I'm with Atrios; cut the crap. Kim Severson is way too kind to "Southern gentility". She admits that a lot of it is about reinforcing gender and racial hierarchies, but there's still a whiff of trying to bamboozle the Yankees by exoticizing our quaint Southern ways in this article. Particularly since "chivalry" was the defense in the nakedly racist incident that inspired her article:
One August night, two men walked into a popular restaurant attached to [Atlanta's] fanciest shopping mall. They sat at the bar, ordered drinks and pondered the menu. Two women stood behind them.
A bartender asked if they would mind offering their seats to the ladies. Yes, they would mind. Very much.
Guess the races of the men and the women in this story. With your guess in mind, consider this:
Angry words came next, then a federal court date and a claim for more than $3 million in damages.
The men, a former professional basketball player and a lawyer, also happen to be black. The women are white. The men’s lawyers argued that the Tavern at Phipps used a policy wrapped in chivalry as a cloak for discriminatory racial practices.
After a week’s worth of testimony in September, a judge decided in favor of the bar.
"Chivalry" was the reason. What Severson neglects to mention is that "chivalry" has always been used as an excuse for racial discrimination and worse, lynching in the South. Segregation was justified in no small part as a way to protect precious white women from supposedly unchivalrous black men. She just goes straight into this:
At least, it used to be. The Tavern at Phipps case, and a growing portfolio of examples of personal and political behavior that belies a traditional code of gentility, have scholars of Southern culture and Southerners themselves wondering if civility in the South is dead, or at least wounded.
This is where the B.S. is at its thickest. Texas has the same kind of chivalrous codes as the rest of the South, even if we don't put up the front of gentility. I have never had a strange man offer me a seat at a bar on the grounds of being female. It's simply not expected. Just like in the North, someone might give up a seat to someone whose shoes look uncomfortable, but it's not gendered, per se. Certainly you would never expect a bartender to demand it. There is a chivalrous ritual of giving up seats in crowded bars, but men generally only offer to women they know. So, if a stranger is standing near you, you wouldn't igve up your seat. But if a strange woman is introduced to a man, he will often immediately offer up his seat. Of course, what's not discussed about chivalry is that it's often about a man showing off how generous he is than a woman being coddled. (Not always; a lot of men are just generically gracious, and you can often tell the difference because they don't object if women offer generosity in return, or they don't get ruffled if women politely decline.) If you actually take him up on the offer, he gains a little power over you because men who show even minor generosity are supposed to be fawned over, and you're supposed to be a little more lax in setting boundaries with him. Which is why it's pointless to offer your seat to a woman you haven't been introduced to her. Men who make these offers to strange women are generally assumed to be angling for an introduction, which of course will be made with you in social debt to him, so you pretty much have to give him some flirtage time, lest you be deemed a bitch. Chivalry is not to women's benefit in the South.
Anyway, it's all bullshit. I've never heard of a man being expected to give up a seat to a woman he doesn't know, and that it was so racialized suggests that this was no coincidence. The same act can have different meanings in different situations. A man offering his seat to a stranger is generally going to be read as "hitting on her", unless there's an extenuating circumstance such as a huge age disparity or she's obviously not well. A man being told to give his seat up is being demeaned, and having his manhood questioned. Elaborate social codes are there to be endlessly manipulated in this way, to give plausible deniability to abusive or power-mongering behavior. I'm a big fan instead of having a "do unto others" philosophy of etiquette.
That said, I am hypocritcally grateful for the linguistic passive agressiveness that I bathed in my whole life living in Texas. The practice of cutting someone down while pretending to say something nice about them teaches one the finer aspects of the creative use of insulting language. I suspect that's a reason that so many fine wits come out of Texas, where there's a bizarro but intoxicating mix of Western bluntness and Southern gentility. You learn how to simultaneously call someone an asshole if the need be, but also to bless someone's heart if that's going to cut closer to the bone.
While Matt Drudge cranks out a constant flow of propaganda to convince his easily-bewildered audience that there's some kind of black-on-white race war going on, CNN is reporting an actual hate crime in Mississippi. Warning: while the video isn't gory or anything, they do run surveillance footage of the murder.
The reporter in the video twice says that this crime is something out of Mississippi's past, but the grim truth is that while crimes like this are far less common than they used to be, this is still a reflection of Mississippi's present. Deryl Dedmon is the 18-year-old charged with running over James Craig Anderson and ending his life, and the reason this looks like it's going to be an open-and-shut case is Dedmon felt so much social support for his racist views that he spent the hours before and after the murder bragging about it. This doesn't surprise me. Growing up in Texas, my experience was white people saying horribly racist shit usually went unchallenged, and Mississippi is even worse on this front than Texas. Take, for instance, this story about how a Charleston, Mississippi high school had racially segregated proms until 2008. And simply integrating proms doesn't exactly stop the problems, as evidenced by a girl in Kentucky who sued because she wasn't allowed to deck herself in the Confederate flag for her prom. (A Google search for this story shows widespread support for this young woman's cause from conservative bloggers, and makes me wonder where they stand on the issue of designing prom dresses around swastikas.) By the way, her story shows how empty the "Southern heritage" excuse for the Confederate flag nonsense is; she said that's her reason for wanting to go to prom dressed in a Confederate flag, but really, since when is your prom dress chosen to reflect your "heritage"? Most girls choose theirs with an eye towards displaying other assets.
The youth of the perpetrators is a reminder of how racism and hatred perpetuate themselves, and why conservatives make such a big stink over "parental rights" to impose complete control over their children, to make sure they instill their "values". Thus the enthusiasm for home schooling and rewriting textbooks to reflect conservative propaganda instead of historical fact. The result of all that hard work of insulating kids from other points of view and making sure they grow up in a thick of conservative "values" is that these kinds of racist views get planted and grow without any outside interference to challenge them. In that kind of environment, hate crimes are basicaly inevitable, since hate crimes tend to be perpetuated by people who believe they have the support of the community for their racist views.
I opened up Michael Lind's article at Salon titled "The Tea Party and white Southern extremism" with a sigh. I'm sure it will be astute, I told myself, but at the end of the day it doesn't seem to matter. No matter how many writers and historians point out that the Tea Party is just the same old race-baited Bible-thumping white Southern fools that have been a pain in the ass of this country since its inception, the mainstream media won't listen, instead characterizing them as some bold new political force.
Makes you wonder if they all think Old Spice smells better now that it has better advertising.
But I tell you now, drop what you're doing and read this piece. In fact, bookmark it. Because while our mainstream media may have short memories that make them impervious to history*, they have a somewhat harder time trying to wiggle out of cold, hard statistical facts. And Lind has really marshalled the evidence to show that this "Tea Party" is basically the same old angry Southern right wing nuts who were so pissed about desegregation that they switched to the Republican Party (after begruding Republicans their votes for 100 years to punish them for the Emancipation Proclamation), and who have spent most of the post-Civil War period nurturing a culture where fundamentalist Christianity is wed to a general hostility towards the nation as a whole, which they disguise as "patriotism", though the cracks often show with their tendency to fly the U.S. flag next to the Confederate flag. In other words, the Tea Party Caucus in Congress, far from being some sparkly new nationwide phenomenon, is the same group of Dixiecrats that would rather burn this country to the ground rather than see it move into a more modern, progressive era.
But even these numbers understate how much the Tea Party is just a new name for the same old bullshit. After all, there has been a Southern diaspora, which is why you see Confederate flags and Bible-thumping Baptists popping up frequently in rural areas of the Midwest and the Northwest. As Lind recounts, many of the people classified as non-Southern hail, unsurprisingly, from districts that are heavy on the descendents of this diaspora.
Many of the other states with Tea Party representatives are border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. One is Maryland, a state with Confederate sympathies during the Civil War, which, because the Census Bureau defines it as "Northeastern," is responsible for the only Northeastern member of the Tea Party caucus, Roscoe Bartlett. The four Californian representatives come from the Orange County area or inland California, both regions whose political culture was shaped by Southern political culture, in the form of the "Okie" diaspora that settled there during the Depression.
I can hear the pissing and moaning and tantrum-throwing of conservatives thus exposed by these statistics, which will center heavily around "Nuh-uh!", as in, "How dare you suggest that just because Southern whites have disproportionately tried to fuck up everything great about this country, all because of their racial resentments and backasswards views on gender, that this could still be going on?"
To which I say, as always, dudes, I'm from Texas. Trying to pass off Southern white culture as more tolerant and less superstitious than it is might work on people who haven't spent a lot of time around the very people we're talking about---thus the baffling refusal to get it in the mainstream media---but it doesn't fly with me. I have a lot of years under my belt of trying to get through conversaations with your average Southern Joes without some offensive shit coming out of their mouths, and I can attest to what a Herculean task that really is. And while part of my reason for living in Austin was to minimize that kind of thing, it's not like we had a law banning assholes from living inside the city limits, as demonstrated by this picture I took during the 2008 elections of a house in my neighborhood.
Needless to say, I'm not fooled by lip-smacking denials about what it's actually like.
I think perhaps the problem was there wasn't a catchy name for this voting bloc before, and so now we're stuck with "Tea Party", even though, as Lind pointed out, the Tea Party caucus presence from the states that conducted the American Revolution is basically nil.
*Seriously, I saw the usually astute Eugene Robinson on MSNBC scoffing at the idea that Republicans might be looking for an angle to impeach Obama. His argument seemed to be, "Nah, why would we think Republicans would be extremist enough to concoct a bullshit reason to impeach a Democratic President simply because they can't stand the idea of him in office?" I suppose it has been a whole 13 years, and so it may as well have not happened. There's some kind of "Logan's Run" system going on with the memories of the Beltway media, except the lifespan of a memory we're allowed to acknowledge isn't 30 years, but somewhere closer to 3.
My co-blogger at my pad, South Carolina native Alvin McEwen, took on this one at the Blend, and I couldn’t resist sharing this bit of unbelievable business here. Well, maybe considering the state of the GOP, maybe they enjoy this kind of party, less as nostalgia, but more about what defines “change” to them. I wonder if Michael Steele was invited to this little event. (FITS News):
The National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW) held its annual fall Board of Directors meeting in Charleston, S.C. last weekend – a decision the organization is likely regretting after several controversial pictures from one of the meeting’s sponsored events began surfacing on the internet.
One of the pictures shows S.C. Senate President Glenn McConnell - who FITS readers will recall enjoys dressing up as a Confederate General – posing in his Rebel garb with a pair of African-Americans dressed in, um, “antebellum” attire.
The event in question – dubbed “The Southern Experience” – was held last Friday evening at the Country Club of Charleston. Hosted by the South Carolina Federation of Republican Women, it was included on the national conference’s official itinerary.
While visiting Kate’s folks down in Alabama this past weekend, I discussed all sorts of things, including the state of education there, but this novel method of teaching geometry definitely never came up. (Birmingham News):
A Jefferson County teacher picked the wrong example when he used assassinating President Bar ack Obama as a way to teach angles to his geome try students. Someone alerted authorities and the Corner High School math teacher was questioned by the Secret Service, but was not taken into custody or charged with any crime.
...The teacher was apparently teaching his geometry students about parallel lines and angles, officials said. He used the example of where to stand and aim if shooting Obama. “He was talking about angles and said, ‘If you’re in this building, you would need to take this angle to shoot the president,’ ” said Joseph Brown, a senior in the geometry class.
Efforts to reach the teacher for comment Monday were unsuccessful.Superintendent Phil Hammonds said the teacher remains at work, and there are no plans for termination. “We are going to have a long conversation with him about what’s appropriate,” Hammonds said. “It was extremely poor judgment on his part, and a poor choice of words.”
Wait. This wasn’t about a poor choice of words. It was a flipping LESSON PLAN. He didn’t just say this off the cuff. A few comments at the site for you:
And what exactly does that mean? I grew up in Alabama and in no way does what this teacher said even seem remotely OK…..
We are not all “good ole boys” just because we grew up in the great state of Alabama. Inappropriate comment? Alert us.
There’s nothing wrong with being a “good ole boy”
The “good ole boys” that I know would have given this teacher a light smack across the head for being an idiot.
Its hard to get good help these days. The person should have been fired on the spot. What does this tell you about the people teaching your children.
Some teachers believe it is okay to use their podiums/classrooms to indoctrinate students to their way of thinking. We went through this with both of our children in both high school and college. Who do these people think they are? This teacher should first off, at the very least, be suspended and then should be instructed to keep his focus on teaching his subject and not injecting his personal political views onto his students; that is NOT what he is being paid to do.
Right, he’s paid to teach about abortion, sex education, evolution, environmentalism, and all the rest of the state religion.
This guy is a math teacher…..he should be teaching math….not commenting on government issues. Ever wonder why our kids math and science scores are so low in this state? Maybe it’s because the math teachers secretly covet the social studies job….
Some teachers believe it is okay to use their podiums/classrooms to indoctrinate students to their way of thinking. We went through this with both of our children in both high school and college. Who do these people think they are? This teacher should first off, at the very least, be suspended and then should be instructed to keep his focus on teaching his subject and not injecting his personal political views onto his students; that is NOT what he is being paid to do. Inappropriate comment? Alert us.
And it was ok to have a class sing a song and praise the prez, I remember the chorus line Barack Hussien Obama,,,,mmmm,,,,,mmm,,,,,mmm This was a form of a teacher using their poduim to indoctrinate students was it not??????? Don’t us doulbe standards
No, it was not okay. I am actually not an Obama supporter and the indoctrination I was referring to concerning my children was of the left-wing variety. I don’t believe public school teachers should be indoctrinating their students with their political views AT ALL.
And you wonder why our education system is so jacked up. This is just plain dumb.
And I’m sure some of the kids have heard this kind of talk at home. What has this State become?
Ben Smith at Politico remarked at the entertaining campaign ads airing in Alabama.
Alabama Republicans have, for reasons that I don’t understand but which I hope a reader will explain, produced a raft of strange and memorable television ads this cycle.
Well, Ben, after 4 days here in Birmingham, I’ve had the chance to view what seems like 100 commercials. Seriously, sometimes during commercial breaks there were 4 or more ads in a row. Almost all of them were yahoo pols fighting each other in one race or another to be the most “Christian” and English-speaking, no matter what office they were running for. This in a state with severe problems educating its children. I lost count of the Tim “This is Alabama. We speak English” James ads (I saw a lot of signs for Tim; I was tempted to bring one back for entertainment’s sake).
However, seeing a Roy Moore commercial was beyond belief. I can’t believe…no, I just shake my head as Moore recruits some black singers to pimp Mr. Ten Commandments. It’s shameless.
Tim James…the classic:
This may take the cake, though. The “True Republican PAC” ran this ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Bradley Byrne, chastising him for believing in evolution:
Byrne’s retort is hysterical:
“As a Christian and as a public servant, I have never wavered in my belief that this world and everything in it is a masterpiece created by the hands of God. As a member of the Alabama Board of Education, the record clearly shows that I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school textbooks. Those who attack me have distorted, twisted and misrepresented my comments and are spewing utter lies to the people of this state.”
Young Boozer (yes, that’s his name), is running for state treasurer. He actualy sounds reasonable, he’s running as a fiscal conservative. He’s one of the few willing to leave the man upstairs out of the campaign. Boozer is running against George Wallace, Jr.
As we’ve been told over and over by some clueless talking heads in the MSM after the election of Barack Obama, we’ve entered post-racial America. I don’t know what paradise they are living in or what heavy drugs they are taking, but I’ve not seen evidence that electing a black man to the presidency has eliminated racism at every other level of society.
As an example, on the one hand, NASCAR has a broader audience than just the stereotypical “Stars and Bars Redneck” crowd many imagine it has.
When NASCAR was born on the sands of Daytona Beach, Fla., 61 years ago, its fan base likely wasn’t much different from its racing heroes. A sport spawned by moonshine running starred undereducated white males from the South who subsisted on modest incomes.
...With TV ratings and attendance in a three-year dip after steady growth for more than a decade, NASCAR has refocused on catering to a constituency that seems vastly different from the redneck stereotype associated with stock-car racing. There are physics professors who apply mathematics to explain the sport’s wrecks and rule-breaking, and multi-degreed mountain climbers mesmerized by its plot twists and rivalries.
However, no how many more women and people outside of the South become part of the NASCAR audience, it’s pretty clear that its base is, um, not comfortable with the growing diversity of its fans.
“Sure, there are upper-middle-income fans, but mostly they came from modest backgrounds,” [racing consultant H.A. “Humpy”] Wheeler says. “They are very conservative, flag waving and, yes, they drink beer.
“You have to be so careful with what you do. Getting away from banjos in an effort to change the so-called image, they turned a lot of people away. They got away from the roots, and the roots don’t change very fast.”
Demographic analysis found that while blacks represent only 8.6% of NASCAR’s audience, it’s a 12% spurt since 2005. Apparently that fact has caused consternation among some of the blue collar bigots that now have to sit in close proximity to more of “those people.”
In the case of one high-class fan at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway on April 26, he stated his opinion on the matter, and a fan there captured this free speech moment and sent the photo to me…
Given there are a lot of black folks living in Alabama, if this guy got drunk and made a wrong turn into the wrong neighborhood while trying to get home, he may have had a tad of a problem.
How about doing a “caption this” to the pic of this POS, or someone doing some fun P’shopping of this image?
One could argue that since the beginning of the 2008 election cycle, as Obama’s political fortunes rose, there seemed to be a startling increase in open expressions of racism based on the irrational fear of a black takeover of America, with black masses hell-bent on punishing whitey for institutionalized and cultural racism past and present. About the only thing that surpasses that irrationality is the fear of the Brown Menace crossing the border and reclaiming the Southwest as part of Mexico.
I would love to hear from the post-racial crowd, now that we’ve seen the developments in Arizona, for instance, and whether they think we’re in a new age of racial understanding.
I understand the concept of commemorating the history of the Confederacy; many men died fighting for their beliefs and cultural system of the South. However, you cannot separate the fact that slavery played an integral role in the Confederacy. Gov. Bob McDonnell did.
People for the American Way responded:
Virginia Governor Celebrates the Confederacy, Forgets Slavery
Virginia governor Bob McDonnell issued a proclamation last week declaring April to be Confederate History Month. Virginia’s last two governors, Democrats Tim Kaine and Mark Warner declined to issue a similar proclamation. Republican Jim Gilmore, who served from 1998-2002, was the last Virginia governor to set aside a month to celebrate Confederate History. But McDonnell’s proclamation was noticeably missing one feature that Gilmore’s proclamations all had—a mention of slavery.
Asked why he omitted a mention of slavery from his proclamation, McDonnell said, “There were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”
People For the American Way President Michael B. Keegan issued the following statement:
“Governor McDonnell’s choice to celebrate Confederate History while omitting any mention of slavery is an egregious rewriting of history. Declaring that slavery wasn’t ‘significant’ enough to merit inclusion in his statement is an insult to the Virginians whose past was shaped by the most abhorrent policies of the Confederacy. Issuing a declaration honoring the confederacy is disturbing enough; failing to acknowledge slavery while doing it is inexcusable.
“Governor McDonnell has repeatedly shown himself to be far more radical than his Republican predecessors, and much more extreme than the moderate image he projected of himself during his campaign. This new attempt to ignore the worst parts of Virginia’s complicated past is irresponsible and dangerous. By appeasing his supporters in the radical Right, he has turned his back on his duty to serve all Virginians. We cannot allow our elected officials to practice this kind of dangerous revisionism.”
You know, speaking of the past, when blacks enjoyed the hospitality of the fruits of the Confederacy— shackled, whipped, raped, etc., we can proudly say that Virginia’s risen from the ashes of the War Between the States. Think of it: someone like Bob McDonnell could seek and receive the endorsement of—and have his hand out for election cash from one Sheila Johnson, billionaire co-founder of Black Entertainment Television and president of the WNBA’s Washington Mystics). God Bless America, Gov. McDonnell.
***
UPDATE: It appears that Sheila Johnson got her comeuppance for forking over dough to this bigot. Now she’s released a statement condemning his decision to reinstate Confederate History Month:
“I must condemn Governor McDonnell’s Proclamation honoring ‘Confederate History Month,’ and its insensitive disregard of Virginia’s complicated and painful history, the remnants of which many Virginians still wrestle with today.
“The complete omission of slavery from an official government document, which purports to be a call for Virginians to ‘understand’ and ’study’ their history, is both academically flawed and personally offensive. If Virginians are to celebrate their ’shared history,’ as this proclamation suggests, then the whole truth of this history must be recognized and not evaded.”
My, my—is it too late to do an “I told you so” to Ms. Moneybags? The humiliation is deserved, because she not only gave buxxx, she did commercials for the guy and stumped for the bigot. In this video, she starts out with “we need someone who can communicate,” then proceeds to mock challenger Deeds’ stutter. Holy crap.
Here’s her endorsement of Bob McDonnell. Sheila, watch and weep about how much money he extracted from your fat wallet then went home whistling “Dixie.”
Hat tip, PFAW’s Josh Glasstetter., who has some reactions from the right wing below the fold.
I think it’s safe to say that if you’re LGBT, the vast majority of people in Fulton, Mississippi think you’re lower than dirt. For young Itawamba Agricultural High School student Constance McMillen, who merely wanted to take her same-sex date to the school prom, it has been a lesson in just how damn evil some of her neighbors are.
McMillen tells The Advocate that a parent-organized prom happened behind her back — she and her date were sent to a Friday night event at a country club in Fulton, Miss., that attracted only five other students. Her school principal and teachers served as chaperones, but clearly there wasn’t much to keep an eye on.
“They had two proms and I was only invited to one of them,” McMillen says. “The one that I went to had seven people there, and everyone went to the other one I wasn’t invited to.”
Last week McMillen asked one of the students organizing the prom for details about the event, and was directed to the country club. “It hurts my feelings,” McMillen says.
Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. “They had the time of their lives,” McMillen says. “That’s the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn’t have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom].”
In a community that invoked the bible and Christian beliefs in condemning Constance, these homophobes clearly chucked the sacred tome when it comes to loving thy neighbor, hospitality, and general decency without a second thought. To think that Fulton not only displayed rank homophobia, it raised the bar of evil by sending learning-disabled students to the fake prom, clearly labeling them “others.” I challenge any of these “Christians” in Fulton to cite where in the bible Jesus teaches that the physically or mentally challenged deserve to be outcasts.
This social hellhole isn’t even worthy of a boycott, since no gay person or ally would want to drive through this evil place to begin with. For Constance, one can only hope for a scholarship to get the hell out of there to attend college in an environment where she can thrive. Leave the evil behind, gain strength, knowledge and, should you want to challenge the hate, return to reclaim your space with others ready to fight homophobia in the darkest of places.
Fulton, Mississippi has earned its stripes as the cruelest town in America, by treating one of its young residents as a pariah for no good reason that the God they claim to worship can imagine. I do hope there is no adultery or fornication going on in Fulton. The bible had a lot to say about that.
UPDATE: More evil in Fulton, from Firedoglake’s Lisa Derrick @ LaFiga; the proud homophobic students grin at how they pulled off their straights-only prom with photos posted on public FB and Flickr pages.
I can see some of the same dresses in these pictures posted by different students.
“Efforts to lift the ban were blocked by a 1993 Congressional amendment introduced by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina. Those who fought the law say Mr. Helms, who died in 2008, perpetuated decades of discrimination. But just as the ban has disappeared, the curators of Mr. Helms’s legacy are trying to touch up the relevant history. Some want him seen as a savior to those with AIDS and a defender of gay rights. Despite Mr. Helms’s storied opposition to ‘a homosexual lifestyle,’ the Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C., is challenging the idea that he was a “homophobe” or obstructive in the AIDS fight.
According to the center’s Web site, ‘It was Senator Helms who worked most tirelessly to protect the very principles of freedom that homosexuals are denied in many other nations.’ John Dodd, president of the Jesse Helms Center Foundation, recently disputed an editorial in the British newspaper The Guardian that vilified Mr. Helms for his role in the ban. Mr. Dodd argued that ‘two million Africans were alive’ because of the senator’s work fighting H.I.V.”
W.T.F. are they smoking? Helms fought needle exchanges and other programs to curb the spread of the disease; all of his homophobic bigotry was raised just last year when Elizabeth Dole tried to have an AIDS relief bill named after the deceased former senator.
Helms didn’t soften his stance about fighting AIDS at home among people who acquired the infection through homosexual activity.
“I don’t have any idea on changing my views on that kind of activity, which is the primary cause of the doubling and redoubling of AIDS cases in the United States,” Helms said.
He also famously opposed Roberta Achtenberg’s nomination to be assistant secretary for fair housing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, saying:
“she’s a damn lesbian. I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that. If you want to call me a bigot, fine.”
That hardly sounds like a gay rights champion.
***
I would watch good old Jesse back in the day when he was a commentator on WRAL in Raleigh. I remember as a child listening to him rail on race on our black and white TV. I wondered why this man was so hateful. You didn’t have to be an adult to get the clear message that he didn’t like black folks encroaching on his lily-white world. They belonged in their place.
And those nasty homos…Jesse had no use for them, except when he hired “good fags” to run racist campaigns like Arthur Finkelstein, who worked with Jesse Helms on his Senate run against Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990. That was the campaign with the infamous “white hands commercial” by political consultant Alex Castellanos showing a close up pair of a flannel-shirtsleeved white hands crumpling a termination notice, with an ominous voiceover explaining that a well-deserved job went to someone else because of affirmative action. This appealed to the blue collar, textile working folks in the rural areas, and Helms won handily.
State Senator Jim Forrester (R-Gaston), is filled with hate for the LGBT residents of North Carolina. This legislator has, for the last six years as the first order of business, filed a marriage amendment (that has failed to reach a vote each time). He is also in favor of preventing gay and lesbian couples from adopting.
In his latest bigot eruption, Forrester adds overt racism to his dance card, blaming the states increasingly progressive tilt to blacks that dare to vote, as well as the Homosexual Lobby in the state capital of Raleigh.
“The (state) Senate is as liberal as I’ve ever seen it,” Forrester said at the monthly meeting of the Iredell County Young Republicans on Tuesday night in Mooresville.
“Slick city lawyers and homosexual lobbies and African American lobbies are running Raleigh,” Forrester added.
...So it may be viewed with some irony that Forrester said the GOP would likely have taken back control of at least one chamber of the General Assembly in 2008 had it not been for what he called the “Obama Tsunami.”
“It brought a lot of blacks out who don’t normally vote,” he said.
The 10-term Republican (who is running
unopposed
this year) then tossed barbs at outgoing State Senator Julia Boseman.
He said state Sen. Julia Boseman — the first openly gay person ever elected to the North Carolina General Assembly — “took a bunch of money from a big lesbian group.” Forrester said a male senator is rumored to be gay and is currently fighting off charges that he shot another man.
“And I say good riddance to them,” Forrester said. He said that neither of the two legislators showed any support for bills Forrester proposed to ban same-sex marriage in the state.
Forrester noted that he “is not against homosexuals.” He said he has gay patients who see him in his medical practice “and I treat them like everyone else.”
Any self-respecting, sane gay or lesbian in his district should not give Forrester one damn dime to his medical practice.
The local chapter of P-FLAG, led by Amy Sifford and Robert Kellogg, contacted Forrester to invite him to a face-to-face meeting to discuss his comments. Kellogg also approached the Gaston NAACP to see if it would participate in a joint meeting with Forrester (that chapter president, Clyde Walker, has requested the state leaders’ advice on how to respond to the legislator).
Forrester said Friday he would decline the invitation from the Gaston County chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays because he believes he’d be criticized for his conservative policies, particularly his stance against same-sex marriage.
“I doubt I will go to the meeting, but I appreciate the invitation anyhow,” Forrester said. “I don’t think it would be a constructive meeting. I think it would just increase animosity toward me, and I don’t want that.”
Gee, I wonder why?
PFLAG’s invitation was e-mailed to the senator on Friday, Kellogg said. Forrester said he would read it with interest, but said a meeting with the group would be unlikely.
“They don’t like my philosophy of traditional family values,” he said. “I don’t believe what they believe and they don’t believe what I believe, and they’re entitled to do that in this free country of ours.”
The Blend was contacted by Robert Kellogg, asking us to publicize this effort to start a dialogue on diversity with Forrester:
I would appreciate any help you could give in attempting to convince our state Senator to respond to the calls of his constituents and explaining the meaning of his words.
The fact is that if Dr. Forrester is a responsible physician who treats gay constituents, why is Sen. Forrester trying to legislate against any and all civil rights for his patients? At the very least he should meet and not dismiss them—as a lawmaker.
It was clear that the Commonwealth of Virginia was going to take a turn for the worse politically when openly wingnut and ant-gay Bob McDonnell pulled the wool over enough voter eyes to slide into the governor’s chair. It gave fringe wingnuts and Dominionists like lawmaker Bob Marshall free rein to spew scripture-laden insanity as public policy.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Monday assailed a series of recent moves in Virginia under new Gov. Bob McDonnell, citing the rising influence of the Christian right in exacerbating “discrimination” against gays and women.
Maddow was dumbstruck by state legislator Bob Marshall (R-Manassas), who declared Monday that children born with disabilities are God’s “vengeance” for abortion, quoting scripture to make his case.
“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” Marshall said, according to the Capital News Service
A speechless Maddow noted that Marshall stood by his remarks when contacted by her producers. “This is the argument he’s using as an elected official to…cut off any state support for Planned Parenthood,” she said.
McDonnell, by the way, apparently tried to rein in the bad PR that he brought upon himself by assuming everyone is a demented “Christian” as himself. So out came the “clarification.”
A story by Capital News Service regarding my remarks at a recent press conference opposing taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood conveyed the impression that I believe disabled children are a punishment for prior abortions. No one who knows me or my record would imagine that I believe or intended to communicate such an offensive notion[.] I regret any misimpression my poorly chosen words may have created[.]
As Right Wing Watch points out, this man has a history of attempts to roll back beyond-offensive statements he’s made, but there’s no misimpression when you go to the videotape…
Marshall is entitled to his offensive views, but he should not run from them.
He said this about abortion in the case of rape: “[T]he woman becomes a sin-bearer of the crime, because the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman.”
And he said this about contraception: “[W]e have no business passing this garbage out and making these co-eds chemical Love Canals for these frat house playboys in Virginia.”
Is there anyone in the 5th district of NC willing and able to run and unseat this horrible embarrassment of a Congresswoman? I’m sorry there just are not any kind words to bestow against the vile, homobigoted politician, who claimed on the floor of the House that Matthew Shepard’s gruesome death was a hate crime hoax, and battled with Michelle Bachmann to put her hands all over GWB at a SOTU?
Now, true to form, even as she complains about the current President’s “lecturing” of her party, she’s got her priorities in line—she brags that she nabbed his autograph.
Flame-throwing conservative Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) was not a big fan of President Barack Obama’s appearance before the House Republican caucus retreat on Friday.
The North Carolina Republican categorized it as “another lecture” from Obama. She suggested that “independent fact checkers” were needed to confirm the veracity of “his comments.” She insisted, against some countervailing evidence, that her Republican colleagues “asked great questions.”
But she also seemed delighted by the fact that she got the president’s autograph. Foxx tweeted that she secured Obama’s signature and a White House official confirmed her account.
***
Speaking of wingnuts, in Hawaii, the RNC is meeting to figure out how to improve its image with voters (good luck with that), and have mostly been cranky with one another over how to distinguish itself from the Dems. You may have heard about the extremist wing’s “Purity Test” proposal by Indiana’s James Bopp which would mandate that required a GOP candidate had to support 10 specific positions in order to receive backing and funding from the party.
(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;
(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run health care;
(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;
(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;
(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;
(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;
(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;
(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and
(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership
The new rule will not prevent support for moderate Republican candidates but will bar funding for those judged to be too far to the left, Crocker said.
“No more Scozzafavas, please. No more Specters, please. No more Chafees, please,” Crocker said, referring to Dede Scozzafava, a GOP candidate for a U.S. House seat in New York whom conservatives opposed; U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, who switched his party registration from Republican to Democrat last year, and former U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, a liberal Republican.
Crocker urged the party to “present candidates who will be attractive” to the people who, like those in the Tea Party movement, “are really dissatisfied with our political conduct over the past several years.
I know some politicians are dim bulbs, but it may be possible that this is one of most ignorant and refreshingly politically transparent remarks I’ve heard in a long, long time. The Palmetto State’s Lt. Governor, Andre Bauer (who is running for governor), on how to handle the poverty problem. Please protect your keyboards.
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed,” Bauer said, according to the Greenville News. “You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”
...“Andre Bauer’s crude utterances once again reveal his immaturity and poor judgment,” responded SC Democratic Party Chair Carol Fowler. “Bauer is a bachelor who has never once had to worry about feeding a child of his own. His notion of punishing children by not feeding them because their parents missed a PTA meeting flies in the face of basic South Carolina values.”
Bauer made the remarks during a town hall meeting Friday in Fountain Inn. Bauer did not immediately return a call Saturday from The Associated Press.
My, my…it’s not surprising the calls aren’t being returned. I’m sure after this makes its way around The Internets, including Twitter and Facebook, it will be hard not to respond, Andre.
Bill James isn’t through making headlines; he clearly has difficulty coping with his fellow Mecklenburg County Commissioners voting to extend domestic partner benefits to county employees—and that includes same-sex couples.
He not only didn’t apologize to Democrat Commissioner Vilma Leake when her referred to her late son, who succumbed to AIDS, he’s spewing more homophobic bullsh*t. The latest:
Homosexual conduct is illegal in NC (even after Lawrence V Texas). We arrest 250 homosexuals each year in Mecklenburg alone for either a ‘crime against nature’ or ‘solicitation of a crime against nature’. Unlike prostitution (exchanging money), even suggesting homosexual sex is a criminal offense in NC. If we were all that ‘progressive’ would we be arresting 250 homosexuals a year? Setting up sting operations to de-infest areas where they congregate? Point is, if you want to delude yourself that homosexual conduct is ‘ok’ go ahead. The law, the police and the DA however have a different view.” — Mecklenburg Commissioner Bill James
BTW, he’s right about the Crimes Against Nature law here. It’s still on the books and while Lawrence v. Texas supercedes it, the police can still make an arrest, put someone in the pokey and basically shame the hell out of them publicly until the case is tossed out. Oh, and he elaborated to Matt Comer of Q-Notes about “de-infest”:
James responded: “I think that if you’re someone who is homosexual and you believe that you are born that way and have every right to engage in that behavior, I think the offensive thing, I would surmise, is not the word ‘infest’ or ‘de-infest’ but the fact that the police are actually doing the sting operations. We can parse words — what phrase should I have used? But the central question for most people is not what particular term got used but whether the action was occurring. Was I accurate in saying there are these sting operations going on and those sting operations — whatever term you want to use — target homosexual men? That is why the county took and spent significant amounts of money to rework the park to take out certain landscaping things to prevent, once the sting operations cleared them out, prevent them from re-congregating — or re-infesting if you use my original term.”
You can also politely let Commission Chair Jennifer Roberts know that language in a reprimand cannot be harsh enough,as LGBT youth groups in Charlotte are outraged by James’s bigotry, given he’s a public servant. She’s been a wonderful ally for years; I interviewed her back in 2005 when James was last in significant eruption mode. But what’s more important is to thank the Commission for doing the right thing and supporting the County’s gay and lesbian employees and their committed relationships.
Oh, and in another spin on his non-apology to Leake, take a look at this:
[H]is comments weren’t meant to be derogatory and that “homo” was a slang word he used when growing up. “People can believe whatever they want, they can believe in the tooth fairy and legend of Atlantis,” James said. “I don’t determine what I do based on what people think. I determine it based on what I did and what I did was I asked a question and that question doesn’t deserve or require an apology.
I'm with Atrios; cut the crap. Kim Severson is way too kind to "Southern gentility". She admits that a lot of it is about reinforcing gender and racial hierarchies, but there's still a whiff of trying to bamboozle the Yankees by exoticizing our quaint Southern ways in this article. Particularly since "chivalry" was the defense in the nakedly racist incident that inspired her article:
I understand the concept of commemorating the history of the Confederacy; many men died fighting for their beliefs and cultural system of the South. However, you cannot separate the fact that slavery played an integral role in the Confederacy. Gov. Bob McDonnell did. 
You know, speaking of the past, when blacks enjoyed the hospitality of the fruits of the Confederacy— shackled, whipped, raped, etc., we can proudly say that Virginia’s risen from the ashes of the War Between the States. Think of it: someone like Bob McDonnell 
I think it’s safe to say that if you’re LGBT, the vast majority of people in 
these pics from two different FB pages. Hmmmm….guess there was a prom after all. Constance and seven others were not invited.
Is there anyone in the 5th district of NC willing and able to run and 
