There is a serious disconnect between the opinions of the American public and the political agendas of our nation’s representatives. Dozens of polls conducted by various institutions all over the country reach the same conclusion time after time: America is not living up to the expectations of her citizens.
For decades now, the people’s plea for equality, freedom and happiness has been drowned out by the vicious drum of the collective pulse of democratic process.
The problem with the American democratic process is its attempt to lend instant and unwavering credibility to every imaginable argumentative perspective existing within the framework of historically debatable issues.
America and her politicians need to realize that some things should not be up for discussion.
Number one is the right to universal health care. Polls consistently show that American public opinion is in favor of making the right to health a necessary and inalienable privilege of American citizenship. Yet this topic is continually debated as if it were somehow a question as to who deserves access to medical care and who does not.
Being poor should not affect your rights.
In fact, our Bill of Rights should be designed so that a person would even have the ability to choose poverty and still receive the benefit of American freedoms. Otherwise, we inevitably create a culture wherein wealth is inextricably associated with personal freedom.
The majority of Americans agree that we need government to facilitate healthcare provision, so that every person can truly feel the sense of security that comes with being an American.
The second right American citizens desire (and deserve) is in the form of equal marriage rights for all adult citizens. According to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, 62 percent of the population supports same-sex unions. This means that any two sane, sober and consenting adults have absolute freedom to legally unite with one another, so long as they can provide the necessary documentation to obtain a license.
Laws which define marriage as being solely between a man and a woman are only based in an archaic societal desire to perpetuate the false American sense of heterosexual superiority. Personally, I think that sense stems from cultural anxiety about how the acceptance of homosexual tendencies could affect the roles of men and women, altering the dependency of the one’s cultural identity upon the other.
It was then exacerbated by our nation’s influence of colonial Puritanism and ultimately validated through the measures of law. Today that sense of superiority still dominates and our democracy mistakenly works to lend credibility to such unjustified beliefs. It is the essential institutionalization of bigotry, veiled with the guise of “protecting tradition.”
Our nation should not further its development with the reputation for civil discord, inequality and non-acceptance. We have the tools to be smarter than that, so being American can mean being free to experience love and family.
States’ rights, especially concerning drugs and medical marijuana laws, are number three on our list of “should-be” American rights. Pollsters find an overwhelming amount of national support on this issue, which is in direct opposition to the Obama administration’s viewpoints on the subject. According to Mason-Dixon Polling and Research, 74 percent of American voters think the federal government should not determine states’ distinct medical marijuana laws.
The fact is, Obama is continuing a baseless battle against the fabricated and hyperbolized evils of a naturally growing herb. Most Americans realize that “Reefer Madness” and cannabis demonization are outdated models of government mass control, reflecting a historical bias against the groups associated with weed usage.
The nation’s War on Drugs exceeded a cost of $15 billion in 2010 and has recently led to a massive and unsustainable rise in drug-related incarceration rates and harsher punishments of drug-law offenders. The federal War on Drugs has been a legal excuse to terrorize the impoverished, the minority Americans and the young.
Americans have spoken in numerous polls. They do not want to continue to pay for a civil war which targets the meek, the underrepresented and the marginalized among us. Americans want the federal government to butt out of states’ decisions regarding their own drug laws and how to enforce them.
Speaking of butting out, the American government needs to keep its democratic process out of any determination of a woman’s reproductive health. This is number four on the list of American rights gone wrong.
One poll conducted by Quinnipiac University found that more than 80 percent of Americans support birth control practices and contraceptive use. Recent New York Times polls show that 63 percent of Americans even support government-mandated insurance coverage for birth control.
Most people in America favor women’s rights, including having access to contraceptives, yet this is steadily debated as though it is an open issue. No American woman should have to feel as though her ability to maintain her personal reproductive health is in conflict with American national civil liberties.
No person should be made to feel as though the body he or she is born into determines the freedom to enjoy that body, to protect and to preserve that body.
The war on women has been taking place for centuries, but now we’ve evolved enough, with enough history behind us, to move past it.
We must move beyond the cultural block that prevents us from realizing the endless depth of human compassion that would flood the world with unity and understanding. To do that, we should seek to rid the prevalence of religious influence from American politics.
The fifth right we have been getting wrong for ages: the right to freedom from religion.
According to a survey by the First Amendment Center, 67 percent of Americans support a Constitutional understanding of distinct church and state separation.
American people agree that we need to keep religion as a personal experience and not allow religious dogma to seep into our nation’s laws.
Our representatives are behind on many levels of public opinion, and it seems that the U.S. government’s primary concern is maintaining the status quo. We cannot allow our nation to exist in two spheres of reality, and overcoming the problems with the democratic process means accepting that all people are indeed entitled to fairness, but not necessarily opinion.