Third Amendment Meme featuring bill author James Madison
The protests and direct action in response to George Floyd’s death in police custody have provided opportunities for citizens to learn about their civic rights, thereby increasing their knowledge about governmental funding and raising awareness of how marginalized people have been treated by an unbalanced system. Civic engagement at scale also empowers citizens to learn about the rights often taken for granted — through easily distributed pieces of visual information called memes. Primarily, people hear a lot about the First and Second Amendments as they’re brought up consistently, but on June 4th, the Third Amendment became suddenly relevant.
As the protests around the nation increased in early June, the US National Guard had been deployed in several cities. On Monday, June 1st, 4,500 National Guard service people were sent to Washington, DC, to assist with the policing. By Thursday, DC Mayor Murial Bowser requested the “troops from out-of-state” leave Washington, DC. One of the major sticking points was in response to where the troops were being housed while in Washington, DC. Within hours, the Third Amendment was trending on Twitter and users were reacting with tweets and memes.
The Third Amendment was a response to the 1765 British Quartering Act and ratified in 1791 into the Constitution in the Bill of Rights. The amendment ensures that in a time of peace, no soldiers should be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, and in a time of war, only in a manner to be prescribed by law. The Third Amendment today is relegated to history as the Founding Fathers could not have envisioned multi-story hotels, to say nothing about the Internet or the immense world of memes online.
Memes, the easily shareable, relatable, and remixable pieces of cultural media are not just for irreverent or snarky discourse. Since 2015, memes have been a significant part of political culture and communication, used to raise awareness and unfortunately to spread disinformation. Memes take large concepts and collapse them into highly shareable images or short videos, embedded with nuance or references that require some level of savvy knowledge to understand. Memes also provide a collaborative haven for like-minded individuals with meme pages on Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Tumblr that focus on extremely specific topics and there are meme pages for every topic imaginable.
While Mayor Bowser did not invoke the Third Amendment during her press conference, the relevance of the Third Amendment was bolstered by Senator Mike Lee making a reactionary statement to Mayor Bowser’s press conference.
Rapidly following this moment, passionate historians, legal scholars, and Third Amendment fans began making memes.
Their time has come
The Third Amendment is so rarely mentioned that its existence makes it somewhat novel in our current context. Recently, comedian John Mulaney reprised his Third Amendment joke on Saturday Night Live in February, making fun of its inclusion in the Bill of Rights. Then, as a result of Mayor Bowser’s press conference, the niche joke became relevant, especially on meme pages. The Third Amendment Rights Supporters Facebook group grew by 1,000s of members in the last week and now hosts over 6,000 people. The page was originally launched in 2010, the same year Facebook launched its Groups product. At the time, thousands of extremely niche groups appeared, many to provide the space for discussion of obscure or trivial cultural paraphernalia.
Memes may be reductionist, but they have the power to inform and provide additional information in an easily understood format. Tori Davies and Nathaniel Adams, the administrators of a Facebook meme page called “Quartering Memes for Third Amendment Fiends,” launched their page after being inspired by John Mulaney. They named their page with the derivative of many pages using that format (see also: “Zoom Memes for Self Quarantines” and “Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends”). Their original goal was to create a satirical page to reflect the obsession many American’s have for the Second Amendment.
Using memes to illuminate particular subjects has definite educational potential. Davies doesn’t believes that memes can fully replace other learning methods feels that memes are “a great way to engage people into a topic and encourage them to remember and want to learn more.” The simple message delivery of a meme is also helpful for explaining more difficult concepts or interpreting the difficult language in the Constitution.
A Third Amendment meme
As social media platforms mature, memes are not evidence of degradation of quality on the web. Being a savvy meme creator requires a deep understanding of the material the meme references as well as the ability to share that information to an uninformed public. With prominent celebrities, culture makers, and the President consistently using memes to communicate, meme literacies have become more prominent in the last several years.
From the depths of historical obscurity, the Third Amendment memes provided an entry point for discussion and learning about our civic rights. Perhaps memes provide a civic good as well as just being objects of distraction.
This article was updated to include the phrase “without the consent of the owner” to the Third Amendment at 3:39pm on 11 June.
