After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
- Understand the basic meaning of civil rights and list specific examples that illustrate what they are and what they do.
- Understand how civil rights have been extended to the citizenry of the United States and have made the nation more democratic.
- Understand why liberty and political equality are important in a democracy and explain how rights were gradually applied to the states through the process of selective incorporation.
- Determine how the legal and political battles waged by the civil rights movement in the twentieth century eventually moved the courts, the president, and Congress to take the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment seriously.
- Examine the political and legal conflicts concerning issues such as affirmative action, abortion rights, and sexual harassment.
- Understand how structural, political linkage, and governmental factors, taken together, explain how civil rights has changed the course of American history.
- Understand the standards of strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, and ordinary scrutiny, and explain how the courts use them.
- Identify key terms and concepts used in Chapter 16.
