Today, in a country with allegedly the finest justice system ever created by man, we choose to relegate 6.1 million Americans to second-class citizenship.
We silence them, we revoke a fundamental birthright, and we deprive them of dignity. And we do it because of a cockeyed notion that a central tenet of democracy - that government rules with the consent of the governed - should not apply to people with a criminal record.
That has been policy since 1844 in our state, where today 94,314 New Jerseyans cannot vote if they are serving a felony sentence. Disenfranchisement laws vary throughout the U.S., and some are less Draconian: There are 14 states that restore voting rights for those on parole or probation, including citadels of progressivism such as Indiana and Utah.
But New Jersey is one of 18 states that re-enfranchise felons only after they have completed their sentences - that includes parole, probation, and prison - and now we have our best chance in 174 years to restore the most basic right of citizenship.
The opportunity contained within the bill sponsored by Sens. Ron Rice (D-Essex), Sandra Cunningham, (D-Hudson), and Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter (D-Passaic) must not be squandered, and Gov. Murphy has signaled his consent to make New Jersey the third state to remove all voting restrictions for felons - even permitting prison inmates to cast ballots, as they do in Vermont and Maine.
We concede that restoring voting rights for the 21,000 people currently incarcerated will be a tough sell and a hard debate, but let's start with the no-brainers.
There are 73,000 felons in our state on probation or parole. Why do we exclude the 58,000 people on probation from the democratic process, when they have never even been in jail? And why do we deny full citizenship to the 15,000 parolees who have already paid their debts?
Former state Attorney General John Farmer Jr. put it best: "The goal of correction," he says, "is hindered, if not completely frustrated, by taking away the most fundamental attribute of citizenship: the right to participate in self-governance."
Some say felons have bad judgment, and that we don't want such people picking our representatives.
We don't set up voting barriers for racists or other ill-informed yokels who probably do more damage to their community with their reprehensible ballot choices than somebody who did time for tampering with a lobster trap.
Some even suggest that felons could subvert laws that protect society if they vote as a bloc.
While some may be tempted to vote for the God-Is-Dead-Anything-Goes Ticket, few DAs around the U.S. are elected on "pro-crime" platforms, and there is no evidence that big felon turnouts could alter the administration of criminal law.
Nobody ever said that "no taxation without representation" should have a felony exception. If you are employed and settled in a community, you should have a voice in how your tax dollars are spent and who represents your interests. Anything less is a mockery of democratic values.
Felon disenfranchisement, of course, is a morally repugnant link to our racist origins. It was borne of an obsession to thwart the popular will: The Southern states passed the Black Codes to deprive the freedman from voting after the Civil War, which meant they were routinely charged with crimes such as vagrancy and moral turpitude - behold, the South was redeemed - and that Jim Crow cudgel was replaced by certifiably racist drug laws.
Today, in New Jersey, African-Americans comprise 15 percent of the population, yet they represent 50 percent of the disenfranchised. One law created this historic outrage, and that law can be changed.
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