The Iowa decision is very upsetting to me, because people don’t realize you have to have judges that rule what is right, even when what is right challenges the status quo.
Throughout American history when the court has decided the conservative way, civil rights, and people have suffered.
The first one I’ll go into detail, may be considered to be one of the most important, but most often forgotten court decision in legal history. Its result was one of the lynchpins in heading towards the civil war, and it betrayed the principles of equality the US were supposedly founded on. Its name lives in infamy as “Dredd Scott”.
Dredd Scott, appealed to the courts be declared free, due to the fact that despite currently residing in a slaveholding state he had been taken as a slave to free states and resided there. After several levels of decisions, the law reached the supreme court.
On March 6, 1857, the court gave the opinion that
1. Those of any African descent were not citizens of the US, be they free or slave.
2. Non whites could not be granted citizenship or freedom by existing federal law
3. The Missouri Compromise’s provisions for excluding slavery from free states were invalid.
The second I want to talk about is another horrific decision, “Plessy vs Ferguson” which enshrined the “separate but equal” provision that still haunts the US today.
Essentially in an effort to challenge the enforced separation of accommodations in Louisiana, a civil rights group sent one of their members, Homer Plessy, to test the legal situation. The court on May 18th, 1896 the court ruled that separation was allowed, and to claim that the facilities for African Americans were inferior was due to their own flawed perceptions. Following the decision, many other similar laws to Louisiana were enacted
across the south.
There are numerous decisions which show similar conservatism including “Korematsu vs United States”, “Bowers vs Hardwick”, “Schenck vs United States”, “Roth vs United States” and “Boy Scounts of America vs Dale”. If the justices are prepared to rule what is just then we get decisions like “Brown vs Board of Education”, “Roe vs Wade”, “Loving vs
Virgina” and “Lawrence vs Texas”
Maybe there can be mistakes made, but i’d rather have Justices that view their role as one of providing justice rather than supporting the status quo.