Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
On the family
Think of that entity “the family,” an impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other: a surname, a sexual dyad, a legal unit based on state-regulated marriage, a circuit of blood relationships, a system of companionship and succor, a building, a proscenium between “private” and “public”, an economic unit of earning and taxation, the prime site of economic consumption, the prime site of cultural consumption, a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children, a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations, a daily routine, a unit in a community of worship, a site of patriotic formation, and of course the list could go on.
