We could hardly believe our eyes this past Monday when we read a Newsday editorial espousing the court-mandated councilmatic district plan in the Town of Hempstead. It stated as part of its position that electing town board members "at-large" rather than by district "[denies] thousands of people the opportunity to choose their own representative.
To further underscore that point, Newsday states that "about 100,000 African Americans and Hispanics live in a series of communities at the center of the town and - while there is one black councilman, a Republican - nobody on the council lives in those minority neighborhoods."
Is Newsday simply naive, or are they actually promoting a veiled form of segregationist "claptrap," a kind of creeping (and, for that matter, creepy) form of ostracism?
It has seemed to us, ever since the lawsuit Goosby versus the Town of Hempstead was filed, that certain few individuals were trying to advance their own political fortunes while hiding their individual ambitions behind the curtain of "civil rights."
While we heartily applaud the advances gained by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and believe in the very principled declarations of the Voting Rights Act of 1964, what really appears to be transpiring here has nothing to do with individual rights and everything to do with advancing the political power bases of a few, disgruntled Democrats.
Are people's voting rights being denied at the polls as Newsday suggests? We haven't heard of any legally registered voters being turned away from the voting booth, have you?
The plain fact is, it's a lot easier to carve out a district for one's own benefit than it is to motivate people to vote for you. That's what's at the heart of this case.
Should the districts be crafted and a person of African American or Hispanic background be elected from the so-called "minority majority district," that representative would likely be two things: a Democrat, and unable to accomplish anything without building a coalition of like-minded representatives on the board.
Even if, as is expected, two of the proposed six districts became "minority districts" those representatives would always be in the minority governmentally.
It seems to us that if the goal that is truly being advanced is to enhance the power and strengthen the voice of the minority community, then what really needs to be done is the hard work of motivating a 100,000-person strong voting block to make their way to the polls.
Do you realize how potent a voting block that is? It represents, in raw numbers, more than half the number of votes County Executive Thomas S. Gulotta received in his landslide victory over Democrat Lewis Yevoli.
Political realities being what they are, if that voice really made itself felt at the polls, the political parties that hold sway in this county would have no choice but to stand up and take notice. And it is our fervent belief that that hundred thousand, if they did cast their votes each Election Day, would have far greater influence on the life of this township - and the life of this county as a whole - than any single representative elected from a councilmatic district supposedly drawn for their benefit.
History has shown us time and time again that to isolate one group or another ultimately diminishes it, cutting it out of the loop and making it irrelevant in the long run. Let us not make that same mistake here.
