Virginia's Long, Messy, and Contradictory History on Race

The last two weeks in Virginia politics have been tumultuous. Interestingly, while national news outlets continue to stir the pot and take shots at Governor Northam and Virginia, it seems most Virginians are moving on, especially the 58% of blacks who are comfortable with Northam remaining in office.  Perhaps part of this seemingly huge disconnect is that those from outside of Virginia - and the South in general - do not have the perspective on the positive changes that have occurred in Virginia, at least over the 45 plus years that I have counted myself a Virginia.  In May, I have my 45th college reunion of the class of 1974, the University of Virginia's first co-ed undergraduate class. When I first arrived at UVA and moved to Charlottesville (I went on to attend law school at UVA as well), having grown up until then in New York State, it was a major state of culture shock, especially on racial matters.  One needs to recall that my undergraduate class started college a little more than 2 years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Loving V. Virginia.  Many public buildings -including many court houses - had two sets of rest rooms from when rest rooms were segregated. 

Over the years things have changed remarkably, but there is is still room for much improvement.  Ironically, Northam, in my view, is one of those pushing to make Virginia more racially tolerant despite the year book fiasco.  A piece in Salon looks at the descendants of Thomas Jefferson, black and white, who represent Virginia bi-polar racial history.  The piece was written by one of Jefferson's white descendants.  Here are highlights:

The man on the left is Shannon Lanier. He is my cousin. We are standing on our great-grandfather’s grave at Monticello. The man buried beneath that obelisk fathered two children with his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and six children with his slave, Sally Hemings. My fifth great grandmother is Martha Jefferson. Shannon’s fifth great grandmother is Sally Hemings. We talk all the time about the “founding fathers” of this nation, the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, who attended the Constitutional Convention. Well, this nation had founding mothers, as well. One of our founding mothers was a slave, Sally Hemings.

Just as the early citizens of the United States and the descendants of its founders helped to build this country, so did the enslaved humans they owned, and their children, and their descendants. If Thomas Jefferson had not owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime, we would not have Monticello to visit today. Slaves built every inch of Monticello. They felled the trees and put them through a saw mill to make the lumber. They forged the nails to hammer that lumber into walls and floors and doors and windows. They made every brick with their hands — in fact, you can see the fingerprints of slave children in some of the bricks in the walls of Monticello today.

Slaves built the nation’s Capitol building. They built the White House. They built countless state and county buildings throughout the south, including state capitol buildings. The labor of slaves was used to build the roads and bridges that forged our way west into the unexplored territories of the Louisiana Purchase. Slaves harvested the cotton crops in the south that put shirts on the backs of early white Americans. They harvested the wheat that put bread in their bellies. Slaves tended the cows that produced milk for white children to drink. In many cases, slave women nursed the babies of their white owners. There is a photograph in the new exhibit of Sally Hemings’ slave quarters at Monticello that shows the black arms of a female slave holding a white baby.

In fact, if Thomas Jefferson had not owned slaves, he probably wouldn’t have had the time to write the Declaration of Independence, in which he famously declared that “all men are created equal.”

That’s our national tragedy, isn’t it? That so many years have gone by, and still Thomas Jefferson’s dream has not been realized. Before the photograph of my cousin and me was taken last weekend at Monticello, there were other photographs taken in the state of Virginia published all over the place, shown again and again on cable news. They were photographs of the governor of Virginia in blackface, or someone in blackface anyway, standing next to a man in a Ku Klux Klan white robe and peaked hat. Whoever was shown in the photos, they appeared on the personal page of the governor of Virginia’s medical school yearbook. Later, the attorney general of Virginia admitted that he, too, had put on blackface for Halloween costume when he was in college.

Today, I’m a writer of novels and movies and journalism, and Shannon is the host of a morning television show in Houston, Texas. You could say that we are among the lucky ones in this country, and you would certainly be correct that we are lucky as an accident of birth. But we had to fight to get to stand together on the grave of Thomas Jefferson. We had just finished an interview with CBS This Morning, which will air tomorrow morning on that show. Finally the day came when we sat together in the new exhibit of Sally Hemings’ slave quarters, and we were interviewed as cousins, as acknowledged descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

It wasn’t always that way for Shannon Lanier. He knew from his family history that he was descended from Madison Hemings, the son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. He told the story of being in the second grade during a class on the American presidents when he stood up and announced to the class that he was a great grandson of Thomas Jefferson, the third president. He was told by the teacher to sit down and stop telling lies. In order to get him out of trouble with his teacher, Shannon’s mother had to go to the principal the following day and tell him that what Shannon had said in class was true.

But for years before and afterward, few people — white people, anyway — believed that Jefferson had fathered Sally Hemings children. Not until a DNA test was released in 1998 did historians come around to accept the oral history of the Hemings family that had existed for more than a century.

It was then that I met Shannon for the first time. In 1999, I invited about 50 of my Hemings cousins to the family reunion of Jefferson descendants at Monticello. It did not go well. At that time Monticello was just beginning to come to grips with the legacy of Thomas Jefferson’s owning slaves. You could still take a tour of the house and never hear the word “slave” uttered by one of the docents. As for the white descendants of Jefferson, they were not happy with the Sally Hemings descendants crashing their reunion. They were especially unhappy with me because I invited the Hemmings.

For the next three years we kept going back. I was trying to convince the white descendants of Jefferson to accept our Hemings cousins into the family. In 2002, they held a vote, and it went 95 to 6 against the Hemings family. Five of the six voting yes, that the Hemings were indeed our cousins, were me and my brother and sisters.
Twenty years have passed since I first invited my cousins in the Hemings family to Monticello. It’s a different place now. They uncovered the slave quarters where Sally and one of her brothers lived. They found and have preserved one slave graveyard, and they are actively looking for more.  Today if you take a tour, you learn as much about slave life at Monticello as you to about Thomas Jefferson himself.

More than 240 years after Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, we still see too many overt acts of racism, and not nearly enough acts of equality.

Monticello is committing an act of equality by telling the story of slave life there, and by extension, slave life in America. When my cousins in the Hemings family stand up and proudly say, we are descendants of Thomas Jefferson, they are committing an act of equality. I guess I committed my own act of equality when I invited them to come with me to the family reunion at Monticello. I was saying, and they were saying, here we are. We are all from the same family. We are all Jefferson’s children.

The photograph you see here is a picture of who we are as Americans. One day, a photograph of two cousins, one black and one white, will not be seen as unusual. One day, acts of equality will outweigh acts of racism. Until that day, however, Shannon and I will keep fighting for what’s right. And one day, we will win.

More Anti-Gay Extremism in Texas

As bad as the Virginia GOP has become, its members look sane and rational compared to the batshit crazy insanity that is now the norm within the Texas GOP.  Leading the charge into La La Land is fat tub of lard state Rep. Cecil Bell (pictured above) who I suspect will sooner or latter be either caught soliciting gay sex or molesting minors.  As I have observed numerous times, NO ONE is so obsessed with gays and gay sex unless they have very serious sexual identity issues of their own that they are desperately trying to hide and/or suppress.  The Texas Observer looks at the bills which seeks to force Texas officials to ignore federal court rulings and basically violate the U.S. Constitution.  Here are excerpts:

The future of the battle over gay marriage in Texas—and possibly in other states—is likely to be determined by the House of Representatives in the next 72 hours, according to LGBT advocates.

House Bill 4105, by Rep. Cecil Bell (R-Magnolia), which is designed to undermine a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, is scheduled for a floor vote Tuesday.

Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, said if HB 4105 passes the House, it’s very likely to clear the more conservative Senate before being signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. There were 204 bills ahead of HB 4105 on the House calendar, and the deadline for it to pass the chamber is midnight Thursday.

HB 4105 is one of more than 20 anti-LGBT bills introduced in the 84th Legislature, believed to be the most in the history of any state. However, with time running out in the session, only four have cleared committee, and of those LGBT advocates view HB 4105 as the most significant threat to equality.

The bill would bar state and local employees from issuing, enforcing or recognizing same-sex marriage licenses—and prohibit public monies from being used to do so—regardless of any court order.

LGBT advocates say if the high court rules in favor of same-sex marriage, HB 4105 would set up a showdown between state and federal law, costing Texas millions of dollars in litigation and potentially delaying the effectiveness of the decision by years. They say the bill would unleash chaos similar to what’s been seen in Alabama over same-sex marriage, and generate the type of business backlash associated with passage of an anti-LGBT religious freedom law in Indiana.

Rebecca Robertson, legal and policy director at the ACLU of Texas, said HB 4105 is designed to give Texas another legal basis for challenging same-sex marriage in court: state sovereignty. And she said it could be used as a model by other states for resisting the Supreme Court ruling.

“The last time that we saw similar efforts to undermine court rulings about what the Constitution requires was when Southern states attempted to use the power of the purse to avoid having to comply with federal court orders ordering school desegregation,” Robertson said. “Those tactics were rejected, but obviously it took years of litigation to get to that point. HB 4105 is trying to do the same kind of end run around the Constitution.”

Note the parallels to racists' efforts to defy desegregation orders of the federal courts.  Candidly, I hope a federal judge will hold some of these GOP legislators in contempt of court at some point and lock their asses in jail.  Meanwhile, as frightening as these bills are, I can think of something even more frightening: the image of Cecil Bell naked! . . . Waiting, I 'm running for my barf bag!!

Southern Baptist Hypocrisy - Compare Gay Marriage Opposition to Abolition Effort

The shocking hypocrisy of the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC") knows no bounds.  How else to explain the statement made at a panel discussion held at the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty forum that compared the SBC's fight to block same sex marriage to the abolition movement to end slavery.  The problem is that the Baptists who became the SBC opposed abolition and broke from the rest of the Baptist convention because they sought to continue slavery.  They even claimed that the Bible justified slavery - .i.e., it was "biblical."  Here are more details via Joe Jervis:

Evans, a Christian writer, was tweeting from a panel discussion held at the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty forum. Here's the "ironic" history of how the Southern Baptist Convention came to be:

Largely comprised of slaveholders, the gathering at the First Baptist Church of Augusta, Georgia, in May 1845 publicly pled their case. Slavery was biblical. Therefore abolition was sinful, and Baptists of the North were wrong to oppose slavery. Abolitionists of the North were responsible for the Baptist division; southern Baptists had been patient with the agitators, but enough was enough. Pledging allegiance to slavery, they vowed “we will never interfere with what is Caesar’s” (a biblical allusion implying it was their moral and legal responsibility to uphold the legal institution of slavery). And for good measure, the delegates expressed outrage that a northern Baptist missionary had “actually remitted money to the United States to aid in the assisting of slaves to ‘run away from their masters.’” (See Proceedings of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1845.) From this point forward, white Baptist leaders in the South through the end of the Civil War openly and insistently championed and defended white supremacy and black slavery, along the way migrating into a form of Christian nationalism heretofore foreign to the very Christian denomination that had been the most vocal champions, since the seventeenth century, of the separation of church and state.

Oh, and let's not forget that the SBC strongly opposed desegregation.  One has to wonder why anyone decent and moral pays any attention to these people.  They are liars and bigots and have been since the SBC's founding.

The Courts Are Saving Virginia from Itself on Ethics and Gay Rights

If  a majority of Virginia Republicans could have their way, Virginia would remain a corrupt state full of political bribes and graft where gays would forever be third or fourth class citizens.  On the latter issue, one only need look to Republican moves in the Virginia General Assembly to kill employment protections for gay state employees and to deep six a bill that would have allowed second parent adoptions in same sex headed families.  We hear lots of blather about protecting children and families, but that only applies to heterosexual headed families.  Children of gay couples simply get kicked to the gutter.  Thankfully, as a column in the Richmond Times Dispatch, lawsuits and a federal criminal prosecution may yet force Virginia into the 21st century despite GOP efforts.  Here are column excerpts:

Former Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, are of modest physical stature. But in the cavernous courtroom of U.S. District Judge James Spencer, Virginia’s former first couple — he in a gray suit, white shirt and blue tie; she in a dress and dark-colored jacket — looked positively small.

The scene Friday morning — at the McDonnells’ arraignment at which they pleaded not guilty to corruption charges announced 11 days after he left an office once occupied by Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and James Monroe — speaks to the humbling effect of the law.

Such power was on display Thursday, as well, three blocks south of the gleaming courthouse, in a shabby state office building on Main Street.

There, the new attorney general, Mark Herring, announced that he would not defend in federal court Virginia’s 2006, voter-approved prohibition on same-sex marriage. He said he had concluded it is unconstitutional, wrongly denying gay couples a right that straight people take for granted. Herring had supported the ban as a Loudoun County senator. As his ambition swelled, his attitude shifted, making him acceptable to a Democratic base for which gay rights is a non-negotiable demand.

The courts — the federal courts — are taking Virginia where Virginia — through its elective government — has refused to go. This North-facing Southern state, at times paralyzed by divided government, is lurching forward at the point of a bayonet: federal judicial edict, actual and perceived. It is forcing those who govern to catch up with the governed.

It happened in the 1950s with the collapse of Virginia’s defiance to court-ordered school desegregation. It happened in the 1960s with the death of the state statute banning interracial marriage.

It happened in the early 2000s when a previous attorney general — Republican Jerry Kilgore — said, as Herring is on the gay marriage ban, that he would not argue in federal court on behalf of a comparatively mundane constitutional restriction: a limit on how churches manage their business affairs. Kilgore decided the measure was unconstitutional

For too long the law rested on a flawed assumption: That because Virginia politicians are presumed to be ladies and gentleman, they do not need to be reminded how to behave.

Tidying up Virginia may require more than straightening out ethics laws. Higher legislative salaries — they have been frozen at about $18,000 a year since 1989 — might discourage solons from walking around with their hands out. It could attract a broader range of candidates and professionalize a General Assembly that looks less like Virginia because, for example, it has more and more retirees.

Further, redistricting thwarts shifts in public opinion, freeing a Republican-dominated legislature to ignore the sentiments of Virginians, as a whole.

Nearly eight years ago, 56 percent of the electorate backed the constitutional amendment under which the state refuses to recognize same-sex marriage. A recent public-opinion poll shows that a similar percentage now favors same-sex marriage.

Virginia had a glorious group of leaders in the early days of this nation.  Leaders who were progressive for their time and had a vision of how government should be.  Sadly, for most of the last two centuries, Virginia's leadership has preferred to be backward thinking, supporting bigotry and prejudice rather than accepting the Founders statements that all men are created equal and that all of us are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  And most of the time it has been "religious conservatives" who have championed backwardness and bigotry.  It's a very, very ugly legacy.  What the GOP controlled General Assembly refuses to do voluntarily, hopefully the federal courts will make it do.

 

Martin Luther King’s Still Unfulfilled Dream Is Still

It has been nearly almost 46 years since Martin Luther King was murdered.   Yet significant aspects of his dream remain unfulfilled.  Some of the unfulfilled aspects tie directly to the decades long program of sabotage implemented by the Republican Party both at the state and federal level.  And if anything, the GOP sabotage effort has accelerated in recent years. Meanwhile, the GOP gives lip service to supposedly wanting more minority participation in the GOP's fictional "big tent."  For one who is a member of a minority demographic to be a supporter of today's GOP is akin to a Jew supporting Hitler's Nazi Party in the 1930's.  Think Progress highlights four initiative that King supported which are subject to consistent GOP sabotage.  Here are excerpts:

While the civil rights leader changed the conversation around race and justice in the U.S., many of his goals never came to fruition.   Here’s a look at four of the things King demanded but never saw completed:

1. A living wage. One of the demands protesters listed for the March on Washington was a minimum wage. “Anything less than $2.00 an hour,” King and his compatriots argued, fails to “give all Americans a decent standard of living.” In 2014 dollars, a $2 an hour wage would work out to about $15.27. But minimum wage is actually much, much lower — less than half of that — today. Forty-two percent of those earning minimum wage are people of color.

2. Desegregation. King hoped to see the end not just of legal segregation in the South, but also of the de facto segregation that existed in Northern businesses, housing, and schools. He even toured Chicago advocating for the end of this kind of segregation, saying civil rights leaders needed to “eradicate a vicious system which seeks to further colonize thousands of Negroes within a slum environment.’’ But today, public schools are more segregated than they were 40 years ago. The unemployment rate for black Americans has remained above 10 percent for most of the last half a century, and black workers earn on average $22,000 less a year than their white counterparts. Black homebuyers are shown significantly fewer homes than their white counterparts when shopping for a house. Ethnic identity is still the key factor in where people reside.

3. Fair voting. King campaigned extensively for legislation like the Voting Rights Act. And he lived to see it passed. But legislators, largely Republicans, have been working to roll back the rights protected under the VRA since its inception. Those efforts have become even more acute recently. More than half the states introduced restrictive voting legislation in 2013 alone, according to a review by the Brennan Center, at a total of 92 separate bills in 33 states. The Supreme Court also struck down a major portion of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, allowing states previously subject to the VRA to put voting laws on the books without federal oversight. Now a group of members of congress — including Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who incidentally established the first official Martin Luther King Day — is working to undo the damage of that decision.

4. Unfettered unionization. King spoke out specifically about anti-union “Right to Work” laws. “[W]e must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work,’” he said in 1961. “Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us.” Over 50 years later, right to work laws are still on the books. In fact, Michigan passed its own right to work law in 2012. But King’s assessment was right: No matter their unionized status, workers in “right to work” states today earn $1,500 less a year than their counterparts, and are less likely to receive other benefits like health care and pensions.

When I accuse today's GOP of being a de facto white supremacist party, I catch a lot of flack.   But, actions speak louder that words and a review of GOP actions and positions make it painfully clear that today's GOP is working incessantly to undermine Martin Luther Kings dream.

Conservative Blog Slams Wayne Coleman for Desegregation Remarks

While most of the GOP base in Virginia has become comprised of a mix of white supremacists, raging homophobes, religious fanatics and angry whites resentful over the loss of the white privilege that they long enjoyed, there are still pockets of sanity within the Virginia GOP.  Admittedly, these pockets of sanity are growing increasingly scare.  Some of these still sane Republicans can be found at the blog Bearing Drift.  They may not win any points with the Tea Party, but they do still have a grip on reality -something sadly missed from the GOP overall.  Here are highlights from Bearing Drift that trash GOP candidate Wayne Coleman (at right) who sought to blame all of Virginia's education challenges on scholl desegregation:

On a recent local morning radio program in Hampton Roads, Republican state Senate candidate Wayne Coleman decided that it would be a good time to comment about how busing in the 1970s was the downfall of education – despite not being asked that question specifically.

We live in an era where the black community votes as a bloc nearly 9:1 for the Democrats. And, in the urban environment of Norfolk, where the black population is 43%, and predominantly makes up the 6th Senate District, saying something that can only come across as offensive is not only wrong, but a losing proposition.

This was nothing but an unforced error.

The reality is that Coleman is, in the vernacular, an OWG (Old White Guy). Having an OWG say something on the radio that seems to come across as “things were better before desegregation” is not only likely to offend black voters, but to inspire them to vote Democrat. 

Coleman was already facing an uphill battle in the 6th District, which has only been held by a Republican for a handful of years over the past several decades. He needed to run a gaffe-free, perfect campaign in order to win.

He hasn’t. And all the explanations, retractions, and clarifications won’t help him now.

Additionally, it is well past time for blacks and whites to have a reasonable discussion on race. That won’t happen until everyone starts looking forward, with a vision of equality and community. Looking to the past and laying blame is not acknowledging the present and looking for solutions.

I hate to break the news to the author at Bearing Drift, but most of the GOP base is made up of OWG's.  And that's who Coleman was speaking to in the hope that their racism, homophobia and bigotry would make Coleman their darling.

GOP Candidate for Northam Senate Seat Blames Desegregation for Public Education Decline

While he is now seriously back peddling and - as seems to be the GOP norm, claiming that he meant something different - Wayne Coleman (pictured at left), the GOP candidate for the Virginia Senate seat formerly held by Lt. Governor elect Ralph Northam, blamed desegregation and school bus for the decline of public education.  Sadly, Coleman's attitude permeates much of the GOP base here in Virginia where increasingly city and county committee meetings ought to begin by all members donning KKK robes. And never mind that the Christofascist elements that support candidates like Coleman seek to have creationism taught as science and school curricula purged of anything that challenges their reactionary and ignorance embracing religious beliefs.  Here are excerpts from the Virginian Pilot on Coleman's batshitery:

The Republican nominee for an upcoming state Senate special election is retreating from remarks he made this week in a radio interview claiming compulsory busing to desegregate area schools "really was the beginning of the decline in some of the school districts."

Commercial freight executive Wayne Coleman offered that opinion during a Monday appearance on "The John Fredericks Morning Show" in response to a question from the host about fixing failing schools in Norfolk.

Coleman's reply:  "I'm old enough to have lived during the desegregation of the schools here locally. And busing children, in my opinion, around the different districts, getting them out of their local neighborhoods, really was the beginning of the decline in some of the school districts."

Coleman sought to clarify his comments Wednesday, saying a lack of precision in his phrasing has presented "an opportunity to misconstrue and mischaracterize their meaning."

School segregation remains a bitter chapter in Virginia's history, where resistance to integration remained intense in Norfolk after the Supreme Court in 1954 declared separate-but-equal schools unconstitutional.

Local efforts to stop desegregation, including closing schools, drew national attention. Even after a federal judge ordered Norfolk schools to desegregate in 1958, officials continued to fight to keep black children separate; 17 black students in Norfolk began at white schools the next February.

By the late 1960s, most Norfolk schools remained nearly all white or all black. Mandatory busing, a new approach to desegregation, began in Norfolk in 1970.

Eastern Shore Del. Lynwood Lewis, the Democratic nominee in the 6th Senate District, said Coleman's other "comments are unfortunate and they speak for themselves," in a brief telephone interview Wednesday.

Rodney Jordan, a Norfolk School Board member whose family was involved in the local civil rights movement, said that no matter what Coleman meant, his comments seemed to romanticize a time in history marked by discrimination and hatred.

Today's Virginia GOP is very ugly and it has only become uglier since the Christofascists became the puppet masters for the Republican Party of Virginia.   Not surprisingly, Coleman is no friend to gay Virginians and has promised to take strong stands for gun rights and against abortion and gay marriage. One can only hope that Coleman goes down to defeat.

Proper GOP uniforms

Anti-Gay, Anti-Immigrant, Birther Groups File Joint DOMA and Prop 8 Briefs

I have often maintained that the Christian Right, White Supremacy groups, Tea Party and anti-Immigrant groups have all more or less coalesced into basically one Christofascist/white supremacy under the banner of the GOP.   The factions are unified by who they hate - which is everyone who isn't a white evangelical/fundamentalist Christian - and as yet further proof of this reality a group of wing nut/racist/anti-gay organizations have teamed up to file amicus briefs in the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases pending before the U. S. Supreme Court.  As one might expect, the batshitery is off the charts and might actual help those seeking to see both DOMA and Prop 8 struck down since they show the clear animus that motivates those in favor of the anti-gay laws.  Right Wing Watch looks at these deranged briefs that represent a who's who of the lunatic fringe.  Besides being anti-gay, they want the Supreme Court's desegregation rulings reversed, along with past equal protection decisions.  Here are highlights:

Citizens United’s National Committee for Family, Faith and Prayer filed two no-holds-barred amicus briefs last week, one in defense of Prop 8 [pdf] and one in defense of DOMA [pdf]. They were joined in both by the anti-immigrant groups Declaration Alliance and English First; WorldNetDaily affiliate the Western Center for Journalism; the Institute for Constitutional Values (founded by white supremacist ally Michael Peroutka, who also argues that the solution to school violence is to abolish schools); Gun Owners Foundation (the research wing of Gun Owners of America); the extremely and occasionally comically anti-gay Public Advocate; the birther group U.S. Justice Foundation; Protect Marriage Maryland and others. Far-right Virginia Del. Bob Marshall and Sen. Dick Black joined the DOMA brief. Both are signed by Michael Boos, general counsel of Citizens United, and by Herb Titus, an attorney with a sideline as a birther advocate [who son is doing 30 years for a ponzi scheme].

So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the filings contain passages like this one, in the Prop 8 brief, arguing that laws against homosexuality affirm rather than deny the humanity of gay people:

Second, while the discrimination against Blacks in America denied them their rightful status as a member of the human race vis-à-vis their white counterparts, the discrimination against homosexuals affirmed their status as full and equal members of the human race. Indeed, the very definition of the “crime against nature,” was employed to emphasize that the sexual behavior condemned was contrary to the law of human nature. Homosexual behavior, then, while unnatural did not mean that those guilty of it were any less human.

Or this one from the DOMA brief arguing that gays and lesbians have not historically faced discrimination because some criminal sodomy laws also “extended to opposite sex unnatural couplings”:

As a class, homosexuals have not been discriminated against in the way that the court of appeals has so “easily” assumed. The appellate panel below concluded that “the most telling proof of animus and discrimination is that, for many years and in many states, homosexual conduct was criminal.” Yet historically, even the crime of sodomy was not so targeted. Rather, it was defined as “carnal copulation against the order of nature by man with man; or in the same unnatural manner with woman; or by man or woman in any manner with a beast.”

But what is truly remarkable about the Citizens United coalition’s legal arguments is their eagerness to burn all bridges and declare everything they come across unconstitutional.  .  .  .  .  Not only should Lawrence and Romer be overturned, this group argues, but so should Bolling v. Sharpe, the 1954 Brown v. Board companion case that desegregated the District of Columbia’s public schools. Bolling was the first decision in which the Supreme Court explicitly found an equal protection component in the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, thus setting the stage for six decades of prohibitions on discrimination by the federal government – all of which the coalition would like to see go.

But these groups don’t just go after decades of legal precedent. They also personally attack two judges who ruled against Prop 8 before it reached the Supreme Court, in particular district court judge Vaughn Walker, who is openly gay:

With the understanding of Judge Walker’s personal interest in the outcome of the case, it becomes much easier to understand his finding every fact for the plaintiffs and his willingness to impute ill will to the proponents of Proposition 8. For example, having in his personal life rejected 6,000 years of moral and religious teaching, we can see how Judge Walker could readily determine that California voters were motivated solely by “moral and religious views…that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples [and] these interests do not provide a rational basis for supporting Proposition 8.”  .  .  .  .  Petitioners were entitled to have their case heard by an impartial judge – not one who was leading a secret life engaging in behaviors which he appeared to believe were being unfairly judged and criticized by the proponents of Proposition 8.

To say that these groups and their members are unhinged and scary is an understatement.   

Arkansas GOP State Rep: Slavery ‘May Actually Have Been a Blessing in Disguise’ for Blacks

The prior post mentioned the racism that permeates so much of today's Republican Party.  Want an example?  Well, for starters there's Arkansas Republican State Representative Jon Hubbard (pictured above) who has taken GOP batshitery to new heights in his self published book Letters to the Editor: Confessions of a Frustrated Conservative (self-published means that he paid to have it printed because he likely could find no one to publish it).  One of Hubbard's premises in the book is that slavery was good for blacks.  That's right, according to Hubbard being owned by others and treated as a piece of chattel the same as an animal or a piece of furniture was a "blessing in disguise" for blacks.  I swear that you could not make stuff up that would be any more insane that what passes as intelligence and leadership in today's Republican Party.   Gawker looks at Hubbard's shocking bigotry.  Here are excerpts:

We spend an awful lot of time condemning slavery, but have you ever stopped to think about the good it did?  No, because you're not a monster. Luckily, Republican State Representative Jon Hubbard of Arkansas has you covered. In his self-published book, Letters to the Editor: Confessions of a Frustrated Conservative, he explains the bright side of slavery:

The institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise. The blacks who could endure those conditions and circumstances would someday be rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth.

Well, gosh, when you put it that way. Hubbard goes on to argue that a life of slavery would have been "likely much better" than a life back in Africa: "Knowing what we know today about life on the African continent, would an existence spent in slavery have been any crueler than a life spent in sub-Saharan Africa?"

As first discovered by Michael Cook of Talk Business, Hubbard's book is shockingly backwards for anyone — let alone a state representative. His worldview is grounded in centuries-old racism, including the stereotypes that blacks are lazy, unintelligent, and generally unproductive members of society.

Hubbard wonders if it will "ever become possible for black people in the United States of America to firmly establish themselves as inclusive and contributing members of society within this country."

Even school integration was a bad thing, as blacks simply can't "learn to appreciate the value of a good education."

What's really frightening is that a majority of today's Republicans probably agree with Hubbard - yes, including Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.   Yet some people - including some readers of this blog - wonder why I cannot be a Republican.   Oh, and I can just imagine what Hubbard thinks of LGBT Americans.

 

The Republican Party’s Race Problem

There have long been those who view the Republican Party as being anti-black (along with anti-gay, anti-Hispanic, anti-immigrant, etc., etc.).  But it wasn't always that way, at least in terms of anti-black racism.  So what happened?  A new book, Strom Thurmond’s America, by Joseph Crespino, suggests that the root cause of this change was the influx of former Southern Democrats led by the late Strom Thurmond, who switched to the GOP as the Democratic Party at the national level embraced desegregation and the Civil Rights Act - which effectively ended the Jim Crow laws.  Since then, the GOP has continued on the road to becoming a largely lily white party - especially to angry white men - that is hostile to anyone who is racially or ethnically different.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the transformation of the GOP and Crespino's narrative of the party saga to embrace racism.  Here are highlights:

Anyone doubting the myths conservatives cling to must consult Strom Thurmond’s America, a well-researched new book by Joseph Crespino, a historian at Emory University. The longtime South Carolina senator was representative of the trajectory so many Southern Democrats embarked on in the 1960s. As the Democrats abandoned their longtime hostility to African-Americans’ civil rights in the 1940s, Thurmond and his compatriots moved to the Republican Party. Thurmond “quit the Democratic Party at the high-water mark of the civil-rights revolution, helped Barry Goldwater win five Deep South states in 1964, and led a historic shift of white Southerners into the GOP,” Crespino writes.

Thurmond fled the Democrats when President Harry Truman urged legislators to implement the sweeping document issued by his Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights. Among other measures, the report called for ending economic discrimination, desegregating all public facilities, establishing regional offices of the Civil Rights Section of a strengthened Justice Department, passing an anti-lynching law, and creating permanent civil-rights commissions in every state to monitor civil rights.

In response, Thurmond created the States’ Rights Democrats, more commonly known as the Dixiecrats Party. “[T]here’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,” he said as in his first speech as the party’s presumptive president. It was the first toss in a game that would see virtually the entire South migrated to the GOP.

Strom Thurmond’s America fairly observers that racism was not the only reason.  Thurmond and the South defected from the Democrats. Many soon-to-be conservatives (most still called themselves liberals) were motivated by “Cold War anticommunism, anti-labor politics, conservative religious beliefs and opposition to liberal church groups, criticism of judicial activism, and hyper-militarism.” One might add growing concerns about crime and maintaining law and order. All of these issues were intertwined with race in many Southerners’ minds, led by Strom Thurmond.

Richard Nixon pioneered the ‘Southern strategy,’ which Crespino persuasively argues is misnamed because it was designed to appeal to the prejudices of both Southerners and a newly conservative Sun Belt. The plan was to attract Americans to the GOP by opposing busing and desegregating schools, advocating states’ rights and prioritizing law and order.  .   .   .   .   The strategy worked brilliantly. Today Democrats cannot hope to compete in the South, which is now as solidly Republican as it was once Democratic.

All of this might be of interest only to historians if Strom Thurmond’s Republican Party had nothing in common with today’s. But it does. When Newt Gingrich calls Obama a “food-stamp president,” he is maintaining his party’s post-1960s appeals to racism. When the late conservative icon Andrew Briebart manipulated a speech by African-American leader Shirley Sherrod to make her seem racist, he was appealing to the myths of whites’ victimization at the hands of blacks. 

Many leading conservative figures and intellectuals not only solicit this racism; they bond it. Rush Limbaugh is the most prominent racist in all of America with his ranting against imaginary black gang-beatings of whites spurred by Obama. Right-wingers believe racism exists—but it always is directed against whites.

These delusions have real-world consequences. Though the vast majority of opposition to Obama is not remotely race-related, some of it (PDF) surely is, and conservatives not only ignore but outright appeal to it.

Conservatives' blindness to offenses against people of color has its roots in historical Republican offenses against people of color. To concede that William F. Buckley and Jerry Falwell were segregationists is to acknowledge that modern conservatism was built and sustained in large part on bigotry.

For northern Republican such as those in my extended family it took us a while to finally admit that what had happened to the Republican Party was indeed something ugly.  The final straw for me and other family members was when the Christofascists took over the Party and the concept of the separation of church and state ceased to exist.  Since our exodus from the GOP years ago at this point, things have only gotten worse.  We did not leave the Republican Party - the Party left us.  It also left rationality and decency in my view.

Bible Based Bigotry Never Seems to Change

Coming across the paired photos above via Facebook, the parallels with what was happening 50+ years ago and today are striking.  And sadly, the mindset exhibited in both photos hasn't changed - only the latest targets of hate and bigotry.  Moreover, now, as back then, the Bible is being used as a basis to justify hatred towards others and the deprivation of CIVIL law rights.

Putting Thurgood Marshall On Trial

One of the more insane things that happened so far during the confirmation hears for Elena Kagan - and there have been a number generated by the GOP and it's untethered witnesses - has been the attack made on former Justice Thurgood Marshall. Marshall - considered an icon by many - was depicted as an activist if not a radical. Marshall's son - a classmate of my late sister at UVA - has an op-ed in today's Washington Post that takes these accusations head on. The true activists and radicals are the members of the increasingly sectarian GOP, not Marshall who simply wanted the U.S. Constitution to be applied literally as written and applicable to all citizens. Once again, it is the Republicans and that party's Christianist masters that want special rights for themselves based on race, religious belief, and national origin. Here are highlights from Thurgood Marshall, Jr.'s op-ed:
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I believe that this spectacle is partly a result of my father having lived a life of consequence as a practicing attorney and as a jurist. The rhetoric serves as a reminder that President Lyndon Johnson displayed wisdom and great courage in nominating my father to the Supreme Court. Yes, he had served as solicitor general of the United States and as a federal appellate judge who authored more than 90 opinions without a single reversal, but as notable is what he did before holding those positions.
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When my father was confirmed 69 to 11, more than four decades ago, that historic act came after he worked for years in private practice drafting wills, trying murder cases and engaging in all legal issues in between; after working in the courts to bring long-overdue voting rights to the disenfranchised and to desegregate schools.
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If there is to be a new round of battles on those issues, then I suspect that the victory margin would be far greater since legions of Americans of every stripe regard the resolutions of those issues as achievements that make our union more perfect. If there is to be a new round of battles over my father's jurisprudence, his vision of the role of the courts or his belief in the 14th Amendment, then I like those odds, too.
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A debate this week about judicial activism seems to have revealed only one thing: One person's activism is another's adherence to constitutional principle. And to my ear, a progressive jurist sounds far more desirable than a regressive one.
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Justice Marshall spent much of his life striving to make the USA a more just nation. His latter day GOP critics have a totally opposite goal Their vision of this nation ought to scare the Hell out of thinking Americans.

Grandson of President Harry Truman Chides Obama - Stories from the Frontlines: Letters to President Barack Obama

Barack Obama continually proves himself to be no Harry Truman when it comes to guts and leadership. Truman told the military that segregation of troops was ending and did not wring his hands ask the military to study how to implement it first. Similarly, he fired Five Star General Douglas MacArthur when MacArthur challenged Truman's authority - something Admiral Mullen might do well to remember. A true leader does something because it is the right thing to do and exhorts subordinates to do likewise. Obama continues to have matters ass backwards and wants to be a follower rather than a leader. Today's letter in the series "Stories from the Frontlines: Letters to President Barack Obama" is authored by Clifton Truman Daniel pictured above being held by his grandfather, Harry Truman. Here is the letter:

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May 7, 2010

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President Barack H. Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest

Washington, DC 20500

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Dear Mr. President:

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Tomorrow, my family and I will mark the 126th anniversary of my grandfather President Harry Truman’s birthday. There are many reasons we celebrate his life and contributions to our nation, but in particular we are proud of his decision to desegregate the U.S. Armed Forces in July 1948, which paved the way for future civil rights advancements.

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It was not easy. He faced fierce opposition from inside and outside the military. Many, including Army Chief of Staff Gen. Omar Bradley, argued that mixing black and white soldiers would destroy the Army.

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My grandfather, however, was appalled that African-American service members had been beaten and lynched upon their return home from fighting in World War II. They had risked their lives to defend our nation, but were denied the full rights and responsibilities of American citizenship. Implementation of his order to desegregate wasn’t easy, but it made our military stronger and our nation a brighter beacon of democracy.

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There are strong parallels between the desegregation of the military and the debate over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the law that mandates the firing of a service member based solely on his or her sexual orientation. Opponents argue that allowing openly gay and lesbian service members to serve alongside their heterosexual comrades will endanger discipline and morale.

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While I have no idea where my grandfather would stand on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I do know that he admired service and sacrifice. An estimated 66,000 gay and lesbian Marines, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Coastguardsmen are willingly risking their lives to defend our nation, despite being treated as second class citizens.

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I would hope that my grandfather would want his openly gay great-granddaughter and others like her to have the opportunity to serve the country they love with dignity and integrity.

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Mr. President, as you have said many times, including in your State of the Union Address earlier this year, ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is the right thing to do. This year is the right time to do it.

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I commend you for your commitment and hope the example of my grandfather, Harry Truman, will help you lead with the same courage and conviction to ensure the "equality of treatment and opportunity for all who serve our nation’s defense.”

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Respectfully,

Clifton Truman Daniel

A Public Viewing for A Virginia Pioneer of Civil Rights

It is ironic that Virginia is honoring Oliver Hill (at center in the picture at left) for the civil rights work he did to end racial segregation. You see, Virginia was one of the states that in areas opted for "massive resistance" in response to the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and literally closed the public schools rather than have blacks and whites attend the same schools. It is also ironic, in my view, because in the area of LGBT rights, Virginia is again following the massive resistance approach - e.g., a "marriage amendment" was passed last November and other anti-gay legislation was enacted before that - instead of one that provides equal rights to all citizens. Here's a portion of the Washington Post story (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/11/AR2007081100972.html?hpid=sec-nation):

RICHMOND, Aug. 11 -- Hundreds gathered at Virginia's Executive Mansion on Saturday to pay homage to Oliver Hill, the civil rights lawyer at the forefront of the court battle that outlawed America's segregated public schools. Dignitaries, citizens and Hill's family members filed into the governor's home to view Hill's body, which lay in repose in a sun-splashed room adorned with bright orange flowers. Hill died last Sunday at age 100.

"I really think this was kind of a validation of all that he'd done in his life," said Hill's son, Oliver Hill Jr., as he stood among a crowd of mourners. "It just lets us know how many people he touched, both black and white -- and he really was instrumental in transforming the commonwealth." An inscription on the inner lid of Hill's casket read, "May the work I've done speak for me."

In 1954, Hill was part of a series of lawsuits against racially segregated public schools that became the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which changed America's society by setting the foundation for integrated education.

"This is a changed commonwealth because of Mr. Hill," [Governor] Kaine said. "There are some things that we will never go back to because he helped break some old traditions that needed to be broken."

Needles to say, to many people in Virginia during the 1950's and 1960's, Oliver Hill was a hated and despised figure. Not coincidentally, many of those who hated Hill (and/or their religious and political successors) today hate gays.