Life, liberty, and the pursuit of voting registration

I was casting about in my mind (what an odd phrase!) for a topic to post about next, and I happened to read an article written by Kate Brumback in the online version of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a proposed new law regarding voting in Georgia. You can read it in its entirety here (Dr. John Linna of Neenah, Wisconsin, take note).

In a comment, Mamamoose wrote: “To show citizenship all you need is your birth certificate. Everyone (minorities, elderly, etc.) should have a copy of their birth certificate. If you don’t, you need it whether or not it is going to be required to vote. Voting is a right as an American citizen. We should want this law to pass. I don’t want illegal immigrants casting votes to determine the people in office.”

Then someone called Freedom Watcher wrote: “I don’t need to prove anything. You need to prove that I am not a citizen or what ever. I was not created to serve government it was created to serve me. I exist at my pleasure not the other way around. If it is nolonger [sic] serving then it should nolonger [sic] exist.”

And someone called Sine qua non wrote: “What a quaint idea...you have to be a citizen of this country to vote in an election in this country! It’s not like the new law is saying you have to be male, or white, or a landowner who pays property taxes, or pay a poll tax (all of which used to be requirements but were overruled by amendments to the Constitution)...only that you have some proof you are an American.

“Freedom Watcher’s heart is in the right place but is he or she saying that ANYONE, American or not, ought to be able to vote in American elections??? Let me put it this way: Should Freshmen, Sophomores, and Juniors have a say in who is to be president of the Senior Class? The Student Body president, maybe, but not the president of the Senior Class. God help us if we ever amend our Constitution to let anyone, anywhere on the face of the earth vote in U.S. elections. That will be the day we have jumped the shark.”

[An aside to lovers of language: Regarding the phrase “casting about in my mind” up there in the first sentence of the post, it originally made me think of someone fishing using a rod and reel or a net (and my mind was the lake), but then it occurred to me that the phrase was somewhere in the Bible. Sure enough, when I searched an online version of the Bible I discovered that the phrase, changed only slightly, appears in the first chapter of Luke in the New Testament in the King James Version. It is in the passage about the Annunciation. After the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and said, “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women,” the next verse says, “And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be” and you know the rest of the story. I checked Strong’s Concordance and learned that “cast in her mind” has nothing to do with fishing; it is a translation of the Greek word διαλογίζομαι (dialogizomai), which according to both Thayer’s Lexicon and Strong means “to bring together different reasons, to reckon up the reasons, to reason, revolve in one’s mind, deliberate.” That must be where our English word dialog comes from, except that a dialog requires two people. I don’t know about you, but I found this extremely interesting. Almost as interesting as the fact that I use more prepositions than the Virgin Mary. --RWP]

I realize this photo has nothing to do with this post, but this is my blog and I can post it if I want to. I don’t even need a birth certificate.

Three guesses who Sine qua non is, and the first two don’t count.