Politics & Power Quote by Jean O'Leary

There is a deliberate, almost aching naivete in Jean O'Leary's phrasing, and it functions as strategy. "I cannot believe" isn't ignorance; it's a public dare. By presenting disbelief as the default moral posture, she forces the listener to recognize that the alternative is uglier: that Americans might knowingly weaponize their most sacred civic text against vulnerable people.

The line is built on a double audience: "the American people" and "the people they elected". O'Leary is separating the myth of popular virtue from the reality of governance, leaving room for betrayal. It's a classic activist maneuver: claim allegiance to democratic ideals while indicting the machinery that routinely fails to deliver them. The Constitution, in this framing, isn't the guarantor of rights; it's a tool that can be turned, legally and politely, into a muzzle.

Context matters. O'Leary, a central figure in gay rights organizing and later a lesbian feminist critic of some mainstream movement priorities, lived through an era when "states' rights", obscenity law, sodomy statutes, and "public morality" were common legal cover for discrimination. Her quote speaks to that chilling American habit: dressing prejudice in procedural respectability. By invoking elected officials, she points at complicity, not just bigotry.

The subtext is warning shot and plea at once: don't hide behind civics while you do harm. If the Constitution can be used to "stifle" rights, then the fight isn't only cultural - it's interpretive, institutional, and relentlessly political.