Editor, Gazette-Journal:

The times they are a changing. June 25 is a small victory for all Americans. The Supreme Court ruled against the Voting Rights Act—not killing it, but clarifying it. When the act was made law, America needed it … especially in the Deep South, where civil rights were not that civil. But to use the sins of the father as an assumption of future guilt of the sons is not only wrong, but truly un-American.

We believe in the assumption of innocence until proven otherwise. This simple concept is one of the foundation blocks of our republic and the erosion of this concept especially in the court of public opinion, and sadly the media, is the source of our slow crumble into history.

Was the law appropriate when written? Certainly. But the misuse over the last half century as a political weapon, not as a protection of rights as it was intended, signaled a correction was due. As politicians and activists on both sides of the spectrum use our differences against us for their own purposes, we as a people need to say enough. Take Paula Deen, for instance, a child of the South and the 1950s and ’60s. Few if any from that era, regardless of race, did not use some derogatory terms for those not like them and often for those who were but thought or acted differently. Many of you will say “Not I,” and for most of you it’s a lie. In 1965, she may have been a racist or at the very least insensitive, but today I for one doubt it. Until the same clarification the court today applied to the law is applied to our view of each other, we will stay as Lincoln said, a nation divided and cannot stand.

S.J. Mehaffey

Gloucester, Va.