It was just two days before the 50th anniversary of the Brown v Board of Education ruling, perhaps the greatest civil rights victory this country has ever seen. The US Supreme Court ruling that desegregated public schools was decided on May 17, 1954. And yet May 15, 2004 at FAU was the site of a short campaign speech by Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Johnnie Byrd who has been a threat to civil rights in Florida for the past eight years.
The College Republicans teamed up with Chi Alpha to bring Byrd to speak. Let me be quite clear before I go on. Any club ought to have the right to bring whoever they want to speak so long as the person isn’t asking for an outrageous sum of money. Byrd came to speak for free.
Byrd is running for the US Senate, a seat which belonged to now retired Bob Graham.
After hearing Byrd’s speech and the question and answer session I realized that this man is a threat to civil rights. Two of Byrd’s proudest accomplishments are Florida’s Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and Parental Notice Amendment, which will be voted on by Floridians in Nov. The same time Byrd will be on the ballot.
DOMA was sponsored by Byrd in 1996 and passed in 1997. Aside from the inflammatory and homophobic language used by Republicans who cheered its passing, this act denies the recognition of same-sex marriages. This of course is a hot button issue right now, not just in Florida but nationally. While there’s the great debate of what same-sex marriages will do to America’s moral fiber, let me just remind everyone that the people deciding on this issue are not the people involved in this issue, once again. As in abortion and desegregation where it was either men deciding on women’s rights or white men deciding on blacks’ rights we have heterosexual men and women deciding on homosexuals’ rights.
Someone explain to me how that’s fair. It is neither fair nor constitutional. According to the FSU Law Review, “In 1980, the Florida electorate amended the Florida Constitution to confer upon its citizens the ‘right to be left alone and free from governmental intrusion and into his private life.’ … Soon after the amendment’s passage, the Florida Supreme Court formally recognized that marriage and other ‘family rights’ fall within the general rights of privacy.” What all that means is that government has no right to tell anyone whom they can marry and who can have an abortion.
Yet Byrd, who parades around the terms freedom and family empowerment has no problem limiting that to those who are already free. Byrd, who after his lecture, praised the privacy amendment, went on to tell how the first bill he sponsored was the DOMA and how his last bill was the Parental Notice.
Where DOMA limits the constitutional rights of homosexuals, the Parental Notice Amendment, if it passes, would force women under 18 to get their parent’s consent if they want an abortion. This amendment is clearly set up to scare away pregnant teenagers who are but children themselves. I guess children don’t have rights either, or at least not according to Byrd. Along with marriage, abortion rights fall under Florida’s privacy amendment. But what’s freedom if it serves everybody equally?
Byrd finished his speech with his mantra “more freedom and family empowerment,” begging the question, for whom?
