Americas Big Moral Questions

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Americas Big Moral Questions
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Who are We the People?

• Slavery
• Resolution 13th Amendment, 1865 Neither
  slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
  punishment for crime where of the party shall
  have been duly convicted, shall exist within the
  United States, or any place subject to their
  jurisdiction.

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Who are We the People?

• Fourteenth Amendment, 1866 All persons born or
  naturalized in the United States, and subject to
  the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the
  United States and of the State wherein they
  reside. No State shall make or enforce any law
  which shall abridge the privileges or immunities
  of citizens of the United States nor shall any
  State deprive any person of life, liberty, or
  property, without due process of law nor deny to
  any person within its jurisdiction the equal
  protection of the laws.
• Japanese internment, WWII, Rendition

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Who are We the People?

• Universal (male) suffrage
• 15th Amendment, 1870 The right of citizens of
  the United States to vote shall not be denied or
  abridged by the United States or by any State on
  account of race, color, or previous condition of
  servitude.
• National Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned
  literacy tests

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and women?

• Womens suffrage
• Started with Wyoming in 1869, national with 19th
  Amendment (1920) The right of citizens of the
  United States to vote shall not be denied or
  abridged by the United States or by any State on
  account of sex.
• Equal Rights Amendment died 1982

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and women?

• Birth Control
• Comstock Act (1873) made it illegal to send any
  "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" materials
  through the mail, including contraceptive devices
  and information.
• In 1936, a federal appeals court ruled in United
  States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries that
  the federal government could not interfere with
  doctors providing contraception to their patients.

Margaret Sanger
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and women?

• Abortion
• Roe v. Wade, 1973 abortions are permissible for
  any reason a woman chooses, up until the "point
  at which the fetus becomes viable, that is,
  potentially able to live outside the mother's
  uterus, albeit with artificial aid. Viability is
  usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks)
  but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.
• The "viability" criterion, which Justice Blackmun
  acknowledged was arbitrary, is still in effect,
  although the point of viability has changed as
  medical science has found ways to help premature
  babies survive.
• Decision still under attack

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Vibrators

• Late 1800s Mechanized devices developed for use
  by doctors to treat hysteria (Gk. hyster
  womb) in women.
• 1920s with introduction of electricity in the
  home, the personal massager is sold to
  consumers but not as a sex aid.

• Several Southern States including Alabama,
  Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, have had bans on
  sex toys upheld by their courts, denying a right
  to sexual privacy.

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Homosexuality

• Sodomy (often undefined, but can mean
  homosexuality, or oral or anal sex between
  consenting adults, and sometimes even
  masturbation) has always been banned by the
  individual states, based on English common law.
  In 1533, a secular law was enacted in England
  against what Henry VIII called the abominable
  vice of buggery.
• Famously, Queen Victoria deleted all mention of
  lesbianism in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of
  1885, stating, "Female homosexuality does not
  exist."
• Virginia had the first written prohibition
  against sodomy, enacted in 1610. It is of note
  that this was repealed after only eight years and
  no other colony had a written law against sodomy
  until Plymouth adopted one in 1636.

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Homosexuality

• Late in the 19th Century, with the beginnings of
  psychological sciences, homosexuality was
  presumed to be a mental disorder. Some gay men
  then fell prey to the eugenics laws, and forced
  sterilization. It was only declassified as a
  mental disorder in the DSM-II in 1973.
• 2003 In Lawrence v. Texas, the court (6-3)
  struck down a Texas statute against sodomy,
  saying that adult have a right to sexual privacy.
  Some have suggested that the decision may also
  have an effect on Obscenity Laws (particularly
  after a decision in 2005 in US v. Extreme
  Associates, which has since been overturned.)

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Sexual Material

• Up until the 20th Century, obscene material was
  generally illegal. Material was obscene if it
  could corrupt the most sensitive persons
• In Miller v. California (1973), the court
  provided a new definition of obscenity
• the average person, applying contemporary
  community standards (not national standards, as
  some prior tests required), must find that the
  work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient
  interest
• the work depicts or describes, in a
  patently offensive way, sexual conduct or
  excretory functions specifically defined by
  applicable state law and
• the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious
  literary, artistic, political, or scientific
  value.

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Sexual Material

• Obscenity is different from Indecency, which
  is a standard set by the case of FCC v. Pacifica
  in 1978. Indecency only applies to broadcast TV
  and radio.
• In 2004, the FCC found CBS guilty of indecency
  for the Super Bowl halftime show with Janet
  Jackson.
• Currently, the FCC is in dispute over a number of
  its rulings on indecency, and the right of the
  government to censor in this way is, to many, in
  direct conflict with the 1st Amendment.
• The science of the effects of sexual material is
  very much in dispute, especially in the age of
  the internet.

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Marriage

• Miscegenation Laws
• Many states banned interracial marriages, up
  until the late 60s
• In Loving v. Virginia, (1967), the Supreme Court
  said Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights
  of man," fundamental to our very existence and
  survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on
  so unsupportable a basis as the racial
  classifications embodied in these statutes,
  classifications so directly subversive of the
  principle of equality at the heart of the
  Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all
  the State's citizens of liberty without due
  process of law.
• Alabama finally repealed its law in 2000.

The Lovings
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Same-sex Marriage

• Only recognized by Massachusetts (2004) and
  Connecticut (2008).
• Vermont, California, New Jersey, and New
  Hampshire have created legal unions that, while
  not called marriages, are explicitly defined as
  offering all the rights and responsibilities of
  marriage under state (though not federal) law to
  same-sex couples.

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Same-sex Marriage

• Maine, Hawaii, the District of Columbia, Oregon
  and Washington have created legal unions for
  same-sex couples that offer varying subsets of
  the rights and responsibilities of marriage under
  the laws of those jurisdictions.
• Many states have passed laws to prevent any
  passage of same-sex marriage rights.

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Climate Change

• 1827 First theories about global warming from
  greenhouse gasses
• 1960s environmental movement associated with
  Left Wing politics
• 1979 National Academy of Sciences warns "a
  wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is
  too late."
• 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce production of
  greenhouse gasses by 2012.

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Climate Change

• 2001 The United States, the biggest single
  greenhouse-gas polluter, abandons the Kyoto
  Protocol. President George W. Bush questions
  scientific consensus on global warming, says the
  treaty is too expensive for the U.S. economy and
  unfair as big developing countries escape binding
  emissions pledges.
• 2003 White House cuts information from EPA
  report
• 2006 An Inconvenient Truth
• White House edits NASA report on global warming
• 2007 George Bush installs a windmill at his
  Maine house.

"First, we would not accept a treaty that would
not have been ratified, nor a treaty that I
thought made sense for the country." -President
Bush on the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty,
Washington Post, April 24, 2001
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Technology

• Eugenics (Social Darwinism)
• 19th Century many states banned marriage for
  anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or
  feeble-minded.
• Over 60,000 people nationally were forcibly
  sterilized.
• Vermont Sterilization Law (1931) Henceforth it
  shall be the policy of the state to prevent
  procreation of idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded
  or insane persons, when the public welfare, and
  the welfare of idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded
  or insane persons likely to procreate, can be
  improved by voluntary sterilization as herein
  provided.
• The law resulted in the sterilization of several
  hundred poor, rural Vermonters, Abenaki Indians
  and others deemed unfit to procreate.

Professor Henry Perkins of UVM, Director,
Eugenics Survey of Vermont
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Technology

• Eugenics (Social Darwinism)
• Holocaust during WWII
• Immigration policies have often excluded certain
  races from entering the United States.
• Current medical techniques, esp. DNA research,
  can determine likelihood of future disease or
  disability, and therefore encourage abortion of
  unsuitable fetuses.

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Technology

• Atomic Bomb
• Hiroshima, 1945
• Cold War (1945 1989), nominally.
• Currently US main enforcer of preventing use by
  other countries.

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Technology

• Stem Cells
• 1995 Dickey Amendment passed which prohibits
  federal funding for (1) the creation of a human
  embryo or embryos for research purposes or (2)
  research in which a human embryo or embryos are
  destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to
  risk of injury or death greater than that allowed
  for research on fetuses in utero
• Recent discovery that skin cells can be used
  instead may change prohibition.

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Technology

• Euthanasia Right to Die
• Discovery of anesthetics in early 19th Century
  resulted in increased ability to provide humane
  death for terminal patients.
• Quinlan case of 1970s resulted in many states
  passing Living Will laws.
• 1990s Jack Kevorkian convicted for performing
  doctor-assisted suicide.
• 1997 Supreme Court finds such practices legal.