On Law and Society

There's something I was thinking about after the latest Supreme Court Justice was confirmed.

The law reflects society. To a certain extent. What do I mean by that? 

I recall a story about a murder trial, I don't remember when exactly. Consider it set in the Appalachian mountains, in a Hatsfield vs. McCoy era. The jury acquitted the defendant, not because they thought he hadn't killed anyone... but because when they heard the case they decided the person he killed had provoked him and it was essentially justified.

I'm bringing this up because I wanted to talk about what we, as a society, accept. Back around the Brown vs. Board of Education era (or prior. I am fuzzy on the details as I try to remember something from a couple of decades ago, so bear with me) there was some debate about which way to take the civil rights movement. Some wanted to focus on the legal system and some wanted to focus on pushing for economic solutions. Iirc they mostly went in a legal direction, partly because slavery was enabled through the legal system. Hence court cases like Brown vs. Board of Education.

I think the results of that decision showed some of the strengths and weaknesses of it, since winning the court case and forcing de-segregation didn't exactly fix everything. When your parents and/or grandparents were slaves, and when the slaves were emancipated and your slave masters decide that means they can throw you out without any sort of compensation... where they decide 'hey, we no longer have to worry about providing you food and housing, or medical care, and we can just offer you a paltry wage and expect you to figure the rest of it out on your own', well... it's kind of hard to build up generational wealth that way.

The legal battles helped break down barriers, it's true. Just like having Jackie Robinson  become the first African American baseball player broke down barriers. (When every. single. employer. discriminated against you it's hard to get the foot in the door. Breaking those barriers down didn't magically fix everything, but at least some were able to get better jobs and start working their way up.) 

But there was also a lot of resentment towards what people felt they were forced to do. I don't necessarily want to get into the discussions on Affirmative Action and the like right now, as too many people think they know what it means already and the terms carry a lot of baggage right now. I'm also not trying to say it's okay, or should have been expected, or anything of the sort. Suffice to say it exists, and that resentment and anger has caused problems. I don't know enough to say whether those problems are better or worse than what would have happened if the civil rights movement had pushed more of an economic agenda than a legal one. What I can say is that we still haven't truly reckoned with the legacy of slavery in America, and too many of us resist hearing about it. At all. (I learned about a lot of things as an adult that I was never aware of, whether it's Sundown Towns, or the way banks refused to give mortgages for anyone living in black neighborhoods, or the way certain policies destroyed black families. Many of these problems have persisted well after the Civil Rights Movement, and most white Americans are barely even aware of them.)

But Kwame Appiah made some interesting points in his book Cosmopolitanism. Namely that what really changed was how white people saw black people. That they saw the abuses of white authority figures and saw that they were being done to people. People who have darker skin. People who look different. But people. Not any of the nasty terms racist people use to try and classify 'other' people as subhuman. (These past few decades have been eye-opening for how far we still have to go, btw. All I have to think about is some of the awful things people said about Michelle Obama - who always struck me as a very classy way - and the way they raved about Melania Trump. While I don't want to slut shame her for her pictures, I know that she in no way, shape, or form had a career that at any other time would have been called 'classy'.)

So here's the thing. While there are still a ton of problems, a lot has changed. And not just with Michelle Obama. More and more of us know people who are openly gay, and know that yes. They are people. More of us know people who are trans. I can remember my mother, well over a decade ago now, talking about a coworker who was trans. We know them, we see them, they are people.

So recent current events make this a scary time for those people who are threatened by attempts to (legally) put the genie back in the bottle. And that's perfectly understandable, and they have a right to be worried.

The part I wanted to hold out as hope, though, is that regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, regardless of what laws get passed, more and more Americans do see these disparate groups as people. If a state tried to make homosexuality illegal again (and I think there are states that still have laws against sodomy), it's increasingly unlikely that the average person is going to bother calling the cops or prosecuting or trying to use those laws. Small comfort for the situations where someone does, and the fact that there are laws that could be enforced is problematic. Not just because of what happens to the person being prosecuted, but for what it does to undermine justice and the rule of law. (Marijuana use illustrates the problem. When even the cops look the other way on marijuana use, it means arrests and prosecution are handed out inconsistently and unfairly. The white college kid that gets a verbal warning can go on to have a fulfilling career, while the black kid winds up in the judicial system and spend their life dealing with the consequences of having a criminal record.)

This is also, btw, the problem with having top-down attempts at controlling people. Does anyone think that if they succeed at repealing Roe vs Wade that there won't be doctors performing abortions anyway? With plenty of people who disagree with the law and will aid and abet it? 

That making homosexual marriages illegal again will stop it? Especially when many businesses and hospitals have changed to adapt to them? 

The people desperately trying to turn back the clock have already lost, and they know it. The best they can do is create situations where average Americans will see people suffering from their rigid and out of touch policies. 

Someone pointed out how Florida went for Trump, and at the same time approved a $15 minimum wage. Just as study after study showed that many Americans supported Obamacare... so long as you didn't use that term. 

The frustrating part is that people form these hardened opinions on buzzwords (like Obamacare), and wind up saying they don't support things that - if you take out the loaded terms - they actually do.

I'm not really sure what this all means, or what the answer is. I just can tell that the people misleading their supporters like that are essentially setting us up for a lot of pain and suffering, and ultimately they're still going to lose.