The trouble with bad manners, Bill Buckley used to say, is
that they sometimes lead to murder.
This is true in more than a metaphorical sense. Murder, in addition to being a
crime, also is a serious breach in morals and manners.
Frothing over with Democratic bumper sticker propaganda,
Democratic State Representative Matt Lesser, addressing Republican Party
opposition to what has been called “a pay equity bill” let loose on
Republicans. Opposition to the bill, Mr. Lesser said, is “rooted in two
things: ‘We’ve always done it,’ and bigotry.” Unfortunately for Mr. Lesser,
Republican leader in the House Themis Klarides was within ear shot.
Within two days, Republicans managed to put together the
poster shown above. And to make matters perfectly clear, Ms. Klarides said, “As
a woman who values equal pay for equal work as much as anyone in the
legislature, and who has witnessed pay inequality, I am deeply offended by his
remarks. Unfortunately, given his track record, I can’t say I am surprised.’’
Mr. Lesser’s track record includes a remark he made in 2011 “during a debate on a transgender discrimination bill: ‘Tonight’s
debate on adding gender identity and expression to the state’s non-discrimination
laws is being hijacked by ugly fear-mongering.’”
Apparently, disagreeing with Democrats on so called “social
issues” opens the GOP to a stream of contumacious remarks designed mostly as
cultural gags in the mouth of the opposition. The operative principle of
Democrats concerning matters of public dispute appears to be: If you cannot win
the argument through licit means, raise your voice or defame your opponent.
Republicans courageous enough to disagree with Democrats on social issues are
either bigots or fear-mongers. If you label someone effectively, said that old
mudslinger V.I. Lenin, you no longer have to argue with him.
Mr. Lesser is not alone. In 2015, CTMirror tells us,
Ms. Klarides stopped business in the House for five hours and led “her caucus
on a walkout to protest Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s criticism of GOP members for
opposing his plan to stop racially disparate drug sentencing. Republicans said
Malloy called them racist.”
One wonders what sweaty partisan lexicographer hit upon the happy phrase -- "racially disparate drug sentencing?" Actually, Republicans were opposing a Malloy proposal to
repeal “stiffer penalties for drug possession within 1,500 feet of a school or
day care.” Noting that the penalties exposed “most urban drug defendants to
enhanced sentences,” since “sixty-four percent of those charged with drug
possession in school zones are minorities,” Mr. Malloy charged “To treat those
folks differently because they live in those communities is patently unfair
and, if not racist in intent, is racist in its outcome.”
Here Malloy was deploying the racist gun against Republicans.
Those Republicans who wanted additional penalties to be visited upon drug
dealers selling or buying near schools or day care centers – however sound
their reasons – were racists, if not by intent, at least unwittingly; but, in any case, they were racists still. Republicans
could not have been motivated by a concern for young children, mostly
minorities, who might be especially open to the blandishments of those selling
drugs.
Well now, what percentage of minority children would
benefit from a measure that would increase penalties for those who deal drugs
near schools and day care centers? Likely – MORE than sixty-four percent,
according to data presented in the Sheff v. O’Neill court case. Many schools in
Hartford are out of compliance with a court order that requires an equity
“balance” of 25% whites to 75% African Americans. Most Republicans would favor a
system of school financing in which dollars would follow children to whatever
school their parents or parent wishes them to attend; far from being racist,
this colorblind apportionment of tax money very well could result in an
improved education for minorities now locked into a segregated system that for
years has provided urban African Americans with inferior educations -- which is, if not racism in intent, racism in outcome.
It is anti-historical to impute racism to the Grand Old
Party of Abe Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas. When Democrats sought to tear apart
the union to preserve slavery – certainly a racist act in intent and outcome –
it was opposed by the party of Lincoln, the first Republican President, who
prosecuted a bloody Civil War to strike the chains from slavery’s feet.
It was the Democratic Party, following the Civil, War that
sought to maintain the essence of slavery through Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs organized by the Klu-Klux-Klan, the militant arm of the Democratic Party in the south.
The Republican Party armed African Americans. Once armed and in full possession
of their Second Amendment rights, African American men fended off the lynch
mobs. It is Ida B. Wells -- a much neglected African American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist and feminist -- who reminds us of the part played by Republicans, the 2nd
Amendment and the Winchester rifle, made in New Haven, Connecticut, in restoring honor and dignity to fearless
African American men. Run out of lynch-prone states by racists, the Republican
investigative journalist attained a foothold in Washington DC and New York
newspapers, where she inveighed tirelessly against the lynching of courageous
African American freedom fighters: “The lesson this teaches and which every
Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a
place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection
which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor
knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American
victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the
Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more
he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”
Given the racist history of the Democrat Party, it is a
combination of poor manners, historical myopia and foolhardy political bravado
for Malloy to intimate that modern day Republicans are racist – either by
intent or as favoring outcomes in which African Americans in cities remain
prisoners of a soci-political structure that insults their intellects and forces
them to cringe and beg for educational and economic crumbs given to them by
Democrats.
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