Today marks the anniversary of the United States granting statehood to my home state of Missouri.
This came about because of the federal statute known as the “Missouri Compromise of 1820,” that admitted Missouri as a slave state, but restricted slavery above the 36°30′ parallel of the Louisiana Territory.
That compromise lasted a generation until overturned by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
Then, the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 declared that African-Americans (whether slave or free) could not actually be considered citizens, and therefore had no standing to sue in a federal court. That decision is now often described as the worst decision SCOTUS ever made. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney presided over the court in that decision; Missouri named a county after him — now better known as the location of Branson.
Ultimately, all of these events formed part of the chain of events leading to the Civil War.
During the War, Missouri was extremely divided among her own citizens, even among families. And after the War, men like Jesse James would rob “Yankee” railroad cars full of “Northern banker’s money.” In addition to the pursuit of ill-gotten gain, James had a notion that the war wasn’t quite yet over.
In the 1990s, an old Southern gentlemen heard I was from Missouri and proceeded to call me a Yankee. I explain that I was from Missouri, not New England. His only response: “Was Jesse James a hero or an outlaw?”
The “personhood” issues involved in the Dred Scott decision are with us still today. In last week’s GOP debate, Gov. Mike Huckabee said:
A lot of people are talking about defunding Planned Parenthood, as if that’s a huge game changer. I think it’s time to do something even more bold. I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments to the constitution now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception.The reason we know that it is is because of the DNA schedule that we now have clear scientific evidence on. And, this notion that we just continue to ignore the personhood of the individual is a violation of that unborn child’s 5th and 14th Amendment rights for due process and equal protection under the law.It’s time that we recognize the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being, and we change the policy to be pro-life and protect children instead of rip up their body parts and sell them like they’re parts to a Buick.
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