What would Lincoln say in his 'Phoenix Address'?

Just a matter of days after Arizona passed new immigration laws which were reminiscent of the oft abused 'sus' laws in Britain in the 1970's - the ability of police officers to stop and question young black men (usually) on suspicion of being...well...young black men - the AZ legislature decided it needed to scale back the powers given to the likes of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his shoot from the hip brand of western lawman.

Instead of just being able to stop brown people at will, they will now have to wait until the brown person in question is stopped for or charged with a criminal or civil violation. Aside from the obvious - that this only raises the bar a tad and simply means that law enforcement will have to be a little more creative when finding a reason to question people, it raises a more important question - how come the Arizona legislature can operate in such an astonishingly speedy way to write, pass, then add, and revise state statutes?

This law joins a cascade of poorly crafted state laws which are instantly challenged in court and often fail to make it into our lives - thankfully. California's Prop 187 is one such example and Arizona might have done well to take a look at that ill conceived immigrant bashing effort before heading down a similar path. And though it deals with a different issue - Prop 8 is another. Do states really have the money, the time - let alone the authority - to try to manufacture social policy just because a loud cacophany of voices shouts down reasoned thought?

Which brings me to a speech - THE speech really, by Lincoln - which is being evoked with such regularity at the moment by the right wing. The frenetic right, which would have us believe that we are in the midst of a Marxist revolution, federal police state, socialist, Leninist, Trotskyist, Chicago Mafia, government takeover of our liberty and freedom under that well known revolutionary guard Barry Obamsky and his cohorts from Goldman Sachs, all under the guidance of the Weather Underground...

I'm talking of course about the Gettysburg Address - Lincoln's 2 minute evocation of the terror and suffering of civil war, the requirement to remember the fundamental truth of the founding of this 'NATION' - that of a new liberty, a new form of government which ensures the freedom of all. Not once did he mention states rights (the mantra of the New Right). On the contrary, he speaks plainly of one nation (there is some dissent as to whether he used the words 'under God') but it matters not.

Lincoln was not thinking of a place far to the west of Gettysburg where a new civil war would be fomented, between those with the correct plastic ID card and those without. At the time, Lincoln feared that sentiment in the North was turning against the war and that he would lose not just the ability to stay the course, but even to stay in elected office. The speech was not even that well received, especially by Democrats who wanted to oust Lincoln. But even that matters not. History has elevated the short speech at Gettysburg into one the foremost symbols of American Liberty.

"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate...we can not consecrate...we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Abraham Lincoln November 19th, 1863