Honoring Freedom, Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation 150 Years Later

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January 4, 2013
Honoring Freedom, Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation 150 Years Later

by John Schachter

Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” has earned rave reviews, myriad award nominations and more than $132 million at the box office. All this for a 2½ hour movie about politics. While other films with government and politics at their core often struggle to draw sizable audiences, “Lincoln” has transcended the genre and demonstrated mass appeal. That’s likely because of the superb acting and script – and the moral force behind the film’s focus, the fight to end slavery in America once and for all..

Tuesday, January 1, marked the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, a document Fredrick Douglass praised as “the most important document ever issued by an American president,” according to historian Eric Foner (in his book The Fiery Trial).

Douglass was no Lincoln apologist; he recognized the great man’s flaws and imperfections. But Douglass also got to know Lincoln and appreciate the great pressures under which he operated. When it came to the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass understood the content, the context and the confines. In his “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” delivered at the unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Washington D.C. in memory of Lincoln, on April 14, 1876, Douglass said:

“Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January, 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word? I shall never forget that memorable night, when in a distant city I waited and watched at a public meeting, with three thousand others not less anxious than myself, for the word of deliverance which we have heard read today. Nor shall I ever forget the outburst of joy and thanksgiving that rent the air when the lightning brought to us the emancipation proclamation. In that happy hour we forgot all delay, and forgot all tardiness, forgot that the President had bribed the rebels to lay down their arms by a promise to withhold the bolt which would smite the slave-system with destruction; and we were thenceforward willing to allow the President all the latitude of time, phraseology, and every honorable device that statesmanship might require for the achievement of a great and beneficent measure of liberty and progress.”

Though sectional conflicts over slavery certainly contributed to the war, ending slavery was not an initial goal. The National Archives notes that that “changed on September 22, 1862, when President Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which stated that slaves in those states or parts of states still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, would be declared free.” Just 100 days later, seeing no action from the rebelling states, Lincoln issued the official Emancipation Proclamation declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious areas “are, and henceforward shall be free.” While the proclamation did not end slavery in the United States, it did fundamentally transform the character of the war and added moral force to the Union cause while strengthening the Union both politically and militarily.

Eric Foner wrote in The New York Times that to some extent the Emancipation Proclamation “embodied a double emancipation: for the slaves, since it ensured that if the Union emerged victorious, slavery would perish, and for Lincoln himself, for whom it marked the abandonment of his previous assumptions about how to abolish slavery and the role blacks would play in post-emancipation American life.”

Across the nation, celebrants have many opportunities to appreciate the value and meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Library of Congress is displaying Lincoln’s first handwritten draft, on display for six weeks starting Jan. 3 in "The Civil War in America" exhibit. And the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian has an exhibit called "Changing America," which recounts both the 1863 emancipation and the 1963 March on Washington for Civil Rights. The exhibit includes a rare signed copy of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that abolished slavery and is the centerpiece of the Spielberg film. What a great opportunity to see and appreciate the reality of what's been portrayed on the movie screen!
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December 28, 2012
The Sweeping License to Discriminate Hidden in the NDAA

by Dena Sher and Ian Thompson, ACLU Washington Legislative Office. The authors are, respectively, legislative counsel on issues related to religion and belief and legislative representative on issues related to LGBT rights in the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office.

With Congress having recently approved this year’s NDAA, we think it is important to draw attention to a provision (Section 533(a)(1)), which, though hidden away, is unprecedented, sweeping, and could invite dangerous claims of a right to discriminate against not just lesbian, gay, and bisexual service members, but also women, religious minorities, and in the provision of health care.

This section of the conference report requires the military to accommodate the conscience, moral principles, or religious beliefs of all members of the armed forces. We strongly support accommodating beliefs -- so long as doing so does not result in discrimination or harm to others, or undermine other important objectives like military readiness or unit cohesion.

We think this language, however, is too broad and could be construed to not allow for the consideration of the harms an accommodation could cause and the impact it could have on others. The language, for example, could reopen longstanding prohibitions against harassment, give rise to claims of a right to proselytize other service members as well as civilians in occupied areas, and could lead to claims affecting health care services or anti-harassment training.
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December 21, 2012
Brandishing the First Amendment: Commercial Expression in America
BookTalk
Brandishing the First Amendment: Commercial Expression in America
By:
Tamara R. Piety
Available here

by Professor Tamara R. Piety, Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Professor of Law, University of Tulsa College of Law

The Supreme Court has been very active on the First Amendment in the last few years. In 2010 it issued Citizens United, a controversial and unpopular decision which announced a robust vision of the role of corporate personhood. According to the New York Times, “[t]he First Amendment dominated” the 2011 term as well when the Court decided, among other cases, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants, a decision striking downa California statute which attempted to restrict the sale of violent videos to children, and Sorrell v. IMS Health, a decision striking down a Vermont statute which attempted to limit the sale of physician prescriber information for marketing purposes without the doctor’s permission on First Amendment grounds. These cases, and others, taken together reflect a distinct trend, in the Supreme Court and elsewhere, toward greater protection for commercial speech. This trend is the subject my new book, Brandishing the First Amendment: Commercial Expression in America (U. of Michigan Press, 2012). In Brandishing the First Amendment I discuss the way in which increased First Amendment protection for commercial speech has provided the intellectual foundation for increased protection for corporate political speech, which has, in turn been then used to argue for greater protection for commercial speech, thereby turning the First Amendment into a sort of all-purpose weapon against a variety of governmental regulations.

This is a troubling development because it is difficult to meaningfully and effectively regulate commerce if you cannot regulate commercial speech. This new and robust commercial speech doctrine threatens to undermine a good deal of the basic regulatory regime legitimized since the New Deal.In Brandishing the First Amendment I look at the various theories that have been offered for why we might want to protect freedom of expression, using as a starting point the work of the late Yale law professor
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Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, First Amendment, BookTalk, Brandishing the First Amendment: Commercial Expression in America, commercial speech, Tamara R. Piety
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December 20, 2012
Tribe Talk
Guest Post

by Dan Urman, Director of Northeastern University’s Doctorate in Law and Policy. Urman is also a member of the ACS Boston Steering Committee.

On Dec. 12, as part of the ACS Boston Lawyer Chapter’s “Legal Legends in the Law” series, Laurence Tribe reflected on his remarkable career as a constitutional law professor and Supreme Court litigator. Tribe, Carl Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, began by providing an overview of the Supreme Court’s decision to hear two cases related to marriage equality: Windsor v. U.S. and Hollingsworth v. Perry. Disagreeing with popular news reports already predicting the outcome, Tribe argued that more than one justice is uncertain about how he or she will vote.

Tribe (pictured) has decades of experience writing, teaching, and litigating constitutional rights for gay and lesbian Americans, often at his professional peril. He referenced his discussion of sexual orientation in his 1978 Treatise, American Constitutional Law, taking a stance well outside of the legal and social “mainstream.” \Tribe argued that laws discriminating against individuals based on sexual orientation were “indistinguishable from laws discriminating against individuals based on their race or gender.” Many friends and colleagues advised him against taking such a position publicly, because it could cost him a position on the U.S. Supreme Court. These warnings resurfaced when he prepared to testify against Judge Robert Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court nomination. Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) told Professor Tribe that it would be great to see “both of them (Bork and Tribe) on the Court,” and if Tribe testified against Bork, he would be “burning a bridge.” Twenty-five years later, Tribe said that if serving on the Court meant holding back his actual views, it was a bridge he did not want to cross.
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Tags:
Supreme Court, Other courts, LGBT issues, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Equality and Liberty, Bowers v. Hardwick, Dan Urman, Defense of Marriage Act, DOMA, Guest Post, Hollingsworth v. Perry, Laurence Tribe, marriage equality, Proposition 8, Romer v. Evans, Windsor v. U.S.
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December 20, 2012
While Federal Government Mulls Gun Control, States Could Move Forward

by E. Sebastian Arduengo

Earlier in the week, the ACSblog covered the loopy arguments that pro-gun forces are making in the aftermath of the tragic school shooting in Connecticut, including a suggestion from Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) that if the school principal had been armed, then the shooter could have been stopped before any of the children were killed. The commercial market responded to the shooting too, with an upsurge in parents buying bulletproof backpacks for their kids.

Legislators at the federal level have responded by hinting that they might be open to moving through legislation that would more tightly regulate guns like the AR-15 style rifle that was used in the Connecticut shooting, and President Obama formed a working group led by Vice-President Biden to provide specific recommendations by the end of January. Any gun control measure, however, will stir up a political firestorm on Capitol Hill and the National Rifle Association has proven adept in the past at slowing federal legislative responses to mass shootings.

But there are common sense measures that state and local governments could move on very quickly. Many of those states, however, would have to reverse a trend of approving laws that put the gun lobby’s interests ahead of community safety.
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