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Civil Rights Vs Civil Liberties Essay

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Civil Rights Vs Civil Liberties Essay
Civil rights and civil liberties are distinctively different in a few ways. Civil rights can be defined as the different actions that the government takes to prevent discrimination or to create or provide equal conditions to its people, mainly in regards to unequal treatment based on groups and characteristics such as race, gender, disability and more. Civil rights are meant to provide equality to the citizens of the United States in circumstances of education, housing, job opportunities, etc., per the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. This can be seen in the fourteenth Amendment to the United States where the Constitution Guarantees equal citizenship rights and equal protection under the law. This, means that all U.S citizens who are fully …show more content…
Both civil rights and civil liberties had loopholes when they were first written, and have since been tweaked or altogether rewritten by Congress. An example of this would be the right to vote. The right to vote was declared in the 15th amendment to the Constitution in 1850, but states were still finding loopholes in this short-and-to-the-point amendment until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. The media also plays a part in this; a current example would be the Black Lives Matter movement. This is bringing to light some of the inequalities between white people and people of color in the United States as well as the institutionalized racism in our country; without the media, BLM would have never gotten as big as it has over the past little while. Another group that plays into this would be the supreme court. The supreme court is responsible for interpreting the laws, and so closing up loopholes has been brought to the supreme court in the form of many cases; ranging from Dred Scott v. Sandford back in 1857, which said that slaves were property and declared the Missouri Compromise Unconstitutional, all the way to Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which said that the ban on interracial marriage was unconstitutional, and what is most likely the most well known, is Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, which sought to end segregation in

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