Civil Rights

The civil rights movement was born out of an intense struggle to enjoy those basic human rights we associate with happiness.

Early leaders of the movement settled on the theory that American society was primarily characterized by racism and that American institutions were grounded in the maintenance of racial privilege. Many of the black politicians who swept into office on the heels of the movement consciously embodied this organizing principle.

The national press has reported an interesting ethical conundrum concerning the 800-member, 126-year-old Atlanta law firm of King & Spaulding, and its Supreme Court advocate Paul Clement, over the firm’s dropping a prestigious and lucrative client — the House of Representatives, no less.

The House hired Clement, a former solicitor general, to defend the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denies federal rights to same-sex marriage partners. After human-rights groups criticized the firm for its role in defending the federal anti-gay marriage law, the firm dropped its client. Clement left the firm, stating that law firms should not desert clients who are unpopular. “Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do,” he instructed. But not always.

Several interesting issues are raised by this incident.

Liberals have their racist supporters, e.g., certain union members. Many liberals will advise that their Ivy League black friends should not have gone to Wall Street to make a fortune and participate in the American Dream. They strongly feel that they should go back to the ghetto and help their people.

They do not tell that to the WASP, Jew, Pole, Italian, etc., only the blacks. That is truly racist and condescending.

It is especially racist when black and white liberals tell black conservatives that they are betraying their people because they want smaller government and individual freedom. Remember, government perpetuated slavery and racism in this country for nearly 200 years. Why should we trust it to keep it from returning as government policy? (Arguably, well-intentioned affirmative action programs perpetuate racism.) Having said that, a movement with racist supporters does not mean that the movement is racist.

Over the weekend, I joined throngs of tourists to take in the Cherry Blossom trees along the Tidal Basin. Because of the unseasonably cold temperatures this year, visitors were bundled up in jackets and scarves, even hats and mittens. I was acutely aware of the extra layers of clothing because there is perhaps no better time to view today’s provocative “tweener trends” than tourist season in D.C. Come July, there is no shortage of young girls riding the Metro in too-short shorts, midriff-bearing tops and high-gloss lipstick.

Unless you’ve been living on the moon for the past decade, it’s hard to miss the fact that young girls today seem to be wearing less and flaunting more. (And companies like Abercrombie & Fitch, which recently released the “push-up triangle” bikini top for girls as young as age 7, certainly encourage these styles.) But given the ages of these girls, it’s hard not to ask: Who’s buying them this clothing?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the authority to declare war, so I want to know: Who authorized the war on American women currently being waged in Republican-controlled legislatures around the country? Aided by some Democrats at the federal and state levels, extreme measures cloaked in lofty rhetoric about fiscal discipline and civil rights are being proposed and passed that undermine our status as equal Americans and take away our access to legal health procedures.
 
In Georgia, as a way to make sure women don’t “game the system” a measure would require a woman to prove that she had a miscarriage; and in his budget, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker bans insurance coverage for prescription birth control.
 
In South Dakota, a measure would redefine murder as “justifiable homicide” if the relative of a woman who’d decided to have an abortion kills the person who performed that procedure. There’s also a new law requiring a woman to wait three days after meeting with her doctor, and undergo a consultation at a "pregnancy help center" — to speak with counselors who oppose abortion.

The conservative assault on the freedom of American women continues today in South Dakota, where the State Legislature is expected to vote on a bill that would essentially redefine what constitutes “justifiable homicide” to include the doctor or healthcare provider who performs the legal procedure of abortion if the assailant is related to the woman who receives the abortion.
 
The measure was introduced by state Rep. Phil Jensen, who tried to backtrack from his barbaric proposal yesterday after a story in Mother Jones started to gain national attention. Jensen’s explanation was that the bill has nothing to do with abortion but rather seeks to make self-defense laws “consistent” by saying that not only can a woman use force to protect her unborn child if necessary, so can her relatives if they also use force or kill someone to protect the unborn child. The clarification doesn’t change the fact that the measure still says despite the fact that a woman may decide to have an abortion, a relative of hers — father, mother, son, daughter or husband — can decide to kill the person who performs that procedure and claim it was a “justifiable” murder.

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, but looking through human history, we see examples of groups of people not treating other groups equally. As Americans, we act like “it only happens here,” for better or worse, and hear people all over the world berating America’s sordid, racially divided past. But guess what— most countries are much, much worse. Australia’s discrimination against Aborigines, France’s and Germany’s treatment of Muslim immigrants, Africans’ wholesale slaughter of fellow Africans from other tribes, China’s oppression of its non-Han minorities, Japan’s underlying prejudice against all gaijin, and so on and so forth.

Racism is a funny thing, even though few find the humor in it. Publicly, everyone rebukes its, yet privately most unwittingly endorse it while thinking, "I'm not a racist."

A friend of mine from the Midwest told me how he was talking to an acquaintance from Southern California. "I can't believe how the Midwest and South treat African-Americans. It's a disgrace." The enlightened Californian followed that with, "All these damn wetbacks are ruining America." Of course, the man didn't think what he said was racist because in his mind racism is only between blacks and whites; plus, he was simply "stating the truth" about Hispanics. Read more...

The TSA’s groin groping and full-porn scanning, championed by Obama’s lackluster Cheney, Joe Biden, enters the realm of dominance, intimidation and sexual threat and knowledge that goes to the core of total government control: totalitarianism. It is the sickly sister to torture; torture without the physical pain but with the humiliation and psychological disturbance and depersonalization and total dominance that is the essence of torture. It is the work of a government lost and disoriented like that in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony: a government sensing in a panic that its time in history is passing and it has lost control.

The purpose of torture in war, is total psychological dominance. When the Bush administration instigated this egregious policy during the invasion of Iraq, Americans, and Congress in particular, barely raised a peep. We had become a nation of zombies. The Bush administration understood that we Americans, and Congress in particular, had failed the test of citizenship and they would be allowed a free hand over there and over here. America had no courage to stop them.

It was because of these actions by Bush and Cheney that state sovereignty solutions first began to arise in New Hampshire and Vermont. A USA Today/Gallup Poll finds just about as many Americans want Tea Party-backed members of Congress to take the lead in setting policy during the next year as choose President Obama. The Tea Party will now bring an antidote to the zombie jamboree that is two-party politics under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.

 

Sexism really is still with us. On a recent episode of PBS’s “To the Contrary,” where I contributed as a guest, the discussion turned to the fact that women still lag behind men in achieving the highest leadership positions in politics and business. And some people think the statistics point to a problem with women themselves.

“Women need to learn to be much stronger” if they are ever going to reach “parity” with men, argued one commentator. Indeed, this activist complained that women are complacent, that “the real barrier now is not so much the external barrier, but the internal barriers that women have.”