Today is Father's Day, so I am going to share a memory of my father that actually relates to the news story that will follow. One of the joys of my father's later years was taking my husband and I and our three daughters to a Pawtucket Red Sox game. Dad loved baseball and he was thrilled to see that all three of our daughters played softball and understood the game of baseball. They always brought their gloves to the ballpark just in case an errant foul ball came their way. My daughters still remember "Honey"(as they called him) taking us all to a ball game. At one of these games when he was about seventy-some years old, he got up and went to the refreshment stand. He came back with a beer and a huge grin. All patrons of the ballpark had to show identification to buy beer, and he had been carded! He was thrilled. It made his day.
Fast forward to Jesse Jackson at a conference for his social justice organization, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. The Reverend Jackson stated, "Now governors and legislators in over 30 states are engaged in a radical rollback of our civil and voting rights," He was describing the laws passed by many states requiring that voters show photo identification to vote.
Some of the things you need to show a photo identification for are:
buying alcohol
buying cigarettes
buying cough medicine
buying allergy medication
getting into an R-rated movie
boarding an airplane
You get the picture. I have no statistics to back up what I am about to say, but I would guess that at least 85 percent of all Americans engage in at least one of these activities. Being asked for photo identification is not a civil rights issue--it is a voter fraud issue.
The article reports:
"The delegation of lawmakers at the 40th annual conference decried such bills, as well as budget cutbacks and early voting regulations, as thinly veiled political maneuvers aimed at weakening Democrats."
My question is simple, "Given the normal life events that require photo identification, why would requiring that identification to vote weaken Democrats?" Don't Democrats support honest elections?
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