Download PROPOSITION: Civil rights were not a prominent feature of the

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.