New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie loves to give the appearance that he is tough and often swaggers around loudly proclaiming his views. As he campaigns for the Vice Presidency on a Romney ticket he tells those that disagree how "things are done in Jersey." Wonder if the governor shares with those voters that the way a governor acts these days in Jersey is cowardly? Wonder if tells about a governor of the Garden State distorts history and advances division in order to advance his creeds with the right wing religious extremists who have taken over his party?
Bigotry is exactly what the cowardly Governor Chris Christie is currently practicing "Jersey style."
The New Jersey legislature is set to pass marriage equality and the governor promises to veto the civil rights bill. He wants a referendum on the issue and to allow the voters of New Jersey to vote on the rights of its neighbors. In pressing his case, he said that African-Americans would have loved the right to have the public vote on their rights in the 1960's.
What planet is he living on? Does he really believe African-Americans in Mississippi wanted the public to vote on their rights in the 1960's? Are you kidding me, Governor? African American leaders in New Jersey were the first to respond to this insanity. Mayor Cory Booker of Newark said,
"I shudder to think what would have happened if the civil rights gains, heroically established by courageous lawmakers in the 1960's, were instead conveniently left up to popular votes in our 50 states,"
The first African-American Speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, Shelia Oliver, was shocked and offended at the governor's suggestion and said,
“Governor, people were fighting and dying in the streets of the South because the majority refused to grant minorities equal rights by any method. It took legislative action to bring justice to all Americans, just as legislative action is the right way to bring marriage equality to all New Jerseyans.”
Even President Eisenhower and Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen opposed a referendum on civil rights for African Americans. Republican Minority Leader Dirksen said in 1959:
“Do we have legislative responsibility or don’t we?” he said during the debate on the Senate floor. “I’m ready to accept my responsibility. I’m not going to pass the buck to the people back home and say, ‘I’m thinking about the next election.' And they would say, ‘Haven’t you got any guts to stand up under the Constitution of the United States?’”
The governor pointed out that individual rights had been voted on before in New Jersey. In 1915, male voters in the states voted overwhelmingly to deny women the right to vote. Does Governor Christie really think this was a bright spot in New Jersey's history? That this vote was the right action to be taken in the suffrage movement?
Even The New Jersey Star-Ledger, a conservative paper, took on the governor's lack of courage in an amazing and powerful endorsement of marriage equality that must be read in its entirety but here is a powerful excerpt:
Imagine how different American history would be if this rule by referendums had carried the day from the start.
Take race relations. If Southern states could have held a referendum on free speech rights for Martin Luther King Jr., can anyone doubt how it would have turned out? How long would it have taken for voters in Mississippi to integrate its public schools?
Gallup has traced attitudes toward interracial marriage for decades. Note that when the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s ban in 1967, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans supported the court’s position. If Christie’s philosophy had carried the day, the ban would have remained in place until the late 1990s.
The point is that minority rights should not be subjected to majority vote. That misses the gist of constitutional rights.
As James Madison put it in Federalist Paper 51: “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. If a majority can be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”
Christie is not bothered by such niceties. He is a politician who sees this kind of restraint as an obstacle to be overcome, not a principle to be respected. He has even threatened to ignore Supreme Court rulings that he doesn’t like.
He is, in other words, exactly the type of politician that Madison had in mind when he drafted the Constitution’s restraints on majority power.
Americans must remember in this time of historic struggle for civil rights that Governor Chris Christie was nothing more than a coward, bully and horrible historian.
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