Civil and political rights Archives

My friend Maria is among the fairly good-sized community of illegal immigrants living in San Francisco. She works hard, buys local, supports her church and her daughter’s school, adds a lot to the city and state economy and functions in every way as a model citizen except she doesn’t pay income taxes. She would like to pay those taxes, but over the years that she’s been here she has not found an opening to apply for citizenship.

Once I asked Maria about her car, a nice one on which she paid hefty sales taxes but which, of course, she drives without a license.”I just drive very, very carefully,” she said, “and keep everything perfect with the car. If you’re stopped, maybe for a turn light being out, it’s $1,000 minimum.”

“A thousand dollars?” I said; “you’re kidding.”

“They impound your car. You have to find someone with a valid license, get them to go get your car for you, plus paying the fine and all the fees.” Maria said this in a quiet voice while I exhaled.

Now, if Maria is stopped in Arizona she will simply be sent home. And this makes very little sense to me. President Obama said the Arizona law threatens “to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

He also said that he is monitoring the Arizona bill for civil rights and other implications.

“If we continue to fail to act at a federal level, we will continue to see misguided efforts opening up around the country,” Mr. Obama said.

In his remarks, the president didn’t offer a timetable for trying to pursue an overhaul of immigration laws in Congress.

Something seems not only unfair but un-American about making it legal for Maria to be summarily sent home after a traffic stop. Or some other kind of stop, no matter how vehemently everyone insists that racial profiling will never happen. We welcome Maria and her family in — after all, we need their labor if we’re going to eat strawberries — but once they’ve proven themselves solid citizen potential we throw them out. Maria has cousins who were migrant workers although she herself has always been a small step up the ladder from that back-breaking job.

Admittedly, illegal immigrants come here for less than good-citizen motives. Certainly we must protect our boundaries. Arizona’s abuse-inviting law does not seem the right way to fix our immigration policies.

Obama Slams Arizona’s Immigration Bill – The Caucus Blog – NYTimes.com.

The New York State Senate‘s rejection of a bill that would have allowed marriage between two people who love each other — but happen to be gay — is just the most recent in a string of set-backs in the area of gay rights. Other set-backs have been occurring, or are currently looming, in women’s rights, specifically reproductive rights. One wonders about the mood of this country.

This particular one wonders if anyone else is harking back, with more than a little sadness, to the 1950s. If you weren’t around then, I can tell you it was a strange decade. Great optimism for the future — well, there’s not much of that today — while simultaneously there was terrible meanness behind the McCarthy witch hunts and the denial of women’s rights, plus a certain amount of smugness embedded into a bland, national complacency.

At ladies’ bridge parties there were small china ashtrays on each corner of the table and the conversation usually drifted toward those lovely wonder drugs emerging to give instant relief for any problem. The conversation never drifted toward back-alley abortions, unless someone had recently died and the others knew how it had happened. Those of us who had jobs — running a house, entertaining for the husband’s business, raising children; those were not considered jobs — usually had male counterparts doing the exact same thing for twice the salary. One did not complain. If one were middle class white, and involved in any sort of civil rights work, one never brought that up at the bridge table. It was a strange decade.

Today’s New York Times story quotes senators who voted against the same-sex marriage bill as saying “the public is gripped by economic anxiety and remain(s) uneasy about changing the state’s definition of marriage.” The San Francisco Chronicle article includes a comment from sponsoring Senator Thomas Duane, “I wasn’t expecting betrayal.” I’m sure those are both accurate reports. Whatever its underlying economic, political or social fears, the public seems also to harbor a degree of meanness in discounting the rights of others.

If you substitute a measure of cynicism or hopelessness about the future for the complacency of a half-century ago, and throw in the self-righteousness of those who for religious or political reasons justify the denial of rights to their fellow citizens, it’s easy to draw parallels between this decade and that one long ago.

In the fifties the groundwork was being laid for civil rights, for women’s liberation, for Roe v Wade and the upheavals that eventually led to progress, by courageous and energetic people of all sorts. I wish I could list myself in that number; I was at the bridge table trying to pretend normalcy in a life gone amok. Today there are others working just as hard for the rights of their fellow men and women.

I hope they can keep the faith.

Tag: Civil and political rights

One immigrant's plight v Arizona law

Gay Rights, Abortion Lose – – Meanness Wins. Is this the 50s?