You’d be surprised. When I lived in Alabama (1999-2000), there was still an anti-miscegenation law on the books, and Alabama was undergoing a voter referendum to decide whether to remove it or not. The voters elected to remove it, but a shocking and depressing number (I think it was around 30-40%) voted to keep it. The naive, optimistic part of me interpreted these votes as a symbolic gesture in favor of states’ rights and against federal intrusion, but the cynical part of me interpreted them as the votes of a bunch of troglodytic, racist assholes.
Generally speaking, Dred Scott v. Sandford isn’t a legal precedant you want to put a lot of weight on - it’s widely (and justifiably) considered the Supreme Court’s worst decision, not only from a moral standpoint but due to its very poor legal reasoning.
On the specific issue of property rights, Dred Scott doesn’t appear to say anything that would apply to Gonzales v. Raich. It said that the federal government cannot prohibit any property in territories that were legal in any state because by doing so it would be discriminating against the settlement of the territory by residents of that state.
I do remember the dust-up over “miscegenation”, but that was still a live issue as late as the 1960’s, so we’re talking about a 35-year lag from invalidation to amendment. Whereas women’s suffrage was settled in 1920 and rapidly ceased to be controversial after its enactment.
Your post, however, made me ponder that Alabama and Mississippi are two of the first places one should look when searching for archaic constitutional provisions. Neither has had a Constitutional Convention for more than 100 years (Con Cons often clean up obsolete language), and both tend to be somewhat, ah, resistant to change in certain matters.
However, it appears that Mississippi omitted “male” from its suffrage requirement (Section 241) long ago. I can’t determine the exact date, but it probably happened in conjunction with other suffrage changes. And even Alabama finally got around to it in 1996, when it rewrote its suffrage article to clean up all the old baggage about literacy tests, “good character”, 21-year-old males, and so forth.
I’d be surpised if any state were more recalcitrant than those two. At least 15 states enacted women’s suffrage on their own before 1920, and many more were in the process of doing so when the federal amendment intervened. Most states have had to rewirte their suffrage qualifications for other reasons since 1920 (18-year-old vote, for example), or have held Constitutional Conventions, and in either case detritus tends to get cleaned up.
Um, are you talking about The Man Show? Adam and Jimmy were out trying to get people to sign a petition to end women’s suffrage, and of course many signed it thinking it meant “the suffering of women” or some nonsense.
Hmm, don’t have a clip, I guess Viacom had their way with YouTube.