Georgia DA: Personhood Critics and the Heartbeat Bill

“Various Democratic District Attorneys in Georgia have recreated what the civil rights laws defeated, choosing political expedience over personhood.”

As the political battle rages over the merits of protecting the unborn, an eerie parallel is developing with a previous blight in Southern history. At the center of the controversy is Georgia’s “Heartbeat Bill,” which is designed to provide greater protections to the unborn. By choosing political convention over humanity and personhood, the opponents of the new Georgia law have taken up the mantle of some of the most loathed figures and maligned moments in the South’s Jim Crow legacy.

The Jim Crow South

Differentiating between classes, Jim Crow laws institutionally subjugated the rights of African Americans, particularly in the Southern United States. While recognized as alive, African Americans did not receive the benefits of personhood. Scores of vile figures enforced those laws and adhered to that tenet. The driving force was generating a divide between favored and unfavored; some humans were considered persons, and others were not. The latter suffered under Jim Crow. The passage and enforcement of civil rights laws helped to provide legal personhood to those who did not otherwise receive the laws’ protections.

Theophilus Eugene Connor, known to most Americans as Bull Connor, was a racist politician who served as an elected Public Safety Commissioner for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights era. Connor’s name has become synonymous with those who distinguished between human life (no rights) and personhood (rights) in the Deep South along the lines of race. As Commissioner with oversight of the fire and police departments, he directed the use of fire hoses and police dogs against civil rights marchers.

Put another way, Bull Connor and those like him refused to enforce the laws which protected a politically powerless people. This was accomplished by generating and reinforcing a divide between which humans were to be considered “persons” and those who were not.