Commentary
On Bill Cosby, Voting Rights, And The Truth
Just remember the Republicans want to deny you a chair and some water while you wait in line to vote in some states. That’s where this country is these days.
After three years in prison, Bill Cosby, the man whose sexual assault conviction was overturned due to a procedural matter, is a free man.
When a district attorney in Pennsylvania made a deal not to prosecute Cosby on criminal charges back in 2005, Cosby couldn’t ‘take the Fifth’ in a civil deposition on the same charges. So, Cosby simply told the truth—that essentially, he used quaaludes and alcohol as his M.O. to have non-consensual sex with women. The deposition should never have been used in 2015 when a new D.A. decided to go after Cosby criminally. But it convicted Cosby, who was in prison until the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided a deal was a deal.
And that is how you get this thing called justice in America. It takes the best attorneys and lots of money. Most of us don’t have that and will never see it. Cosby had it. He did serve three years, but he’s out now.
I feel for all the women who came forward after years of silence. I feel for the plaintiff in the one case, Andrea Constand.
But this is the law. We can change it. Or other Cosby victims—if time hasn’t run out–can come forward and lodge new cases. In the meantime, we should be happy the law works. Because most of the time, the wrongfully accused and jailed are not the Cosbys of the world, but the innocent nobodys who get a raw deal. The law works for us all.
Note that no one is saying Cosby is innocent. But it’s a tough lesson when the truth is revealed and can’t be used because of a D.A.’s blunder.
But it does fit in with where we are in this truth-forsaken country of ours.
When we stood on the Fourth of July among fellow Americans–after looking at the sparkle of peonies and coronavirus shapes shot in the air– did you ask yourself if our democracy was going up in smoke?
We have an ex-president who continues to upset the democratic equation by challenging the very fact that he lost the election fair and square last November. We know that to be as true as there are 50 states in our union.
But here we are in mid-2021, after the twin disaster of an actual pandemic and a political pandemic, that is four years of a president who, though out of office, is still hellbent on destroying our democracy. After all that, what are we left with? Not a sense of unity. Not in an America where no one can seem to agree on anything. Masks? Vaccines? The Constitution? Truth?
And let’s put aside hot buttons like abortion, policing, or race, for now. Let’s just think of practical matters like how do we fund and fix our infrastructure to make sure our country’s roads and bridges are safe for all?
Or how can we balance our priorities and close the income gaps that exist between the very wealthy and the very poor?
And then we have the basis of our democracy itself. How do we make sure that everyone gets heard in our country through the fundamental right of franchise? Not the right to open a Jollibee. a Panda Express, or a Popeye’s Chicken. I mean the right to vote. That kind of franchise.
Just remember the Republicans want to deny you a chair and some water while you wait in line to vote in some states. That’s where this country is these days.
On the other hand, if you maintain that the presidency was stolen last November from Trump, then you believe not only in the “Big Lie,” but in its enabler, the myth of voter fraud.
And then it’s likely you were either part of the insurrection of the capitol or supporting the violent actions to de-certify the election on January 6. Is all that worth investigating—to protect our democracy? But Republicans don’t think so.
They prefer the anti-democracy solution: to exclude people from voting by making the rules tighter and tougher so that even legally cast ballots are disqualified. These are laws that will likely hurt Blacks and other people of color disproportionately.
Last week at the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, six conservative justices (including the three Trump appointees) beat back the three liberal ones to side with voting restrictions. Already 17 states have restrictive laws, and now challenging any of them will be near impossible.
This is another blow to perhaps the single most important civil rights law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Weakened over the years, last week’s ruling is the alarm for Congress to take action and pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act in order to restore protections that would preserve our democracy.
As they say, keep your eye on the prize. Bill Cosby? Just a distraction. Let him defend Phylicia Rashad’s Free Speech rights to defend Cosby.
Right now, the fight of the ’60s has been renewed. The threats to our democracy are that real.
