, for instance, to deny minorities and women the right to vote, to assemble, to petition the government, or to hold public office, practices widely enforced in this country for most of our history. This is not to say that racial minorities and women have attained full social or material equality; many areas of American life, from wealth holding to representation in the professions and in Congress, remain unequal and unrepresentative. Nor is this to say that all civil rights issues are settled; note the continuing disagreements over same-sex marriages and affirmative action. Nevertheless, the attainment of formal political equality is real and something about which Americans might take great pride.