Dignity has no expiration date

The United States Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais is a tragic example of what happens when the law makes important judgments without considering human dignity.

In most other democratic societies, the courts use their authority not only to uphold and expand voting rights but to reinforce a simple but profound truth: true democracy is important because it is the only form of government that protects and promotes human dignity.

Democracy and dignity

Democracy is the only system that places the power to make decisions about what kind of world we want in the hands of the people who are most affected by those decisions. Democratic decision-making means that we the people decide whom we want to represent us and we control their actions by the threat of periodic elections. In any other system, some authority other than the people is making decisions for the people and without fair and regular elections, there is no accountability.

Democracy is surely critical to the protection of human dignity.

But democracy touches dignity in even more personal ways as well.

Dignity is experienced when we express ourselves and articulate the things that are most important to us. It’s the free and full development of the personality. Dignity is when we develop and share our ideas about our values and our needs, and about what kind of world we want to live in. All of these are expressed when we vote. (Look what happened in April 2026 in Hungary!)

Elections are collective experiences in the act of self-expression about society’s most important questions: Do you want a functioning health care system? Do you believe that everyone is entitled to equality and due process? Do you want your tax dollars to fund wars or education? Do you want policies that protect the planet, or your own body? These are the deeply held values that are expressed when a person goes to the polls.

I’ve called this “Participatory Dignity” because it reflects how important participating in group decision-making is to each person’s individual dignity. Participation can include running for office, canvassing, speaking out in civic organizations, engaging in dialogue and, of course, voting. All of these are forms of expressing your dignity. The South African Constitutional Court has called it “civic dignity.”

The participation by the public on a continuous basis provides vitality to the functioning of representative democracy. It encourages citizens of the country to be actively involved in public affairs, identify themselves with the institutions of government and become familiar with the laws as they are made. It enhances the civic dignity of those who participate by enabling their voices to be heard and taken account of. Minority groups should feel that even if their concerns are not strongly represented, they continue to be part of the body politic with the full civic dignity that goes with citizenship in a constitutional democracy. … Public involvement will also be of particular significance for members of groups that have been the victims of processes of historical silencing. It is constitutive of their dignity as citizens today that they not only have a chance to speak, but also enjoy the assurance they will be listened to.

Protecting the Dignity of Voting

The post-Civil War drafters of the Reconstruction Amendments understood this. This is why they not only abolished slavery in the 13th amendment (1865), but mandated equal protection of the law and due process for all persons in the 14th amendment (1868) and ensured that the right of citizens to vote would not be “denied or abridged” on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude in the 15th amendment (1870). The purpose of these Reconstruction Amendments was not just to end slavery but to restore dignity to those whose dignity had been denied by the institution of slavery.

But without enforcement of these constitutional amendments, the country slid into the terrible, long, and judicially sanctioned Jim Crow era in which blacks were denied every basic civil and social right, including the right to vote and the right to have their vote counted fairly.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, who championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also ensured the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which protected against the most egregious forms of racial disenfranchisement. The purpose of these laws was not only to establish a legal foundation for claims of racial discrimination, but to protect the equal dignity of all Americans.

Ignoring the equal dignity of voting

It is Section 2 of this law which the Supreme Court eviscerated in Louisiana v. Callais. The case is complicated because it rests on a premise that is itself violative of participatory dignity and then compounds the problem by ignoring equal racial dignity.

The United States is unique or almost unique among the world’s democracies in allocating the power to control federal elections to state governments, in allowing political entities like state legislatures (rather than independent commissions) to draw district lines, and in constitutionally permitting political actors to draw district lines to protect their incumbency and their partisan control through disenfranchisement. So when one party controls the state house, they can also ensure that their party will gain a majority in the House of Representatives, even if more people cast votes for the other party. The Callais case rests on the expectation of partisan gerrymandering. Because gerrymandering enhances the power of some people’s votes at the expense of others’, it is a violation of participatory dignity.

One limitation on partisan gerrymandering might have been to prohibit gerrymandering that disenfranchising people on the basis of race; that is, after all, what the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act aimed to do. This door all but closed in the Callais case where the Court held that a partisan gerrymander is constitutional even if it disenfranches minority voters, so long as there is no evidence that the racial disenfranchisement was intentional.

The basis of the Court’s holding, as evidenced here and in other cases, is that laws that protected racial minorities in the past are no longer needed.

Of course, this denies the reality of ongoing racial discrimination. And it ignores the very purpose of constitutions and framework statutes which are designed to implement fundamental values and processes “to ourselves and our posterity.”

But most importantly, it ignores that these laws were designed, fundamentally, to protect human dignity. And human dignity has no expiration date.

For more on the dignity of voting, watch our 5-minute animated video.