One Right-Wing Conservative’s View On The Banishing Of The Confederate Flag

For the record, the Confederate flag has NOTHING to do with me or with my conservative worldview.  I was not born in the South, which makes it easier for me to be able to declare this: but I have never ONCE in my life worn a hat, or a shirt, with the Confederate flag on it or with ANY symbol of the Confederate cause.  Nor have I ever been near enough to be photographed – even inadvertently – standing next to any such flag or symbol.

So as for the banning of the Confederate flag, I say, “We should have banned that damn flag in 1865 as a symbol of a vicious rebellion that consumed the lives of as many Americans as all the rest of our wars put together.”

When I was in the Army, I remember being invited to a party at a home in Georgia whose owner had proudly displayed a giant Confederate flag in the garage (where most of the party was happening).  I’d seen the Confederate flag before, of course, but not so up close.  And as I looked at that giant emblem, something welled up inside me.  I declined to go in.  I didn’t talk or think about race, but said something like, “My flag fought against that flag when that flag rose up in rebellion against my flag, and my flag defeated that flag in a war that that flag started against my flag.  That is an enemy flag.  I’m not about to honor that flag now.”

I wasn’t upset about the Confederate flag as a “racist symbol” at that time; I was upset about that flag as a statement of rebellion against my country and against the flag that I had pledged allegiance to since I was a kindergartner.  And now I was in the armed forces fighting for the same flag that I had pledged allegiance to, and in my heart I would tolerate no rivals to it for my allegiance.

So from my childhood, the Confederate flag has never had anything to do with me or anything that I believed in.

In the spirit of someone who hates the Confederate flag as a patriot, would you like to see a flag that is EVERY SCINTILLA as morally outrageous as the Confederate flag?  Here it is and anyone who actually loves America will readily agree with me:

That damned flag represents TREASON and “the fundamental transformation of the United States of America” – which is a euphamism for the “fundamental perversion” of a once-great but now degenerated and depraved country that used to be “one nation, under God” until the president of “God damn America” warped it with his lies.

But let’s talk about race and the Confederate flag.

There’s a line from a great movie called Gettysburg made in 1993, in which a great Civil War hero and Medal of Honor recipient named Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain speaks about the fundamental hypocrisy of the South/Confederacy.  It sums up my own thoughts perfectly:

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain: All these thousands of men. Many of them not much more than boys. Each one of them some mother’s son, some sister’s brother, some daughter’s father. Each one of them a whole person loved and cherished in some home far away. Many of them will never return. An army is power. Its entire purpose is to coerce others. This power can not be used carelessly or recklessly. This power can do great harm. We have seen more suffering than any man should ever see, and if there is going to be an end to it, it must be an end that justifies the cost. Now, somewhere out there is the Confederate army. They claim they are fighting for their independence, for their freedom. Now, I can not question their integrity. I believe they are wrong but I can not question it. But I do question a system that defends its own freedom while it denies it to an entire race of men. I will admit it, Tom. War is a scourge, but so is slavery. It is the systematic coercion of one group of men over another. It has been around since the book of Genesis. It exists in every corner of the world, but that is no excuse for us to tolerate it here when we find it right infront of our very eyes in our own country. As God as my witness, there is no one I hold in my heart dearer than you. But if your life, or mine,is part of the price to end this curse and free the Negro, then let God’s work be done.

Slavery is an evil that fundamentally denies the powerful truth of Genesis 1:27:

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

ALL men are created in God’s image.  And the position of slavery is implicitly and explicitly a Darwinian view that we all evolved, and in Darwin’s book-title words, some races are “Favoured” over others in “the Struggle for Life” in which the races are all pitted against one another.  And I reject that premise utterly and profoundly.

There are a lot on the left who amazingly want to blame that damn Confederate flag on the right and on Republicans.  Such people are historically stupid to a degree where they are beneath contempt.  Every single state that seceded from the Union and fought the bloodiest and most vicious war against the United States in all of its history WERE DEMOCRAT.

The Democrat Party voted AGAINST Republican Abraham Lincoln and voted for the DEMOCRAT Stephen Douglas ran for president.  And the DEMOCRATS seceded from the Union when and because REPUBLICAN Abraham Lincoln won the election.

One of the things that amazes me is how little the Democrat Party has changed since the days when they fought a vicious war for slavery.  Consider the identical nature in the debate over abortion that I described shortly after I started this blog back in 2008. In that article, I carefully consider (and copy and paste) Obama’s speech defending abortion and say this:

Obama’s answer essentially is, “We don’t know for sure when life begins, so we should opt for death.”

Let me give an example: Suppose you are in the shower, with shampoo in your eyes, when your five year old says, “Momma, can I kill this?” What do you say? Do you seriously reason, “Well, I don’t know what the ontological status of the thing my little Johnny is talking about is, so I should allow him to make his own decision.” Johnny might be talking about his two-year old brother!

By Obama’s own reasoning, he just may be supporting and even advocating the murder of innocent human beings. The bottom line is, if there is any doubt at all about the status of the unborn, why not opt for the side of life?

The view that the government should be or even can be morally neutral in such a circumstance is simply false. African-Americans ought to be particularly sensitive about this line of reasoning. Allow me to cite an answer by Abraham Lincoln in refuting the view expressed by Stephen Douglas. It is historically fitting that Democrat Stephen Douglas ran for president as the U.S. Senator from Illinois. Douglas said that, although he was personally against the institution of slavery, “popular sovereignty” ought to determine whether slavery was legal or not. In their Sixth Debate at Quincy on October 13, 1858, Lincoln’s famous response to Douglas was:

“So I say again, that in regard to the arguments that are made, when Judge Douglas says he “don’t care whether slavery is voted up or voted down,” whether he means that as an individual expression of sentiment, or only as a sort of statement of his views on national policy, it is alike true to say that he can thus argue logically if he don’t see anything wrong in it; but he cannot say so logically if he admits that slavery is wrong. He cannot say that he would as soon see a wrong voted up as voted down. When Judge Douglas says that whoever or whatever community wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical, if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.”

The fact of the matter is that if government permitted blacks to be owned as slaves, it was not taking a neutral position. It was implicitly accepting the view that blacks were less than fully human, and therefore could be owned as property. And if the presuppositions justifying slavery were wrong, then as Lincoln said, one simply could not have “the right to do wrong” – even by popular vote. In the same way, by permitting unborn babies to be aborted, the government is not taking a neutral position. Rather, it is likewise implicitly accepting the view that the unborn are not fully human, and therefore can be regarded essentially as property rather than as persons (property that may be destroyed at will).

There is something else that should be realized: that the right of a woman to choose abortion logically and morally entails the position that fathers do not and should not matter. Abortion trivializes the role of the father.

If the “thing” that is created by intercourse is not in fact a human being and a human person, then why should he be held accountable for what develops 9 months later? It is out of his control by the implicit reasoning of abortion: the woman alone decides. Only if he fathered a child with all the recognition and human dignity of a human being should he be held accountable for fathering a child! If the “right to choose” is up to a woman and a woman alone, then what does the man have to do with it?

Fathers are put in a despicable position by abortion logic: if a woman decides to abort her baby, then the father – by abortion morality – must stand idly by while his own child is put to death, and even approve of the killing. If, on the other hand, the woman decides to keep her baby, then a father is held to the duty of supporting that child until that child reaches legal adulthood whether he wants to have a child or not. Where is his “right to choose”? Where is his “reproductive freedom”? The father is completely left out of the decision as an insignificant component. Is there any wonder

Just as the institution of slavery pit one group’s rights up against another group’s rights, and then usurps the rights of one group to privilege a hypocritical group of people who usurp other people’s rights in the name of their “freedom” and their “right to choose,” abortion does the identical same thing.  A slaveowner should have the right to choose to own slaves – and damn the rights of the poor black person who is now condemned a be a slave; a woman should have the right to choose to kill her baby – and damn the rights of the poor baby who is now condemned to die and damn the rights of the father who is every bit as responsible for that child coming into the world as the mother is.

The same Bible that condemns racism as being anti-God also condemns abortion as being anti-God and states the nature of the unborn:

Psalm 139:13-18

¹³ You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
    and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ Thank You for making me so wonderfully complex!
    Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
¹⁵ You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
    as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.
¹⁶ You saw me before I was born.
    Every day of my life was recorded in Your book.
Every moment was laid out
    before a single day had passed.

¹⁷ How precious are Your thoughts about me,^[a] O God.
    They cannot be numbered!
¹⁸ I can’t even count them;
    they outnumber the grains of sand!
And when I wake up,
    You are still with me!

Democrats haven’t changed their spots in 150 years.  Long after fighting and losing a war against Republicans to enslave black people and forcibly keep them on plantations, Democrats began another strategy to voluntarily keep blacks on plantations through a welfare system and through an ideology that implicitly declares that black people don’t have a right to come to conclusions for themselves, but must believe as their “masters” tell them to believe and think and vote as liberal progressive Democrats who put them in chains to begin with.

Abortion is every bit as morally and scientifically wrong as racial slavery is.

Republican Governor Nikki Haley courageously banned the Confederate flag.  Let’s see how many DEMOCRAT governors could have done so before her. Since the beginning of the Civil War, 41 of the Governors of the State of South Carolina – including the ENTIRE period of segregation and “separate but equal” status – were DEMOCRATS. Versus eight Republican governors – one of whom finally took down that damned Democrat Party symbol of hate.

Don’t you DARE blame the Confederate flag on Republicans, you lying hypocrite Democrat fascists.  Don’t you DARE transpose your symbol of hate onto us.  The Confederate flag is the DEMOCRAT PARTY FLAG that the DEMOCRAT PARTY CREATED AND FOUGHT FOR AND KILLED REPUBLICANS UNDER.

Hey, you want a nice contemporary example gift-wrapped with a bow for you?  How about this one: guess which president as governor signed into law an act to add a Confederate star on his state flag “to commemorate the Confederate States of America.”

Oh, but it gets even BETTER: guess which party actually resurrected the flag and made it part of South Carolina again. And of course the answer is a damned DEMOCRAT.

Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton are for HELL.  The Democrat Party stands for hell on earth.  And they are for whatever the HELL will give them POWER to keep perverting and depraving everything sacred in this land that was built on trust in God.

And so 150 years later, you DEMOCRATS are still every bit as wicked and as hypocritical and every bit as eager to deprive innocent people of their basic rights and freedoms in the name of your own twisted “rights” as you were in 1865 after good Republicans rose up to defeat you.  When Democrats and the residents of Democrat-controlled ideological plantations blame Republicans for the Confederate flag, they are Adolf Hitler blaming the Jews for being the cause of the German defeat in World War One – when any reasonable and moral person would realize that the Republicans are every bit as innocent of the Confederate flag that they literally rose up against and defeated as the Jews were for being responsible for everything Hitler falsely blamed on them.

If black people want to show the same spirit that Republican Governor Nikki Haley displayed in banning the Confederate flag, they would similarly ban black race-based organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Black Congressional Caucus, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, the historically black colleges and universities and the historically black religious denominations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s Halloween, Liberals; Do You Know Where Your Global Warming Baby Is?

“Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past,” the headline said. 

The story said:

Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall in much of lowland Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east. It is the continuation of a trend that has been increasingly visible in the past 15 years: in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. London’s last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.

Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community. Average temperatures in Britain were nearly 0.6°C higher in the Nineties than in 1960-90, and it is estimated that they will increase by 0.2C every decade over the coming century. Eight of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the Nineties.

However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become“a very rare and exciting event”.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

Well, somehow the “global warming” message that was utterly refuted by reality was morphed by the true believers into “climate change” – whatever the hell that means.

But “the scientists” and “the computer models” all said that it was going to get hotter and hotter, and that “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”  And these morally stupid liberals couldn’t have been more wrong as they perverted science to suit their ideological agenda.

Here is reality:

Brrr… New York City Expecting Earliest Significant Snowfall Since Civil War
Posted by Jim Hoft on Saturday, October 29, 2011, 10:57 AM

It must be global warming climate change.

(Star Tribune)

New York City is expecting its earliest snow storm since the Civil War.
The Daily Mail reported:

The North East is bracing for a chilling Halloween weekend as 60 million people are expected to be hit by snowstorms.

New England has already been struck by a very early snowstorm, while this weekend looks set to see huge amounts of sleet and snow covering the North East, invariably causing power outages and travel chaos.

Low pressure will track up the East Coast on Saturday possibly bringing significant amounts of the white stuff across the tri-state area, Pennsylvania and New England.

New York has received measurable snow before Halloween only three times since 1869 – and never more than one inch, which is what some experts are predicting.

Likely to see the most snow will be the Massachusetts Berkshires, the Litchfield Hills in northwestern Connecticut, southwestern New Hampshire and the southern Green Mountains.

In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy warned residents that they could lose power due to the anticipated wet, heavy snow.

I have far more intellectual respect for the most severely mentally disabled person than I do for liberal “intellectuals”; because even that serverely disabled person (who also has an excuse for his or her inability to comprehend basic reality) can learn to stack one block on top of another.  Liberals are utterly incapable of learning.  I mean, this leftwing lunacy keeps boomeranging back over and over again.

What does the Bible say about liberals? 

Yes, it says that “The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left” as indicated by Ecclesiastes 10:2.  But why is that so?  Because liberals are “always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7).  The truth to a liberal is akin to nuclear physics to a primitive yet-undiscovered aborigine.  Because there is absolutely no possibility that they will ever discover it as long as they continue to think and live as they do.

Children just won’t know what snow is, liberals said.  Because liberals actually are that stupid and that wrong.

 

False Prophets Of Global Warming Wrong As Their Bogus Pseudo-Science Proves Again

Let’s see.  Here’s what the global warming alarmists were saying a few years ago:

Study links more hurricanes, climate change
Updated 7/30/2007 12:12 PM
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

The number of hurricanes that develop each year has more than doubled over the past century, an increase tied to global warming, according to a study released Sunday.

“We’re seeing a quite substantial increase in hurricanes over the last century, very closely related to increases in sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean,” says study author Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

Working with hurricane researcher Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology, Holland looked at sea records from 1855 to 2005 in a study published in the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

The researchers found that average hurricane numbers jumped sharply during the 20th century, from 3.5 per year in the first 30 years to 8.4 in the earliest years of the 21st century. Over that time, Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures increased .65 degrees, which experts call a significant increase.

The reality can be summed up in a single pithy statement:

Barring a freak storm, on June 10 it will have been 1,000 days since any hurricane struck the US. The longest period since before the Civil War.

This “inconvenient truth” was first raised back in October 2010.

Now the same global warming alarmist industry that said that the reason it was so cold last year was because it is really so hot are saying that the global warming they said meant more hurricanes now means that there will be less hurricanes.

It’s that old story:  This is liberalism.  This is your brain on liberalism:

But hey, global warming is just a fact.  Every rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth liberal and every mainstream-media-propagandist and every government-payrolled-“scientist” will tell you that.

We need to gut our economy and redistribute our wealth and create a Marxist-fascist global tyrant state to solve our global warming agenda.  We need to kill our babies so the global warming bogeyman doesn’t kill the earth.  We need four more years of Obama so he can heal the planet and lower the level of the oceans.

Global warming and Darwinism have a lot in common.  Both have routinely been endlessly adapted to explain everything, and therefore actually can’t legitimately explain anything.  Both have been routinely held up as being beyond the need for proof.  Both would have been thoroughly disproven if “proof” were ever actually an issue.  Adherents of both Darwinism and global warming (and they are to a large extent the same people) have resorted to literally fascist tactics to ridicule, demonize and destroy scientists who have disagreed.  Both are no longer scientific theories as much as they are all-encompassing worldivews, if not religions.  As such, both are seized upon by the left as a guise toward even worse ideologies as they seek to take over society.  The similarities are really quite remarkable.

Obama To Skip Out On Arlington Memorial Day Ceremony

From KGO Radio:

“Obama will be on vacation in Chicago this Memorial Day, instead of presiding over Memorial Day ceremonies at Arlington. This may be the first time since the Civil War that a president will not pay respect to the veterans passed.”

What a slimeball.

Somebody wrote, “Good! I’m relieved that the graves of brave men and women won’t be desecrated.”

And he might be right.  But the paradox here is that the fact that Obama isn’t going is proof that he doesn’t deserve to go in the first place.

Here’s the story, which cites the Washington Post report that Obama will skip the Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington:

President Obama’s Memorial Day Plans, Skip Arlington, Vacation In Chicago
By Shannon Bell

President Obama’s Memorial Day Weekend plans include skipping Arlington,vacation in Chicago, you know, because he hasn’t been there in a while. The mainstream media sure has a nifty way of spinning the fact that Obama’s skipping Arlington services on Memorial Day in a time of war no less to vacation in Chicago.

The Washington Post says Obama’s skipping Arlington on Memorial Day to keep a “campaign promise.” One of his many promises during the campaign of 2008 was that he would visit Chicago every six weeks or so. He hasn’t been there for a stay since February of 2009.

Once again Obama’s lack of good decision making shines through. He’s the Commander in Chief whether he or we like it or not. Memorial Day comes but once a year, Arlington is where the President of the United States needs to spend his time. But Obama’s Memorial Day plans, skipping Arlington, vacationing in Chicago.

It’s only Memorial Day. The day when we honor those who have given the ultimate sacrifice for our freedoms. It’s only Arlington National Cemetery. Quite possibly the most hallowed and sacred piece of realestate in the country. He’s only the Commander in Chief. The leader of our armed forces who commands their respect.

But hey. If you need a break take it when you can get it, right? Obama hasn’t had many opportunities to fly home to Chicago. There was that one time he took Michelle out dancing and to the theater. Oh wait that was New York. Well how about a couple weeks ago when he took the time to spend the weekend there when he should have been attending to the oil spill? Did I miss that one too? You’re right, that was a weekend getaway to a spa in North Carolina.

What about his numerous golf outings, or what about the Obama’s vacation last year to the beach? He couldn’t have taken one of those “opportunities?” Nope. Obama’s Memorial day plans, skipping Arlington , vacationing in Chicago. Priorities Mr. President, priorities.

Obama basically hasn’t kept any of his other promises.  Why is his promise to vacation in Chicago more important than his duty to honor the fallen soldiers in wars past as well as the one he’s sending troops to die in now?

The problem is that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is in Arlington, not in Chicago.  Unless Obama wants to have one made out of Styrofoam like those tacky Grecian columns he once used.

And, oh, yeah.  That golf thing.  After the media criticized George Bush for playing gold while his troops were fighting for their lives, Obama has played golf more in one year than Bush did in eight years.  In fact, Obama was playing golf when three of the soldiers under his command were sacrificing their lives on the battlefield.

This is a president who has ordered men to their deaths in Afghanistan.  The least he can do for those who’ve died under his direction is lay a freaking wreath on a freaking tomb on one special freaking day of the year.

Shame on him.

Slimeball.

You know if it were Teleprompter Day, Obama would be there to lay that damn wreath to honor the only device that keeps him from looking like the complete jabbering fool that he truly is.

Barack Obama apparently won’t be there (unless political pressure shames him into canceling his “vacation”), but please help me – even if you’ve disagreed with everything I’ve said about Obama – in doing your darnedest to honor our heroic warriors, be they young or old, living or dead.

Update, May 31, 2010.  I have been challenged on the claim that Obama is the first president since the Civil War to skip Arlington.  I checked into it, and stand corrected.  That said, many of those who tell me to check my facts should likewise check their facts.

For instance, Farrow says:

Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all missed the wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetery at one time or another

Moreover, President Obama will lay a wreath tomorrow (Memorial Day) at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery.

Well, yeah.  But Bush II missed Arlington only one time – when he honored the veterans who had fallen on the beaches of Normandy in France.  That’s a pretty good reason to “miss.”  Much better than Obama’s promise to vacation in Chicago more.

With the “blame Bush” climate, this is one thing you can’t “blame Bush” for.

George H.W. Bush missed ceremonies at Arlington, but he was a decorated combat veteran of World War II.  Barack Obama, by contrast, is not a veteran, did not serve in combat, and has not been decorated for anything.

When Barack Obama is decorated for heroism in combat, like Bush I was when he received the Distinguished Flying Cross, he can skip Arlington, which honors such heroes.  Until then, an excuse that cites George H.W. Bush falls apart rather pathetically.

One of the occasions Regan missed as President occurred while he was recovering from wounds incurred after having nearly been assassinated.  You might cut him some slack for that one.  He also attended a summit meeting, and was out of the country dealing with the Soviet Union, during wreath-laying ceremonies.  In 1987, Reagan was in Camp David – working on a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviets.  Again, hopefully you’ll cut him some slack for working to end nuclear Armageddon.

As a further update, Obama did not actually participate in the Memorial Day event in Chicago.  It was canceled due to rain.  Which means that maybe God Himself doesn’t think Obama deserves to honor our warriors.  End update.

Harry Reid Invokes Slavery To Attack Republicans: The Real Story

Another day, another profoundly dishonest and immoral Democrat lie.

The Democrat Senate Majority Leader had this to say about the Democrats’ health care agenda and its relationship with wanting to own slaves:

“All Republicans can come up with is this: Slow down, stop everything and start over. If you think you have heard these same excuses before, you are right,” Reid said on the Senate floor Monday. “When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down, it is too early, let’s wait. Things are not bad enough.’ “

As Republicans erupted into outrage at the ugly and utterly despicable tactic – and presumably after Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele called on Reid to apologize for his “disgraceful statement” – Harry Reid spake again through his spokesman:

“Today’s feigned outrage is nothing but a ploy to distract from the fact they have no plan to lower the cost of health care, stop insurance company abuses or protect Medicare.”

Harry Reid conveniently forgets that his Democrat party is trying to strip Medicare of $460 billion in funding at a time when it needs those funds the most, against unanimous Republican objection.  But facts don’t really amount to much with hard-core liars.

Let me try Harry Reid’s trick:

“All Democrats can come up with is this: tell lies, make stuff up and use deception to make the cost of their bills look different than it really is. If you think you have heard these same excuses before, you are right.  When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of child molestation, there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down, buggering little boys is fine, it’s discrimination to go after them. Things are not bad enough.’ “

And if Democrats become outraged at being compared to being a bunch of child molesters over their takeover of the health care system, I’ll just trot back out and say:

“Today’s feigned outrage is nothing but a ploy.”

Because, after all, when I slander you with the most hateful demagoguery, how DARE you respond in outrage?

I tell you what: Joseph Goebbels is just so freaking happy listening to Harry Reid from his special place in hell.  Every demagogue in history has got to be dancing.

If I really wanted to continue with the Democrat tactics, I would make sure that everyone knew that this was hate speech that would incite black people to begin murdering Republicans.  And the moment I found any registered Republican killed by a black guy, I would immediately cite the event and decry Harry Reid as a blood-faced murderer.

Harry Reid wants to talk about slavery.  So let’s talk about slavery.  Democrats fought the bloodiest war in American history to keep blacks in bondage; Republicans under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln won the emancipation of black slaves at the cost of their own lives and limbs.

During the 1860 presidential election, Democrat candidate Stephen Douglas supported the doctrine of popular sovereignty: allowing settlers in each territory to decide for themselves whether abortion – oops, I mean slavery – would be allowed.

On October 13, 1858, During Lincoln-Douglas debates, U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) stated: “I do not regard the Negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother, or any kin to me whatever.”

An article entitled “The African Civil War” has a very simple entry as to how the Civil War began:

Abraham Lincoln was against slavery. When he was elected President in 1860, seven Southern states left, or seceded, from the United States. They formed the Confederate States of America

The Democrat Party: the Party of slavery.

A little history lesson:

April 16, 1862
President Lincoln signs bill abolishing slavery in District of Columbia; in Congress, 99% of Republicans vote yes, 83% of Democrats vote no

July 17, 1862
Over unanimous Democrat opposition, Republican Congress passes Confiscation Act stating that slaves of the Confederacy “shall be forever free”

January 31, 1865
13th Amendment banning slavery passed by U.S. House with unanimous Republican support, intense Democrat opposition

April 8, 1865
13th Amendment banning slavery passed by U.S. Senate with 100% Republican support, 63% Democrat opposition

November 22, 1865
Republicans denounce Democrat legislature of Mississippi for enacting “black codes,” which institutionalized racial discrimination

February 5, 1866
U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) introduces legislation, successfully opposed by Democrat President Andrew Johnson, to implement “40 acres and a mule” relief by distributing land to former slaves

April 9, 1866
Republican Congress overrides Democrat President Johnson’s veto; Civil Rights Act of 1866, conferring rights of citizenship on African-Americans, becomes law

May 10, 1866
U.S. House passes Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the laws to all citizens; 100% of Democrats vote no

June 8, 1866
U.S. Senate passes Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the law to all citizens; 94% of Republicans vote yes and 100% of Democrats vote no

The above-cited article entitled, “The Democrat Race Lie,” goes on with numerous entries detailing well over a century of Democrat opposition to racial equality, to match their support of the institution of slavery.

So in other words, Harry Reid is accusing Republicans of being so vile, so hateful, so ugly, so despicable, so depraved, so morally evil, that they have become like Democrats.

And those are fighting words.  Because as bad as Republicans are, there’s no way they are THAT loathsome.

After the Civil War, the Democrats formed the Ku Klux Klan as a violent terrorist organization which

resisted Reconstruction by assaulting, murdering and intimidating freedmen and white Republicans.

So you can understand why I would be deeply offended and appalled that Harry Reid would say that I’m such a nasty piece of work as a Republican that I’m somehow like a Democrat in wanting to continue slavery.

Let’s move ahead to 1924, to see how the Ku Klux Klan still owned the Democrat Party:

The 1924 Democratic National Convention, also called the Klanbake,^[1] held at the Madison Square Garden in New York City from June 24 to July 9, took a record 103 ballots to nominate a presidential candidate. It was the longest continuously running convention in United States political history. It was the first national convention in which a major party had a woman, Lena Springs, placed in nomination for the office of Vice President. It was also known for the strong influence of the Ku Klux Klan.

That’s why Martin Luther King, Sr., a major civil rights figure before his son took his mantle, “had been a lifelong registered Republican, and had endorsed Republican Richard Nixon.”  And that’s why Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., registered as a Republican in 1956.

The section entitled, “The Modern Civil Rights Era,” from an article, “Republicans for Civil Rights,” is worth reading:

During the civil rights era of the 1960’s, it was the Democrats who Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the other protestors were fighting. Democrat Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor in Birmingham let loose dogs and turned fire hoses on black civil rights demonstrators. Democrat Georgia Governor Lester Maddox famously brandished ax handles to prevent blacks from patronizing his restaurant. In 1963, Democrat Alabama Governor George Wallace stood in front of the Alabama schoolhouse chanting, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”. In 1954, Democrat Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus tried to prevent desegregation of a Little Rock public school. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who established the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, enforced the desegregation of the military, sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate the schools (using the 101st airborne), and appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court which resulted in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education (which ended school segregation). Eisenhower also supported the civil rights laws of 1957 and 1960.

Little known by many today is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, not Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through the civil rights laws of the 1960’s. In fact, Dirksen was key to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968. Dirksen wrote the language for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing.

Conveniently forgotten today are significant facts about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The law guaranteed equal access to public facilities and banned discrimination by any establishment receiving federal government funding. The law was an update of Republican Charles Sumner’s 1875 Civil Rights Act which had been stuck down by the Democrat-controlled US Supreme Court in 1883.

In-fact, Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, Al Gore Sr., William Fulbright (credited as Bill Clinton’s political mentor) and Robert Byrd (a former Kleagle for the Ku Klux Klan), filibustered against the bill for 14 straight hours before the final vote. Former presidential candidate Richard Nixon lobbied hard for the bill. When the bill finally came to a vote, the House of Reps passed the bill 289 to 124. 80% of Republicans voted for the bill VS only 63% by Democrats. The Senate vote was 73 to 27 (21 Democrats voting no VS only 6 Republicans voting against). Simply put: Republicans are responsible for the bill being passed, not Democrats as they’d lead you to believe.

Equally important was the 1965 Voting Rights Act that abolished literacy tests and other tests used to prevent blacks from voting (a right granted by the 15th Amendment). With images of violence against civil rights protestors led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. shaping the national debate, Democrats in Congress finally decided not to filibuster the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When the bill came up for a vote, both houses of Congress passed the bill. In the House of Representatives, 85% of Republicans and 80% of Democrats voted for the bill. In the Senate, 17 Democrats voted no, and only one Republican voted no.

Democrat President John F. Kennedy is championed as a civil rights advocate. In reality, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil rights Act as a senator along side Democrat Senator Al Gore Sr. After he became president, John F. Kennedy opposed the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph who was also a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI.

In a historic apology, issued unanimously on January 20, 2007 by the North Carolina Democratic Executive Committee, composed of over 700 party leaders and activists from 100 counties, resulted from the1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission Report of May 31, 2006. The report concluded that the Democrat Party was solely responsible for that 1898 murderous rampage against blacks.

“The Democrat Party was soley responsible” become the overarching theme.

The Democrats’ record regarding slavery is a record of abject shame and moral evil.

Democrats might point out that Strom Thurmond filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act signed by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  But they should also recognize that he was a member of the Democrat Party when he did it.  And then they should account for the fact that their very own Robert Byrd – who continues to serve as a Democrat Senator today – not only filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but actively served the Ku Klux Klan in the leadership positions of “Kleagle” and “Exalted Cyclops.” And this now revered Democrat wrote a letter to Senator Theodore Bilbo that said:

“I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side… Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

— Sen. Robert C. Byrd, honored Democrat in good standing.

And for Harry Reid to lecture Republicans, using slavery as an example, is an insult to history, in addition to generation after generation of Republicans trying to win first emancipation and then individual liberties for blacks against the bitter and steadfast opposition of the Democrat Party.

How dare he?  How DARE he?

Harry Reid should not only apologize, he should frankly resign in disgrace.  He won’t, only because the Democrat Party wallows in disgrace like pigs wallow in mud.

Civil War Within GOP? Democrats Ignore Log In Their Own Eye

I occasionally turned on CNN last night during the elections.  They couldn’t go three consecutive minutes without somebody mentioning the “civil war” within the Republican Party.

Particularly as it became more apparent that the Democrat in the NY-23 race was poised to win the district – as the ONLY Democrat victory in an otherwise complete smackdown by the GOP – pundits speculated on the “fracturing” in the Republican Party.

And, of course, we should listen to these people.  After all, they correctly predicted that the Republican Party was clearly dead after the 2008 elections.  I mean, they obviously know what they’re talking about, right?

A divided party: Progressives threaten Democratic lawmakers
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
11/03/09 2:39 PM EST

MoveOn.org is sending out emails today seeking more contributions for its campaign to defeat any Democratic senator who does not fully  support Obamacare. Yesterday the left-wing activist group asked members to contribute “to a primary challenge against any Democratic senator who helps Republicans block an up-or-down vote on health care reform.” Today, MoveOn reports that it has received $2 million in pledges in less than 24 hours. “It’s a clear sign of how angry progressives would be at any Democrat who helps filibuster reform,” MoveOn executive director Justin Ruben writes in the new email.

“The larger the war chest we can offer a potential challenger, the stronger the signal we’ll send to conservative Democrats,” Ruben continues. “So we’re setting a huge new goal: $3 million in total pledges by the end of the week. That’s plenty to launch a serious primary challenge.”

MoveOn is already planning radio ads targeting Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu and Arkansas Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln over the health care issue.

MoveOn’s new campaign comes amid much discussion in the political world of divisions among Republicans, with many analysts reading the presence of third-party candidates in New York’s 23rd District and in New Jersey, and coming primary battles in Florida and elsewhere, as proof of deep, and perhaps disastrous, divisions inside the GOP. One publication recently dubbed it a “nightmare scenario” for Republicans. But MoveOn’s new threat of primary attacks on Democratic lawmakers suggests that the story might be a bit one-sided. Democrats who stray from progressive orthodoxy might be in for big trouble — and the divisions inside the Democratic party might be just as big a deal as the problems inside the GOP.

And other names, such as Joe Lieberman’s, need to be added to the list.  Democrats publicly threatened to strip him of his chairmanship if he blocked the liberal agenda.

NY-23 wasn’t so much a civil war within the GOP as much as it was an example of the stupidity of the 11 county Republican apparatchiks who seemingly chose Scozzafava’s name out of a hat, rather than choosing a candidate who in any way reflected the makeup of the party within the district.  And I personally believe that Hoffman’s defeat will cause both the Republican Party and the conservative movement in general to learn some lessons.

Lessons that the morning after clearly reveal that Democrats will not learn.

Barack Obama won Virginia by six points in 2008.  Virginia hadn’t elected a Republican for governor in 12 years.  And both Virginia Senators are Democrats.  It wasn’t a “purple state”; it was a state that was deeply into the process of becoming a BLUE state.  And yet the Republican candidate walked away with the governorship by an 18 point spread.

In New Jersey, it was even worse.  Obama won that state by 16 points.  New Jersey has been a reliably Democrat state for decades.  Republican Christie’s cheat-proof 5-point win is like a political earthquake.

To make the defeat even more alarming for Democrats, the Republican in Virginia won independent voters by a 66-30 margin, and the Republican in New Jersey won them by a 60-30 margin.  Independents are becoming more conservative, not more liberal.

Let’s see.  When was the last time anything like this happened?  Oh, yeah – 1993 – the year before the worst political defeat for either party in history.

Republicans get paranoid about the prospect of an Orwellian 1984 scenario occurring as big government liberals usurp more and more power away from the people and into the government.  If they are halfway smart, Democrats will start getting paranoid about the 1993 scenario happening again.

Update, November 10, 2009:

Kos and Effect

Daily Kos blog founder Markos Moulitsas is telling his fellow liberals to ditch the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee because the money could be going to moderate Democrats who voted against the House health care bill.

Moulitsas writes: “Skip any donations to the DCCC. Their first priority is incumbent retention, and they’re (necessarily) issue agnostic. They’ll be dumping millions into defending these seats. Instead, give to those elected officials who best reflect your values.”

The Politico calls it “a dangerous little challenge to the Democratic establishment… the GOP is loving the Kos post.”

DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen tells Fox News, “It would be a mistake to take any measures that would jeopardize a large and vibrant Democratic majority.”

And, yeah, I’m sure the GOP IS loving the Kool-aid Kos post.  I know it brings laughter and merriment to my heart.

Just another little tidbit to lay to rest the mainstream media-created propaganda that the Republican Party is the one on the verge of meltdown.

Clinton Campaign Predicted Pandering Obama Would “Renege” His Position On Iraq

Barack Obama has done quite a job in a very short time reversing the positions he claimed to hold while campaigning for the Democratic nomination. If you don’t believe me because I’m a conservative, just see for yourself what a lot of liberals are saying.

The New York Times recently ripped Obama on his character over all his dramatic reversals. The editors point out that,

“We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.”

And liberal blogs really tore Obama a new one over his announcement that he was now supporting the so-called “faith-based initiatives” that were first put into action by President Bush.

But none of Obama’s flip flops have been so significant as have been his reversals over Iraq. We are not just talking about theoretical campaign positions; we are talking about thousands of American lives, years of painstaking effort at high costs, and foreign policy that will define American prestige for decades to come.

When Obama announced that he would not use public financing, he broke his personal promise. But at least no one died trying to raise campaign contributions. A lot of Americans have dedicated their lives – and even laid their lives down – to secure freedom for Iraq. It is not just another issue over which “to play old political games” over.

Over and over again, Barack Obama has promised that he would bring the troops home in 2009. He pointedly did NOT emphasize when he made that promise at campaign event after campaign event that his pledge was dependent upon the situation in Iraq or upon the opinion of American military commanders. In point of fact, that was Hillary Clinton’s position – and Barack Obama won the liberal vote by positioning himself well to the left of her on Iraq.

A GOP press release titled “Obama’s Iraq Fact Check” clearly documents that Obama has massively reversed his position. Again and again, Obama has made crystal-clear statements such as the one he gave at the Democratic National Committee Annual Fall Meeting at Vienna, Virginia on 30 Nov 2007: “As president I will end this war in Iraq. We will have our troops home within 16 months.” They’ve got the sources, and even the YouTube videos of Obama making this vow.

The Clinton campaign pointed out in March that Barack Obama’s pledge to get out of Iraq was “an example of more empty words by Obama,” and that he had no intention of doing what he said he was going to do.

In other words, he was lying to the American people about his real intentions. He was using pandering, empty rhetoric to solidify his standing amongst the left-wing to beat his opponent. And he was using this deplorable tactic on an “issue” for which over 4,000 Americans have given their lives.

Here is the entire article:

Barack Obama’s aide suggested renege on Iraq troop pledge

BY MICHAEL SAUL in New York and KENNETH R. BAZINET in Washington

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS, Saturday, March 8th 2008

Samantha Power paid for her “monster” dig by resigning Sunday, but Hillary Clinton‘s campaign seized on potentially more damaging remarks suggesting Barack Obama might renege on his pledge to pull U.S. troops from Iraq promptly.

Even before the Harvard professor and Obama’s chief outside foreign policy adviser stepped down, the Clinton camp was gleefully circulating another interview where Power called Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan “the best-case scenario.”

“[Obama] will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. senator,” Power told the BBC in what the Clinton campaign flagged as eyebrow-raising remarks.

“He will rely upon a plan – an operational plan – that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn’t have daily access now, as a result of not being the President,” she said.

Aides to Hillary Clinton jumped all over those comments, charging in a hastily planned conference call that it was an example of more empty words by Obama.

“The impression that one thing is said for political purposes perhaps and another thing is what’s actually going to happen, is amateur hour on making foreign policy,” said Clinton foreign policy adviser Jamie Rubin, a State Department spokesman in the Clinton administration.

“On foreign affairs, in particular, words matter,” Rubin added. “He can’t seem to run a foreign policy team the way it’s supposed to run.”

Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark added that Power’s Iraq comments were “quite disturbing.”

Bomb-lobbing spokesman Howard Wolfson, who a day earlier compared Obama to Clinton nemesis Ken Starr, contended Power’s remarks fit a troubling pattern: “Again we are seeing the difference between talk and action.”

Obama’s team charged Clinton’s aides were distorting what Power had said for political advantage.

Obama responded himself in Wyoming, blasting Clinton for hurling mud to divert attention from her vote backing the war.

“Sen. Clinton used this to try to imply that I wasn’t serious about bringing this war to an end….Don’t be confused,” Obama said.

“Sen. Clinton is not even willing to acknowledge that she voted for war,” he added. “So I don’t want to play politics on this issue because she doesn’t have standing to question my position on this issue.”

These new dustups come as Wyoming holds caucuses today with 15 delegates up for grabs. A Clinton source conceded Obama will likely win easily, padding his overall lead in delegates slightly.

A blogger on Oprah.com had this to say:

The AP and ABC are reporting that Barry is already fudging on bringing the troops home….

Obama says that he is “refining” his plan to bring the troops home. He will wait to see what he see on the ground and will consult with Military Commanders.

Wait a minute isn’t that what Clinton said???

He said that “I am going to do a thorough assessment…I’m sure I’ll have more information to refine my policy.”

Isn’t that what McCAin has been asking him to do???

Bingo!!!

But there is more to say about this politician who cynically deliberately misrepresented his position on a sacred policy issue that over 4,000 Americans died to implement.

He now says he will consult with military commanders.

Does he mean the ones in Iraq? The commanders he has not bothered to visit for going on 912 days now? Their opinions didn’t seem to matter very much when he was making all his earlier promises. Why should they now?

Does he mean General David Petraeus, the man who – as the architect of “the surge” strategy which Obama has repeatedly opposed – and who has used that strategy to accomplish the defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq?

If you watch this, you may have noticed that Obama doesn’t ever bother to ask Gen. Petraeus a single question. Rather, he spends 10 minutes lecturing and pontificating.

Barack Obama didn’t seem to give a damn about consulting with Gen. Petraeus then. To make it even worse, Barack Obama could have arranged to meet privately with the General – as John McCain and other members of Congress did – but this pandering, demagoguing hypocrite couldn’t be bothered to do so while he was deliberately and knowingly misrepresenting his position on Iraq.

A Huffingtonpost blogger named JanetE – after watching the videos of the Petraeus hearing – observed this pathetic fact about Obama’s disregard for the General:

Senator Clinton and John McCain chose to sit and listen intently to the hearings with General Patreus today. I guess Obama is too fidgety for that. He’ll waltz in later. This does not forbode well for what might be his presidency. What’s the problem? Is he too good for this? Clinton, no matter how tired she was, sat there and did her duty as a concerned, patriotic citizen and asked thoughtful, intelligent, informed questions of the general. So maybe Obama went out for a smoke, maybe listened to what Clinton and McCain had to say, and then figured out how, nice and well-rested, he could out-do them. This should be interesting.

Personally, I don’t think that the quintessentially arrogant Barack Obama will give the opinions of military commanders one iota more respect than he’s already demonstrated.

I am not an eager supporter of John McCain (rather, I am an avid opponent of Barack Obama), but this country desperately needs the wisdom, courage, and steadfastness that this war hero has displayed both in his life and in his policy on Iraq.

John McCain – practically as a lone voice – went against his own party and criticized his own president’s strategy and called for more troops at a time when the war in Iraq was not going well. His view was wildly unpopular with Democrats, with the media, and even with many in his own party. But John McCain bravely called for what his experience told him the country needed – even if it was harmful to his career. Hindsight demonstrates how right he was. The surge has worked. Iraq has now met 15 of the 18 political “benchmarks” even as the Iraqi military has now become tough enough to take on al Qaeda and other insurgents on its own.

Had we listened to Barack Obama – who has consistently opposed the surge, and who even voted to cut off troop funding – we would have slunk away from Iraq in failure, leaving the struggling and vulnerable country exposed to sinking into bloody civil war and becoming a haven for terrorists which would have undoubtedly threatened the United States yet again.

Instead, we listened to John McCain, and now we we have an Iraq that is reaching the point where it will be capable of standing up on its own two feet. Rather than a meaningless war that resulted in empty defeat, we are on the verge of having what few dared to dream of – a democratic republic in the heart of the Arab world, and a valuable future ally of the United States. At great cost, we have achieved something great, and forged an ally from a former implacable enemy.

RNC Chairman Robert M. Duncan recently released the following statement:

“Barack Obama opposed the surge when it was proposed, neglected to witness
it first-hand, and refuses to acknowledge the progress now. Obama once
demanded a ‘surge in honesty’ in the debate about the Iraq war. A ‘surge in
honesty’ would require Obama to acknowledge the courage and success of our
troops in Iraq. Despite Obama’s attempts to cut off funding and prematurely
withdraw our forces, the surge has successfully put the terrorists in Iraq on
the run, making the country a more stable and safe place. Of course, much work
remains, which is precisely why we must continue to build on the gains made by
our troops and the Iraqi government, and reject calls for premature withdrawal
from the ill-informed. Senators Obama and McCain each made an important
decision about how to proceed in Iraq, and Obama chose to strongly oppose the
surge. Shouldn’t Barack Obama admit it was weak judgment?”

We have a choice between two candidates: one has demonstrated courage, integrity, and leadership; the other has demonstrated cynicism, political posturing, and opportunism.

The choice should be clear.

Jeremiah Wright’s Stupid Views on Black and White Learning

I can pretty much stand by what I’ve said before: a Jeremiah Wright in context is nothing but an even more racist, more hateful, more anti-American Jeremiah Wright than a Jeremiah Wright out of context. Now – in living, glowing context – Jermemiah Wright is saying things that would make even a self-respecting fascist blush.

You have simply GOT to hear these words from Wright, spoken before a cheering crowd of 10,000 at the 53rd annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner sponsored by the NAACP on April 27.

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as being deficient. We established arbitrary norms and then determined that anybody not like us was abnormal. But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as being deficient. We just see them as different. Over the past 50 years, thanks to the scholarship of dozens of expert in many different disciplines, we have come to see just how skewed, prejudiced and dangerous our miseducation has been.

Miseducation. Miseducation incidentally is not a Jeremiah Wright term. It’s a word coined by Dr. Carter G. Woodson over 80 years ago. Sounds like he talked a hate speech, doesn’t it? Now, analyze that. Two brilliant scholars and two beautiful sisters, both of whom hail from Detroit in the fields of education and linguistics, Dr. Janice Hale right here at Wayne State University, founder of the Institute for the study of the African-American child. and Dr. Geneva Smitherman formerly of Wayne State University now at Michigan State University in Lansing. Hail in education and Smitherman in linguistics. Both demonstrated 40 years ago that different does not mean deficient. Somebody is going to miss that.

Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different. In fact, Dr. Janice Hale was the first writer whom I read who used that phrase. Different does not mean deficient. Different is not synonymous with deficient. It was in Dr. Hale’s first book, “Black Children their Roots, Culture and Learning Style.” Is Dr. Hale here tonight? We owe her a debt of gratitude. Dr. Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks.

And in so doing, we kept coming up with meaningless labels like EMH, educable mentally handicapped, TMH, trainable mentally handicapped, ADD, attention deficit disorder.

And we were coming up with more meaningless solutions like reading, writing and Ritalin. Dr. Hale’s research led her to stop comparing African-American children with European-American children and she started comparing the pedagogical methodologies of African-American children to African children and European-American children to European children. And bingo, she discovered that the two different worlds have two different ways of learning. European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America. Back in the early ’70s, when Dr. Hale did her research was based on left brained cognitive object oriented learning style. Let me help you with fifty cent words.

Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.

African and African-American children have a different way of learning.

They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn’t stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.

Reverend Wright believes that white children and black children learn differently. White children are left-brain object oriented; and black children are right-brain subject oriented. White children are “logical and analytical.” Black children are “creative and intuitive.”

Imagine if a white man had said that. Imagine, furthermore, if the pastor of John McCain’s church had presented such a pet theory to a national audience. There would be a firestorm of unimaginable proportions. As it is, not so much as a peep from the elite media. They are too busy hoping that they can either whitewash Wright’s views as “an acceptable form of culturally-black expression” or at least distance Barack Obama from any damage if plan A fails.

Jeremiah Wright says, “Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different.” The problem is that different actually very often DOES mean deficient. Pol Pot was different from the Dalai Llama. Adolf Hitler was different from Winston Churchill. Ice cream is different from colon cancer. Saying “different is not deficient” over and over again don’t make it so.

Do you see the can of worms Jeremiah Wright’s views open? should we now re-segregate our schools, so that black right-brain children can learn “their kind’s” way? The answer is ‘absolutely yes,’ according to Barack Obama’s mentor. And decades of hard-earned integration go right down the drain. Different classrooms come first. Different water fountains and bathrooms, of course, presumably come later. Do you see how completely radical these views are?

And, if there truly is a biological difference between black and white intelligence, as Wright claims, how does that not mean that one might very well be superior to the other? The record of history comparing the success of white European society to that of black African society now comes into play as a rather powerful prima facia argument that “logical and analytical” biologically trumps “creative and intuitive.” Racists have been making the very point that Wright embraces for generations. And from that understanding of difference, they argue to the deficiency: Prior to and during the Civil War, southern white elites professed to be taking care of blacks through the institution of slavery. “Blacks can’t think like whites. They are like monkey-children, and we have to use our superior white intellect to take care of them,” they claimed. We got the phrase, “That’s mighty white of you” from that sort of attitude. Jeremiah Wright himself now opens the door to a return to some of the darkest racial times this country – and the world – has ever seen.

You simply must understand that the kinds of “differences” Wright points to have been – and are to this very day – viewed very much as “deficiencies” by many others who have dreams about solving such “deficiencies.” Jeremiah Wright, who argues that he is “descriptive,” not “divisive,” is indeed extremely divisive – and this particular brand of divissiveness has led humanity down dark and terrifying pathways.

Genuine Christianity – unlike Wright’s racist brand – does not fixate on such “differences,” but instead fixates on the image of God that all humanity shares in common. It’s not about what separates us, but what we share in common.

“I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said rather famously. But let us instead follow the thought of Jeremiah Wright and separate those children on his perceived difference in learning ability?

Let me take you down that dark path, from the idea to the consequences:

Out of Darwinism comes social darwinism. If the former theory is true, the latter is a necessary corolary. And Darwin’s subtitle for The Origin of Species was “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” Darwin described the development of life-forms in terms of an ongoing struggle for existence. The result of this struggle would be a natural selection of those species and races who were to triumph over those weaker ones who would perish.

In his Descent of Man, Darwin wrote:

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

People have argued about Darwin’s racial views, but don’t think for a nanosecond that a vast array of intellectuals did not pick up on the clear implications of Darwinian thought – or that the consequences of that thought brought us horror on a scale that humanity had never dreamed of in its worst nightmares.

Francis Galton ackowledged that he was greatly influenced by Darwin’s Origin of Species. In his book Hereditary Genius he extended Darwin’s theory of natural selection into a concept of deliberate social intervention in his work, which he held to be the logical application of evolution to the human race. Galton was by no means satisfied to let evolution take its course freely. Having decided to improve the human race through selective breeding, brought about through social intervention, he developed a subject which he called “Eugenics”, the principle of which was that by encouraging better human stock to breed and discouraging the reproduction of less desirable stock, the whole race could be improved.

Darwin congratulated Galton on the publication of Hereditary Genius, telling his younger cousin in a letter that, “I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original.”

In his essay, Eugenics as a Factor in Religion, Galton laid out arguments that would one day lead to Nazi death camps. He left no doubt about the link between evolution and eugenics: “The creed of eugenics is founded upon the idea of evolution; not on a passive form of it, but on one that can to some extent direct its own course….”
http://www.coralridge.org/darwin/legacy.asp?ID=crm&ec=I1301
http://www.galton.org/books/memories/chapter-XXI.html

A quote from Tom DeRosa’s “From Darwin’s Theory to Hitler’s Holocaust” fills in the picture:

When Hitler came to power in 1933, he installed a dictatorship with one agenda: enactment of his radical Nazi racial philosophy built on Darwinian evolution. He sought, in Darwin’s terms, to preserve the “favoured” race in the struggle for survival. Brute strength and [superior white Aryan] intelligence would be the driving force of the Nazi plan.

The first task was to eliminate the weak and those with impure blood that would corrupt the race. These included the disabled, ill, Jews, and Gypsies. Second, the Nazis sought to expand Germany’s borders in order to achieve more living space, or “Lebensraum,” to make room for the expansion of the “favoured” race. Third, the Nazis set about to eliminate communism because of its threat to the Aryan race and because, according to Hitler, communism was the work of Bolshevik Jews.

The plan quickly unfolded. An order to sterilize some 400,000 Germans was issued within five months of Hitler’s rise to power. The order, set to take effect on January 1, 1934, listed nine categories of the unfit to be sterilized: feebleminded, schizophrenia, manic depression, Huntington’s chorea, epilepsy, hereditary body deformities, deafness, hereditary blindness, and alcoholism. The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 to prohibit marriage between Jews and Germans and to strip Jews of their German citizenship.

The Nazis established eugenic courts to ensure that the eugenic laws were enforced. To identify the unfit, German eugenicists compared the individual health files of millions of Germans with medical records from hospitals and the National Health Service. The American firm, IBM, aided the effort by automating a national card file system that cross-indexed the defective.

American eugenicists celebrated the German sterilization program. A leading U.S. eugenics publication, Eugenical News, published an admiring article on a German eugenics institute and extended “best wishes” to its director “for the success of his work in his new and favorable environment.” The New England Journal of Medicine editorialized in 1934 that “Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit.”

Eugenics in America was not a fringe movement. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark 1927 ruling that authorized the sterilization of a “feeble minded” Virginia woman. In his majority opinion for the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

DeRosa points out that “Today when evolutionists are questioned as to how Darwinian evolution gave birth to Hitler’s Nazism, they immediately want to beg the question, answering that racism has nothing to do with science. They are correct! Racism has nothing to do with science, but it has everything to do with evolution—a fact that is unavoidable.”

It might be worth mentioning at this point that Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in order to put her philosophy of eugenics to life. And blacks were near the top of her list of “deficients.”

Eugenics is back in the news today. Recently, a UCLA pro-life student group conducted a “sting” that exposed the fact that the organization created by racist-eugenicist Margaret Sanger may well be as racist as ever. An overwhelming number of “Family Planning clinics” are located in predominantly black neighborhoods, helping black women terminate half their pregnancies.

Pro-abortionists call it “exercising a woman’s right to choose.” Francis Galton called it “discouraging the reproduction of less desirable stock.” Should I again mention Jeremiah Wright’s mantra, “Different does not mean deficient” here? I argue that such views are morally deficient.

Black pastors are coming out in force to condemn the genocide of black babies in Planned Parenthood clinics. Unfortunately, Jeremiah Wright is not among their number; he supports abortion. I don’t know how he feels about the fact that half of all black babies are killed before they can see the faces of the mothers who don’t want them.

Now, I have no doubt that Jeremiah Wright would immediately disassociate himself from Nazis, from eugenics, from the genocide of black babies, and maybe even from Darwinism.

The problem is that there is a world of unintended consequences. Liberals once added a luxury tax on items such as yachts to collect more revenue. They were very quickly forced to suspend the tax because wealthy people quit buying yachts resulting in the layoff of thousands of workers. In this case, Wright wants to pursue an agenda of black racial separatism, but I am arguing that the consequences for blacks will be anything other than good.

The problem is that, for all of his intelligence, Jeremiah Wright is a moral idiot who does not understand that Adolf Hitler, Margaret Sanger, and every other racist social Darwinist would listen to the comments I’ve quoted from Jeremiah Wright and completely agree with them.

The problem is that ideas have consequences, and Jeremiah Wright has a head crammed full of vile ideas.

The problem is that the more the American people hear these vile ideas, the more they will legitimately question whether a man who sat under such teaching for twenty years is fit to be president.

In Defense of Life

There are many people who oppose the abortion industry, but they generally can’t do a very good job explaining why. The Republican Party is officially pro-life in its platform, but I’ve never heard a GOP candidate offer a good reason for being pro-life. But there are excellent reasons for being pro-life, and it is way past time that society heard them.

Democrats and “pro-choice” proponents offer “a woman’s right to choose” as the primary reason to support abortion. But let us think about that for a moment: should women have “a right to choose?” Sure they should, up to a certain point. But should that right extend to anything a woman might want to do? What if she wants to drive her car through a crowd of people? What if she wants to hijack an airplane and fly it into a skyscraper? Clearly, a woman doesn’t – and shouldn’t – have a right to do anything she chooses. The first question needs therefore needs to be, “the right to choose to do what?”

If you were busily working on peeling potatoes over the kitchen sink when your oldest child came in and said, “Is it okay if I kill this?” What would you do? Would you say, “Sure! Go ahead! Since I’m not certain of the ontological status of whatever you’re considering killing, I’ll leave the decision up to you!” Or would you turn around and look to make sure your little gremlin wasn’t talking about your youngest child? (Or maybe it wouldn’t matter, because you’d figure your firstborn was exercising that sacrosanct “right to choose“?). The ability to use rhetoric to cast metaphysical doubt on the meaning of “being human” does not mean that ignorance is bliss, and one can abort at will. The fact of the matter is, we haven’t even begun to understand the miraculous – and it truly is miraculous – process of a baby forming in mommy’s womb. The age of viability has decreased dramatically; medical experts have been repeatedly proven dead wrong again and again in determining brain function in comatose patients who later recovered after being declared ‘brain dead’; the Hippocratic Oath recited by doctors for centuries explicitly banned the performing of abortions; and so on, and so on. When in doubt, why not choose life?

And there really is no doubt, once we truly consider the issues. Ever hear the argument that fetuses aren’t human beings, so it’s okay to kill them? Think again. Both science and logic assure us that – from the moment of conception – that thing in the womb of a human mother is fully a human being. Take a moment and consider the taxonomic system by which every living thing is rigorously categorized and classified. By that system a human embryo is of the kingdom Anamalia, of the phylum Chordata, of the class Mammalia, of the order Primate, of the family Pongidae, of the genus Homo, and of the species Sapiens – same as any other human being. Put even more simply, that embryo is a human by virtue of its parents, and a being by the fact that it is a living thing: it is a human being.

And then there’s that whole “It’s a woman’s body” line. That one falls rather flat as well. The fact is that that from the moment of fertilization there is a separate, distinct, unique genetic individual in the mother’s womb; every cell in its little body is different from that of its mother. Half of children are male, for goodness sake! We are clearly not talking about a woman’s body; we are talking about her child’s body.

Then there’s the notion of a woman’s rights to her own body, which views the baby in her womb as a hostile invader forcing itself upon her. Why should she carry it to term if she doesn’t want to? Well, for one thing, because it’s her child. The so-called “violinist argument” is fatally flawed from the outset by casting a woman’s child in terms of an unwanted intruder whom the woman has no moral obligation to care for. Furthermore, we would never consider that rather despicable line of moral reasoning after a child is born – when it actually requires a far greater sacrifice and burden to care for (ask a new mother whether her child required more chasing around the house before or after birth). We go from the rather passive act of “being pregnant” to the extremely active act of caring for a newborn – and that burden proceeds to continue for years as the child grows up. Leave your five year old at home and go gamble in Las Vegas for a week and see what happens when you come back home if you don’t believe me. See how far that, “But I have a right to my own body” line takes you. It ought to take you all the way to jail for abandoning your child.

If this isn’t enough to dispel the “woman’s right to her own body” argument, then let us think about the way they are using the term “rights.” We must realize that in virtually every case one person’s right presupposes someone else’s duty. One person’s right to freedom of speech imposes the duty upon the remainder of society to tolerate what might be offensive to them for the greater good of a free society. In other cases, the duty imposed is far more selective: When liberals describe the duty of the rich to pay their fair share of taxes, they are imposing a duty on a small class of people. The wealthiest 5% of Americans already pay 57% of the taxes, and the wealthiest 10% pay 68% of the tab. The top 1% earn 19% of the income but pay 37% of the taxes; meanwhile the “poorest” 50% of Americans earn 13% of the income but pay only 3% of the taxes. This introduces a legitimate question for some future discussion: just how much more should the wealthy be expected to pay? [Don’t allow the issue of taxation to distract you from my argument: I merely raise taxation as an issue in which certain advocates subjectively claim that a few should have a duty to pay more, while the majority should have a right to pay less]. But in the case of abortion, the right given to the mother presupposes the most extreme duty upon one single individual – her child – the duty to die for the convenience of its mother. On the side of the “right of a woman to choose” are not only women who suddenly find themselves pregnant and their anxious parents, but hedonistic men and women who want to abdicate any responsibility for their “sexual expression,” along with a powerful media culture that aggressively pursues the same end, a powerful abortion industry and its lobby, the stem cell research lobby, unelected judges who impose their will on society, etcetera. Who is on the side of the right of the unborn to live? The Constitution – which guarantees the right to life as preeminent over all others – but other than that, far too few allies. One side has sole access to the megaphone; the other cannot speak. If we were to stop focusing on the Constitutionally-invisible “right to choose” and focus just for a moment on the DUTY OF PARENTS to nurture and care for their children, we would have a very different discussion indeed. I cannot help but remember the slogan of the Ministry of Health vans that Nazi Germany used to haul away retarded children, epileptics, children with malformed ears, chronic bed wetters, and the like to their deaths: Lebensunwertes Leben – “Life Unworthy of Life.” Today I still see cars bearing bumper stickers with the equally oxymoronic – but far more deadly – slogan, “Pro child, Pro choice.” What a shame that so many Americans have so blithely come to champion Nazi morality.

Then there’s that, “It’s only a potential human being” pseudo-argument. First of all, I’m not even sure what it means to be “a potential human being” – and neither do those who are reciting it. I do understand what it means to be “a human being with potential.” Let us begin this discussion with the straightforward observation that had your mother decided to have an abortion during her pregnancy with you, that you would not have been born. It would NOT have been some potential you that perished; it would have been you. You would have been one of the nearly 50,000,000 babies in America alone who were killed by abortion. Just as you were once a child, once a toddler, once an infant, you were also once a fetus, once an embryo, once a zygote. Killing you while you in any of those stages would have killed you just as dead.

And let us pause for a moment to consider what murder actually does to the victim. The character Clint Eastwood played in Unforgiven put it pretty well: “When you kill a man, you take away everything he has and everything he’s ever going to have.” A human baby will naturally inherit every quality of human life unless someone steps in and unnaturally ends that life. It is simply his or her nature as a human being to do so. You merely have to contemplate your own life to consider what would have been taken away from you had you been among the abortion statistics. This idea of “potential” as some ambiguous term that allows a mother to kill her baby is as ridiculous as it is amoral. If I were to walk up to you in a parking lot as you got out of your car and shoot you to death, what would I be guilty of? I certainly didn’t take away your past, as it has already happened. And if your future – when is clearly merely “potential” – doesn’t count, all I truly deprived you of is the two or three seconds of immediate conscious awareness. And I could have deprived you of at least that much had I merely asked you for the time instead of shooting you! For murder to be a serious crime, “potential” has to be a real, tangible thing that has intrinsic, incommensurable value. To attempt to argue that an unborn baby’s potential is somehow meaningless but a born person’s matters is both a fundamentally irrational and immoral distinction that leads inevitably to a degradation in the value of human life. Tyrants have routinely made the same type of “status of humanity determined by selective criterion” distinction when they said that Jews, or blacks, or any other class of people should not matter.

Deep down, I believe that even the Democrats and other abortion advocates realize the immorality of abortion in their choice of language. They demonstrate this by reciting the new mantra, “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” But why on earth should it be rare if it is a fundamental human right? How many other basic rights should be rare? Put “free speech,” “freedom of the press,” “the right to peaceably assemble,” or any other right that liberals hold as sacrosanct into this “____ should be safe, legal, and rare” equation and see how it flies. If abortion is a good thing, why on earth should it be rare? In point of fact, we should be encouraging more of it, not less.

During the Lincoln-Douglas presidential debates, when Douglas said that states ought to have a right to choose the institution of slavery, Lincoln famously said, “One cannot say that people have a right to do wrong.” Fortunately the country chose Lincoln’s moral reasoning over Douglas’. The Civil War was subsequently waged by a Confederacy which argued that their own rights were being systematically violated, even as they inhumanly violated the most fundamental rights of the blacks they oppressed. Apart from the fact that the party of Lincoln, the party of abolition, was the Republican Party and the party of Douglas, the party of institutionalized slavery, was the Democratic Party, I cannot help but see the parallels between the Party of Slavery and the Party of Abortion. For one thing, the Party of Abortion uses the identical arguments to justify its abominable institution that the Party of Slavery relied upon. For another, the Party of Abortion is just as insistent upon its “rights” as was the Party of Slavery, even as they systematically violate the rights of the most innocent and most helpless.

Toward Genuinely Overcoming Racism in America

I begin by pointing out that I am white (well, caucasian, anyway: my skin is actually a fair shade darker than ‘white’). To many, this fact alone disqualifies me from talking about racism. In fact, quite a few would say that my being white is sufficient to condemn me as being responsible for racism. I frankly have little to say to this group, because it is impossible to have rational debate with irrational people. But to those who are susceptible to reason, I would offer that my ancestors on both sides of my family tree fought in the Civil War on the side of ending slavery, and in fact even made the ultimate sacrifice for that cause. Why doesn’t this count? Why doesn’t it count that so many other [white] Americans’ ancestors similarly championed the right side of freedom and equality?

As is now well known, Barack Obama’s pastor – the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. – has been repeatedly quoted as having made despicable statements about “white America,” even going as far as pronouncing America with three Ks in a transparent effort to characterize the United States as the United States of the Klu Klux Klan.

Some – such as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich – have said that Jeremiah Wright’s statements shouldn’t be characterized as being particularly racist, given that just about any committed member of the left (regardless of skin color) basically agrees with the sentiment that America is a terrible place with a racist and immoral past. That doesn’t excuse Wright, and it certainly shouldn’t make Americans feel any better that an even larger number of Americans than we might think hate and despise their countries’ past. But the central problem with Wright’s view is not racism per se, but rather that if you hate and demonize America’s past, then in what meaningful sense can you say you love America? You’re essentially saying we need to overthrow histoic, traditional America and replace it with something entirely different. But how would that different thing still be America?

Wright has gone all the way back to our founding fathers and our most cherished traditions and applied the label “racist” to the whole lot. Remember, Barack and Michelle Obama’s pastor is the one who said, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!… [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.” When Wright gets through cutting away all of what he views as the racist and immoral parts of America, what would be left over? Is it any wonder that a man who so profoundly despised America and everything it has stood for would come to embrace liberation theology, which is Marxist (and fundamentally anti-American) to its very core?

The revelation of Wright’s views certainly helps us trace the origin of Michelle Obama’s views that she is proud of her country for the first time in her adult life, and that “America in 2008 is a mean place.” We now can understand that her attitude was substantially influenced by her pastor. Is it beyond the pale of reason that the same ideology that clearly seems to have influenced her thinking similarly might have influenced her husband’s? Barack Obama gave a beautiful speech yesterday, but he didn’t even attempt to answer why he chose to keep going to such a church, under such a pastor, for year after year after year.

In flat out disagreement with Jeremiah Wright, I would argue that from its very outset, America was founded by good people with great ideals. And also from its very outset, America has been a country that has had its share of not-so-good people who have frequently undermined and perverted many of those ideals. On the balance, the United States of America has been a beautiful face marred with some blemishes. So called “white America” needs to confront the blemishes; but so called “black America” surely needs to look at the face and begin to appreciate its beauty.

And I think – ultimately – that loving one’s country is rather like loving one’s spouse. It is only when you love despite the imperfections and blemishes, love in spite of past hurts and wrongs, that you truly love. It is easier for some to love the United States of America than it is for others; but I think that they who know her flaws and still love her passionately love her more deeply than the those who don’t.

But even as “white America” examines America’s blemishes, and asks itself why the nation founded on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution somehow managed to tolerate slavery for another century, and why the greatest and freest nation in the history of the world has continued to struggle with inequality to this very day, “black America” needs to examine itself as well. If we refuse to look critically into a mirror, it is as impossible to see our own imperfections as it is easy to notice the imperfections of everyone else. Let me now mention some blemishes that “black America” desperately needs to work to resolve.

It is fairly well known that black men are incarcerated at a significantly higher rate than whites, Asians, or Hispanics. It is also fairly well known that black apologists commonly cite “racial profiling” as the reason for such high rates of incarceration; it is not that young black men are either so unable to control themselves, or are so morally depraved that they have become predators, it is rather that the police are always looking for them and therefore finding them. It is an almost impossible argument for society to refute, because it amounts to proving a negative (i.e. Prove to us you didn’t do it).

But the incarceration rate of black men does not stand by itself. There are a lot of other facts to consider, which, when taken into account, actually do refute the “racial profiling” polemic. Recently, the Center for Disease Control released data pertaining to teenage girls having sexually transmitted diseases. This new study (April 2008) reveals that 50% of black teens have STDs, as opposed to only 20% of whites. Was this the result of some kind of “profiling”? Obviously not. Rather, a significant sample of whites, blacks, bispanics, and asians were tested, and the percentages emerged from the test results. Likewise, a 2005 study also finds that nearly 70% of black births are “out of wedlock,” as opposed to the still tragically high numbers of 25% of white births. Now, it is fair to ask: did black single girls and women become pregnant because they were “profiled”? Again, no.

We commonly see the diversity agenda in media and academia emerge in its shameless flogging of racial “disparities” in such areas as education, law enforcement, public health, business ownership and even mortgage interest rates. There’s almost always a clearly-stated assumption of “institutional bias” or racism against blacks. But what we don’t see is the numbers in these categories being balanced with the statistics relating to crime, out of wedlock births, and STDs. But when we look at the entire picture, a very different story emerges than the one we are commonly told.

Black children are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than are white
children–but not because they are “born black in America,” according to a new
study from The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis (CDA). Examining
data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth,
Heritage analysts determined that child poverty rates are driven primarily by
single-parent households and dependency on welfare benefits. When these and
other, less significant, factors are taken into account, the disparity between
black and white child poverty rates disappears. “Race alone does not directly
increase or decrease the probability that a child will be poor,” says Robert
Rector, Heritage’s senior research fellow in welfare and family issues and a
co-author of the report. The study notes that 68.8 percent of black American
children were born out of wedlock in 1999, compared to 26.7 percent of white
children. And black children were five times more likely to be dependent on Aid
for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the government’s largest welfare
program. Black children also live in poverty longer than whites-46.9 percent of
their time since birth vs. 26.7 percent for whites. Yet when black children and
white children are grouped by levels of single parenthood and welfare dependence
the poverty rates for both groups are nearly identical, Rector found. The
analysis also found that nearly half (44.5 percent) of all children born to
never-married mothers depend on AFDC, compared to a fifth (20.4 percent) of
those born out of wedlock, whose mothers later married. Only a tenth (10.7
percent) of the children born to married couples who subsequently divorce end up
relying on AFDC, as do a mere 2.5 percent of those whose parents’ marriages
remain intact. The press release can be read below, and the entire paper,
“Understanding Differences in Black and White Child Poverty Rates,” is available
online at http://www.heritage.org/library/cda/cda01-04.html.
Cited in a posting from Smart Marriages Listserv on May 29, 2001. (source: http://www.divorcereform.org/pov.htm).

So what we see is a crystal-clear connection between family status and poverty. The institution of marriage, and the presence of a father in the house, is the ultimate determiner of poverty, not race. And I find it more than passing interesting that “Black children are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than are white children,” given that more than twice as many out of wedlock births occur in the black community than in the white community, and that more than twice as many black teenage girls have STDs than white teenage girls. Do you see how the former would be expected to result from the latter?

Every time an individual or a societal or government institution makes mention of facts such as these, they are immediately set upon as racist. I vividly remember Bill Cosby making some of these observations and being labeled an “Uncle Tom.” And I similarly remember hearing Rev. Jeremiah Wright shout out the names of “Clarence, Colin, and Condoleezza!” to defame Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman and Secretary of State Colin Powell, and current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as white collaborators. I believe that no one has served “black America” more terribly than the perversion of the civil rights movement and the current leadership of that community. The day when a man would be judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character has been replaced with a shrill demand for race quotas. And there has been a refusal to examine the real issues that have had the most severe impact on the black community, and one vicious attack after another on anyone – regardless of skin color – who has attempted to address the issue squarely and legitimately. There can be no improvement when one refuses to look at the actual problem.

The ugliest blemish on the beautiful face of America was the institution of slavery. One of the most terrible outcomes that occurred as a result of slavery – at least according to some sociologists and cultural anthropologists – was the conception of something called the “vicious cycle.” As a matter of simple history, the American institution of slavery routinely resulted in the breaking up of black families. Fathers and mothers were separated from their children by being sold to new owners individually rather than as families. And black men and women were bred like animals to produce more slaves. The vicious cycle theory holds – accurately, I believe – that several generations of this practice created a dynamic that has been incredibly difficult to overcome. And had this dynamic been perpetuated against ANY racial group, the vicious cycle would be born out in that group for generations to follow.

what I’m trying to say here is that one does not need to “blame the victim” to recognize the obvious increasing breakdown of the black family in America. Rather, Americans black and white can come together and acknowledge that a despicable institution – slavery – created a long-term disaster that has yet to heal. And Americans – black and white – need to be allowed to come together and focus on the healing of the black family. If whites continue to be labeled as “racist” every time they try to come to the table and express their views, there will be no coming together.

The problem is – as I see it – that the moment we begin to focus on “family values,” liberals tend to become extremely fidgety. They do not want the focus to be on practices such as guilt-free sexual expression, the diminishing of the role of the father, rampant divorce on demand, teenage pregnancy, and out-of-wedlock births, because they have championed all of these things for the past 40 years. Rather, they want to focus on discrimination, race quotas, glass ceilings, and the like. But the figures I’ve provided clearly demonstrate that the former dwarfs the latter as the real cause of racial inequality. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted blacks to be judged by the content of their character, but nothing shapes and strengthens the content of one’s character more than a solid family structure!

Does it seem completely unreasonable to claim that if a baby is born to a poor, uneducated single mother on welfare, that that child will grow up twice as likely to be poor? Does it seem completely unreasonable to claim that such a child is far more likely to turn to drugs, gangs, and crime than a child born into a married family with a father? Why can’t we try to resolve these problems?

In 19th century England there were slums that shocked the senses. Filthiness, criminality, prostitution, drunkenness, sloth, and every other imaginable vice had come to completely characterize entire sections of cities. William Booth – the man who founded the Salvation Army – came into these places and preached not only salvation, but individual responsibility. He told the inhabitants of these slums that no one would help them because no one even viewed them as human in their current condition, but that if they began to clean up their streets and start to take control of their own lives, that others would see their efforts and begin to provide the economic assistance that they needed. And history proves that William Booth was exactly right. It wasn’t that the wealthier class didn’t want to help people in the slums; rather it was that they had never seen these people begin to act responsibly and demonstrate that assistance would change anything. But when residents of the slums began to clean up their streets, willing help came from all directions. This ought to stand as a template for any social movement.

Similarly, it isn’t that whites don’t want to put racism behind them, help blacks, or recognize that it is in their legitimate interest to do everything they can to reach out to fellow Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr. was successful because he led his people to stand up for themselves in a positive manner and begin to take individual responsibility. He literally shamed whites who had held blacks as being somehow inferior into changing their attitudes. Over in India Ghandi accomplished a similar success. Clearly, it can be done. It is only a matter of choosing the right approach and framing the discussion in a way that does not begin by attempting to frame any subsequent discussion in terms of bitterness and blame. But that is exactly what has been done, over and over again.

What is racism? I would define it simply as holding negative views about a person or group of people on account of race. And it can’t be a despicable thing when whites hold racist views against blacks, but permissible when blacks hold racist views against whites. And any justification for such a double standard – such as the frankly self-serving notion that black racism isn’t racism because blacks aren’t the group in power – will do nothing but create bitterness and anger and continue the division. It’s not that whites don’t want white people who make despicable comments to be held accountable; it’s that they expect blacks to hold themselves to the same standard that they demand whites adhere to. If “black America” really wants “white America” to overcome its incipient racism, then they must work toward doing the same. It’s as simple as that.

Does anyone seriously doubt for a moment that, were it discovered that Senator John McCain had attended a racist white church for twenty years, that Democrats en masse would be screaming for his resignation, much less the end to his presidential campaign? And Senator Barack Obama in the past couple years called for Senator Trent Lott’s resignation for his comments honoring 100 year old retiring Senator Strom Thurmond, just as he called for Don Imus’ firing over his line against the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Bad as their words were, can anyone say that they descended to a lower level than blaming white America for a genocidal campaign to murder blacks with the AIDS virus? Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have made numerous racially charged comments against whites and Jews in their pasts, but they to be allowed to serve as the judge and jury of selective black outrage. Frankly, anyone who believes that continuing the politics of the dual-standard will lead to racial healing is a fool.

“White America” and “black America” need to arrive at a consensus on how to – in the words of our founders – “form a more perfect union.” And I would recommend we begin by focusing on issues in which both sides can come to common agreement. If “black America” demands that conservative whites either support a socialist-liberal redistributionist program or be labeled as racist, then nothing will happen except the continuation of the historic division and bitterness. Conservatives don’t believe in welfare as a general principle; they don’t want white people to live on welfare either. But if “black America” decides to truly begin to come to grips with the problem of the broken family structure in America, then “white America” – and particularly religious whites – will rally to their cause in huge numbers. Religious whites yearn to see a healthy black family structure; for that matter, they yearn to see a return to a healthy white family structure.

All sides in the racial divide need to understand that we are all in this nation – and the dilemmas we face as a nation – together. That “Why don’t you just go back to Africa!” line is pointless and hurtful; no one is going anywhere. We are all Americans. And Americans of every skin pigmentation need to come together in common cause and work – and do I mean WORK – to resolve and overcome differences and begin to make progress toward a better and stronger United States of America by focusing on common causes and common agreement.

Any naysaying aside, I do have a right to express my voice in the discussion toward racial harmony in America. My ancestors secured that right for me with their sacrifice and their blood.