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.
News24 today reports as follows:
An advertisement for a religious campaign has been ruled out of order for lack of evidence that Jesus can heal Aids. The Advertising Standards Authority made the ruling after receiving a complaint about a newspaper advertisement last month for a “Miracle Crusade with Reverend Angley”. The advertisement claimed among other things that Jesus “heals Aids”. The ASA said it had tried unsuccessfully to get a response to the complaint, but the advertiser had “failed to provide the ASA with verification of the claim in question”.
This seems to suggest that almost all religious advertising in