Scary times and nervous people
November 21, 2016 6:27 pm
We are often told that to accurately judge history, it must be viewed through an empathetic lens. It is difficult, they say, to assess actions without applying the standards of the day to those actions. Our story this week is ostensibly about an event pertaining to public safety. There is historical precedence for the actions that were taken, but one wonders…do the times of the day ever justify the suspension of our constitutional liberties? A not so easy question to answer in this week’s Stories of Atlanta.
According to Abraham Lincoln, yes. He suspended habeus corpus during the war and had people thrown in jail for criticizing the Union. He justified it by asking “if the government itself should go to pieces, lest that one be violated.”Report