Has an ugly era returned?

Letters to the Editor

Has an ugly era returned?

When the New York Knicks played the St. Louis Hawks in the mid-1950s, three African-American team members were not allowed to stay in the same St. Louis hotel as the white players. In that same period, black musicians touring in the South were routinely turned away from hotels, restaurants and barber shops.

Are we now entering a new era of discrimination in which restaurant owners, bakers and county clerks can decide which citizens they will serve and which will be turned away?

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family go to a restaurant to eat a meal, but are told to leave because of Sanders’ politics.

NFL players are denied First Amendment rights to protest racial injustice, Muslims are banned, refugee children are taken from their parents and white supremacists are called fine people.

Is there no end to hatred, bigotry and discrimination?

Shirley Baechtold

Richmond

Comments

Letters to the Editor

Cringe-o-rama: Mitch McConnell, lower standards for nursing home inspections, UK shoe fetish, us. Us?

By Herald-Leader readers

February 15, 2019 04:51 PM

Cringe-worthy McConnell

In opinion pieces in the Herald-Leader and on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell has opposed the Democratic Party’s legislation to reform the methods states use for electing members of Congress. He characterizes the bill as an unprecedented power grab by Democrats. He casts himself as a defender of the constitutional rights of state legislatures to prescribe the time, place and manner for holding elections for U.S. senators and members of the House of Representatives. He pledges that he will not let such a bill come before the Senate for a vote (as an aside, how democratic is a system based on procedures that allow one person to block a bill from being considered by the full Senate?).

As a retired University of Kentucky law professor, I cringe that one of our graduates would make an argument that ignores a basic tenet of constitutional interpretation — read the whole sentence/clause. The Constitution, Article I, Section 4, states: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations...”