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Ok, and if you didn't scroll down to the comments, there were some very good comments made, and I'm not talking about mine in particular. But I'm going to re-post it here.
I had a conversation a year or so ago where I mentioned that the GOP should rightly bear the mantle of The Party of Civil Rights. I also pointed out the MLK himself was a registered Republican.
To which even my relatively conservative friend responded “yeah, but the two parties have kind of switched roles since then”.
I shook my head. No. They don’t get it. Civil rights are for everyone. It’s what the Constitution says. With slavery, we weren’t living up to the very ideals embodied in the Constitution that defines our Republic. The Republican Party’s tradition, embodied in its name, reflects that we are a Republic and we have rules to live up to to remain true to that Republic.
The other party that bears the name of one of the tools of our Republic, that being Democratic elections and approving certain things by popular vote within the confines of the Republic’s Constitution …. and they’ve fudged the very idea of what we are in most people’s minds … “we are a Democracy”. We are not a Democracy. At least we’re not supposed to be, and anyone who has studied the history of the founding of our nation knows it.
The Republicans have “switched” roles only to the extent that they appear to be ever more willing to go along with the idea that Government is there to fight for “social justice” … and “social justice” sounds like it means one thing, but as with most Progressive ideas it means something very specific and quite different from what it sounds like it means. It means “redistribution of wealth”. It means Socialism. Democrats have not moved in the opposite direction, they've moved farther in the same direction. So there's really been no switch.
But to the Republicans’ general credit, they do appear to be, or have appeared to have been, even in the years since the 1960’s, the party that pays more than a little lip service to the idea of the Republic — at least more so than the other party … and insists that All Men Are Created Equal, and no man deserves special treatment from the state no matter what his lot in life. So it is the party that sometimes resists when laws that do just that are brought up.
What has happened is that the Democrats have run a very successful PR campaign to paint opposition to special treatment as equal to opposition to Civil Rights. Up is Down. Black is White. Left is Right. Peace is War.
But the fact remains that equal treatment by the State is Civil Rights.
MLK would be proud of the destruction of institutionalized racism left in his wake. He would be appalled and saddened as to how that has been squandered and the movement was hijacked and turned into something which turned institutionalized racism to institutionalized reverse-racism, and dependence for many of the descendants of former slaves — effectively a kind of self-imposed “cultural slavery”.
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