Comments on: Anyone still think they should be permitted to vote?

By: DAD

DAD — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:10:34 +0000

One’s collective fate is still in their hands, no matter which candidate wins. It hangs on one’s point of view and whose ox is gored.

By: Vince Williams

Vince Williams — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:29:27 +0000

I’m scared, too.

By: Steve Levine

Steve Levine — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:34:11 +0000

I see that my tongue-in-cheek notion of a literacy test has taken on a life in this Forum.

So perhaps it’s time to pull the plug on the idea and confess that I was never serious about disenfranchising any voters. Even the most obtuse and misinformed.

My rant was spoken in anger and frustration at the idiocy of some voters, and the fear that our collective fate would be in their hands.

I do believe in the wisdom of crowds, but on the eve of this election, I’m still scared.

By: Vince Williams

Vince Williams — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:59:52 +0000

Well, Steve, we have to remember that Texas is Southern Baptist and Church of Christ (no connection with the United Church of Christ) country, probably most of whose members still believe that the earth was created about 6000 years ago, and like Sarah Palin, that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Many of them accept the reckoning, in 1650, of the Biblical literalist, the Bishop of Ussher , that the Earth was created October 23, 4004 BC (Julian calendar).

They believe that the patriarch Noah carried at least a pair of every species of land animal on his ark– so intelligent discussion of science, or just about any subject, especially politics, is impossible with these people. They are the same ones whose forebears justified slavery on the grounds that the black ‘race’, as the the descendants of Noah’s son, Ham, were cursed by God, and thus made subservient to the white ‘races’. There are people to this day who still defend that monstrous belief.

I don’t agree with your contention that they should be prevented from voting, though. What would we do, test their general literacy, and who would have authority to administer these eligibility tests? That’s too reminiscent of the schemes used by whites in the Jim Crow South to disenfranchise African-Americans.