How far does a Democracy have to go to accommodate minorities? *UPDATED*
Bookworm on Feb 05 2010 at 12:36 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
This is not a post in which I opine. Instead, I’m seeking your opinions about a question that’s been bedeviling me for some time. What made it pop into my mind is a mass of statistics that Randall Hoven assembled regarding the percentage of gays in the American population. As always with Hoven’s data, there’s a lot, so check out the post, but I just want to focus on this bit:
Various estimates of percentage of US population that is gay:
Average guess by polled Americans: 21% of men, 22% of women
Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male: 10%
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force: 3% to 8%
The Family Research Report: 2% to 3% of men, 2% of women
The 2000 US Census Bureau: less than 1%
You can’t be a sentient being in the U.S. today to know that gay activists are asking to change to significant American institutions: marriage and the military. When it comes to marraige, they want an ancient, often religiously-based, institution that has always involved men and women (even in polygamy, there’s a man involved), to be changed into a civil institution that involves two people proclaiming their love. As for the military, which a traditionally manly venue that has nevertheless had homosexual overtones (the Romans), huge racist problems (a refusal to integrate until Harry Truman), and a slow and difficult time integrating women to work right alongside men (sex, sex and more sex, plus pregnancy), the gays now want it to be so that gays and lesbians can serve openly. We already know that they are serving, and that the vast majority do so with pride, competency and patriotism — they just can’t talk about their love lifes or desires.
You also can’t be a sentient being with knowing that, in America and in other places, Muslims, who are a minority of the population, are making demands on the majority culture. You probably remember when the Somali Muslims in St. Paul protested against driving passengers who were carrying (not drinking, just carrying) alcohol. Clerks in stores, both in America and England, have protested at having to ring up sealed packages of pork based products. Various PC schools have created prayer rooms and special bathrooms for the ritual washing required for Islam. Some swimming pools (the ones I can think of are in Europe, but you may know of some closer to home), have special “women only” hours to accommodate Muslim women, who cannot share a pool with men.
I know you can think of other examples in which a statistically small group within a democracy has asked for changes, ranging from the picayune to the significant, in the way in which the majority handles itself. I use the gays and the Muslims as an example just because they’re easy examples, not because they’re the only ones. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, a lot of the tension between majority rights in America and significantly small minorities involved Seventh-day Adventists (UPDATE: and, an even better example, Jehovah’s Witnesses)– just a reminder that the issue isn’t always about sexuality, race, or a hostile religion. (The Mormon fights with the American government in the 1860s are worth remembering too, as is the fact that the Mormons officially gave up polygamy in order to come within the American fold.)
My question for you is how far you think a democratic majority, especially one with constitutional civil rights protection, has to go to ensure that it’s minorities’ needs are protected. I’ll tell you right off that I think that, sometimes, people in a minority class simply make the decision to step out of the mainstream. Again, finding an example is easy for me: for the most part, the ultra-Orthodox Jews just live their own lives, and to hell with the larger society. They don’t make demands on America; they just ask to be left alone to live as they wish. And they’re willing to accept that they won’t benefit from all America has to offer. The Amish are another example. All they ask is to be left alone.
Other groups, however, want to be left alone, but they also want to impose their values or traditions on America.
Help me out with this one. I’m really struggling to figure out what constitutes ensuring that all citizens have full rights, versus making demands that are not reasonable. I’ve got inchoate ideas about a strong center that every culture needs to maintain (that’s the melting pot), with the culture unable to sustain too much fragmentation in the face of too many disparate demands, but I’m not going anywhere with these thoughts.
Comment away my friends. I know I can trust you to keep all comments civil and intellectual, and not to devolve into denigrating any particular group.
UPDATE: Let me throw a few more things into the mix:
How do you define what’s a civil right, to which people are Constitutionally entitled, versus what’s a societally normative standard or behavior? Gays argue that marriage is a civil right. People opposed to gay marriage argue that marriage between a man and a woman is a civil right. Gays argue that being denied the right to serve in the U.S. military is a denial of a civil right. People opposed to this viewpoint say service is not a civil right, and the military can do what it takes to function effectively. Gays shoot back that, in the 1940s and before, the military argued that refusing blacks the right to serve alongside whites [corrected for error implying blacks couldn't serve at all] was a sure sign of an effectively functioning military.
What constitutes being left alone? I can’t stand the smell of cigarette smoke. While I am opposed to government using its punitive powers to prevent people from smoking in private places (homes or businesses), my personal desires are well met by banning smoking in private places. The smell bugs me, so I want the smokers, not me to suffer. Who has the right of it here? The smoker, who is deprived of the right to smoke; or me, who wants to be protected from having smoke inflicted on me?
Should some things be tied to citizenship? I dislike multilingual ballots, because I feel that a prerequisite for participating in our nations political discourse is being sufficiently immersed in the country to speak the language. Others say that the only thing that matters is being informed and that someone who can read a Chinese or Spanish language newspaper shouldn’t be forced to learn a new language in order to vote.
DQ told me that in a town in Pennsylvania, at great expense, they’re changing all the intersections so that the corners protrude into the street more. The theory is that there are a lot of elderly people there, that elderly people cross the street slowly, and that it’s better to have the corners closer together so that elderly people don’t spend as much time on the roadway. Drivers are incensed, since it bolluxes up traffic and requires more bobbing and weaving. Whose rights should prevail? The frail elderly or the drivers? How should a democracy decide those things?
I think I already told you about what happened in my neighborhood. Because we have a lot of children on the street, we we wanted a four way stop at a busy intersection. The town told us it could only afford to make it a two way stop, which seemed stupid to us. After all, how much can it cost to install two more stop signs? It turns out that the expense was that, if a town makes any changes to an intersection, it is required by law to put wheelchair ramps on every single corner. I like wheelchair ramps. When I was pushing baby strollers, they were very helpful. In our case, though, within 10 feet of each of the four new wheel chair ramps is at least one large driveway. Also, the two stop signs prove to be meaningless in terms of protecting our children. Forty thousands town dollars — for nothing. Were handicapped rights advanced here?
Incidentally, in each case in which the government gets involved, it costs the tax payers money, whether affirmatively spent cash (longer, multilingual ballots; useless wheelchair ramps) or the cost of policing (and just how do you police whether someone is smoking in his own apartment, unless you also turn us into an East German-like nation of squealers?).
UPDATE II: Sometimes stories just drop in your lap. How’s this one about a school trying to limit traditional feminized cheerleading moves to girls, while being taking to task by a guy who falls into multiple minority categories: gay, multiracial and mentally disabled.
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I guess I would say that minorities are entitled to be left alone, and to enjoy the freedoms in the constitution. Demands that the society as a whole change because 1% of it is uncomfortable with something can and should be ignored. Were I the owner of one of those stores where clerks refused to ring up pork, I’d fire them.
Since democracy automatically turns into an oligarchy, catering to 1% of any population wouldn’t be such a big deal.
The way you run a nation composed of warring tribes and ethnicities is the same way alpha leaders run an army.
Basically, there’s some common interests tying everybody together, whether it be external enemies like terrorism, internal enemies, jobs, food, water, shelter, etc.
Alpha leaders use the trust they have built up across human social lines to ensure that people get what they NEED, and not what they want.
Thus there’s no reason to hear people’s complaints about what they want. All that is needed is to get their trust in the alpha leader and the alpha leader will make these decisions.
People think that if you just do whatever it is people demand, that you are somehow gaining their respect or trust. That’s not so. The reason why people give the power they have to the alpha leaders is because they trust in the alpha leader not to screw them over. And this means also that the alpha leader won’t exploit one part of the group to benefit the other, because along that highway is ruin. Eventually your faction will be the one served up for the ritual sacrifice sooner or later.
People don’t know what the hell they want and no amount of protests or idiotic fabricated ideology will change that fact.
People with conflicting impulses or interests have to be reigned in by the alpha leader because it is the alpha leader’s responsibility to maintain common cause in the face of adversity and turmoil. Nobody else has the ability or trust of the group, but then that’s why they aren’t the alphas, just followers.
The United States of America experimented with things in a drastic fashion. Instead of setting up one alpha leader and 99% serfs or beta followers, the USA posited the belief that every single individual can become an alpha and be responsible for leading not only their own group, but in counsel with others. Obviously that experiment has been wobbling for awhile now. But even still, this partial success has resulted in the most powerful nation in the history of the human fing species. And that’s due to a partial success. Try to imagine what a full success would look like.
Alphas normally are the best negotiators and not necessarily the best fighters. Whenever the group has a conflict of interest, they go and seek out the alpha in order to get a resolution. The damage of modern US laws is that it takes the responsibility and power away from local groups and gives it to corrupt judges, the lawyer’s guild of Democrat taxation looters, and various Dem funded special interests. What that would end up doing was kind of obvious to begin with.
This is no magic trick solution, however. Regardless of what an alpha’s intentions are, they are still limited by their resources. They may wish to protect their people but if they lack the resources to do so, they will attempt to sacrifice the interests and lives of foreigners, enemies or not, in order to preserve their own. And this results in what is called Balkanization or factionalism: the scenario where trust breaks down and it is every man for himself. Whether between nations, tribes, or individuals, none of it is a pleasant sight to behold and an even less pleasant experience.
The United States Constitution figured out a way to not only create more alphas out of betas, but to ensure that alpha leaders could make common cause and have enough trust not to attempt to obliterate each other. Just leaving each other alone wasn’t enough. Alpha leaders had to unite and ally their people and their interests together. But normally in human hierarchy, this meant that somebody had to rise to the top of the pack or else the human social functions become irrational and self-destructive. The President and Executive branch fulfills that requirement, while at the same time ensuring that power still is in the control of the people where it originated from. The people that currently hold the trust of the community they represent.
Modern United States politics is based around two supporting pillars. Having alpha leaders exercise power and having alpha leaders not try to kill each other to defend their people’s interests. The Left likes to instigate wars because they think it’s always going to be the poor f**ks that end up dying for the Left’s glamorous Utopia with the Left’s elite cadre getting the benefits. The Left also likes to reduce the people of America to slaves, essentially omegas, in order to reduce the numeral superiority of alpha leaders and consolidate power under one faction or leader or tribe.
Controlling immigrant populations serves these two purposes. First, it keeps immigrants at the slave status or second citizen rank, ensuring that they are all betas with no real alphas to challenge the Left’s “protection of the immigrant’s interests”. Secondly, keeping immigrants and other minorities in check via getting people to kill each other and distrust each other, means that you incite people on every side to feelings of distrust and hatred. This creates what is called the ‘manufactured crisis’, something AQ also did in Iraq with the bombing of the Samara mosque. Normally alpha leaders would not incite such feelings, because they are counter-productive to securing the people’s survival and prosperity. The Left, however, reduced the number of alpha leaders precisely in order to ensure that people had nobody but the Left to look towards for solutions. Solutions to problems the Left themselves created with their instigation of distrust, fear, warfare, violence, and immorality.
The Left are not alpha leaders. So they have to kill off the real alphas and ensure nobody new comes on the scene from the native population. By keeping a population full of slaves, you get them used to comfort and safety in obedience to authority. What the Left seeks is obedience and authority, power essentially, but unlike the alpha leaders of humanity’s various hundreds of thousands of years of progression, they do not seek to use this power or authority to benefit humanity. They seek it to create Utopia on earth for themselves, no matter who needs to be sacrificed to get there.
I’m really struggling to figure out what constitutes ensuring that all citizens have full rights, versus making demands that are not reasonable.
There is no one standard. It takes quality leaders to produce quality standard of living for others. Everything else is a derivative off of that. You don’t even need the US Constitution or experiment to do the exact same thing in a different shape or form. You just need the same caliber of leaders and the same NUMBER of them.
Human beings will be ruled by the leaders of humanity for as long as we remain humans. Democracy or oligarchy, monarchy or totalitarian dystopia, it does not really matter. One will lead, the others follow. That is not a choice we have. Our only choices are to ensure that the leaders who deserve the position are the ones actually in the position and the other choice we have is to create more alpha leaders/positions for people to fill. Wars tend to get rarer the better the alpha leader, and they also become scarce the more alpha leaders there are leading the various factions involved in a potential conflict. You only need one Obama, one Saddam, or one Stalin to cause a war of total devastation.
CollegeCon has the right of it.
Minorities have the right to be left alone, i.e., Orthodox Jewry, and to practice whatever they wish up to the point where it interferes with the peaceful enjoyment of the rights of others.
Being minorities they are not, however, entitled to tell the majority how they must live, and what norms of their own they must break down to be accommodating to the minority: the majority is under no obligation to be accommodating to the minority.
They are obligated to leave them in peace. They don’t, however, face any obligation to listen. That Americans often do listen – far more than any other civilization ever has – is simply a mark that Americans tend to go well beyond the merely tolerant.
But they aren’t obligated to do so.
Book, it’s interesting that you use gays and Muslims as your primary examples because I see a similarity between the two groups that goes beyond the constant whining of their so-called leaders.
The similarity is that the radicals in both groups are the tail wagging the dog. Most U.S. Muslims probably could not care less about foot baths or unopened alcoholic beverages being carted around in pristine Somali taxis. Most gays are not pathetic America haters like Barney Fwank or Larry Kramer, and haven’t really bought into the necessity of same-sex marriage or a constitutionally mandated equality between sodomy and heterosexual intercourse.
But that’s the problem: The quiet Muslims and gays are too busy leading real lives, or are too intimidated by the militants, to protest what is being done in their names. Add to that the complicity of the heterosexual left, which adores sexual libertinism (”You go, gays! Compared to what you guys do, our stuff looks normal!”), and the secularist left, which sees Islam as a way to distress, dilute and delegitimize Christianity. As long as the left commands the academy, the media and the courts, everyday gays, Muslims and other people like us will continue to have the “rights” demanded by the “leaders” of those two groups shoved down our throats.
Our hope, of course, is that statism will be dealt heavy enough blows over the next few years that the momentum towards normalizing homosexuality and Islam will die quiet deaths. (Now that Obama has left the doors open, Al Qaeda’s next attack on our soil will probably kill any remaining sympathy Americans have for poor, oppressed Muslims.)
I think “don’t ask, don’t tell” will probably be overturned at some point. If it is, the services will be well within their rights to tell everybody–straight or gay–that overt expressions of affection, or public trysts, or endlessly boring other soldiers with stories about your sphincters are grounds for disciplinary action. The result will be a restoration of the staus quo ante: Nobody will ask, nobody will tell.
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Marriage is not a civil right. It is a privilege, licensed by the state, like driving, fishing, and hunting. As a licensed privilege, marriage is subject to reasonable restrictions (not marrying your mother or sister, not marrying more than one person, not marrying an animal, etc.). In the debate over gay marriage, the pro-gay marriage side shouts that it’s a civil right, but shouting that something’s a civil right doesn’t make it one. Abraham Lincoln put it this way: question–if you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Answer: calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg. Calling marriage a civil right doesn’t make it a right. But if the state (that is, the people of the state) want to change the restrictions on a licensed privilege, they are within their rights to do so (so long as doing so doesn’t constitute a danger to public safety, or deny someone a constitutionally-protected civil right–you wouldn’t, for instance, issue drivers’ licenses to the blind). The people of California voted not to change the restrictions on the licensed privilege of marriage. So what’s the issue?
<B>Whose rights should prevail? </b>
That’s the wrong question. The question isn’t “who gets sacrificed for the greater good”, something the Left has inculcated as being connected to basic human right, but “how do you ensure that everybody’s interests are protected in such a fashion that nobody sacrifices essential liberties or securities in place of others”.
“huge racist problems (a refusal to integrate until Harry Truman)”
I have to check into this a bit further, but according to someone I heard/read recently, this isn’t true. Supposedly the military was integrated until Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. He was apparently a strict segregationist, required the military to be segregated which was the condition that remained until Truman’s presidency.
I’ll try to check this out a bit…
>>the military argued that refusing blacks the right to serve was a sure sign of an effectively functioning military.>>
Demonstrably not true. We refer to the Jim Crow military, meaning blacks and whites serving in the miltary, but in different and segregated corps. You couldn’t have a segregated army if there weren’t someone to segregate.
Suek – I don’t know. I’ve done zero research myself – but I do seem to recall that the Union army was perfectly happy to have black soldiers during and immediately after the civil war, and the cavalry – which was more or less where the army went in the post-war years – was not at all short of black soldiers.
No idea if this was “official,” or if it just sort of happened.
U.S. Army units were pretty much segregated until the late 1940s. In Ken Burns’s recent special on the national parks, he lingers on the protective services rendered by black soldiers in Sequioa and Yosemite parks, doing everything from trail construction and road maintenance to evicting squatters and grazers, and facing down angry, heavily armed whites who didn’t like being told what to do by black men.
In earlier years, the Army had assigned black soldiers to patrol troublesome frontier areas, including encounters with the Apaches, who were downright savages. The Army figured blacks were expendable, so why not send them up against the orneriest natives in the West? Turns out the black soldiers were tough, aggressive, brave, resourceful sonsofbitches. They spanked the Apaches and other tribes bad, earning the sobriquet “buffalo soldiers” because their nappy hair reminded the Indians of bison pelts.
The Army’s never again going to have an ethnic regiment like the 442 Nisei, but I sometimes wonder what it would have been like in modern times if there had been an all-black regiment fighting in Vietnam or Iraq. I would have pitied the fools that faced them.
It’s the radical activists that cause most of the problems. They never know when to stop. I support civil unions for gays, but it’s not the same as a marriage, in which every sexual act can result in pregnancy. The laws and traditions aound marriage have evolved because of that, and I see the radical gays ignoring of this as a sign that they don’t put the needs of society on an equal footing with their desires. I have similar fears about gays in the military. I fear that a small group of nut cases would enlist just to cause trouble. I am happy that 3rd-party outing will no longer be grounds for dismissal, but some standards for discretion have to be established.
I see no need for special accomodations for Muslims. I see the alcohol in taxis issue and special prayer rooms as attempts to intimidate, not just non-Muslims but also nonradical Muslims. We have to resist this. It’s not about religion; it’s about control.
As far as issues like wheelchair ramps go, sensible people should be able to work out sensible solutions without being hampered by regulations from state and federal busybodies. Substitute guidelines for rules and regulations. This makes people aware of special needs without requiring one-size-fits-all expensive and silly measures.
I hope we will see the silent majority of people in the country take it back from the radicals.
Charles Martel #5:
> But that’s the problem: The quiet Muslims and gays are too busy leading real lives, or are too intimidated by the militants, to protest what is being done in their names.
Well, that’s me in a nutshell. I’m living my life as an individual. Most gays, like most blacks, have ghetto-ized themselves by joining the Democrat far-left en masse. They won’t and don’t listen to me. They don’t speak for me and I refuse to be defined by them.
Expat says in #13:
> It’s the radical activists that cause most of the problems. They never know when to stop.
I think it’s worse than that, expat. The radical activists, in many cases, are professional activists. Grievance-mongers, if you will. It’s not that they don’t know when to stop. It’s that they have every vested reason to keep on going. No matter what battle they may win, when they wake up the following morning, it would be only to identify what the *next* grievance is going to be, and to launch into that one. The protest and the battle defines their professional (and personal) lives, and they will never stop. They CAN’T stop – what would they do with their lives if they did? Maintaining the protest du-jour is precisely WHAT THEY DO. They are professional activists, not hobbyists.
I’m always most morally comfortable when I can find nice, bright lines and litmus tests and demonstrate their validity and applicability. Failing that, I stumble off in the dark, trying to channel John Stuart Mill, James Mill and Jeremy Bentham as a backup. (Their utilitarian ethics and “felicific calculus,” that is, not the bit about having my embalmed corpse wheeled out for faculty meetings after I’ve passed on — that’s channelling a bit too much.)
Some bright lines that I believe would help here are from Locke: life, liberty and property. Does the Muslim driver own the cab? If so, he should apologize for any misunderstanding, but it’s his cab. Cab owned by a Christian gal named Ann Heiser Busch? Help the nice people with their bags, or find another job. Don’t like pork? Don’t apply for a job in a store that sells it. Smoking on your own property? Your call. A rented apartment? Landlord’s call. Restaurant? Restaurant’s call.
The multilingual ballot may be in its own category. A decent command of the English language is actually a requirement for citizenship. Period. If they need a ballot in another language, an investigation into a fraudulent application for citizenship may be in order. And this makes sense. To have one unified country, you need one unified language. (What’s next? Road signs in 17 languages, so no one feels left out? Try picking out your language at 65 mph, and steering as well.) Another element here is not changing the rules in the middle of the game. Anyone who immigrates to an English-speaking country is implicitly accepting its English language, and has no right, once having settled, to demand that we adjust for them.
Accomodations for Muslims and gays are harder to pin down. Falling back mostly on utilitarianism, I would argue that actually building special rooms for prayer and washing for a very small minority, at taxpayer expense, is going a bit too far. On the other hand, if they just wanted the lunch period shifted back 10 minutes in order to cover one of their mandatory prayer times, that would, in a fuzzy and subjective sort of way, not seem too unreasonable. Excluding men from a swimming pool during prime swimming hours? No. During hours of very sparse use, but when the facility would otherwise be open and staffed anyway? Probably OK.
My take on marriage is the product of having belatedly discovered that my faith in the accidental nature of the universe was very badly misplaced. If God exists, then it is a relatively short trip to the conclusion that it is He who makes official any given marriage (or declines to do so). To inform the government of a marriage is a nice and thoughtful thing to do, and can certainly simplify some of the paperwork that might come up in the future, but should not be strictly necessary. Somewhere along the line, in a time when we were all much more on the same sheet of music regarding basic things, government arrogated unto itself the “right” to perform marriages, and… we are where we are, for now anyway. In a practical sense, I see nothing wrong with people of the same sex asking a state or local government to make note of their mutual designation of each other for certain legal purposes, e.g. power of attorney, hospital visitation, etc.. And I see nothing wrong with arranging some sort of one-stop-shopping to arrange many or all of those legal relationships. But the crux of the debate, I think, is this: What does it mean? In other words, what exactly are we, as a society, signing onto? Are we allowing people to streamline a little paperwork, or are we giving our wholehearted blessing and endorsement to this unusual relationship? Two points: 1) We as a society have a right to speak for what we endorse. 2) As Jefferson said, “government that is best is that which governs least;” the more aspects of life we choose to throw into the public arena to be fought over, with the most politically powerful interest group vanquishing the others, the more we will fight over, until it involves every little aspect of our lives, and freedom is a distant memory.
On gays in the military… Mrs. Bookworm, I believe it was you who provided a link the other day to an article which summed up in one word the gravest danger of repealing DADT: lawyers. The military runs on the concepts of everyone being the same in all militarily relevant ways, and everyone doing what they’re told. Introduce the “aggrieved” who have been “discriminated against” and lawyered up, end a few otherwise-unblemished careers of commanders because a pliable jury in a civilian court wanted to feel kind and sympathetic, and a wonderful culture will change very quickly. Our force right now is an amazingly well-oiled machine, and achieves remarkable results under the worst of conditions because it is largely allowed to tune itself to the mission. Introducing the implicit threat of a lawyer into any unit where someone is out of the closet, and you throw a monkey wrench into the tuning, and people will suffer and die as a result. Even John Stuart Mill, with his famous sympathy for the rights of minorities not to be tyrannized, would have to do his felicific calculus and agree that the negative consequences in this one far outweigh some vague (and false) feelings of affirmation on the part of a tiny minority who voluntarily inserted themselves into a very specific environment which did not fit them well.
Well, that’s my two cents. A motley collection of methodology with which I’m not entirely comfortable, but maybe ambiguity is one of the things which helps keep he world interesting.
Spartacus # 15, brilliantly told, the whole thing!
> Introduce the “aggrieved” who have been “discriminated against” and lawyered up, end a few otherwise-unblemished careers of commanders because a pliable jury in a civilian court wanted to feel kind and sympathetic, and a wonderful culture will change very quickly.
Precisely the worst problem! Find a way to keep the lawyers out of it, and it could be made to work.
(Always remember what happened to Governor Sarah Palin’s government in Alaska after the failed presidential campaign. Something as seemingly innocuous as FOIA requests and lawsuits alleging misuse of government was deliberately maliciously and nefariously used to bring the entire state government to a screeching halt under a tsunami of requests and suits. Purely out of political malevolence – and using willing and eager lawyers to do all the dirty work.)
And yes it can happen here. I’m still rather stunned that Canada is suffering so tremendously under those sickening speech codes that are stifling free speech. I’d always considered them fiercely independent people, and they’re putting up with this kind of BS? Cultures change, and our military culture can be forced to be change as well, by the endless lawyering up of the aggrieved. Yes, it *could* very easily happen, don’t think it couldn’t.
As a severe warning sign of this, you need only look at the shameless whitewashing given in the report on the Ft. Hood Jihadist Murderer. Chock full of the most useless PC language and avoidance of the real issues, it shows what is already happening in even the military, under the pressure of the PC crowd’s fierce determination to never give offense. Our military – tiptoeing gingerly around the tender, trembling sensibilities of its fragile, wimpy corps? What??? When did this total pile of stinking crap start?
What if your _goal_ is to disable the military?
I am well aware of the “Buffalo soldiers”. That’s one of the reasons that the statement that it was Wilson who re-segregated the military was something I noticed. So today I’ll do a bit of exploration and see what I can find. Starting with wikipedia, I found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson#Segregation_in_the_federal_government
Now the interesting thing about this is that Wilson was a democrat. All this stuff about the Dems being the defender of blacks is _so_ bogus! I know that wikipedia isn’t the most reliable, but when they say ” In 1912, “an unprecedented number”[5] of African Americans left the Republican Party to cast their vote for Democrat Wilson. They were encouraged by his promises of support for their issues.” , I’m inclined to believe it. (even if they weren’t AAs in those days, but negroes.) Reading the article, it’s clear that integration was already in progress when Wilson took office, but he made segregation the official policy of the government. I repeat…Wilson was a Democrat.
So…anyway…time to prowl the net and see what’s out there!!
Very interesting, suek. Wilson was in Ivy League elite who used people till he threw them under the bus. That sounds familiar.
The same people that instigated and maintain the situation that led to Hasan, is also going for more ‘diversity’ (Casey) in the military.
Truman thought blacks were either mentally or socially inferior. Except he didn’t tell his combat veterans that fought in WWII that they should toe his line. Instead, they wanted integration because they felt that was best for the nation and for the military, and Truman didn’t block it.
Well…Truman _was_ from Missouri. That’s pretty much deep south attitudinally speaking.
I’m not done looking, but I sure don’t like some of what I’m reading. Some of this is the history Helen would have us form our opinions on – it sure isn’t happy stuff. At this point, it looks like the Navy, at least, was integrated up until there was action taken to exclude the Japanese on the basis of race, and blacks just sort of got included.
(Cutting and pasting a short section…)
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http://www.dmna.state.ny.us/historic/articles/blacksMilitary/BlacksMilitarySpanAm.htm
Events following the Spanish-American war indicated nothing of improvement for the Black American population. The Navy segregated in response to Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905. The goal behind creating a “Great White Fleet” was to demonstrate Caucasian supremacy to the Japanese Navy
Catch any Republican members of the KKK? Its founders were Democrats. Democrats ran the South and enforced segregation with Jim Crow laws. Note the Progressive approval of eugenics. Progressive Republicans such as Teddy Roosevelt were on board with that – there are remnants called RINOs. Gerard Nadal’s site Coming Home has a bunch of posts/history lessons that document Sanger et al’s links with fascism and eugenics. If you want to look back even further, check William James and Thomas Dewey (author of the present un-Godly mess in our public schools. One of the best guys for a really intense history lesson about the whole “rigts” mentality can be found in Natural Rights and The Right to Choose – he addresses abortion specifically but since the gay rigts activists have framed their argument as one of civil rights, best go to the whole genesis of the concept of rights.
To Americans, the right to life , liberty, and the pursuit of happiness aren’t up for a vote – they’re granted by our Creator. Take Judeo-Christianity out and any right is up for a vote. Our rightss don’t give us license to do as we please and if you demand a right that substantially interferes with another’s, I’d say you’re out of luck.
Griswold v. is the SCOTUS that invented the right to privacy, which is the basis upon which Roe v and Doe v were decided. It was also the basis for decriminalizing sexual conduct between two consentin adults.
Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t part of Planned Parenthood’s founder, the one who argued for wiping out the criminal black race with abortions on demand.
“Various PC schools have created prayer rooms and special bathrooms for the ritual washing required for Islam.”
I know of a “Christian” church in Sf that is having a Mosque built into the basement. Holy Cow. Just wait till the church wants to have ham at the Christmas dinner or pulled pork sandwhiches at a barbeque…
MacG
Mike — Very kind of you, but having overcome my laziness and tracked down the hinted-at links, I must pass along any credit. Here are, respectively, the links to Mrs. Bookworm’s post, J.E. Dyer’s more recent short article, and her longer original article:
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2010/01/30/the-presidents-religious-desire-to-reverse-dont-ask-dont-tell
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/j-e-dyer/227401
http://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/all-tell-%e2%80%93-no-ask
Woodrow Wilson was a truly monstrous man, as many here have begun to point out. What a whitewashing he has received in our history books!
For you women and supporters of women’s rights, it would be very useful and informative to read up on the jailings and beatings his people gave the suffragettes as they campaigned for the right to vote.
If you didn’t toe the Wilson line in ALL things, they came after you with incredible viciousness. There has never been a more conformist time in the 20th Century than the Wilson administration. And they used government propaganda to full effect to try to shut down dissent in every form. We fear “Obama Corps” these days trying to shut down those who disagree. But Wilson Corps actually existed throughout the country, and they *did* shut down dissent with threats and violence.
Wilson was a fascist monster. And yep, segregationist, too. What a whitewash he’s received.
Good books on how horrible Wilson was are Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and 1920 : The Year of the Six Presidents, by David Pietrusza. Wilson was his generation’s Obama.
Incidentally, in the second of those two books, the man who comes off looking remarkably good is Calvin Coolidge. He is a perfect example of how the Progressives who, even then, clustered in media and education, destroyed a good man’s reputation and elevated a bad man’s.