“No idiot or insane person shall enjoy the right of suffrage” (NJ Constitution)
January 8, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Courtesy of the Internet, I am able to learn about autism all around the world and to meet (digitally) autistic persons and parents and teachers of autistic children seemingly anywhere on this planet. Then I open up a New Jersey newspaper this morning and discover that, written in my own home state’s Constitution, is this:
No idiot or insane person shall enjoy the right of suffrage.
That’s in the New Jersey Constitution, Article II, Section I, Paragraph 6, as reported in the Star-Ledger. The New Jersey Developmental Disability Council urged Senate President Richard Codey to introduce an amendment remove this language.
The language “smacks of disrespect and an ugly time in history when we treated people with disabilities as second- or third-class citizens,” said Luke Koppisch, the [Developmental Disability] council’s coordinator for the project. “A lot of people don’t realize this is in the constitution.”
Marianne Valls of Jersey City, a college graduate and a leader of the Hudson County chapter of the project, said her group was “outraged by the archaic language … I feel like we are in the dark ages.”
Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio: These eight states also have consitutions that refer to “idiots and insane” to describe those who cannot vote. Codey is introducing the bill today in the NJ State Legislature; the “idiot and insane language” was first inserted into the NJ Constitution in 1844 and is, in the words of Codey, a “‘disgrace.’”
I concur: To hear language like “idiot” in one’s state’s constitution is a disgrace, at the very least.
Does this mean it’s a free for all against JBJr, then?
TANGENT
iirc, and resident classicist proffesor can please correct me, but i think i heard in a history class once that “idiot” in the greek, originally was not associated with intelligence but instead meant the people who didn’t participate in democracy. (this is kind of ironic but it implies a behaviour, a choice, not an inherent quality)…
is that a true origin of that word?
i still find “idiot” useful as an insult to someone doing something stupid (ie: something you yell in traffic, with the car windows shut, at the guy who just cut you off) — implication: they are being an idiot, but not a word that should be applied intrinsically to a person.
/TANGENT
Note to TANGENT:
Yes, that is the origin of the word—-”idiot” is from idiotes, which means a “private citizen.” From my post The Rise of the Idiocracy: