I read with bemusement Deborah Bucknam’s commentary which Digger recently lowered itself to publishing. The galvanic taste of irony was overwhelming in her inane attempt to equate diversity, equity and inclusion training with Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford, from which she quotes briefly. The irony being that, were it not for the 14th Amendment, the ratification of which Deborah Bucknam would almost certainly have opposed then just as much as she opposes Critical Race Theory today, Taney’s majority opinion is still standing SCOTUS precedent. It has never been overruled or repudiated formally by the Supreme Court.
In company with this glaring example of racism being deeply intertwined with the bedrock of our deeply flawed but slowly improving nation, Korematsu v. United States is also still standing SCOTUS precedent, which held that Japanese Americans, by virtue of their ancestry, could be deprived of their property and and interned in camps during World War II. Again- The Supreme Court has never repudiated or overruled this opinion. It is still the law of the land.
As is Buck v. Bell, a 1927 opinion that held that the states have the right to forcibly sterilize women it considers “unfit to procreate.” The criteria for these sterilizations include race and ethnicity. This standing SCOTUS precedent is only overruled by the Americans With Disabilities Act (under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution), which has only been in effect since 1990. This last hits close to home, as Vermont was forcibly sterilizing Abenaki women well into the 1960s, and the state law authorizing this is still on the books in Vermont. We could overturn this law, but to my mind Proposition 5 is a better avenue of permanently foreclosing Buck v. Bell, at least in Vermont.
The rest of the commentary is a muddled morass of cherry-picked ad hominem and wild extrapolation meant to serve as a clarion call to the sort of people who maybe have the good sense, most of the time, to not fly the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia off their porch or the radio antenna of their truck, but largely sympathize with those who do in private.
There’s a reason Bucknam’s party can’t win elections in this state.
Scott Gillette
Hancock
