How to Win LGBT Equality in the South

After years of effort LGBT Virginians will have non-discrimination protects effective July 1, 2020. What finally allowed this to happen?  The short answer is Democrats took control of the Virginia General Assembly while holding the governor's mansion.  The more detailed answer is that the majority of Virginians finally said "no more' to the Virginia GOP's three pillars of its agenda: demonizing gays, unrestricted gun rights, and pandering to the hate merchants who parade as "Christians" while basically pushing a white supremacist agenda.  With Democrats now able to revise the redistricting process, Republic strength in the state, which relied heavily on gerrymandering, will likely be reduced further. Making similar progress across the rest of the South will be far more difficult as the GOP remains entrenched and blindly follows the dictates of Christofascists even as the lack of non-discrimination protections makes other Southern states less competitive in attracting new businesses - something that ought to priority No. 1 in the age of an economically crippling pandemic.  A piece in The Advocate looks at the situation and concludes that federal legislation may be the only way to bring LGBT protections to the South as a whole (yet another reason to strive to have Democrats take control in Washington, DC).  Here are article highlights:

In a time when COVID-19 has brought such heartbreak to so many and has so disrupted the normal routines of life, it can be hard to yank our attention from the moment we are in. 

But something truly significant has taken place in Virginia this month. The politics of the state’s legislature finally caught up with the values of the state’s people as a law ensuring comprehensive nondiscrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people went into effect. Years and years of tenacious and hopeful work went into this historic bipartisan LGBTQ victory in Virginia — the first statewide win for a comprehensive nondiscrimination bill in the South. 

Winning anywhere in the South matters for the LGBTQ people who are actually impacted by the passage of a law, but it also ripples across the region’s political and cultural climate, and it changes the story: Now, it is possible to pass nondiscrimination legislation here. 

The South demands a multipronged strategy. There are states where it will take too long to win on the state level, and that’s why we must push hard for federal legislation, the most effective way to deliver protections to every corner of the South. 

In many Southern states, legislatures remain a bastion of anti-LGBTQ sentiment — just witness the recent cluster of bills targeting transgender youth that made headlines this year in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and more. Far-right conservatives continue to be overrepresented in Southern legislatures, and their positions are increasingly out of sync with the growing majority that supports LGBTQ rights. 

Look at North Carolina’s efforts to pass a bill protecting young people from anti-LGBTQ “conversion therapy,” . . . . the bill hasn’t yet moved out of committee — it was held up without even a hearing because Republican leadership of the North Carolina General Assembly wanted it defeated. Specifically,  a small group of powerful legislators who were doubling down on a view held by just the 13 percent of Republicans who opposed banning “conversion therapy.”

Stories like this are a salient reminder that LGBTQ Southerners continue to meet every formal definition of political powerlessness. Indeed, it is a particular variety of political powerlessness when a minority group has the support of an overwhelming majority of the public but still can’t achieve the basic threshold of equal protection under the law because a small group of politically powerful politicians are systematically blocking natural progress. 

Deploying both real-time and long-game organizing strategies is critical in every single Southern state. But this approach creates a patchwork of progress rather than a blanket of protections. That’s why we need to simultaneously focus on the passage of federal legislation like the Equality Act, which passed in the House of Representatives but is currently stalled in the Senate.

More than one-third of all LGBTQ Americans live in the South. This is our home, and we’ll continue to fight for and celebrate progress like this victory in Virginia. Indeed, as millions of Americans face unemployment and grave health and financial challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, nondiscrimination protections in the workplace, healthcare settings, and housing are more essential than ever. 

We are ultimately hopeful about what’s possible in the South. But we simply cannot wait for every state legislature to catch up with the people of the South. 

Every poll you can find and countless stories I could share, from the mountains of North Carolina to the Gulf Coast of Missisissipi, demonstrate that the people of the South are ready for federal LGBTQ protections. The next step is to move from “ready for” to “calling for” and “demanding.” 

This is what it will take to compel Congress to do its job and pass clear and comprehensive protections from anti-LGBTQ discrimination. It’s time that no one — not in the South or in any other region — is left vulnerable to discrimination.

The Trump Voter Paradox

Like many progressives, I find myself at a loss at times understanding how friends and acquaintances who seemingly are nice and decent people can support today's Republican Party much less have voted for Donald Trump.  Why do they look the other way when Der Trumpenführer engages in the use of language and behavior that they would never tolerate at their country club or yacht club - indeed, such behavior (e.g., "pussy grabbing") might cause one to have one's membership suspended.  Similarly, how do they support a party agenda that directly harms those they act as if they care about. Is the friendly facade and civility just a charade?  Yes, there are truly foul supporters of Trump - e.g., white supremacists and Christofascists - but these labels don't outwardly apply to many.  It is a paradox that has led me to unfriend some on Facebook and lessen social interaction with some.   Equally baffling is the fact that some of these Republicans, if engaged in a one on one conversation actually support policies much more liberal and compassionate than what they political party stands for.  A column in the New York Times looks at this bizarre paradox.  Here are excerpts:

Roy Moore’s decisive victory over Luther Strange in the Republican Senate primary runoff on Tuesday in Alabama confirms — as I have reported before — that many Republican voters have a strong sense of white identity, that they harbor high levels of racial resentment and that they sometimes exhibit authoritarian leanings.

At the same time, that’s not a complete picture.

A 2013 study of red and blue America, conducted well before the seismic events of the last two years, sheds additional light on the Republican electorate and provides a more complicated understanding of contemporary conservatism.

In “Divided We Stand: Three Psychological Regions of the United States and Their Political, Economic, Social, and Health Correlates,” Peter J. Rentfrow, a reader in the psychology department at the University of Cambridge, along with five co-authors, explores the results of standardized personality tests given to 1.6 million people in the United States from 1999 to 2010.

The Rentfrow paper breaks the country into three “psychological regions” and ranks each region on personality dimensions known as the big five traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience.

The most conservative and most Republican of the three psychological regions — which Rentfrow labels “Cluster 1: Friendly and Conventional” — extends across the northern tier of the United States from Montana to Michigan, down through the Midwest to almost all of the South for a total of 26 states. Rentfrow found that the Cluster 1 region is

less affluent, has fewer highly educated residents, and is less innovative compared with states in the other regions. States in this region also appeared to have higher levels of social capital and less social tolerance compared with states in other regions. Moreover, friendly and conventional states were more politically conservative and Protestant compared with other regions.

My question went as follows:

Some research shows that Republicans, and Trump voters in particular, score high on measures of authoritarianism and on critical, if not hostile, views of African-Americans and immigrants. How does this fit with your finding that residents of the most Republican region are friendly, sociable and considerate?

Rentfrow replied that

individuals high in authoritarianism score low in openness. So in this sense, the patterns of results we find at the regional level are consistent.

Many whites in the South, he argued, abide by an “honor culture.” As long
as everyone is respectful and abides by the social norms, everyone is happy and agreeable. But when threats are made against one’s reputation or values, acts of violence and physical aggression are considered appropriate forms of retribution. In some ways, the profile we observe touches on the surface of this profile — the friendly and considerate aspect when all is well. But I think we’re now beginning to see more of the aggressive aspects. I think many people, perhaps especially in this region, have begun to feel threatened by the changes taking place in society and are reacting with anger.

Karen Stenner, the author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” pointed out that the Rentfrow study found that red state voters were simultaneously “friendly” and less “socially tolerant.”  Stenner explained this seeming contradiction by noting that

it is a lot easier to be generous and considerate and civic-minded and invested in one’s community if one’s community is full of people much like oneself. The kinds of behaviors we get out of authoritarians depend critically on how and where they have drawn the boundaries of “us” and “them.” They can be very attentive to “us,” but also tend to be very particular about whom “us” includes.

John Jost, a professor of psychology and politics at N.Y.U., expands upon the implications of the word “conscientiousness” in describing red state voters:

Conscientiousness is correlated with measures of racism, sexism, homophobia, prejudice, authoritarianism, social dominance, and system justification. I suspect that this personality factor has more to do with a need for order or desire for rule-following, which can easily take an authoritarian turn, than other aspects of conscientiousness that we might associate with, say, honesty or integrity.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business . . . cited an essay that he and Emily Ekins, the director of polling at the Cato Institute, published in February 2016, “Donald Trump supporters think about morality differently than other voters.” In contrast to Republican primary voters who supported candidates other than Trump, they noted, voters who supported him “score high on authority/loyalty/sanctity and low on care.” These voters, according to Ekins and Haidt, “are the true authoritarians — they value obedience while scoring low on compassion.” In fact, authoritarian voters with a sense of besieged white identity are more than a “grain” in the Republican electorate. . . . And the clout of the authoritarian, white identity wing of the Republican Party is such that Trump is governing to please this wing first and foremost.

From his apocalyptic threats to Kim Jong-un to his call for the firing of protesting N.F.L. players, from his pardon of Joe Arpaio to his defense of pro-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, Trump has remained the leader of hard-right, white America.

This strategy won him the presidency in 2016 when millions of non-authoritarian white Republicans — sympathetic, kind, affectionate, conscientiousness, persevering, thorough and reliable — made a pact with the devil and chose party loyalty over conscience.

The take away?  Some friends and acquaintances seem to put order - which equates to blacks, gays, and other minorities "knowing their place" - above kindness and compassion. To me, that is a serious moral defect. I am left still not sure of how to interact with such people when I must do so. I surely am left feeling that I cannot trust them. 

Quote of the Day: Kathleen Parker on Southerners

In a piece in the Washington Post largely bemoaning the presidency of Der  Trumpenführer, columnist Kathleen Parker had a line that I found simply wonderful as one who has lived most of my adult life in the South: 

United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley . . . . Haley, quickly at home in her new position, has been at once firm and diplomatic in her statements about Russia. Southerners are exquisitely expert at being polite while adding arsenic to a glass of sweet tea.

In New York for instance the stab wounds from one's enemies will be in the chest.  In the South, they are ALWAYS in your back, often occurring after polite pleasantries.  The women are the worst. 

Taking the South's Pathologies Nationwide

I have lived in the South for more than 2/3's of my lifetime at this point although, thankfully, the Hampton Roads area of Virginia becomes a little less Southern with each passing day in part because of the constant rotation of military members and their families through the area.   Alabama and Texas where I also lived in the past and much of the rest of the region are akin to someone with a significant case of bi-polar disorder who refuses to remain on their medications.  Some days one sees sweetness and light and graciousness and others one sees racism and bigotry and the embrace of ignorance that is downright chilling.  Some southerners live in a fantasy world where they are akin to the Saxon nobles in Ivanhoe resisting the Norman ascendancy.  Others embody the worse elements of the Klan and/or religious extremism. Despite its proclaimed religiosity, the Bible Belt has the highest teen pregnancy rates, the highest Internet porn usage, and the highest divorce rate.  Education levels also are among the lowest in the nation.  Now, Donald Trump and the Republican Party want to spread this dysfunction nationwide.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this disturbing prospect.  Here are highlights:  

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in Mississippi or Alabama? Well if the GOP has its way, you’ll get the chance to find out.

That’s because Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, through the executive branch leadership now being assembled and the legislative priorities they have laid out, are preparing to take the economic, political, and social arrangements of the South and spread them across the country.

The desire to southernize the entire United States is not new, and in some ways it’s been happening for a while, at least where Republicans have control of government. But now that Republicans have complete control in Washington, they’re going to try to accelerate and deepen that process. Let’s look at it piece by piece:

The Southern economic model. The first and most far-reaching component of this project is to take the Southern economic model national. The foundation of that model is the elimination of collective bargaining and the destruction of the labor unions that are able to negotiate higher wages and better benefits for workers. The Southern model replaces the North’s high-wage, unionized manufacturing with a low-wage, low-benefit version that has succeeded in drawing many factories southward. Southern states have lured companies with gigantic tax breaks and the promise of a powerless and desperate workforce. The result is often more jobs in those Southern states, but worse jobs. . . . multiple forces including the crippling of unions and the emergence of Walmart as the nation’s largest retailer have acted to pull wages and benefits across the country down toward the South’s level.

Yesterday we learned that Trump will nominate Andrew Puzder, the CEO of the fast-food company CKE Restaurant Holdings, to be Secretary of Labor. . . . . Puzder is an ardent opponent of minimum wage increases, expanded overtime pay, paid sick leave, health coverage for workers, and collective bargaining. While he’s toiling at the Labor Department for the interests of corporations, Republicans will almost certainly try to pass a federal “right to work” law — the kind now in force in states across the South — as part of their effort to destroy labor unions once and for all.

The Southern health care model. The Republicans’ first legislative priority is to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and while we don’t yet know what form that repeal (or its replacement) will take, the people most vulnerable are the estimated 12 million who would lose the coverage they gained because of the law’s expansion of Medicaid. Nineteen states refused to accept that expansion, preferring to keep their poor citizens uninsured . . . . the largest group of states was in the South: 10 of the 11 states of the Confederacy (Louisiana being the sole exception) refused the Medicaid expansion. 

The Southern education model. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is not an educator or education administrator; using her wealth as the wife of an heir to the Amway fortune, she has devoted her efforts to essentially trying to destroy public education in her home state of Michigan and in America more generally. DeVos advocates for vouchers that can be used at private and religious schools, and for the expansion of for-profit charter schools with as little oversight as possible. . . . . it’s a system that is particularly strong in the South, where not only charter schools (which have support in many places) but private vouchers (which have far less support) are prevalent.

The Southern civil rights model. For his Attorney General, Trump picked Alabama’s Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, named for the president of the Confederacy and a Confederate general. Sessions was rejected by the Senate in the 1980s for a judgeship because of his history of what these days we call “racially charged” comments. His most famous case as a prosecutor involved his unsuccessful prosecution of a former aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Sessions went after for helping elderly African-Americans to vote absentee. While we don’t know exactly what Sessions’ agenda is, it’s a fair bet that vigorous enforcement of civil rights protections will not be high on his list.

In addition, Republicans will almost certainly be taking their voter suppression crusade national, especially given how successful it has been in putting up voting barriers to African-Americans, Latinos, and other people who might cast ballots for Democrats. Look for federal versions of voter ID laws, limits on early voting, and bans on same-day registration.

The Southern abortion rights model. As I’ve explained, not only are Republican eager to overturn Roe v. Wade; even with that precedent intact they may try to pass federal laws that make the whole country like the South when it comes to abortion. That would mean that it’s technically legal to get one, even as a series of onerous laws targeting both abortion providers and the women who seek abortions make them extraordinarily difficult to obtain.

The Southern environmental model. Trump has named Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, in a clear sign that he believes the first two words of the agency’s name are no longer operative. This too could represent a nationalization of what prevails in the South, where officials in Republican-dominated states see environmental protection as essentially a nuisance for corporations and the most pressing environmental question is how many wells we can drill.

During the 2016 campaign, some commentators noted that Donald Trump’s rhetoric bore a disturbing resemblance to the backlash to Reconstruction a century and a half ago. Now, as one constitutional scholar recently told this blog, it’s not unreasonable to expect “the beginning of the end of the Second Reconstruction.”

Think of what is worse for the majority of Americans and that more or less sums up the Trump/Republican agenda.  The wealthy and large corporations will thrive, but the rest of us not so much.  

What Donald Trump's Popularity Reveals About the South

At this point I have lived the majority of my life in the South, including four years in Alabama.   While the Hampton Roads area of Virginia is less and less part of the South due to the influx of people from Northern states, there remain pockets that are very Southern when it comes to claimed religiosity, racism and hypocrisy.  The South can display charm and supposed hospitality, but depending where you are, beneath the veneer of graciousness lucks a would be KKK supporter.  As a column in Politico notes, the rise of Donald Trump's popularity in the South has done much to display the reality that while much has changed, the stain of racism and a fear of modernity and those who are different is still alive and well.  Folks may sit in the pews on Sunday morning, but they make a mockery of the Gospel message the rest of the week.  Here are excerpts:

The Republican South so far has rallied behind Donald Trump, a northerner without any of the grassroots evangelical credibility that is supposed to bind conservatives here—a candidate whose main appeal, in fact, has been coded appeals to the same hatred that drove [Dylnn] Roof to pick up a gun.

Make no mistake, Trump’s embrace by millions of people in my region isn’t solely about economic angst. It is also about the kind of pent-up fear—made up of barely submerged racism and profound ignorance—that a reader in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, expressed to me shortly after Barack Obama’s election: “I think he’s gonna enslave us,” he said. “Look what we done to ya’ll.”

Trump was, in many ways, the optimal antidote for that fear, and the racism behind it. It was Trump who more than anyone kept “birtherism” in the mainstream through the first term of Obama’s presidency, feeding belief in the deep South that this oddly-named president was not even American. And now it is Trump who has brilliantly exploited and drawn out the racism that the civil rights movement drove underground 50 years ago, but which is now resurfacing.

All this has thoroughly removed the scales from my eyes. I grew up watching the South become more tolerant. My son will have far more opportunities here than my father did. But I now know just how deeply the region is stuck in our ugly past. I now realize that little boy I saw 26 years ago more likely than not grew up to harbor the same racial hatred his parents did. I’m not forced to sit on the back of the bus; I’m not restricted from swimming in some parts of the Atlantic. But too often, that overt progress has been used as an excuse by residents to pretend that further civil rights gains would be “giving” minorities something they don’t deserve.

Trump’s rise in both South Carolina and throughout the South proves why celebrating that change—the removal of a flag that should not have been flying—was in many ways premature, if not misleading.

There’s little reason to pretend, as some are, that the anger Trump has tapped into in the South, which has propelled him to a near sweep of Southern states and to the top of Republican polls, is primarily about white Southerners’ anger about their changing economic fortunes. If that were the case, Southerners would also be embracing Bernie Sanders, another candidate seen as a political outsider running on a populist economic message.

Instead, while Sanders eagerly touts his civil rights past, Southerners—including those who long claimed the principles espoused by their conservative Christian faith influence their every decision—have picked the one presidential candidate who claimed (at first) he didn’t know enough about the Ku Klux Klan to have an opinion about it—the one candidate the Klan has said it is using as a recruiting tool.

They picked the one candidate who initially excused two white men who beat up a homeless Hispanic man, saying they were following Trump’s lead.

They picked the one candidate sued by the Justice Department in the 1970s for telling employees to avoid renting property to black people.

They picked the one candidate who stoked the fires that helped lead to five young black men in New York being falsely accused and convicted in the Central Park jogger case in 1989.

They picked the one candidate who proudly said out loud what they’ve been saying throughout the entire Obama era in email chains and private discussions after Sunday morning church services: That the nation’s first black president isn’t a real American and needed to prove he belonged in a way no other president, or presidential candidate, ever had to do.

According to widely-cited exit polls and other surveys, 70 percent of Trump supporters in South Carolina wanted the Confederate flag to keep flying, compared with 31 percent of South Carolinians overall. Twenty-one percent of his voters in the state either believe whites are superior or aren’t sure; 20 percent don’t like the Emancipation Proclamation.

But none of that can detract from the fact that Trump’s supporters also include white nationalist groups like the American Freedom Party and American Renaissance whether he wants them to or not. To them, Trump has come as close to sounding like former Klan wizard and Louisiana Rep. David Duke that a politician can—and still potentially win high national office. That should give pause to the millions of other Trump supporters, or would-be supporters, who are ignoring his bigotry because they are so desperate to see a political sea change.

Too many of us have been convinced that quiet equals peace. That’s the one good thing about the loudmouth that is Donald Trump. It’s hard to remain silent in the face of the ugliness he has highlighted like no other politician has in quite some time.

He isn’t Dylann Roof, deliberately targeting a single African-American church. No, he’s potentially more dangerous because he targets the vulnerable wherever they are. There aren’t enough Americans, in the South or the Republican Party, primarily motivated by hate to have fueled his rise. His presence on the national stage is scary because too many otherwise good people—the kind who would give comfort to a black orphan or pray for a sick Hispanic friend—are turning a blind eye to his peculiar brand of bigotry and angrily following his lead.

Resistance to Gay Marriage Follows Path of Old Style Racists

Anti-gay Christofascists take huge offense - at least in public - at rightly being compared to the segregationists of the 1950's and 1960's (and beyond) in the manner in which they (i) use cherry picked Bible passages to justify hate and discrimination against others and (ii) are refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges last month.  Frankly, if you engage in the same type of behavior and use the same tired religious claims to justify bigotry, then the comparison is valid.  A piece at ABC News lays out the continued parallels between Christofascists opposition to interracial marriage and same sex marriage.  Here are highlights:

Legal experts suggest that history might hint at how the coming months will unfold, as a handful of defiant clerks across the South and Midwest refuse to abide by the Supreme Court's ruling last month that legalized gay marriage.

The first test is set to begin Monday in a Kentucky courtroom. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, who cited her Christian faith on June 30 as she refused to issue marriage licenses to any couple, gay or straight. Other county clerks rallied around her, demanding the government protect Christians from having to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The aftermath of the Supreme Court's 1967 ruling Loving v. Virginia played out in similar ways, according to Sam Marcosson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Louisville. Now, once again, scattered patches of resistance will force the courts to intervene.

In 1967, Liane Peters and James Van Hook, turned to the NAACP, which sued the county and won. The couple received a license the following year.

They are still married, 47 years later. Van Hook is 82 and his wife is 76. They have two sons and three grandkids, she said. They still live in a little house with a big yard and garden they bought soon after their wedding.

Interracial couples across the South also had to sue, said Peter Wallenstein, a history professor at Virginia Tech who wrote a book called "Tell the Court I Love my Wife" about race and marriage in the United States. The legal battles dragged on for years.

In 1970, three years after the Supreme Court's decision, an Alabama judge denied a marriage license to a white soldier stationed at Fort McClellan and his African-American fiancee, Wallenstein wrote. The federal government sued to force the county to comply.

The question is how long they can stall and make mischief," said Kenneth D. Upton, senior counsel for Lambda Legal, a law office that specializes in LGBT issues.

Some take offense at the comparison between interracial marriages five decades ago and the religious objections to same-sex marriage that clerks are raising today.

Others scoff at the thought of letting elected officials decline to do part of their job. Marcosson compared the situation to the Catholic Church's refusal to marry people who have been through a divorce. The church and its followers have the religious freedom to decline to recognize those marriages. But a Catholic clerk in public office has no right to deny a civil marriage license to someone who has been divorced, he said.

The Fantasy World of the Southern Republicans

Here in Virginia the state's demographics are changing rapidly with urban populations growing as the number of rural voters shrinks, and the numbers of non-white voters is soaring, especially in vote rich Northern Virginia.  No Republican has won statewide office since 2009 and the Virginia GOP currently maintains control of the Virginia General Assembly thanks to shockingly gerrymandered districts.  Yet despite these changes, the Virginia GOP hasn't changed its play book and, if anything has double down on its racism and self-prostitution to "Christian" religious extremists.  Virginia is ahead of the curve compared to other Southern states, but the same trend is happening elsewhere even as the GOP remains in a fantasy world believing that yesterday, today and tomorrow will all remain the same.  A piece in the New York Times looks at how sooner or later - and it is hopefully sooner - the GOP fantasy world will slam into objective reality.  Here are highlights:

Such public-relations acumen is a relatively new thing in Alabama, whose residents complain constantly about being looked down on. But the more intriguing story is that Mr. Bentley is among the Southern Republican officeholders who, despite the smart occasional concession, do not fully understand that their dominance will not be a feature of the region’s two-party future. They still act as if tomorrow will be exactly like today, their tenure assured by unbendable evangelical Christians and testy white suburbanites.

But, as in the time of Henry W. Grady, the post-Reconstruction journalist who popularized the term “the New South,” inexorable forces will in a few decades reshape Southern society, this time in a more progressive direction. Witness the flood of gay weddings in Mobile and the mounting alarm of evangelicals across the region, the latter being the driving force behind the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s retro presidential campaign. Like their peers in other regions, secular Southern whites under 40 care less than their elders do about cultural issues like flags, racial and ethnic purity, or private sexual conduct.

This won’t come about because current Republican voters and their elected officials now in office will somehow be converted, but because they will be overwhelmed by new voters in the burgeoning Hispanic and Asian communities, who will join the black minority.

It seems an overstatement to say that Southern Republicans are in outright denial about the fact that whites will be a minority in America around 2043. It does seem fair to say that the national Republican Party is underreacting, and Southern Republicans seem to be especially resistant to appealing to their minority neighbors.

Like their counterparts in the national G.O.P. and the current crop of about 15 me-too Republican presidential candidates, Southern legislators seem unwilling to make any change on social welfare, retirement, health care or women’s and gay rights that would attract Southerners not voting Republican at present.

A survey of demographic and polling data in what the Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey calls a New Sunbelt, stretching across the Southern Rim from Miami to Los Angeles, makes an ironclad case for this huge recalibration in political and cultural attitudes. 

“Demography is destiny” is the theme of Mr. Frey’s new book, “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America,” and another recent book, “The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown,” by Paul Taylor and his colleagues at the Pew Research Center.

“Demographic transformations are dramas in slow motion,” Mr. Taylor writes, an implicit warning to Republicans who believe that all they need to do is reinforce the beliefs and prejudices of the suburban South.

For now, Republican officeholders live in a dream world where they think rhetoric and repetition will somehow cause minority voters and center-left whites to turn into Republican voters. Alarmed Republican political professionals warn that unless their candidates stop obstructing on health care and make progress on gender issues, the party will lose the White House in 2016 and in quadrennial spurts see its Southern hegemony dismantled by new voters in the New Sunbelt.

Now we’re seeing a new coalition politics, in which Hispanic, black and Asian voters are joined by Democratic-leaning younger whites who, unlike older white voters, do not care about dog-whistle issues.   It is a quintessential Southern pattern. The region’s most affluent citizens always resist the obvious at first.  

It will take awhile for Southern and national Republicans to understand that, as Mr. Frey put it, “Demographics is destiny.” The longer they take to get it, the greater the odds that multiethnic Democrats will finally break the Republican lock on the solidly red South.

South Carolina’s Lost Battle to Rewrite its Racist History

Having lived in the South for the majority of my life now, one steady undercurrent has always been the effort of some whites, perhaps not a majority, to keep minorities in their place.  Here in Virginia the separate rest room facilities for blacks and whites are gone, but through voter ID laws and the difficulty faced by felons (blacks are disproportionately convicted) to regain voting rights, the theme of keeping blacks subservient is alive and well, especially among Virginia Republicans.  But Virginia, despite the statues on Monument Avenue in Richmond, has been discrete about its racism compared to South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War, and which has flown the Confederate flag at its state house until today.  A column in the Washington Post looks at South Carolina's losing battle to rewrite its very racist history.  Here are excerpts:

For most of my life, a flag representing white supremacist violence against black people flew at the capitol of my native state. It is a very big deal that this emblem of hatred and oppression is finally coming down.

Gov. Nikki Haley (R) was expansive after the state legislature finished action early Thursday on a bill consigning the Confederate battle flag to the museum displays where it belongs: “It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of.” I have to entertain the notion that she may be right.

In the South, William Faulkner wrote, the past isn’t even past. The flag represented, for some white South Carolinians, a past that was invented out of whole cloth — a past in which something other than slavery was the cause of a conflict Southerners called the “War Between the States.”

In truth, the Civil War only was about states’ rights in the sense that the Confederate states feared losing one specific “right” — to own human beings and compel their labor. No amount of Spanish moss can obscure this basic fact. No paeans to the valor of Confederate soldiers can change the fact that they were fighting for slavery.

And no amount of revisionist claptrap can change the fact that the flag was hoisted at the capitol in Columbia in 1961 and kept flying not to honor some gauzy vision of Southern valor but to resist the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation. The flag meant whites-only schools, whites-only public accommodations, whites-only voter rolls. It represented white power and privilege over subjugated African Americans.  

[I]t was another woman — Republican state Rep. Jenny Horne — who guaranteed success with a powerful speech telling her colleagues that enough was enough.

“I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful, such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday!” Horne thundered. She wasn’t having any of the “noble heritage” cornpone that flag apologists were selling; Horne is a descendant of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, she said, and still she knew it was time for the flag to come down.

Before Horne’s intervention, it looked as if the state House might cave to the latter-day Johnny Rebs who were seeking to stall the legislation into parliamentary oblivion.

For 150 years after Appomattox, the states of the Confederacy lived a twisted fantasy. As evidenced by the diehards in the South Carolina legislature, some white Southerners still refuse to wake from the reverie. But the rest of the state has finally moved on.

Does this mean that South Carolina and other former Confederate states will take a new look at all the monuments and memorials dedicated to white supremacists who advocated slavery and fomented armed rebellion against the United States?  . . . . Probably not, or at least not anytime soon. Emanuel A.M.E. Church is on a street named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina “statesman” who defended slavery not as a necessary evil but as an absolute good, and who laid the philosophical groundwork for the treasonous act of secession.

The flag is more important, though, because of the way it has been used — not just as an instrument of repression but also as a way to deny history and thus avoid history’s judgments and responsibilities. What South Carolina’s governor and legislature have announced is clear: It’s time, finally, to stop pretending.

Symbols matter. South Carolina should have brought down the Confederate battle flag long ago. . . .

The Bible Belt = Obese Porn Watchers

The disconnect between what Christian fundamentalist say and demand of others and what they actually do is once again in sharp display in the results of two new studies.  We hear these "godly folk" constantly shrieking about the evils of pornography and condemning others for sins that are a matter of "choice" - gays, of course are a favorite target on the latter.  Meanwhile, these folks who live in the Bible Belt use more online porn than anywhere else in America and seemingly lack the ability to make the choice to not shovel another fork full of food into their mouths (perhaps they eat while perusing online porn?).  The sin of gluttony is apparently an unknown concept to this falsely pious folk.

As MSN News reports, the most obese states are, with only two exceptions, located in the Bible Belt with Mississippi leading the way in the most obese state for the second year running:

Most people get psyched when they earn a distinction two years in a row, but we’re guessing Mississippi residents aren’t thrilled with this one: According to findings from a new Gallup poll, the state has the highest obesity rate in the nation for the second year running. The poll found that more than 35 percent of Mississippi residents are obese, trumping runner-up West Virginia by nearly a whole percentage point.

Obesity rates have continuously been highest in Southern and Midwestern states and lowest in Western and Northwestern states, per Gallup.

Yep, it's the awful liberal states so decried in the Bible Belt where folks seemingly have enough "personal responsibility" to put down their forks. 

On the issue of pornography, Patheos looks at the results of a new survey that suggests that while the godly folk are sitting in the pews on Sunday, they may actually be planning their next foray into online porn.  Here are highlights:

Religious conservatives in the Bible Belt search for online porn more than anyone else according to a new study published earlier this month.

The new study, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior and  produced by researchers from Canadian Universities, found that American states with more religious conservatives search more for sexual content on Google.

Researchers used Google Trends to analyze porn searches while linking state level information from Gallup polls asking about religious and political attitudes together with a variety of sex and porn-related search terms.

The following is an excerpt from the study’s Abstract:

(researchers) examined associations between state-level religiosity/conservatism and anonymized interest in searching for sexual content online using Google Trends (which calculates within-state search volumes for search terms). Across two separate years, and controlling for demographic variables, we observed moderate-to-large positive associations between: (1) greater proportions of state-level religiosity and general web searching for sexual content and (2) greater proportions of state-level conservatism and image-specific searching for sex.

[T]he Canadian researchers offer “the paradoxical hypothesis that a greater preponderance of right-leaning ideologies is associated with greater preoccupation with sexual content in private internet activity.”

While one can only speculate as to why there is such a strong connection between the consumption of porn and professed conservative Christian values, multiple reports indicate similar findings concerning the Bible Belt’s apparent voracious appetite for pornography.

The hypocrisy of it all is stunning.  But hypocrisy is, of course a hallmark of fundamentalist Christians.