Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Some lessons on the people’s right to vote

As a Fayette County resident almost all of my life, a product of Fayette County Schools from kindergarten to high school graduation, and now a social studies teacher at Fayette County High School, I was disgusted by the lies and untruths you published in the March 3, 2004 edition of your paper.

In your editorial articles, “What about our rights?” and “The Gay Marriage Debate: Some servants and some mis-representatives,” you have ignored the foundations of our government both at the state and national level.

Eight times in the front page article and twice in the opinion page article you accuse those in the state House of Representatives of taking away the people’s right to vote. This is untrue and invalid at its core.

According to Article II, Section I of the Georgia Constitution the only reasons a person, who meets age and residency requirements as defined by the U.S. Constitution and state law, can have the right to vote taken away from them are due to convictions of felony crimes involving moral turpitude or judicial declaration of mental illness. I certainly hope the state legislature was not trying to declare us all crazy or felons as you suggest!

The Georgia constitution then defines the election and terms of members of the Georgia legislature in Article II Section II Paragraph V. Those elected representatives then are to fulfill all duties prescribed to them by Article II Section I, the powers of the Assembly, and in Article X Section I Paragraph II which defines the procedure to amend the state constitution.

That procedure is to have a proposed amendment pass in both the state house and state senate by a two-thirds vote. After this is completed, the amendment is brought to the voters of the state for their approval in the next general election.

Of course you left out that the Georgia Constitution and all of its 62 amendments were originally passed through a state legislature controlled by Democrats and ratified by a VOTE of the people.

The main reason that many amendments are not getting passed through this year’s legislature is [because of] a Republican-controlled Senate and a Democrat-controlled House. These party differences make it even more difficult for a proposed amendment to get the constitutionally required two-thirds majority in both houses.

As for your comment that the state house has handed “the future of marriage to faceless, legislating, activist judges,” you left out that in the state of Georgia those judges are also ELECTED by the people and serve either four- or six-year terms depending on the court they are elected to.

Also don’t forget that due to the supremacy clause (Article IV, Section 2) of the U.S. Constitution, the state judges cannot “invent out of thin air ‘rights’ never imagined by the framers of our governing document,” as you suggest unless you are describing the framers of our state constitution (Written all the way back in 1983!).

One of the most common misconceptions about American government is that we are a pure democracy. This is untrue and is the pothole that your articles stepped in. There has never been a country that has practiced pure democracy in the history of the world. America practices representative democracy in which the people elect representatives to make decisions for them.

Students in Fayette County schools learn this in eighth grade Georgia government class and in chapter one of the textbook used for twelfth grade citizenship education.

If you do not like the decisions made by your representatives, you have the right to choose another after their term is complete. If you feel they represent you well and they run for re-election, you have the right to vote for them again.

Either way, please participate in the political process by voting, contacting your all of your elected representatives, and reviewing their records before deciding who to vote for in the November election.

Allen Leonard

Teacher at Fayette County High School and resident of Fayetteville, Ga.