The Perfect HIV Storm Facing Black Men

Prior post has noted the high risk black males have to contacting HIV - and the inadequate measures being taken to address the epidemic.  Among the causes blocking necessary measures and creating toxic conditions are conservative politics, religion, stigma, and racism - especially in the South where HIV infection rates are the highest and access to medical treatment is the lowest due to Republican refusals to expand Medicaid and provide needed funding for necessary programs.   Candidly, if the epidemic were hitting whites in such numbers, it would be far more likely that needed steps would be taken.  Here in Hampton Roads, Virginia, the situation in dire.  The Advocate has a lengthy article that looks at the huge and frightening problem.  Here are excerpts:

Half of black gay and bisexual men in the United States “will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime” if current trends continue, according to analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study was presented in late February at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, and was described as “the first-ever comprehensive national estimates of the lifetime risk of an HIV diagnosis” in every state.  

To offer some perspective: The nation with the highest rate of HIV prevalence is Swaziland — a tiny, landlocked kingdom within South Africa — at about 27 percent prevalence. The second-highest rate is in nearby Botswana, with 25 percent. If America’s black gay and bisexual men comprised a nation unto themselves, that nation would soon have the world’s highest rate of infection — twice as high as its closest rivals.

The financial burden would be staggering. The CDC estimates the average lifetime cost of treatment in this country to be about $400,000. Thousands of new cases a year means billions of dollars for HIV treatment alone. And those figures don’t account for treatment for other illnesses, lost wages or productivity, or the emotional costs of depression, stigma, and anxiety.

African Americans and other black communities represent only 14 percent of the nation’s population but account for a staggeringly disproportionate 44 percent of all new HIV infections. Black MSM — especially teens and men in their 20s — face the brunt of the epidemic. A growing body of research has made the case for years now.

Black MSM have been more affected by the epidemic than any other population in the world, the Black AIDS Institute reported four years ago in a study released at AIDS 2012. An estimated 1 in 2 black MSM are HIV-positive in some cities, the study adds. This was less than one year after an August 2011 CDC report noted an “alarming increase of new infections” among black MSM ages 13 to 29. 

“Why isn’t this a public health emergency? This probably has much to do with race and class,” says Ramon Gardenhire, the AIDS Foundation of Chicago’s vice president of policy and advocacy.

There is not one specific reason new infections are increasing among black MSM. The data show that black MSM do not practice more of what has been described as “risky behavior” — multiple partners and intercourse without protection — than their white counterparts. Black couples were actually “more likely to use condoms,” according to a study by San Francisco State University researchers.

The release of the CDC’s lifetime risk estimates — without explanation or context — isn’t just peculiar. It feeds “into the narrative across popular culture and the media that black men and women are hypersexualized, criminals, and sexual predators,” says Ravi K. Perry, Ph.D., an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

Many researchers believe a “perfect storm” of health, racial, and socioeconomic barriers — including limited access to health care and insurance, unemployment, poverty, housing insecurity, incarceration rates, homophobia, stigma, and racism — has fueled the epidemic across black communities. These factors have been exacerbated by inadequate federal, state, and local funding, as well as generations of government neglect. 

Unemployment rates are usually higher among black MSM youth. “Because they are less likely to be employed, they are less likely to have health insurance, and to be diagnosed in a timely manner. So there are very high rates of unrecognized infections among young black gay men,” says Gregorio Millett, M.P.H., the American Foundation for AIDS Research’s vice president and director of public policy. “Then they are less likely to be in care, which means they are less likely to be able to be taking medications so they will not transmit HIV to their partners.”

“The Department of Health and Human Services found that although black MSM comprised half of the new infections in the African-American community, most of the prevention programming was going toward heterosexuals,” he says. “That is a historic imbalance that is born of homophobia.”  

The states with the highest lifetime risk of seroconversion — with only some exceptions — are all Southern.

“About half of the people living with HIV are in the South. Most of them are black,” says Treatment Action Group’s Farrow. “We see very high numbers in places like Atlanta, Miami, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Jackson. Those cities have become the epicenter of the epidemic. It’s no longer New York or San Francisco.” 

The South is also the stronghold of the Republican Party. The Southern states’ rejection of expanding Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act — despite residents in those states being overwhelmingly poor and underinsured — is another critical factor behind the increase in black MSM infections.

“The lack of health care infrastructure in the South has particularly impacted black gay men,” says Farrow. “Under the Affordable Care Act, anyone who is HIV-positive can get insurance. But in [almost] all of these states the Republican governors and legislatures have refused to expand Medicaid.”

It’s going to take “a multi-pronged approach to improve health outcomes, health access, health literacy, and [reduce] stigma” among black MSM, says Orlando O. Harris, Ph.D., a TAPS Fellow at the University of California–San Francisco’s Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, who has researched African-American and Caribbean MSM communities. “We cannot have a one-size-fits-all intervention strategy [and we] must recognize there are many separate communities. Caribbean Americans often feel left out of prevention. The conversations have to be across generations,” he adds. “We also need to have sex-positive conversations with young people.”  

The introduction of the antiretroviral Truvada for prevention — known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP — has marked a historic shift toward a biomedical HIV-prevention model. Truvada is more than 90 percent effective in preventing HIV infection if taken at least four times per week. Several states and municipalities — including Washington State, San Francisco, and West Hollywood — have created PrEP access programs. But many of these regions are largely white. White gay men also enjoy better access to health care and insurance.

“This is extremely problematic,” says UCSF’s Harris. “We have created a new disparity for black MSM. They are facing the brunt of the epidemic but cannot access [PrEP] as readily as white MSM.”

“We need to begin a national conversation around PrEP just like we had a national conversation around safe sex,” says Farrow. “Everyone needs to know what it is. We need someone from CDC to go on all the black talk-radio shows — like Tom Joyner or Rickey Smiley — where millions are listening. The fact that they haven’t done this is a failure of vision and leadership at the CDC.”

The data is disturbing and depressing.  Sadly, in much of the South - and certainly rural areas of Virginia - Republican politicians are virulently anti-gay.  Add their overt racism to the mix and the situation is truly toxic.  Sadly, some in the GOP (and, of course, white fundamentalist churches) are probably pleased with the decimation hitting the black population.  A slow genocide is just fine with them. 

USA States Compared to Countries By Education Level

Click image to enlarge

As regular readers know, one thing that drives me to distraction is the myth of American exceptionalism, a myth most loved by Republican politicians but also foolishly embraced y Democrats as well.  The truth is that America is becoming increasing less than exceptional unless one uses ranks for gun violence and the percentage of the population of an advanced that lacks health care coverage.  Now, America ranks 28th in educational attainment and life expectancy is declining unlike in other advanced nations.   An article looks at how American states were compared to foreign nations based on educational levels.  The map they compiled is above.  Actually, Virginia did fairly well in relative terms, no doubt because of the high education levels in Northern Virginia.  Here are article highlights:

Americans like to think they’re the best when it comes to just about everything, when measured against other nations. While we’re certainly the richest, most freedom loving, and pretty much the bodyguards for the poor and defenseless, we’ve known for years that we’re certainly not the smartest country on earth.

Recently, we ranked 28th when it came to math and science scores, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

We’re really smart, people. Just not the smartest. And we’re working on it.

We thought it would be cool to align each state’s educational attainment to a country of similar intelligence. 

We used the U.S. Census to get the numbers on each state’s high school graduation rate, and then compared those numbers to the education index of each country in the world, provided by the United Nations Development Program

Many things stand out. For instance, most of the northeast – considered the ‘smartest’ region in the United States – is very similar to Europe’s education levels.

Note how the states that are GOP strongholds fared.   It actually strikes me as accurate, especially when one looks at the Deep South.  Embracing ignorance does not make "America great again."

Homophobia and America's Huge" Closet"

Sarah Rice—Getty Images

Despite advances in gay rights compared to even 15 years ago, the number of men who remain in the closet remains shockingly large and demonstrates that homophobia and fear of becoming a social outcast and/or losing one's job is very much alive and well, especially in "conservative" states an regions.  Don't believe me?  Try a simple experiment: check out Craigslist and see how many "MWM" - married white male - and "DL" - down low - individuals that you will find on any given day.  There are LOTS of them.  Odds are these individuals do not respond to surveys admitting their true sexual orientation.  Hence, the true umber of gays is, in my view still, way under reported.  A piece in Time Magazine looks at America's huge closet and the damage that it does. Here are some highlights:

After determining that the percentage of men attracted primarily to men is roughly equivalent in states throughout the country, based on dating site and adult-content searches, Stephens-Davidowitz was able to draw some preliminary conclusions. The barriers preventing men from building openly gay lives in certain parts of the country are clearly specific to the local social climate. For instance: The rate of Craigslist searches by men seeking casual encounters with men is higher in Mississippi than in New York, while there’s a higher rate of gay men seeking dates and relationships on Match.com in New York than in Mississippi.

“The closet doesn’t just mean you don’t announce your sexuality on Facebook,” Stephens-Davidowitz said. “It’s influencing people’s lives in a big way.” For a closeted gay or bisexual man in Mississippi or someplace like it, in other words, a relationship with a man may seem impossible. Some men in this situation are married to women or are trying to pass as heterosexual while seeking secretive, casual encounters on the side.

Stephens-Davidowitz points to one horribly confining and terribly sad effect of homophobia in conservative parts of the country and even in conservative areas of more liberal regions: It allows gay and bisexual men in these regions to seek only furtive, often dangerous sexual encounters with other men rather than making free choices about their sexual and emotional interactions and enjoying the rites of passage of dating and relationships just as heterosexuals do.

Looking at Google searches, Stephens-Davidowitz found that the question “How do I know if my husband is gay?” is far more common than “How do I know if my husband is cheating?” or “How do I know if my husband is depressed?” Moreover, the highest percentage per capita of “How do I know if my husband is gay?” searches come from conservative parts of the country, with South Carolina at number 1, followed by Kentucky and Louisiana.

Stephens-Davidowitz determined that, . . . about half of gay men nationally do not identify publicly as gay or bisexual. In more conservative places, again using Mississippi as an example, that figure goes up to 80%.

Far fewer people are openly gay (or, we can assume, openly lesbian or bisexual) than we have come to think, even in perhaps the most liberal places, and it’s extremely difficult to be out in many parts of the country. The presumption of victory whitewashes the hardship of millions of Americans — not just lesbians and gays themselves but also the spouses and children of people living in the closet.

“In Gallup polls, among people under the age of 30, more than 6 percent of adults tell pollsters they’re gay,” Williams Institute Demographer Gary Gates told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2013 . . . a large piece of that is younger people are growing up in an environment where this is acceptable, so they’re willing to identify themselves as gay.”

The closet is very damaging, both for gays and their families - I know, I lived in the closet for 37 years.  It made me miserable much of the time and certainly prevented me from being as good of parent as I might otherwise have been.  Self-hate and self-loathing and living in fear of having one's "secret" discovered does not make for a happy life or quality relationships.  Yet, thanks to the "godly folk" and the embrace of ignorance and bigotry, millions still suffer because of homophobia and the closet.  This needs to end NOW.

 

Race and the Modern GOP

As I have noted many times, the Republican Party in which I grew up and in which I was very active for the better part of a decade no longer exists.  In its place one finds a sectarian party that embraces white supremacists and celebrates the embrace of ignorance - also so it can woo some of the nastiest elements of society to get out and vote.  The rise of the Christofascists within the GOP has fueled this decline into something ugly, especially the growing embrace of white supremacy.  Anyone who denies what has happened is either lying to themselves - usually because they don't want to admit that it is their own greed that motivates them to continue to support the GOP - or they have been living under a rock or imbibing vast quantities of Kool-Aid.  Apiece in Politico Magazine looks at the racism than now suffuses the GOP.  Here are highlights:

In the past few years, we’ve celebrated the 50th anniversaries of many seminal events and landmark achievements of the civil rights movement, from the nonviolent direct action campaign waged in Birmingham, Alabama, to the March on Washington and Freedom Summer. An award-winning play devoted to Lyndon Johnson’s shrewd stewardship of the Civil Rights Act ran on Broadway for most of 2014. And next year, we will commemorate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which restored to Southern blacks the franchise that had been unconstitutionally denied them during the Jim Crow era. These are all, certainly, accomplishments to celebrate.

But the legacy of the all these landmarks is much more complicated and tinged with—make that drenched in—irony than the conventional story of courage and triumph lets on. It is time to state the obvious. Forget about weak explanations for today’s deep political divisions like “the culture of Washington,” gerrymandering or the rise of cable TV: The civil rights movement, while a victory on many levels, was also the origin of our present morass. It spawned a powerful national “white resistance” countermovement that decisively altered the racial geography of American politics, pushing the national Democratic and Republican parties off center and toward their ideological margins, undermining the centrist policy convergence of the postwar period and setting the parties on the divisive course they remain on today. Many will blame today’s unprecedented political polarization on recent events, such as the rise of the Tea Party or Obama’s election in 2008, but they will be wrong. The seeds of America’s dysfunction were planted 50 years ago. And the ugly politics of race had everything to do with it.

In just 8 years, the number of liberal Republicans in Congress fell by 75 percent and the number of conservative Republicans quintupled. The policy preferences of the two parties essentially flipped. As Democrats moved sharply left on matters of race, the GOP delegation moved even more dramatically in the opposite direction.

In 1956 the “solid South” holds true to its historic allegiance to the Democratic Party, even in the face of Eisenhower’s sweep of the rest of the country. Eight years later, the South is out of step with the nation once again, this time in a way that no one could have imagined in 1956. The votes of the Deep South now belonged to the Republican Party and, more tellingly, to its conservative, anti-civil rights candidate, Goldwater.

The shift was not just limited to the South: By the middle of the decade the southern segregationist resistance to the civil rights struggle had morphed, as the mainstream media proclaimed, into a nationwide “white backlash” movement.

Seeing an opportunity, an increasing number of Republicans began to embrace more conservative racial politics designed to appeal to Wallace supporters throughout the country. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so,” said Ronald Reagan during his 1966 campaign for California governor, in which he also decried welfare and opposed government efforts to encourage neighborhood integration.

In a scant eight years, the Party of Lincoln had gone from being the more racially liberal of the two major parties to something more closely resembling a coalition of white racial conservatives, with the South as its natural geographic home, at least when it came to presidential politics.

In short, the essence of today’s GOP—overwhelming white and disproportionately Southern—was evident by the late 1960s. This is not, of course, the whole of the story. The evolution of the party and the broader racial geography of American politics would continue in fits and starts over the next 45 years. But unquestionably it was the civil rights movement, and white resistance to it, that put the Republican Party on its demographic and ideological trajectory.  . . . .  the GOP has moved from its broadly centrist, racially liberal, geographically diverse base in the postwar period to the ideologically extreme, overwhelming white and disproportionately Southern party it is today.

These politics were on full display in the 2012 Republican primaries, a half a century later, with the candidates seemingly trying to outdo one another in impugning the poor and African-Americans in particular. Newt Gingrich accused Obama of being a “food-stamp president” and opined that, “poor people should want paychecks, not handouts.” Rick Santorum was even more explicit when he offered up the following quote: “I don’t want to make black peoples’ lives better by giving them someone else’s money.”

Even Mitt Romney played the race card, blaming his defeat on the policy “gifts” that Obama had bestowed on the very “dependent” segments of the population he had alluded to in his notorious “47 percent” video. “Especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community, and young people,” he clarified, . . . . 

The imprint of race and racism on today’s GOP is not only a matter of rhetoric. It was also reflected in the party’s transparent efforts to disenfranchise poor and minority voters in the run-up to the 2012 election. Throughout the country, Republican legislators and other officials sought to enact new laws or modify established voting procedures that, in virtually all instances, would have made it harder for poor and minority voters to exercise the franchise.

The Ignorance of the GOP Base -Economic Woes Worse in Tea Party Districts

I continue to be amazed at how so many in the GOP base allow themselves to be manipulated by Republican politicians and far right hate groups who play upon the base's religious extremism, homophobia, racism and fear of loss of white privilege, all with the result that GOP base votes against its own interest.  Indeed, by allowing themselves to be duped by cynical Republicans, these people are their own worse enemy.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the consequences suffered by Tea Party districts which has been greatly exacerbated by Republican obstruction of higher government economic stimulus spending.   Yet what do the cretins members of the GOP base do?  They blame Barack Obama rather than the GOP obstructionists who are the real underlying cause for the economic malaise they are suffering.  Here are excerpts from the Washington Post story that looks at the alternate universe in which these people live:

If you want to understand the congressional Republicans who have forced confrontations with Obama on the “fiscal cliff,” the government shutdown and the debt ceiling — and whether those lawmakers might feel encouraged to force more confrontations in the future — you need to understand the economic struggles of the Republicans’ home districts.

People in those districts are poorer and more likely to be unemployed than in the nation at large. They have focused their anger about their economic circumstances on Obama, and they want someone, anyone, to make him improve things for them. This is why Hackett praises his congressman, Tom Graves, for voting against the plan to end the budget impasse with Obama that produced the shutdown. “I think he’s great,” he said of Graves. “Somebody’s got to stand up to him.”

Forty-five House Republicans have most consistently pushed their caucus to brinkmanship over the past several years, according to a Washington Post analysis of voting patterns.

On average, the economy in the districts those Republicans represent is significantly worse than it is in the nation at large.

The median income in those districts last year was 7 percent lower than the national median, according to the Census Bureau. The unemployment rate averaged 10 percent. That was almost two percentage points higher than the national rate, and two percentage points higher than the overall rate in the states that contain each district.

The epicenter of that economic distress lies in the Deep South. Four of the congressional districts are in North Georgia. A dozen others are close by in Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, and North and South Carolina. Nearly all of them ended 2012 with jobless rates in the double digits.

“There is a lot of frustration over the way the government’s acting” when it comes to the economy, said Roger F. Smith, the chief executive of River City Bank in Rome, one of several people in town who contrasted Obama’s performance in office with the economic success they experienced under President Bill Clinton. “There’s a lack of confidence in the leadership. That starts with the president. It certainly hampers the ability to recover.”

Hackett, 58, called Obama’s entire agenda anti-business: “It’s like, ‘What can we do to kill the economy?’ ” It was his final day of selling to customers at the specialty meat shop he opened in 2008 as a hobby, catering to grilling enthusiasts like himself who want higher-end steaks than the big grocery stores sell.

For those who have followed this blog over a period of time, it is obvious that the Congressional GOP has sought to destroy or at a minimum, impede, economic recovery in the hope that it would destroy Barack Obama.  And yet these fools of the GOP base stupidly continue to support those most responsible for their ongoing misery.  I do not want to sound mean, but I find it difficult to feel very sorry for them.  They need to get their heads out of their asses and stop being controlled by their religious extremism, homophobia, racism and fear of loss of white privilege.

The South Really Is Different — And It’s Because Of Race and Religion

The last post looked at the winners and losers in the rapidly changing post Great Recession economic front.  Not surprisingly, with few exceptions which mainly have energy industry or entertainment industry ties, most of the cities that fall into the "winner" category" are not in the South.  Why?  Because the South is not welcoming to diversity, knowledge and innovation thanks to the twin pillars of racism and backward thinking, intolerant religiosity.  As I have argued many times before, innovators and entrepreneurs simply do not want to relocate to areas that are socially toxic and unattractive to educated employees who have numerous options on where to live and work.  A piece in Think Progress makes the case that racism in particular (followed by religious extremism) is a poison that hurts the South's prospects for the future.  Here are highlights:

The debt ceiling crisis may be over (at least until February), but the crisis created by the Republican Party’s sharp reactionary turn emphatically is not. I’ve argued that the Tea Party, is the legacy of structural racism in the South dating back to the 1930s, and will remain a powerful force in the Republican Party absent tectonic shocks to the political landscape on the level of the civil rights movement.

The buried story of Wednesday’s government-opening vote in the House was a split between Republican Southerners — and everyone else. Southern Republican whites voted overwhelmingly against the deal — 73 against, 18 in favor. Other Republicans were evenly split (69 in favor, 71 against) and Democrats, of course, unanimously supported the deal. Roughly the same thing happened the last time House Republicans almost took the United States off the default cliff.

The overwhelming Tea Party conservatism in the Southern delegation reflects the region’s exceptionally conservative bent. In a brand-new American Politics Research article, Columbia University’s Steven White ran a series of regressions analyses aimed at separating out the effect of region and religion on Southern political views. White found “very substantial support” for the idea that Southern whites were across-the-board more conservative than whites in the rest of the country. Moreover, whites in the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) were more reactionary than their also super-conservative peers in the Peripheral South (Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia).

Southern political uniqueness appeared to be partly religious — but only partly. Roughly half of America’s evangelicals live in the South, a pattern dating back to the early 1800s. . . . . Since then, Southern Oregon University’s Mark Shibley documents, evangelical faith has dominated spiritual and cultural life among Southern whites in a way that it hasn’t anywhere else in the United States.
Something else, something distinctly regional, explains why the South, both Deep and Peripheral, has more conservative views across-the-board than the rest of the country. Race, and its historical legacy, appears to be the key. 

Three political scientists at the University of Rochester found that, when you control for series of potentially confounding factors, white Southerners in the Mississippi Delta-to-Georgia “Black Belt” were “less likely to identify as Democrat, more likely to oppose affirmative action policies, and more likely to express racial resentment toward blacks” if their county housed high percentages of slaves prior to the Civil War. This effect survives controls for the percentage of African Americans in-county today, inclining the Rochester scholars to believe that racial prejudice (in mutating forms, to be sure) has been passed down continually among Deep South whites from parent-to-child since slavery.

Race and religion, then, have always set the South apart. So the South’s turn away from the Democratic Party over race, beginning in the 1930s and finalizing in the 1990s, is a pattern of evolution consistent with the region’s long history of racial conservatism. That the religious right became a dominant force in both the South and the Republican party in the 80s and 90s is the other side of the coin. 

The South, in short, was a region uniquely well suited for the modern conservative movement’s “fusion” between social and economic conservatism. It’s no surprise that the South is the driver of hard-right conservatism today. That’s what its racial and religious heritage would suggest.

[T]he Religious Right’s growth was tied up in the South’s race problem.  . . . . “It was not the school-prayer issue, and it was not the abortion issue,” Weyrich said. “What caused the movement to surface,” he told Columbia University’s Randall Balmer, “was the federal government’s move against the Christian schools.” After Brown v. Board of Education, many Southern whites moved their kids to private schools (“segregation academies,” in common parlance). Many of these academies were religious in character.

Bob Jones University, which was fully segregated until 1971 and subsequently continued to ban interracial dating, become the flashpoint. In in 1970, the Internal Revenue Service began proceedings against BJU and, in 1975, the IRS revoked its tax-exempt status, citing its racially discriminatory practices. Weyrich and his allies spun IRS’ action into a liberal campaign against the Christian way of life. The Religious Right as an organized movement grew in significant part out of the defense of Bob Jones and other similarly “persecuted” Christian schools.

Evangelical Christianity was politicized by conservative activists who exploited the legacy of Jim Crow to mobilize evangelicals as foot soldiers in the emerging Republican and conservative Southern establishment that itself was born from segregation’s ashes. It isn’t religion that explains the South’s conservatism; it was the rise of conservatism that explains the powerful political role Southern religion plays today.

Studies of Tea Party attitudes suggest a pervasive fear that America is no longer “their” country. Sociologist Theda Skocpol, one of the foremost scholars of the political movement, sees a tinge of racism and xenophobia in that, but more importantly “they also resent young people – including in their own families.”

They believe, according to Skocpol, that younger folks “hold ideas that are not very American.” In reality, these younger folks hold ideas that are not very traditionally Southern.

Things are changing, but nowhere rapidly enough.  As a result, until more of the older generations of Southerners die off, the twin evils of racism and religious extremism will continue to haunt the South and, unfortunately, the rest of America.

How Racism Caused The Government Shutdown

I grew up through high school in Central New York State (Syracuse area) and did not come to Virginia until I started going to college at the University of Virginia literally only a few years after the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Loving v. Virginia.  At the time, in many ways I felt like I had moved to a foreign land, especially on issues of race and how blacks were treated.  Thankfully, over the last 40+ years, things have changed in many parts of Virginia and other parts of the Deep South.  But in other areas of the South, things have changed very little.  Visit Martinsville, Virginia and many parts of Southern states ranging from Alabama to Kentucky, and the mindset has changed little from that evidenced by far too many whites displayed in the book and movie, The Help.  What does this have to do with the GOP's forcing of the federal government shutdown?  A lengthy piece in Think Progress (it is worth a full read) lays out the case that racism - and not just against Barack Obama - that underlies the behavior of today's GOP which has become a party dominated by reactionary Southerners.  Here are highlights:

This isn’t an article about how Republicans shut down the government because they hate that the President is black. This is an article about how racism caused the government to shut down and the U.S. to teeter on the brink of an unprecedented and catastrophic default.

I understand if you’re confused. A lot of people think the only way that racism “causes” anything is when one person intentionally discriminates against another because of their color of their skin. But that’s wrong. And understanding the history of the forces that produced the current crisis will lay plain the more subtle, but fundamental, ways in which race and racism formed the scaffolding that structures American politics — even as explicit battles over race receded from our daily politics.

The roots of the current crisis began with the New Deal — but not in the way you might think. They grew gradually, with two big bursts in the 1960s and the 1980s reflecting decades of more graduated change. And the tree that grew out of them, the Tea Party and a radically polarized Republican Party, bore the shutdown as its fruits.

In 1938, Sen. Josiah W. Bailey (D-NC) filibustered his own party’s bill. Well, part of his party — Northern Democrats, together with Northern Republicans, were pushing an federal anti-lynching bill. Bailey promised that Southern Democrats would teach “a lesson which no political party will ever again forget” to their Northern co-partisans if they “come down to North Carolina and try to impose your will upon us about the Negro:”

Just as when the Republicans in the [1860s] undertook to impose the national will upon us with respect to the Negro, we resented it and hated that party with a hatred that has outlasted generations; we hated it beyond measure; we hated it more than was right for us and more than was just; we hated it because of what it had done to us, because of the wrong it undertook to put upon us; and just as that same policy destroyed the hope of the Republican party in the South, that same policy adopted by the Democratic party will destroy the Democratic party in the South.

Bailey’s rage at the affront to white supremacy was born of surprise. Until 1932, the South had dominated the Democratic Party, which had consistently stood for the South’s key regional regional interest — keeping blacks in literal or figurative fetters — since before the Civil War.

But the Depression-caused backlash against Republican incumbents that swept New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt into the White House and a vast Democratic majority into Congress also made Southerners a minority in the party for the first time in its history.
[T]he New Deal not only benefited blacks, but brought them to a position of power in the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, “the GOP’s ties with chambers of commerce, manufacturers’ associations, real estate groups, farm lobbies, and other organizations opposed to the increased government oversight of private enterprise that would come with fair employment and other civil rights legislation encouraged the GOP’s drift toward racial conservatism.”

Republican economic libertarianism, together with its gradual embrace of traditionally Southern “states rights” arguments to as weapons in the war on the New Deal, set the stage for the eventual white flight from the Democratic Party.

And Southern Democrats, without whose votes the New Deal never could have happened, were willing to sacrifice their commitment to economic liberalism on the altar of white supremacy.
Hence the famous Dixiecrat revolt of 1948, when Strom Thurmond and likeminded Southerners temporarily seceded from the Democratic Party over Harry Truman and the Democratic platform’s support for civil rights. The tacit bargain that Katznelson documents during the Roosevelt Administration, in which the Northern Democrats would get their New Deal if the Southern Democrats got their white supremacy, became untenable.

But the Dixiecrats weren’t ready to migrate en masse to Party of Lincoln just yet. Something needed to happen to make the Republican Party shed its commitment to leading on civil rights wholesale. That “something” was the rise of the modern conservative movement.

[I]t wasn’t until Barry Goldwater and the rise of the modern conservative movement that this marriage was formally consummated. Goldwater lost all but six states — Arizona, his home, and five Deep South states. It was the first time the GOP had prevailed at the presidential level in the South in the party’s history. Republicans have held the South since..

By the Johnson-Goldwater election, it had become clear that overt racism and segregationism was politically doomed. Brown v. Board of Education and LBJ’s support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act saw to that. As this scary recognition dawned on Southern whites, they began searching for a new vehicle through which to shield themselves and their communities from the consequences of integration. The young conservative movement’s ringing endorsement of a minimalist federal government did the trick  . . . 

These “rights” included “the ‘right’ to select their neighbors, their employees, and their children’s classmates, the ‘right’ to do as they pleased with their private property and personal businesses, and, perhaps, most important, the ‘right’ to remain free from what they saw as dangerous encroachments by the federal government.”

Kruse traces this language through white resistance to desegregation from the 40s through the 60s, using a detailed examination of “white flight” in Atlanta as a synecdoche. In the end, he finds, “the struggle over segregation thoroughly reshaped southern conservatism…segregationist resistance inspired the creation of new conservative causes, such as tuition vouchers, the tax revolt, and the privatization of public services.” The concomitant rise of the modern conservative movement and the civil rights movements’ victories conspired to make Southern whites into economic, and not just racial, conservatives.

The more politically active blacks became, their data suggest, the more whites flocked to conservative Republicans as a counter. So from 1964 on, conservative white Southerners voted against Democrats at the presidential level. But the en masse formal switch in party identification until Reagan.

We all know what happens next. The Southern conservative takeover of the Republican Party pushes out moderates, cementing the party’s conservative spiral. This trend produces the Tea Party, whose leading contemporary avatar — Ted Cruz — engineers the 2013 shutdown and risk of catastrophic default.

So we can draw a tentatively straight line between the last 80 years of racial politics and this week’s political crisis. Aside from being an interesting point of history, what does that tell us?
First, that the shutdown crisis isn’t the product of passing Republican insanity or, as President Obama put it, a “fever” that needs to be broken. Rather, the sharp conservative turn of the Republican Party is the product of deep, long-running structural forces in American history.
Second, and more importantly, the battle over civil rights produced a rigidly homogenous and disproportionately Southern Republican party, fertile grounds for the sort of purity contest you see consuming the South today.

One 2005 study that measured racial animus found that Southern whites were “more racially conservative than whites elsewhere on every measure of racial attitudes ordinarily used in national surveys.” And Obamacare is a racially polarized issue. Brown University’s Michael Tesler found, in 2010, that there was an astonishing 20 point higher racial gap on health policy in 2009 than there was in the early 90s. In Tesler’s experiments, subjects’ responses to statements about health policy were “significantly more racialized” when the statement was attributed to President Obama than President Clinton. So it’d be implausible, to put it mildly, to say that modern racism has nothing to do with the shutdown fight.

As someone  who has lived in the South for 40+ years and who spent close to a decade involved in the Republican Party, I believe this analysis is 100% on point.  Racism and religious extremism - these folks STILL use the Bible to justify segregation - are indeed the under currents that have driven the GOP to its current insane state.  Having a black man in the White House has only made the extremism and racism bubble to open view more fully.

Is Racism Behind States Electing to Not Particiapte Medicaid Eaxpansion?

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The map above is pretty telling - the majority of states that are likely to opt out of the Medicaid expansion component of the Affordable Health Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare, largely coincide with the states that comprised the former Confederate States of America.  Also telling is that those most injured and deprived of health care coverage will be disproportionately black.   After blacks, Hispanics will be the next most adversely affected.  Many of my former GOP colleagues don't like to admit it, but in addition to far right religious extremism, racism is a key component of today's GOP.   That and hypocrisy since the GOP base wraps itself in religion, yet then seeks to destroy the social safety net that in many ways implements the Gospel message of caring for the poor and less fortunate.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this troubling phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

The New York Times has a story up outlining the effects of the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act in general, and the Medicaid expansion in particular:

Starting next month, the administration and its allies will conduct a nationwide campaign encouraging Americans to take advantage of new high-quality affordable insurance options. But those options will be unavailable to some of the neediest people in states like Texas, Florida, Kansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia, which are refusing to expand Medicaid. 

More than half of all people without health insurance live in states that are not planning to expand Medicaid. People in those states who have incomes from the poverty level up to four times that amount ($11,490 to $45,960 a year for an individual) can get federal tax credits to subsidize the purchase of private health insurance. But many people below the poverty line will be unable to get tax credits, Medicaid or other help with health insurance.

[I]f you look at a map of which states are refusing the Medicaid expansion, and then look at this report from the Urban Institute, a troubling (if predictable) trend emerges. Approximately a fifth (about 18 percent) of all people who will remain untouched by the Medicaid expansion are black. When you start drilling down to the states where those black people tend to live, it gets worse. In Virginia and North Carolina, 30 percent of those who are going to miss out are black. In South Carolina and Georgia, the number is around 40 percent. In Louisiana and Mississippi, you are talking about 50 percent of those who would be eligible for the expansion but who will go uncovered.

You look at Latinos and get a similar (and to some extent worse) picture. Nationally, Latinos make up 18 percent of those who stand to get health coverage. But in Arizona -- where the legislature is fighting Jan Brewer's effort to expand Medicaid -- Latinos make up 34 percent of those who stand to gain coverage. In Florida, they make up 27 percent, and in Texas they make up 47 percent. Texas has the highest rate of uninsured in the country. The majority of people there who are going to miss out on care -- over 60 percent -- are black and Latino.

When you have a country grappling with the deep vestiges of bigoted policy, you do not need "colored only" signs to get "colored mostly" effects.

I continue to find it disgraceful that the USA alone of developed western nations continues to view many of its citizens as disposable garbage.  The fact that a disproportionate number of these people are racial minorities speaks volumes.

Two Alabama Cities Top List of Porn-Loving "Religious Places"

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The South: Racism and Insane Gun Ownership

While I was born in New York State, the vast majority of my life has been lived in the South - Virginia, Alabama and Texas and back to Virginia in the years after high school.  Having acquired more liberal sensibilities in New York moving to and living in the South at times feels like one has moved to an insane asylum peopled by schizophrenics who can demonstrate wonderful generous traits and in the next moment exhibit frightening levels of racism and bigotry.  The phenomenon surely isn't limited to the South, but the region seems to have brought it to a higher level than other regions of the country.   Two things are stark: latent racism and an insane love of guns. And opposition to any form of rational gun control.  Kathleen Parker - who seems to have once again sworn of GOP Kool-Aid, at least for the moment - has a column in the Washington Post that looks at the troubling love of guns.  Here are highlights:

Analysts seeking insight into the gun debate need look no further than the land of cotton, where nothing is ever forgotten. In a matter of days, citizens and lawmakers on both sides of the gun issue have advanced laws to:

●Allow concealed weapons to be carried in bars and restaurants;
●Make it legal to purchase or own any weapon that could have been acquired legally at the end of 2012; and
●Strengthen background checks to identify people with mental illness.

The latter is the most serious of the batch and follows a recent near-tragedy at Ashley Hall, a private girls school in Charleston, S.C., where Barbara Bush, among other notables, was once a student. Several days ago, a woman with a long record of mental instability, including a 2005 court plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, brought a loaded semiautomatic pistol to the school and pulled the trigger several times while pointing the gun at a school administrator. 

Fortunately, the gun never fired, and Alice Boland, 28, was unable to complete her mission. What exactly that was isn’t easily discerned from her bond hearing rant, which covered a diverse collection of complaints:

The woman herself said she was crazy, yet she’s sane enough to buy a gun? More than 50 Ashley Hall parents have signed a letter sent to a dozen state and federal officials urging action to prevent people such as Boland from acquiring firearms. Boland managed to answer questions on a federal questionnaire adequately to purchase the gun. And because she has no criminal record, her name wasn’t flagged during a routine background check.

But Boland had another record that clearly should have disqualified her from gun ownership. Never mind an earlier diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. She also had faced federal charges for threatening to kill President George W. Bush and “the entire U.S. Congress.” Her plea of not guilty by reason of insanity inarguably should have placed her in a database of those ineligible to purchase firearms. But because her charges were dismissed in 2009, she had no criminal record.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, speaking in Washington on Wednesday, labeled the Ashley Hall case Exhibit A of a “broken system” and has vowed to introduce legislation that would enhance the background check process to include “prior exposure to court and . . . mental status.”

Meanwhile, state officials back home in Columbia were busy figuring out ways to skirt any new laws that might restrict gun ownership.   Citing an 1881 “unorganized militia” state law, state Sen. Tom Corbin (R) proposed legislation guaranteeing everyone’s right to own any weapon that could be purchased legally as of Dec. 31, 2012. Corbin’s claim that federal law could not preempt South Carolina law — in addition to being incorrect; federal law trumps state law — was rather dramatically disproved during the unpleasantness of 1861-65.

In other action, a state Senate panel approved a bill to allow concealed weapons in restaurants and bars so long as the carriers don’t drink. Noting the volatility of mixing guns and alcohol, some suggested that business owners could post signs banning guns in their establishments. But one speaker called that “un-American.” Another insisted that he should be allowed to have a glass of wine with his lasagna while packing heat.

So it goes in the state that James L. Petigru, anti-secessionist and former South Carolina attorney general, long ago described as “too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”

As I said, it's like living in an insane asylum.

The Corelation Between Religiosity and Obesity, High Divorce Rates, and Teen Pregnancies

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Gallup has a new report on religiosity by state and not surprisingly, other than Utah and Oklahoma, all of the most religious states are in the Deep South.  Meanwhile, the least religious states clustered in the Northwest and in the Northeast.  In a related report, Gallup also found that the highest rates of obesity, lack of health insurance coverage and struggles to subsist were correlated to the most religious states.  First these findings on levels of religiosity (see the chart above as well):

Overall, 40% of Americans nationwide were classified as very religious in 2012 -- based on saying religion is an important part of their daily life and that they attend religious services every week or almost every week. Thirty-one percent of Americans were nonreligious, saying religion is not an important part of their daily life and that they seldom or never attend religious services. The remaining 29% of Americans were moderately religious, saying religion is important in their lives but that they do not attend services regularly, or that religion is not important but that they still attend services.

Eight of the top 10 religious states are in the South -- basically comprising the entire Southern belt from Georgia and the two Carolinas on the Atlantic coast through Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, to Louisiana and Arkansas in the west. The states outside the Southern belt are Utah -- with its strongly religious majority Mormon population -- and Oklahoma, which straddles the border between the South and the Midwest.

The 12 least religious states comprise the entirety of New England -- Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut -- along with the three most Northwestern states in the union, Alaska, Washington, and Oregon, plus the District of Columbia, Nevada, and Hawaii.

As for social malaise correlating to the most religious states, there are these highilights:

Texas residents continue to be the most likely in the U.S. to lack health insurance (25.5%) in 2012 and those in Massachusetts remain least likely (4.1%).

One in four Mississippi residents report lacking enough money to buy the food they or their families needed at times in the last 12 months -- more than any other state in 2012. North Dakotans were the least likely to struggle to afford food, at 9.6%.

A majority of American adults in all 50 states are either overweight or obese in 2012. West Virginia residents are the most likely to fall into one of these weight groups (69.3%), while Coloradans are least likely (55.1%).

Obesity rates remain highest in many Southern and Midwestern states. Western and Northeastern states still boast the lowest obesity rates in the country. Diabetes and high blood pressure rates follow the same geographic pattern.

As this blog has noted frequently, states in the Bible Belt also have the highest divorce rates and the highest teen pregnancy rates.   Obviously, there is a major discontent between claimed religiosity and actual behavior.  Some might call the phenomenon rank hypocrisy.

So Where Are Romney's Despised 47%

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Yesterday I posted about Mitt Romney's open contempt for a large segment of Americans - particularly those who "paid no taxes."  Well guess what.  Most of those folks live in the Deep South and in states that are Republican bastions.  Just as is the case of those who receive most government aid, it's the red states, not the blue states who suck up the most federal money.  Thus, in his rant, Romney was actually slamming his own party base it would seem: lower income angry white voters in conservative states.  The Atlantic has a telling map posted above that shows where those Romney deems parasites actually live.  Here are highlights from The Atlantic piece that looks at who does and doesn't "pay taxes" further:

So let's set that speculation aside and look at who the people are who actually pay no income tax. Romney's statements are a little unclear, but it appears that the 47 percent figure represents all of those who pay no income tax, rather than the Democratic base. His problem is that those people are disproportionately in red states -- that is, states that tend to vote Republican.

It's important to remember that just because people aren't paying income tax doesn't mean they're not paying taxes -- they pay federal payroll taxes and state and local sales taxes, for example. Once those taxes are factored in, the tax regime is basically flat. And the reason that most income tax nonpayers don't pay is they simply don't make enough income to qualify to pay. As one might expect, the map of states with the highest poverty levels resembles this map fairly closely. Many of them are also seniors, a highly contested voting bloc. Just more than 10 percent of households pay no income tax because they're retired. They might also be voters in places like Florida who are already jumpy about the changes to Medicare and Medicaid that the Romney-Ryan ticket has proposed -- although they would be mostly unaffected by those reforms.

So Romney appears to be wrong about these voters. But if calling for a less progressive taxation system was enough to alienate poor voters in the Deep South, the Republican Party would have already lost its stronghold there.

So once again we see Romney not only having his facts wrong, but also displaying an open contempt for average Americans when gathered with his 1% buddies.  The same folks Romney wants to give a massive tax break to at the expense of the middle class.  The man is truly an arrogant asshole.