Supporting the Protection and Expansion of Voting Rights

These past weeks we have witnessed and responded to recent actions of the federal Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets (VAAFM) that compromise VT’s on-farm slaughter law, threaten the practice and tradition of on-farm slaughter, and undermine the active democratic work done by Rural VT, VT’s on-farm slaughter community, and VT’s supportive legislative body to improve this law for over a decade.  

As we feel our local democratic process being threatened, we recognize that at a national level, we are at a critical juncture in our nation’s democratic trajectory.  A number of States have advanced voter suppression laws and more gerrymandered districts disproportionately affecting the agency and representation of the working class and people of color.  Meanwhile, efforts to enact new legislation to protect and expand voting rights federally have faltered in the face of a lack of political will and leadership and systemic anti-democratic structures which enable minority control of government.  Equal access to the right to vote and equal representation are essential components of a liberal democracy - and provide the foundation and leverage for much of what we do as an advocacy organization, and what you can do as a citizen advocate, to affect policies like on-farm slaughter, raw milk, healthcare, and more.  The passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act is essential to our work, and to the just and equitable representation of our communities.  

Last week was Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Aside from his work on voting rights, MLK spoke to and embodied the deep need for embracing the intersectionality of the issues facing us as a society - and he received substantial pushback, at times from allies and certainly from opposition; but he persisted, whether that be integrating the critique of the Vietnam War and militarism, or picketing with striking workers in support of just working conditions.  At the National Family Farm Coalition, and at Rural VT, we are asking ourselves how we can support the protection and expansion of voting rights.  We need agricultural organizations, individuals, and businesses - all of our voices - to join in solidarity with the movement to achieve these fundamental rights.  We may face pushback, we may hear that we’re “out of our lane” or won’t have any impact or to trust the people in power - and at times like these we can also remember what MLK wrote in his letter from the Birmingham jail about the need to pursue justice and equity regardless of the barriers before us and the excuses for delay:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negroes’ great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s “Counciler” or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.””