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Take the 14th Amendment, one of three Reconstruction-era changes to the Constitution which panelists will explore. This amendment ensured the citizenship of formerly enslaved individuals, but since that time, because it affirms equal protection under the law, it has allowed for a huge number of different kinds of people to come forward with other kinds of claims far beyond this, said Alison Parker, panelist and chair of the Department of History at UD. It is now the basis for the protection of gays to marry and the notion that you could have a right to privacy that might gain you access to birth control and/or abortion that all comes from an expanded sense of what life and liberty is, under the 14th Amendment.
The Reconstruction Amendments, which were also responsible for abolishing slavery and guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race, represent a racially charged period in time that in many ways replicates our own, said Dael Norwood, panel moderator and assistant professor of history at UD. In this sense, studying the Constitution should give us a sense of the danger and also the promise of the present moment.
These pieces of legislation represent the promise of multracial democracy and tighter national unity founded around a greater expansion of individual rights as promised by the federal government, Norwood said. So thats a really hopeful vision of the future. It didnt really work out that way for a variety of reasons well cover at the panel, Im sure, but that kind of Reconstruction moment is a moment of hope and imagining something new which is a valuable place to get our heads back into when were feeling beset from all sides.