Vote Suppression and Racist Legislation Do Have Consequences

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The Georgia legislature recently passed a bill to "reform" the state's existing election laws.    The new law, a wide-ranging statute that the state's predominantly white GOP legislators assured the public, with a wink and a grin, was designed to stop election fraud, was immediately signed by the state's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who hailed it a a big step forward in the advancement of free and fair elections.    

However, many others felt, with plenty of good reason, that the primary purpose was not to limit fraud by voters, but rather to limit voting - especially voting by minority groups and people of color.  The President of the United States referred to Georgia's new legislation as a modern expression of the old Jim Crow laws of the segregated South.

There was enough national noise on the matter that a couple of Georgia-based businesses, Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, spoke out against what many were calling an attack on democracy.  The negative notices by some members of corporate America no doubt made some Republicans nervous since their party normally does quite well from the largess of big business, but then things suddenly got far more real last week when Major League Baseball announced that it would not be playing this summer's All-Star game in Atlanta as previously planned and scheduled.

The Cobb County (Atlanta) Travel and Tourism Board has estimated that moving the All-Star game out of Atlanta will cost the area an estimated $100 million or more in lost revenue.  Others argue that the loss won't be that steep, but it will be significant, nonetheless, for an urban area that is trying to recover from the lingering business slump brought about by the pandemic.

Some Republican politicians, particularly those of the southern white variety, are wailing about something they call "cancel culture," and proposing economic retaliation through boycott of businesses that they feel are interfering with their God-given right to discriminate based on race.

And meanwhile they're breaking out the party hats and horns in Colorado after Major League Baseball announced yesterday that the July 13th All-Star game will be played in Denver!

It would seem that vote suppression and racist legislation do have consequences!