Next Question Mailbag Roundup

Okay.  So.  It has been several weeks since I asked all of you out there on the Internet what the Next Big Question shall be.

To sum up, my previous column asked: “after marriage equality has been decided, what will the next major question be?”  What will be the next civil rights groundswell?

In an effort to get some outside perspective on this, the Next Big Question has been my most-social-media-shared post ever.  Thank you to all the Tweeters and Facebookers who spread the question around the web.  Here is some of what I have heard back.

Several readers discussed the educational disparities across the country, saying that those will require a major groundswell to truly correct.  I think this is true, but not quite the same as marriage equality.  Marriage equality was seen to be impossible just 25 years, now people consider it inevitable.  America’s education system has always been under the microscope.  A Nation at Risk was published 30 years ago.  It’s not a meteor the way Marriage Equality has been.

Universal preschool makes the exception for education.  It seems to be working up a groundswell on fairness grounds.  President Obama called for universal preschool in the State of the Union, and just this week both Esquire and The Atlantic brought it back up.  Changing minds so preschool becomes a right, not a privilege, will require a long and intense campaign.

Second, many people said that incorporating non-Judeo-Christian leaders into the nation’s power structure.  This will not require the legislative and court cases the way marriage equality has.  James Madison forbid religious tests in the Constitution.  However, to really correct this will be a major public awareness and public knowledge campaign.  In the last election, attacks on Governor Romney’s Mormonism and the continued use of “Muslim” as a false slur against President Obama showed how far we as a nation have to go in this area.

Body image also cropped up a lot in replies to the column.  For example, weight as a disqualifier for a job or for public life.  On OSHA posters and such, it mentions race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation as illegal reasons to fire an employee.  Will body type come next?

The right to die was also brought up as a legal question.  Physician assisted suicide (PAS) has a lot of potential as such an issue because of the libertarian streak that has emerged of late in American politics.  What other issue strikes at the core of individual autonomy than that level of control over one’s life?  Also, it has a lot of potential traction because of our aging population.  More and more Americans watch their parents and grandparents suffering in sickness or old age and thought about whether or not PAS makes sense.

Because this is Brown, one of our comments was about pot legalization.  This issue does not work the same way to me.  Homosexuality is an innate part of a person.  Being a smoker is not.

Of the responses, universal preschool and physician assisted suicide both have the potential to become national groundswells.  Both require legal actions and legislation to become national.  They can create the state-by-state battles like we have seen for marriage equality. Many of the others require a shift in mentality, but not in legislation.  These, like marriage equality require both.

I end by asking you, what do you think we have missed?  What else is out there, waiting to sweep American society?

Again, many thanks to everyone who commented, replied, retweeted, blogged, and discussed this with me.   It makes being a columnist fun.