Emanuel Celler Quotes
The Democratic Party will never desert the freedoms of our people under the guise of pretending to protect them.
Celler, Emanuel. You Never Leave Brooklyn. John Day Company, 1953.
The Grammar Curmudgeon. Almost every government action to protect rights impinges on the rights of some. For example, laws to protect minorities from discrimination in the workplace impinge on the right of employers to hire whomever they want. The Voting Rights Act eliminating the Poll Tax instituted to prevent Negroes from voting, impinged on the Southern States’ rights to determine the election rules and standards for their states. Laws requiring all pharmaceuticals to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration to protect the public from dangerous drugs interfere with the doctor’s and patient’s rights to determine the best treatment and the drug company’s right to sell whatever products they want.
This quotation was used ten years later by Virginia which, in convention, passed a resolution objecting to the Alien & Sedition Acts. The drafter of the original resolution was James Madison.
Many New Yorkers and others felt that since the attack on the World Trade Center was made in the name of Islam, the mosque and commuity center should be built in another location further from Ground Zero. Ellison was debating someone who argued that the Mosque should not be built so that sensitivity can be shown for those New Yorkers who lost relatives and friends in the attack of September 11. Rather than insist on their Constitutional rights, the Muslim leadership of the project, moved the location somewhat further away from Ground Zero.
The Fort Collins newspaper had published the names of concealed gun permit holders. Clauber and others felt that this inhibited people who were breaking no laws and just wanted to avail themselves of their 2nd Amendment rights. The Newspaper argued that there was a public safety issue at stake in that people should be aware of which people they may be dealing with in day to day affairs are armed and this they can alter their behavior as not to provoke or deal with these people.
Emanuel Celler was an American politician from New York who served in the United States House of Representatives for almost 50 years, from March 1923 to January 1973. A member of the Democratic Party, during World War II, Celler strongly supported help for Jewish refugees fleeing Europe, and as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee for all but two years between 1949 and 1973, he ushered through the House the major civil rights movement legislation of the era. His district was based in Brooklyn and Queens.
