Questions regarding legislation and the first amendment

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Questions regarding legislation and the first amendment:

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What are some examples of legislation advanced by political movements to secure the rights of disadvantaged groups?

The first of these examples would be Affirmative Action. It required that dynamic measures be taken to ensure that blacks and other minorities had the same opportunities in career, job placements, school admissions, financial assistance, scholarships, and all other aid that had been exclusive to whites. It focused mainly on jobs and education. This was introduced by President Kennedy in 1961 to address the discrimination that continued in spite of the civil rights laws and other constitutional guarantees (Wikipedia, 2011). It was President Johnson that developed and enforced the federal contractors to enforce affirmative action and hire individuals irrespective of race, religion, or national origin. As I am sure you are well aware of, Affirmative Action has been a topic of tremendous debate mainly on the grounds of racial inequality. Reverse discrimination claims were settled in University of California vs. Bakke (1978) (Soifer, Hoffman, & Voss, 2001) when the Supreme Court ordered the white applicant initially denied admission be admitted to avoid reverse discrimination.

The second example is the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed by President Johnson in an attempt to deal with the demands of blacks for equal rights. In the 1950's and 1960's, civil rights were linked to the struggle for equality of American blacks. "The aim of that struggle was to secure the status of equal citizenship in a liberal democratic state. Civil rights are the basic legal rights a person must possess in order to have such a status. They are the rights that constitute free and equal citizenship and include personal, political, and economic rights" (Altman, 2007). This is a constitutional guarantee provided by the Fourteenth Amendment. The 1964 Civil Rights Act specifically prohibited discrimination in voting, ...