Why You’re Not Hearing That Ralph Northam Was Smeared

By throwing Ralph Northam under the bus, the Virginia Democrat
Party is trying to erase its leading role in Massive Resistance..  The hypocrisy is truly breathtaking. 

Some readers may be tired of hearing about the firestorm in Virginia - much of it fueled by inside the Beltway pundits  and right wing "news" sites - but as a close fiend of Governor Northam and his wife, I cannot sit back and quietly watch the political assassination underway.   While Northam was first smeared by a far right website, far too many Democrat elected officials have jumped on the bandwagon to make it difficult to feel that some sort of dirty deal has been cut between elected officials and the Black Caucus in the Virginia General Assembly. I am so livid that I am considering a run against either my member of the House of Delegates or State Senator both of whom are members of the Black Caucus.  I last ran for office 25 years ago and swore I;d never do it again, but with these very low turn out elections, such a campaign might just be doable.  But I digress.  A piece in Slate looks at why Northam may be unfairly being savaged by the media and social media.   What the piece leaves out is (i) evidence exonerating Northam, and (ii) the fact that the Democrat Party in Virginia has a very ugly racist history that it now pretends never happened.  Massive Resisistance - where public schools were closed down rather than integrate - occurred under Democrats, not Republicans.  By crucifying Northam, the Democrat Party of Virginia is trying to rewrite history and erase its own ugly history of racism which pales compared to anything Ralph Northam might have done as a student.  Northam, in fact, wasn't even born when Virginia Democrats developed Massive Resistance.  Here are article excerpts:

When mainstream media outlets reported on sexual assault allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Republican politicians and conservative media outlets said he’d been the victim of a left-wing “smear job.” When the same outlets covered a viral video of Covington, Kentucky, high school students facing off with a Native American protester near the Lincoln Memorial, Republican politicians and conservative media outlets said the same thing. . . . There are similar open questions about some aspects of the scandal into which Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has gotten himself. Last Friday, news broke that a photo on Northam’s medical school yearbook page showed two individuals at a costume party, one in blackface and one dressed as a member of the KKK. Many Democratic politicians and left-wing commentators called on him to resign. Subsequently, though, some of Northam’s medical school classmates have said they don’t remember Northam in those get-ups, and that it’s technically possible the picture could have been put on his page by mistake.

And yet, we’re not hearing much about a “smear job” when it comes to Northam.

The difference between the reaction to Northam and the reactions to Kavanaugh and Covington is pretty easy to spot: Northam is a Democrat. Despite not every detail of his situation being locked down, we’re not hearing about this story as a smear job because, for reasons including identity, ideology, and coalition-building necessity, Democrats and pundits on the left aren’t looking for ways to worm out of confronting racist and sexist behavior. Northam’s peers in his party and his movement aren’t invested in proving that all such accusations are fraudulent, and centrist media figures haven’t been made self-conscious about criticizing people like him by years of bias accusations.

Perhaps an even more important article is this one.  Read the entire thing. 

Statistics: Blacks Treated More Harshly Than Whites Under Virginia's Marijuana Laws

From the end of Reconstruction onward through the Jim Crow period and then to Massive Resistance, Virginia lead the South in devising ways to disenfranchise black voters and/or subjugate blacks to an inferior status. Virginia's current marijuana laws are a continuation of that legacy which involves two steps: first, enact draconian marijuana laws and second, disproportionately target blacks for arrest and prosecution.   Under § 18.2-250.1, Code of Virginia, possession of marijuana is punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a fine up to $500 for the first offense and up to one year in jail and a fine up to $2,500 for subsequent offenses.  Under § 18.2-248.1, the delivery or sale of one-half ounce of marijuana or less is punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine up to $2,500. For greater than one-half ounce, the penalties increase to a possible 1 - 10 years in prison and a fine up to $2,500. Add to this the disproportionate prosecution of blacks for marijuana offenses and one discovers a vehicle to accomplish the voter disenfranchisement so loved by Republicans, including those in the Virginia General Assembly.  Inroads have been made in legalizing medical marijuana, but much reform and decriminalization for recreational use is needed. A piece in the Daily Press looks at the damning statistics on what happens to black Virginians.  Here are excerpts:

Whites charged with marijuana possession in Virginia are more likely to get a second chance, while blacks are far more likely to spend time behind bars, a Daily Press review of court data found.

And, while only about one in five Virginians is African-American, half of those charged with a first offense of marijuana possession are black, the review found.

The data show the pattern holds for all marijuana charges, for first offenders and for first offenders who were not charged with any other offense when arrested. 

Health surveys suggest blacks and whites are about equally likely to use marijuana. But, in Newport News and Hampton, where U.S. Census figures show just under half the residents are black, African-Americans are defendants in more than three-quarters of first-offense marijuana cases.

“This is something I kind of knew, I felt it in my gut, but we never had the numbers,” said a shocked Del. Mike Mullin, D-Newport News, who has worked as a prosecutor for a decade and has been thinking Virginia might need its first update in four decades of its marijuana possession laws.

The Daily Press analysis of district court case records found 49 percent of all first-offense marijuana charges statewide are filed against African-Americans, compared to 47 percent against whites. The percentages are almost exactly the same when those first-offenders have no other charges, which occurs a bit less than half the time.

The disparities are sharper on the Peninsula. In Newport News, 75 percent of charges are filed against blacks; in Hampton, the figure is 80 percent.

The paper reviewed nearly 29,500 marijuana cases from 2017 arrests, matching them against a database of more than 200,000 earlier cases to sort out individuals charged with possession for the first time, and a database of more than 1.8 million other district court cases from 2017 to find those who had been charged only with marijuana possession.

The review found:

*Once in court, blacks are slightly more likely to be found guilty, but are significantly more likely to go to jail. Only about one out of 14 convictions for a first-offense marijuana possession ends up with jail time; but of those that do, 65 percent are black. 

“These figures are staggering,” said Bill Farrar, director of public policy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. . . . Farrar said, “there is no reason to keep possession on the books as a criminal charge except as way to punish a particular group of people … this is a major racial justice, criminal justice and mass incarceration issue.”
 “It was meant to be an easy conviction, especially after the General Assembly dropped the requirement for a crime lab analysis of seized marijuana in possession cases — the field analysis is sufficient to prove a substance is marijuana,” he said. In Hampton Roads’ urban cities, four out of five charges for a first offense of marijuana possession making it to court were filed against African-Americans. In suburban communities, that figure was just under two-thirds. In Newport News, the figure was three out of four. In rural communities, about half of cases going to court were filed against blacks. In the Williamsburg/James City County General District Court, about half the cases of first-offense marijuana possession were filed against blacks. Once in court, judges found blacks guilty in seven of 10 cases, whites in four of 10. Four out of 10 blacks found guilty spend time behind bars, while two out of 10 whites did.

And, of course, once has a criminal record on their record, it becomes much more difficult to find a decent job setting the stage for marijuana law loving Republicans to whine about blacks not in the work force and being freeloaders.  If Virginia wants to escape some of the worse elements of its past, one step is to decriminalize recreational marijuana. 

The Real Agenda of Critics of "Government Schools"

Another area where Donald Trump is delivering on promises to Christofascists is in the area of public education.  His appointee as Secretary of Education, Betsy De Vos, has a long, long history of working to gut funding for public schools - as well as well documented support for anti-LGBT hate groups - is now striving to divert public education funding to "charter schools" notwithstanding the spotty record of such schools when it comes to actually improving education. If one looks at the history of such schools and especially their largest cheerleaders, one finds that beneath the supposed libertarian is a Christian extremist and/or white supremacist.  In Virginia, the "Massive Resistance" movement was powered by Christian fundamentalists who set up private "Christian academies" rather than have their children attend integrated schools.  Sadly, that mindset is alive and well decades later. In addition, the secular nature of public schools is viewed as a threat by the "godly folk" who view true science and knowledge as a threat to the made up world view.  A piece looks at the agenda of De Vos and those like here who are being abetted by Der Trumpenführer, who wants to divert $9 billion from public schools to charter schools.  Here are excerpts:

When President Trump recently proposed his budget for “school choice,” which would cut more than $9 billion in overall education spending but put more resources into charter schools and voucher programs, he promised to take a sledgehammer to what he has called “failing government schools.”

[I]n certain conservative circles, the phrase “government schools” has become as ubiquitous as it is contemptuous.

What most people probably hear in this is the unmistakable refrain of American libertarianism, for which all government is big and bad. The point of calling public schools “government schools” is to conjure the specter of pathologically inefficient, power-mad bureaucrats.

Accordingly, right-wing think tanks like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Heartland Institute and the Acton Institute have in recent years published screeds denouncing “the command and control mentality” of “government schools” that are “prisons for poor children.” All of these have received major funding from the family of the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, either directly or via a donor group. But the attacks on “government schools” have a much older, darker heritage. They have their roots in American slavery, Jim Crow-era segregation, anti-Catholic sentiment and a particular form of Christian fundamentalism — and those roots are still visible today. Before the Civil War, the South was largely free of public schools. That changed during Reconstruction, and when it did, a former Confederate Army chaplain and a leader of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Robert Lewis Dabney, was not happy about it. An avid defender of the biblical “righteousness” of slavery, Dabney railed against the new public schools. In the 1870s, he inveighed against the unrighteousness of taxing his “oppressed” white brethren to provide “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” For Dabney, the root of the evil in “the Yankee theory of popular state education” was democratic government itself, which interfered with the liberty of the slaver South. One of the first usages of the phrase “government schools” occurs in the work of an avid admirer of Dabney’s, the Presbyterian theologian A. A. Hodge. Less concerned with black paupers than with immigrant papist hordes, Hodge decided that the problem lay with public schools’ secular culture. In 1887, he published an influential essay painting “government schools” as “the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.” Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony. An admirer, too, of both Hodge and Dabney, Rushdoony began to advocate a return to “biblical” law in America, or “theonomy,” in which power would rest only on a spiritual aristocracy with a direct line to God — and a clear understanding of God’s libertarian economic vision.

Rushdoony took the attack on modern democratic government right to the schoolhouse door. His 1963 book, “The Messianic Character of American Education,” argued that the “government school” represented “primitivism” and “chaos.” Public education, he said, “basically trains women to be men” and “has leveled its guns at God and family.”

The critique of “government schools” passed through a defining moment in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, when orders to desegregate schools in the South encountered heavy resistance from white Americans. Some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private “segregation academies” for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes. Among the supporters of the Trump administration, the rhetoric of “government schools” has less to do with economic libertarianism than with religious fundamentalism. It is about the empowerment of a rearmed Christian right by the election of a man whom the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. calls evangelicals’ “dream president.” We owe the new currency of the phrase to the likes of Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council — also bankrolled in its early years by the DeVos family — who, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing same-sex marriage, accused “government schools” of indoctrinating students “in immoral sexuality.” When these people talk about “government schools,” they want you to think of an alien force, and not an expression of democratic purpose. And when they say “freedom,” they mean freedom from democracy itself.

As I have noted a number of times, about the only area in which Trump is keeping his promises in the area of forwarding the Christian fundamentalist/white supremacist agenda.  Be very afraid.  

Bobby Scott Calls Out Republicans Attacking McAuliffe's Restoration of Voting Rights

As Virginia's population becomes more urban - with urban areas being much more liberal than the hinterland regions - the Republican Party of Virginia has done all it can to block the restoration of voting rights for felons who have done their time and paid their fines.  In the vast majority of states the restoration of voting rights happens automatically.  Not so in Virginia.  Why?  Because convicted felons in Virginia are disproportionately members of racial minorities - minorities that tend to vote liberal/Democrat.  Indeed, Virginia Republicans even opposed former Governor Bob McDonnell's effort to restore voting rights - one of McDonnell's few progressive acts - because even a small increase in minority voters might tip some districts from the GOP column to that of Democrats.  This GOP concern is heighten by the reality that the population of the urban cities and counties of Northern Virginia, greater Richmond, and Hampton Roads now exceeds that of the rest of Virginia combined.  It was no surprise, therefore, that the Virginia GOP went ballistic over Governor McAuliffe's executive order that restore voting rights to thousands and thousands of former felons, many of who are now productive members of society and good citizens.  As the Virginian Pilot reports, Congressman Bobby Scott - who is my representative and who the husband and I know - blasted the bigotry of Virginia Republicans.  Here are story excerpts:

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott struck hard Wednesday at Republicans who accused Gov. Terry McAuliffe of trying to help the Democrats win the presidency when he issued an executive order last week restoring voting and other civil rights to 206,000 felons.

State Republican leaders have said McAuliffe’s executive order last week that allows felons who have served their sentences and probation to vote, run for office or serve on juries was a way to register more voters for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the November presidential election. They also objected to his restoring rights to those who committed violent crimes.

Scott, an attorney and civil liberties expert, argues the governor is correcting a suppression effort that goes back 115 years.

“The right to vote is a right. It’s not a privilege. You have Republicans who at every opportunity are trying to deny people the right to vote,” he said in a conference call with reporters.

He noted Virginia’s ban on felons voting originated in the early 1900s as part of a package of new state laws designed to suppress blacks. Those restrictions, including the now-banned literacy tests and poll taxes, at the time had forced the removal of 85 percent of black voters from the rolls.

McAuliffe’s order could return to the voting rolls as much as 20 percent of the state’s black population that have felony convictions, Scott said.

“If there is such an advantage to Democrats, it means the Republicans were enjoying a huge advantage all these years because they could deny 20 percent of the African American population the right to vote,” the Newport News Democrat said.

Virginia remains one of four states that strip voting rights from felons for life after their convictions. Before McAuliffe’s action, felons could get the right restored only by individually applying to the governor. Governors, both Republicans and Democrats, have restored rights to thousands in recent decades.

The mindset behind Massive Resistance in the 1960's is a live and well in some factions in Virginia, especially the Republican Party of Virginia which has become increasingly racists and homophobic since I resigned from the party many years ago.  I should note, however, that the growing racism and religious extremism directly corresponds with the rise of the Christofascists in the Virginia GOP. 

The GOP's Alabama Problem

The turmoil roiling in Alabama as some state court judges are ignoring federal court rulings allowing same sex marriages to proceed is also setting up a problem for the GOP.  The recalcitrant judges are singing the same "states rights" song that the GOP has made its national anthem of late whenever its knuckle dragging, spittle flecked base seeks to torpedo federal programs or wants majority rule to determine the rights of gays, blacks, and anyone else the cretins and Christofascists deem as "other."  Now, the GOP may be about to see the mindset it helped foment bite it right in the ass.  A piece in Politico looks ate the looming problem that lunatics like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum try to fan the flames into a conflagration.  Here are article excerpts:

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s defiance of a federal court order on gay marriage is just the latest in a long line of bitter states’ rights fights on issues from school integration to the Confederate battle flag – and the latest potentially embarrassing political sideshow for the 2016 field of GOP presidential hopefuls.

In the end, some veteran Republican strategists suggest, Moore’s order barring county probate judges from issuing gay marriage licenses may serve mainly to harden the entrenched positions of supporters and opponents of a legal issue on which public opinion has been shifting with lightning speed, and which the Supreme Court seems likely to resolve by this summer.

Moore’s decision, however, increases the chances that Republican presidential candidates will be forced to discuss the issue — in the racially freighted framework of states’ rights, no less — before extremely conservative voters in the heat of a primary campaign.

“It’s really the same arguments that the Civil War pivoted on, from nullification to states’ rights and all this stuff,” said Bill Carrick, a longtime Democratic strategist and native South Carolinian with a vivid appreciation for his region’s folkways and resistance to change.

Almost 52 years ago, Alabama’s segregationist Democratic governor, George Wallace, drew worldwide publicity for his theatrical stand in the “schoolhouse door” against integration of the University of Alabama. But he knew his was a losing cause. John Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and that was that.

More issued his order Sunday night, in defiance of a federal court ruling last month that Alabama’s statutory and constitutional bans on gay marriage are unconstitutional. The state is appealing that decision, but on Monday, the United States Supreme Court declined to extend a delay in its enforcement, and officials in Alabama’s more cosmopolitan quarters began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.

The issue flies straight in the face of efforts by Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus to broaden the GOP’s appeal, if only because it also flies straight in the face of the most conservative elements of the party’s base. As Huckabee recently put it, asking some conservative Christians to accept gay marriage is akin to asking Jews to serve “bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.”

“There is a feeling of ‘Here we go again,’’’ consultant Carrick said. “Roy Moore’s trying to turn back the clock, which is his specialty. I don’t know what the party’s going to do about these guys. As hard as Reince Priebus tries to get the clown car out of the Republican parade, there’s always somebody who comes in in another one.”

The true solution for the GOP?  Kick the Christofascists out and send them into the political wilderness.  They need to become outcasts not given the time of day in polite society or in national political parties. 

White/Christian Rage Against Progress.

If one looks at what motivates the increasingly lily white/far right Christian base of the Republican Party, it's really all about hanging on to power and privilege with a good measure of wanting to take the nation back to an imagined time when "things were better."  Of course, that envision time may have been good for white, heterosexual Christians, but it wasn't some glorious period for others, including blacks, gays, non-Christians and many others.  As things have improved for others in terms of civil rights and equality at least in theory under the law, the reaction of the Christofascists and white supremacist types is to feel that they have lost something.  Keeping others downtrodden and disadvantaged is sadly key to their sense of self worth.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this sad phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Mo., during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we’ve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.

[T]he real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. 

White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancement, there’s a reaction, a backlash.

The North’s victory in the Civil War did not bring peace. Instead, emancipation brought white resentment that the good ol’ days of black subjugation were over. Legislatures throughout the South scrambled to reinscribe white supremacy and restore the aura of legitimacy that the anti-slavery campaign had tarnished. 

Influential white legislators such as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pa.) and Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.) tried to make this nation live its creed, but they were no match for the swelling resentment that neutralized the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, and welcomed the Supreme Court’s 1876 United States vs. Cruikshank decision, which undercut a law aimed at stopping the terror of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nearly 80 years later, Brown v. Board of Education seemed like another moment of triumph . . . . But black children, hungry for quality education, ran headlong into more white rage. Bricks and mobs at school doors were only the most obvious signs. In March 1956, 101 members of Congress issued the Southern Manifesto, declaring war on the Brown decision. Governors in Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and elsewhere then launched “massive resistance.”. . . .
They shut down public school systems and used tax dollars to ensure that whites could continue their education at racially exclusive private academies. Black children were left to rot with no viable option.

A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama’s election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger.

It’s more subtle — less overtly racist — than in 1865 or even 1954. It’s a remake of the Southern Strategy, crafted in the wake of the civil rights movement to exploit white resentment against African Americans, and deployed with precision by Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Now, under the guise of protecting the sanctity of the ballot box, conservatives have devised measures — such as photo ID requirements — to block African Americans’ access to the polls.  

Add to this the tea party movement’s assault on so-called Big Government, which despite the sanitized language of fiscal responsibility constitutes an attack on African American jobs. Public-sector employment, where there is less discrimination in hiring and pay, has traditionally been an important venue for creating a black middle class.

So when you think of Ferguson, don’t just think of black resentment at a criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act.  

Only then does Ferguson make sense. It’s about white rage.

 Here in Virginia it is note worthy that one of the organizations that pushes for voter ID laws, maintaining "law and order" and advocates for "family values" is comprised of the direct descendants of those who supported Massive Resistance and segregation.  It's called The Family Foundation.  Under their world view, only white, heterosexual, conservative Christians should have rights and they exhibit rage towards anyone who in their minds seeks to diminish their special rights and privileges.   These people are the antithesis of the Gospel message.

Segregation, Not Abortion Formed the Religious Right

Jerry Falwell got his start fighting for segregation - Getty Images

I often note that most of the anti-gay "family values" organizations also have a strong undercurrent of racism, with many of the self-anointed leaders descended from active segregationists.  Indeed, Tony Perkins at Family Research Council has documented dealings with the KKK and has spoken at white supremacist gatherings.   These people only care about minorities, especially blacks, when it comes to suckering them into doing the bidding of the lily white family vales crowd.  Here in Virginia, one sees The Family Foundation play black pastors as if they were trained circus dogs.  A piece in Slate makes the case that what really caused the coalescent of the Religious Right wasn't a reaction to Roe v. Wade, but instead support for segregation and the Jim Crow laws. In Virginia during "Massive Resistance", many of the schools that whites fled to were so-called Christian academies, many of which still flourish today.  Here are excerpts from the Slate article:

The modern religious right formed, practically overnight, as a rapid response to the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade. Or, at least, that's how the story goes. The reality, Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth professor writing for Politico Magazine, says, is actually a little less savory to 21^st century Americans: The religious right, who liked to call themselves the "moral majority" at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated. It wasn't Roe v. Wade that woke the sleeping dragon of the evangelical vote. It was Green v. Kennedy, a 1970 decision stripping tax-exempt status from "segregation academies"—private Christian schools that were set up in response to Brown v. Board of Education, where the practice of barring black students continued.

Desegregation, however, was a different issue altogether. Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized conservative Christians. Bob Jones University stalled and resisted admitting black students, forcing the IRS to strip its tax exempt status in 1976, an event that spurred evangelical leaders to action. Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, two conservative activists who had been seeking a way to marshal evangelicals into a Republican voting bloc, pounced. Balmer writes:

Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.

The argument they used to defend school segregation will sound familiar to anyone following the lawsuits against mandatory contraception coverage in health insurance plans or the battles over whether businesses have a right to refuse gay customers: "religious freedom."

How did abortion eclipse pro-segregation as the rallying cause of the evangelical right? Balmer argues that Weyrich, in particular, was a sharp enough political thinker to realize that pro-segregation sentiment was enough to get the ball rolling, "but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale." They took their new coalition of evangelicals and pointed them in the direction of fighting abortion. The strategy worked.

[T]here was one other shift in the public consciousness going on at the time. The "Stop ERA" campaign, headed up by Christian right leader Phyllis Schlafly to kill the Equal Rights Amendment banning sex discrimination, got moving in 1972. By the time male Christian conservative leaders like Weyrich and Falwell decided to make abortion a centerpiece issue, Schlafly had done the yeoman's work of convincing huge numbers of evangelical Christians that feminists were a threat to the very fabric of society. With hostility to women's equality rising, making the anti-abortion pitch was probably much, much easier. 

Balmer notes at the top of his piece that it's common for anti-choicers to compare themselves to abolitionists. Once you know the pro-segregationist history of the religious right, however, it becomes clear that this comparison is not only obnoxious, but offensive. 

The bottom line?  Your Christian conservatives are not the nice people they pretend to be.  The truth is something quite different.

Virginia's Sorry History of Bigotry and Discrimination

The Virginia Capitol designed by Thomas Jefferson

In the founding days of the United States of America, Virginia provided some of the guiding lights of those men who embraced enlightenment and helped write the nation's founding documents: Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and James Madison was a principal author of the Constitution.  Sadly, since those glorious early days, Virginia has more often been on the side of discrimination and on the wrong side of history: laws in support for slavery (Virginia even fought to maintain slavery), Jim Crow laws and rabid legal support for segregation, "Massive Resistance" which closed public schools rather than desegregate, bans on interracial marriage, and now bans on same sex marriage.  In short, for nearly two centuries hate and discrimination have been the "Virginia way."  It's not something anyone decent should be proud of.  And in announcing that his office would no longer defend Virginia's same sex marriage ban, Attorney General Mark Herring specifically cited that he did not want to continue Virginia's ugly track record, recognizing that like it or not, it has been the application of the U.S. Constitution that has forced Virginia to do what it should have done voluntarily.  Yet the Virginia Christofascists and Virginia GOP want to continue this shameful track record.  A column in the Augusta Free Press looks at this sad reality about Virginia.  Here are excerpts:

Despite Virginia’s historic antipathy toward the federal government, the Commonwealth has nonetheless historically ceded decisions to federal authorities on major issues on which the state had been unwilling to move forward.

Another issue is about to fall into this category: same-sex marriage. Regardless of the desire on the part of conservative Virginians to pretend that it is not so, thousands of Virginians love someone of the same gender, an unknown number live together as partners, and some have already gotten married in other states. While an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as being between a man and a woman passed in a referendum more than a half dozen years ago, recent public opinion polls show a majority of Virginians as accepting of same-sex marriage.

Failure of the legislature to act on the issue has resulted in two cases before federal courts challenging Virginia’s prohibition of same-sex marriage. If the experiences in other states where such cases have been brought in federal court hold true for Virginia, the prohibition will be found to be unconstitutional. With the federal courts’ prodding, Virginia will once again be required to face a reality that it has resisted.

It is not the first time. Virginia also had a law that said that persons of different races could not marry. The legislature refused to acknowledge the unfairness of the law or vote to change it. It took a federal court decision, Loving v. Virginia (1967), to strike down the law.

Virginia segregated its public schools based on race until the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954)–of which a Virginia case was a part–struck down racial segregation. Virginia’s decade-long effort to resist the federal decision was called Massive Resistance, ”a deliberate, orchestrated campaign…intended to slow to a crawl attempts to integrate Virginia’s schools.” (www.lva.virginia.gov/exhibits/brown/resistance). The campaign was unsuccessful, although it did take 40 more court decisions to integrate the schools in Virginia.

Virginia was also part of the Baker v. Carr decision in 1962 establishing the “one man, one vote” principle because the state legislature refused to acknowledge population shifts that were occurring and permit legislative representation to reflect those shifts until the federal courts intervened.

Federal intervention and the Voting Rights Act got rid of the blank sheet voter registration system and the poll tax that disenfranchised most African Americans. 

While it is good that the federal government has been a backstop to ending discrimination in many forms, it is truly unfortunate that the General Assembly was not willing to recognize the wrongness of their laws and make decisions on their own without the need for the federal courts to protect Virginians from their own government.

Too often the argument for states’ rights has been used to justify a violation of personal rights. I believe the federal courts will strike down Virginia’s marriage amendment. The General Assembly needs to move forward in outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation instead of waiting until we’re forced to by the federal government.

The column's author is a member of the Virginia House of Delegates.  Would that there were more decent, moral delegates like him.

The Racist History of the Charter School Movement

In addition to seeking to achieve an evolution free approach to science where religious based lunacy is allowed to hold complete sway, many charter school advocates have another agenda: to get their children away from "those people."  Yes, I mean blacks and other racial minorities.  It's an agenda that is allied with the white Christofascists effort to get school vouchers for religious based schools.  An article in Southern Studies looks at this often unmentioned agenda.  Note that as usual, Virginia figures in the history of this ugly agenda.   The attitude from 1959 mentioned in the article is alive and well in today's Virginia GOP.   This unspoken road to de facto school segregation not surprisingly very popular with the white supremacists at The Family Foundation.  Here are highlights:

As a parent I find it easy to understand the appeal of charter schools, especially for parents and students who feel that traditional public schools have failed them. As a historical sociologist who studies race and politics, however, I am disturbed both by the significant challenges that plague the contemporary charter school movement, and by the ugly history of segregationist tactics that link past educational practices to the troubling present. 

The now-popular idea of offering public education dollars to private entrepreneurs has historical roots in white resistance to school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The desired outcome was few or, better yet, no black students in white schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five cases decided in Brown, segregationist whites sought to outwit integration by directing taxpayer funds to segregated private schools.

Two years before a federal court set a final desegregation deadline for fall 1959, local newspaper publisher J. Barrye Wall shared white county leaders' strategy of resistance with Congressman Watkins Abbitt: "We are working [on] a scheme in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to our corporation, reopen as privately operated schools with tuition grants from [Virginia] and P.E. county as the basic financial program," he wrote. "Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with 'em."

Meanwhile, in less blatant attempts to avoid desegregation, states and localities also enacted "freedom of choice" plans that typically allowed white students to transfer out of desegregated schools, but forced black students to clear numerous administrative hurdles and, not infrequently, withstand harassment from teachers and students if they entered formerly all-white schools. When some segregationists began to acknowledge that separate black and white schools were no longer viable legally, they sought other means to eliminate "undesirables."

Attorney David Mays, who advised high-ranking Virginia politicians on school strategy, reasoned, "Negroes could be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they could not maintain, by hazing if necessary, by economic pressures in some cases, etc.

These nefarious motives may seem a far cry from the desire of many charter school operators to "reinvent" public education for students whom traditional public schools have failed. In theory, these committed bands of reformers come with good intentions . . . . In others, however, this sparkling veneer masks less attractive realities that are too often dismissed, or ignored . . . 

Providers in these fields have a disincentive to accept or retain "clients" who require intensive interventions to maintain desired outcomes -- in the case of education, high standardized test scores that will allow charters to stay in business. The result? A segmented marketplace in which providers compete for the "good risks," while the undesirables get triage. By design, markets produce winners, losers and unintended or hidden consequences.  Charter school operators (like health insurers who exclude potentially costly applicants) have developed methods to screen out applicants who are likely to depress overall test scores. 

Whether intended or otherwise, these sifting mechanisms have the ultimate effect of reinscribing racial and economic segregation among the students they educate -- as the research on this topic is increasingly bearing out.

In the West and some areas of the South, it appears that charter schools "serve as havens for white flight from public schools," according to the Civil Rights Project.  

How can we compare the performance of charters versus traditional public schools if we don't know whether they are enrolling the same types of students? At the national and state levels, policymakers are pushing for the rapid expansion of charter schools on the basis of hope rather than evidence. 

Richmond Newspaper Regrets Role in Support of Segregation

Virginia - which gave the early years of the nation many enlightened and dynamic leaders - has for more than 125 years become a bastion of reactionary thought and embraced discrimination against targeted groups of its citizens. Once it was black Americans and today it is LGBT citizens with Virginia being among the most anti-gay states in the nation. Belatedly, the Richmond Times-Dispatch has expressed regret for its role in defending racial segregation in the years following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. During that era, many areas of Virginia engaged in "Massive Resistance" and closed their public schools rather than allow them to be integrated. Since it has taken roughly 50 years for the Times-Dispatch to express remorse for its treatment of blacks, I can only ponder how many decades we will have to wait for apologies to the misdeeds done to LGBT Virginians. Here are highlights from the "apology" published yesterday:

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Sometimes the era seems ancient; sometimes it resembles yesterday. Fifty years ago Virginia had a rendezvous with destiny and came up wanting. It scorned human rights and the promise of the Declaration of Independence and instead took a course known as Massive Resistance. Tomorrow at the Capitol, the University of Virginia's Center for Politics will convene a conference on the chapter and its legacy.

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Throughout the episode, Richmond Newspapers played a central role -- but not a centering one. The hour was ignoble. Editorials in The News Leader relentlessly championed Massive Resistance and the dubious constitutional arguments justifying its unworthy cause. Although not so intimately engaged, The Times-Dispatch was complicit. The record fills us with regret, which we have expressed before.

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Hubris prevailed. Those who railed against oppressions visited upon sovereign states by an allegedly imperial Washington relied on government's coercive might to deny the full humanity of their fellow citizens. Massive Resistance was neither a departure nor an exception but the extension of Jim Crow and the attitudes informing it. Segregation and its associated indignities were in retreat. Massive Resistance formed a last stand.

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Many simply could not see the harm they did to so many others. Jefferson trembled for his country when he reflected that God is just. Yesteryear's words cannot be revoked. They endure on newsprint yellow and brittle, on microfilm, and in the computer files into which they have been translated. They belong to history, and history lives. It is well and good that the words be remembered, as a warning perhaps best. We will not forget.

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But, of course, Virginia has forgotten and has passed anti-gay statutes and even wrote anti-gay discrimination into its Constitution in 2006. The same hubris and hate is ever present in the likes of many Virginians and organizations: Pat Robertson, Victoria Cobb, Bob "Taliban Bob"McDonnell, Regent University, Liberty University, The Family Foundation, Ken Cuccinelli, break away Virginia Anglicans. The list goes on and on. Somethings in Virginia unfortunately do not change. Virginia has once again had a rendezvous with destiny and came up wanting.