President Obama Celebrates Civil Rights Law - East Idaho News
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President Obama Celebrates Civil Rights Law

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Getty 041014 ObamaSpeech?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1397160853548BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Signing the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson implored Americans to “go to work in our communities and our States, in our homes and in our hearts, to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country.”

Fifty years after the end of segregation, the first black president commemorated Johnson’s achievement in Austin, Texas.

“The laws LBJ passed are now as fundamental to our conception of ourselves and our democracy as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” Obama told several hundred attendees at a three-day civil rights summit at the LBJ Presidential Library commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act’s passage and signing.

“They are a foundation, an essential piece of American heritage, but we are here today because we cannot be complacent,” Obama said, sharing a stage with the civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.

Obama recounted the difficulties Johnson faced in moving it through Congress. He also drew a link to the present.

“Those of us who’ve had the singular privilege to hold the office of the presidency know well that progress in this country can be hard, and it can be slow,” Obama said. “The office humbles you.”

Fifty years after Johnson, Obama faces a new set of civil rights issues and a new set of arguments over what constitutes injustice.

While debates over racism have amplified under Obama’s presidency — evidenced by Attorney general Eric Holder’s remarks this week, and the reaction to them — Issues over gay rights, gender discrimination in the workplace, and immigration have come to the fore as the major civil rights issues of Obama’s presidency.

“If some of this sounds familiar,” Obama said, recounting Johnson’s push for civil rights legislation, “it’s because today we remain locked in the same debate about equality and opportunity and the role of government in ensuring each.”

With the Employment Non-Discrimination Act before Congress since the 1990s, for two decades Congress has been considering expansions of the Civil Rights Act’s employment protections to gays.  President Obama approved an end to the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, and the Supreme Court struck down California’s ban on gay marriage, while opinions on homosexuality and gay marriage have shifted under Obama’s watch.

The president has pushed equal pay for women as both a legislative and a political issue, in both his 2012 reelection campaign and in the current midterm year, and signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as the first piece of legislation he enacted in 2009. Immigration, while up for debate as a “civil right,” has been cast that way by those who support legal-resident status for immigrants who came the U.S. illegally. The LBJ Presidential Library’s summit began with talk of immigration on Wednesday.

Obama largely shied away from those issues in his speech, focusing instead on Johnson’s place in history and the struggles of the civil rights movement — and on his own experiences in the Oval Office, including his costly political battle for health care reform.

To applause, he praised Johnson for passing a health care law “that opponents described as ‘socialized medicine’ that would curtail America’s freedom, but ultimately freed millions of seniors from the fear that illness could rob them of dignity and security in their golden years, which we now know today as Medicare.”

Because of legislation Johnson signed, doors of opportunity swung open “not just [for] blacks and whites but also women and Latinos and Native Americans and gay Americans and Americans with disability. They swung open for you, the swung open for me. That’s why I’m standing here today, because of those efforts,” Obama said.

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