Those Cursing Benedictines

Wow! Could those pre-Middle Ages Benedictines curse! 

They cursed landlords, people who were stealing their properties and just about anyone possibly doing them wrong. They cursed them at Mass and Vespers and in special ceremonies. And they cursed them for generation to generation for eternity. 

I used to collect benedictions and curses; my two favorite non-Benedictine curses were “May you never have a day of luck” and “May all your teeth fall out but one. And that - it should hurt!”

More on curses later.

Decades before the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, Thomas D. Rice appeared in minstrel shows in full blackface, dressed in rags and wearing a bed hat and torn shoes. Legend has it Rice was imitating an elderly, disabled slave with a crippled leg and deformed shoulder and singing about “Jim Crow,” whose surname was that of his slave master.

Not coincidentally, so-called Jim Crow laws began to appear in the wake of the withdrawal of federal troops from the post-Civil War Reconstruction South. Over the next twenty years, the derisive term for Black men came to be applied to state laws that established different rules for Blacks and Whites and were based on the theory of White supremacy. In the 1890s, they were designed to appeal to Whites who feared losing their jobs to Blacks and were fueled by newspaper accounts that played-up - often phony - Black-on-White crimes. 

Jim Crow laws touched every aspect of Southern life: Black and White textile workers in South Carolina could not work in the same room, enter the same door or gaze out the same windows. Unions excluded Black members. One could not marry someone of a different race and “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs were ubiquitous. Oklahoma had Black and White phone booths and Miami/Miami Beach limited Blacks to a sliver of “beach” miles from the ocean. Prisons, hospitals, orphanages and colleges and universities were segregated, and Atlanta courts maintained Black and White bibles. Virginia fraternal organizations even prevented Black and White members from calling each other “brother.”

More than 350,000 Black men served in World War I, most in support units or alongside French troops; 171 were awarded the French Legion of Honor. Private William Henry Johnson was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Barrack Obama in 2015. Corporal Freddie Stowers recommendation for the honor was “misplaced” and never processed. Seventy-three years after his death, President George H.W. Bush presented the Medal of Honor to his surviving sisters, Georgina and Mary. 

Black soldiers were welcomed home with race riots and White mobs lynching uniformed Black veterans. These veterans came home to states in which Blacks and Whites could not ride in the same railroad cars, use the same waiting or wash rooms, eat in the same restaurants or sit in the same theaters.

Jim Crow laws stripped Blacks of the modest social, economic and political gains they had made in the late 19th Century. Laws designed to ensure that Whites retained control of social relations between the races were established in the more fluid atmosphere of growing cities and towns in the South, where traditional patterns of deference and subjugation were more difficult to preserve than in the countryside.

While colonists paid poll taxes before the American Revolution – “taxation without representation,” they were not always linked directly to voting; they were personal taxes. After Congress passed the 15th Amendment in 1870 declaring citizens – but not women – should be allowed to vote without regard to race or prior history of slavery, eleven Southern states imposed a form of poll tax on their residents – requiring citizens to pay the tax or provide proof of payment to register or vote. 

The 1901 Alabama Constitution established a cumulative poll tax; to vote, all taxes must have been paid from the time a man turned twenty-one. The 1926 Georgia Code stipulated that a resident “shall have paid all taxes which may have been required of him” since 1877. 

In 1926, the House passed – 295 to 86 - the 24th Amendment, outlawing poll taxes as a voting requirement in federal elections; the Amendment became part of the Constitution in 1964 when South Dakota ratified it. In the 1966 decision of Harper v, Virginia Bd. Of Elections, the Supreme Court found “A State’s conditioning of the right to vote on the payment of a fee or tax violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” 

Beginning in 1890 through the 1960s, states also administered literacy tests specifically designed to exclude potential Black voters; Whites were often exempted from the tests if they could provide testimony that they were of “good moral character.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended literacy tests in the South in 1965 and nationwide in 1970.

In 1875, the Congressional Record first referred to the party that preserved the Union as “this gallant old party.” The following year, the Cincinnati Commercial called the party of Lincoln “the grand old party” – a term that was abbreviated to GOP in 1884.

Today, 156 years after 40,000 Black Union soldiers died in the war against slavery – nearly 30,000 of infection or disease, members of the party of Lincoln seek to limit the Black francize. The same party that gave Black men the right to vote is presiding over a nationwide effort to limit voting rights, and, let’s be clear, not just of Black Americans. But union members, recent immigrants, elderly men and women who have difficulty traveling or standing in lines for hours-on-end, and college students and it’s an effort that has been intensified after losing the presidency – 81,2658,924 to 74,216,154 in the popular vote and 306 to 232 in the Electoral College – and the Senate.

This despite a statement by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declaring “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” 

Seventeenth Century men in the Massachusetts Bay Colony could vote absentee if their homes were vulnerable to Indian attacks and absentee ballots have been used in New Hampshire since 1775. Large scale absentee voting began with the 1864 Civil War era presidential election. “We cannot have free government without elections and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us,” declared Abraham Lincoln

In 2020, after a record voter turnout flipped George blue for the first time in decades, state Republicans who control the legislature moved quickly to undermine pillars of voting access by ending automatic voter registration, banning drop boxes for mail ballots and eliminating the broad availability of absentee voting. Georgia voters have enjoyed no-excuse absentee voting – a program that was traditionally very popular with White and Republican voters - for more than a decade. But in 2020 the racial disparity in its usage shrunk significantly and suddenly White Republican voters want to eliminate it. 

Sunday early voting has enabled Black churches to ensure that their parishioners get to the voting booth through popular “souls to the polls” efforts. Now largely White Republican legislatures in Georgia and other states are seeking to curtail those programs by eliminating Sunday early voting. One of the most egregious consequences of such measures will be to lengthen the time that voters will spend in line at polling places. But the Georgia legislature has a solution to that: Prohibit volunteers and local service agencies from “line warming” activities like providing water and food to waiting voters. Clearly a Christ-like response to “when I was hungry, thirsty, tired and cold, you gave me drink….”

Alabama legislators want to eliminate straight-ticket voting – creating longer lines; and a Tennessee Republican state senator had the hutzpah to propose eliminating early voting entirely. Not to be outdone, Iowa Republicans passed and the governor signed a bill that reduces early voting by nine days, closes polls an hour earlier and tightens rules on absentee voting even though Republicans were the states big winners, including in key races for the White House and Senate in 2020. Nonetheless, one Republican state senator explained during floor debate, “Most of us in my caucus and the Republican caucus believe the election was stolen.”

By mid-March 253 bills had been introduced in 43 state legislatures to tighten voting rules in order to restore flagging confidence in elections and democracy

The reasoning is simple: Make winning easier by making voting more difficult in large urban areas with high minority populations 

Arizona Republican lawmakers have proposed allowing lawmakers to review election results “if needed” and would grant the legislature the power to pick the state’s presidential electors. 

Arizona has considered requiring mail ballots to be post marked by the Thursday before Election Day – even if they arrive at election offices before polls close. This even though the Republican governor had told the now former president that it is “difficult, if not impossible to cheat” the state’s mail-voting system.

After the 2020 November election, Florida’s Republican governor praised how smoothly his state’s election had gone and Republican legislators proposed new laws requiring voters to request mail-in ballots more frequently – a move that might diminish the number of Democratic party voters, which edged Republicans by about 700,000 mail-in ballots in 2020.

For Republicans the unhappy truth is that in 2020 their presidential candidate repeated the lie he popularized in 2016 – the election was “rigged” against him and his constituency fell for the lie and were outnumbered in the mail-in ballot category. The election was “rigged” until he won; then “miraculously” it wasn’t. 

Perhaps, if they really want voting reform, Republicans legislators might consider laws that require that they can only vote on in person on Election Day. Members of Congress must be on the floor of the House or Senate on the day before and after elections; they must pay their own expenses traveling from Washington to their hometown precincts and must stand in line like everyone else – without food or water or chairs or blankets. They don’t get to cut the line or enjoy special privileges. No mail-in or absentee ballots.

It’s time to ask what vote-restricting legislators are so afraid of that they are making it more difficult to vote.

If you listen closely, perhaps you might hear those Eleventh Century Benedictines at Vespers praying for the Gutless Obsequiously Party.

Perhaps they will begin with a reading from the Prophet Isaiah:

Here is my servant whom I uphold…
upon whom I have put my Spirit…
A bruised reed he shall not break,
and a smoldering wick he shall not quench,
until he establishes justice upon the earth….
Isaiah 42:1-3

Then they’ll break into that cursing they do so well:

May their bodies be cursed… cursed in the head and the brain… 
in their eyes and their forehead… in their ears and their noses…
in fields and pastures… in the mouth and throat… 
in the chest and heart, cursed in the stomach… 
… blood… hands and feet. 
May they be cursed going in and coming out…
in towns and in castles… in streets and squares… 
when sleeping and when awake, when going out and returning, 
when eating and drinking… 
May they be cursed in all places and at all times….

Yup. Those Eleventh Century Benedictines could curse!