Ah Texas. I’ve said it before, with the exception of Austin and a few other alcoves of sanity in the state, we may as well hand Texas back over to Mexico; they seem to want it more than we do. Kidding aside though, Texas manages to ram some really incredibly stupid and mind-boggling laws down the throats of its citizens, most of whom are so conservative or libertarian enough that they don’t really care because the rules will never apply to those with privilege – the moment they do, however, you can expect them to rally with their guns in the air outside of the state capital.

In this case, Texas’ new drinking laws give police the discretion to cuff you and lock you up regardless of where or how you’re drinking. This is how it works:

Late on a balmy Saturday night last June, six Fort Worth cops and two officers from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission went looking for trouble. They had just raided two Hispanic bars in an industrial stretch of town and nine detainees now sat in the paddy wagon (pdf), hands bound with plastic ties. The rest of the city’s bars would soon shut down. It seemed like the night was over, except for the paperwork. Then Sergeant Richard Morris had an idea. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s go to the Rainbow Lounge.”

A half-dozen police cruisers, an unmarked sedan, and the prisoner van slid to a stop in front of the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth’s newest gay club, at about 1:30 a.m. on June 28, 2009 — 40 years, almost down to the minute, after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn with billy clubs and bullhorns. Inside the bar, the officers fanned out, grabbing and arresting six patrons for public intoxication. Benjamin Guttery, a 24-year-old Army vet, says an officer told him to put down his drink, then “bulldozed” him through the crowd to the paddy wagon but then let him go. “I’m 6′8″, 250 pounds, and I had just finished my second drink,” Guttery told a local reporter. “I might have had enough to have a loose tongue, but not a loose walk or anything like that.” Another man alleges that he was slammed against a wall, elbowed, and fell on the ground, landing him in intensive care for a week with bleeding in his brain. He was charged with public intoxication and assault.

That’s right – arrested for “public intoxication” inside of a bar. Only in Texas.

But here’s the clincher – these guys aren’t going to rootin’ tootin’ cowboy bars with blasting country music and confederate flags on the walls; they’re headed to gay bars and latino night spots, so they can make sure they round up, harass, and arrest the people they dislike the most: minorities and gays. It’s racial profiling at its finest, and the law enables them to do it.

The finest quote on the matter comes from a defense attourney in Dallas:

The public intoxication standard, backed by the Texas-based Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is so broad that you can be arrested on just a police officer’s hunch, without being given a Breathalyzer or field sobriety test. State courts have not only upheld the practice but expanded the definition of public intoxication to cover pretty much any situation, says Robert Guest, a criminal defense attorney in Dallas. “Having no standard allows the police to arrest whoever pisses them off and call it PI,” he says, adding, “If you have a violent, homophobic, or just an asshole of a cop and you give him the arbitrary power to arrest anyone for PI, you can expect violent, homophobic, and asshole-ic behavior.”

Yup – that sounds about right.

The point of these laws, and the intention I’m sure that Texas’ MADD arm had, was to keep drunken people off of the roads and streets where they can cause harm to themselves or others. But good intentions paving the road to hell and all that, the statute doesn’t include the appropriate checks and balances against the inevitable abuse of police power, especially in a state like Texas; deep in the heart of Red America.

There is hope though – as with any group of cockroaches (I love this metaphor, which is why I use it so often) as soon as you shine the light on them, they scatter and try to get away:

After community activists took to the streets and airwaves, Irving’s arrest rate for Hispanics plummeted. (Dallas and Irving are no longer part of the federal program.) In Fort Worth, protests over the Rainbow Lounge raid elicited a quick apology from the police chief and promises to review the PI policy. But the arrests have continued elsewhere, and no one is targeting the public intoxication law itself. Many people don’t care, Novello says, “because they can’t vicariously experience this injustice.” The Houston attorney puts it more bluntly. “As long as police are going out there fucking with the blacks and the Mexicans, until it hits the people with the power, they won’t care.”

And that brings me back to the original point. Until the white, privileged majorities are affected, there likely won’t be any real change here – and if there is real change because of the outcry, it’ll be a step-by-step struggle against that privileged majority who doesn’t see anything wrong with the rules only because they’re not the target of their enforcement.

[ Drinking While Brown (or Gay) in Texas Will Get You Arrested ]
Source: AlterNet

Bashing the Republicans and the right-wing (even the center-right) for their blindness to privilege and racial injustice is low-hanging fruit for me, but every now and again there’s more good data to share on the matter. For example, a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report shows that during the Bush years, everything we’ve said about civil rights is absolutely true. The Bush Administration went out of its way to dilute the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and placed political appointees in places where they could obstruct the actions of career lawyers and officials who would want to take on civil rights abuses that were reported to their office.

George W. Bush was never particularly taken with the civil-rights crowd. Not that he was exactly hostile to the notion of protecting society’s most vulnerable groups. But he and his minions assumed that the time for coddling minorities had passed. So after sizing up the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice—the most powerful advocate for civil rights within the federal government—Bush’s operatives endeavored “to rip the heart out of [it],” in the words of Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP.

In dry statistics and even drier prose, a report released last week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) spells out how sweeping that effort became. The Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division veered away from challenging “at-large election systems” that marginalized African-Americans and focused on language discrimination against Spanish speakers. The Employment Litigation Section moved away from so-called pattern or practice cases (suits that took on widespread or systematic discrimination) in favor of individual complaints. (“Plenty of individual lawyers can bring these individual discrimination cases,” pointed out Alan Jenkins, executive director of The Opportunity Agenda, a New York–based nonprofit; but only the Justice Department can pursue certain big cases that can make a real difference.) Bush’s Justice Department was also particularly sensitive to discrimination against white males. In 2007 the division filed a suit against Indianapolis for favoring African-Americans and females over white males for promotion to police sergeant.

For Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the breadth of the changes crystallized during a meeting with Ralph Boyd Jr., an assistant attorney general for civil rights under Bush. A case filed by several women against the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) was then working its way through the courts. SEPTA had instituted new physical-fitness standards for aspiring transit police. Many women had a hard time meeting the new standards, which required all new applicants to run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes or less. After being rejected by SEPTA for failure to pass muster, the women sued. The Justice Department signed on to that suit under President Clinton. Under Bush, it withdrew. Henderson tried to convince Boyd of the necessity of taking a stand against what he considered a clear case of discrimination against women. Boyd, as he recalls, responded with a lecture on how the women should exercise and get in better shape. He reduced “this case of discrimination to one of personal failings,” observed Henderson.

What really entertains me here is that not only was the Civil Rights Division hostile to minorities, they were also hostile to women. And not only were they hostile to minorities and women, they are particularly sensitive to the group that benefits the most from privilege and the old boy’s network, but seems to always feel threatened when confronted with their own prejudices and privilege. It’s absolutely stunning how scared even some so-called libertarian and centrist white males will get when they have to come to terms with their own privilege, and most of those same men will then deny that privilege exists and sputter into the tailspin of claiming that, like Bush and his minions did, the time for “coddling” minorities and women has passed and that all of this racism doesn’t really exist and is a figment of the imaginations of minorities. It’s a pretty quick jump for those particular white males, but it’s always an amusing one to watch them take.

Beyond this though, the GAO report is pretty damning, and while I’m sure things are getting better at the Justice Department and a breath of fresh air is headed through the department, it’s important to remember that it’s things like this that are relieved by having someone like President Obama in office. So while we may disagree with him or wish he were pressing harder on progressive issues, it’s important we don’t lose sight of the so-called smaller issues and positions that the Administration takes that keep our agencies of social justice in line with American values.

[ The GOP’s Civil-Rights Problem ]
Source: Newsweek

Remember just a year or so ago, when people were dancing in the streets because George W Bush wouldn’t be their president anymore? When people were so thrilled that the Republicans were out of office that they couldn’t help but celebrate the future?

Sure, some of that euphoria has worn off, and the honeymoon is definitely over with President Obama, but if you ask anyone if they’d rather go back to the civil-liberties-stealing, war-funding, fear-mongering, terrorists-blaming days of a government run and managed by the Republicans, most Americans would visibly shudder in fear. Why? Because even though things aren’t perfect today and there are serious hardships at hand, people still feel like today is a better day than yesterday.

But what if the Republicans were still in control? Let’s take a look at what kinds of “change” we probably would have to deal with if they were still in power. Here are some of my favorites from a roundup at Alternet:

3) Stubbornly deny the existence of ominous climate change while blithely pumping more pollutants into the environment from lucrative, dirty industries and practices. Although reputable scientists say 350 carbon parts per atmospheric million is the safe limit for sustained life on Earth, Republicans dismiss the frightening fact that we’re already at a carbon level of roughly 390 ppm.

4) Remove “restrictive” regulations on everything from investment banks and credit card companies to a broad array of “profit-eroding” consumer protections, leaving the American masses exposed to a host of resulting abuses and dangers.

5) Continue to criticize and insufficiently fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, thus entirely ignoring that progressive public systems are used in every country that has education outcomes superior to our own.

6) Outlaw abortion, under a fraudulently moral guise, compelling the US to bloodily join those benighted, backward nations where thousands of already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning females perish because of sexist denials of their basic reproductive rights.

7) Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while remaining numbly oblivious to the harsh hypocrisy of preventing our homosexual citizens from marrying.

8 ) Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in secret wiretapping, repression of domestic dissent, neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a panoply of Patriot Act transgressions against the Constitution of the United States…all under the misused rubric of “national security.”

Those are some good ones, but here are some shiners:

14) Give full vent to the intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals…if only they could.

15) Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.

Yeah, that sums it up nicely.

[ 15 Awful Things Republicans Would Do If They Had the Chance ]
Source: Alternet

On October 22nd, 2009, Congress finally passed the Matthew Shepard Act, after many long years, obstruction by Republicans, threats of veto by the Bush Administration, scare tactics from the religious and evangelical right-wing, and even personal threats against the families fighting to make equal protection against hate crimes against actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability under federal law a reality.

I’ve been one of those people looking on from the sidelines and adding my voice whenever possible, but the dream is now a reality, and President Obama has promised to sign the bill before the end of the month, making it federal law.

If you’d like to send a personal message to the Shepard family and the Byrd family, use the link from the Human Rights Campaign below, or visit the project page to learn more about the bill and its long struggle to get here at Love Conquers Hate.

[ Thank the Families Who Stood Against Hate ]
Source: The Human Rights Campaign (HRC)

We’ve been hearing more and more about these kinds of stories lately, and while I think that part of the reason they make headlines is because there’s an ongoing debate about health care in Congress, I’m also glad that such issues are coming to the forefront because there are more people who are being abused by health insurers that are seeing those insurers backtrack on their behaviors as a result of being publicly shamed.

Like this story for example:

Yet another deep, deep disconnect is on the issue of women–the people, their lives, their reproductive needs–being considered either irrelevant a la Senator “Who-Needs-Maternity-Care” Kyl of Arizona (home of the Sheriff who wanted female inmates to pay extra transportation costs to procure abortions) or in the form of Senator “You-Can’t-Pay-For-Your-Abortion-With-Your-Private-Insurance-Policy” Hatch (R-Utah), or the insurance companies and the Catholic Bishops for whom women’s health is a pre-existing condition or a condition of original sin.

Out of all of this is an increasing string of stories of individual women who’ve been denied insurance because their wombs, breasts, rapes (pick one) or simply their sex makes them a “pre-existing condition.”

Among the most recent examples is a woman who spoke at the launch of NWLC’s “Being A Woman Is Not A Pre-Existing Condition” campaign on October 20th, 2009.

Writing at Womenstake.org, Amanda Stone recounts the tale of the speaker, Chris Turner:

“Nope, we won’t take her.” This is what insurance companies in Florida said when asked whether they would provide insurance coverage to a hypothetical applicant who had survived rape. Let’s back up a few steps. First, who was asking the question? Second, why was the applicant’s history posed as a hypothetical? Third, what can we do to change this dire situation?

Turner is a health insurance agent from Tampa Florida, and a rape survivor who spoke of her survival story. She was the person, in Stone’s frame, who was asking the question.

As recounted by Stone:

In November 2002, [Chris Turner] was drugged and raped while on a business trip. She sought medical help from her physician, who put her on preventative anti-HIV medication, since there was no way of knowing whether the person who raped her used a condom. Following her assault, Chris was afraid to leave her house for some time. About a month after the assault, Chris gathered the courage to seek counseling to deal with her fears-counseling which continued for about a year. She took the steps she needed to take care of herself, and the steps she now encourages other rape survivors to take as a volunteer at a Florida organization called SOAR-Speaking Out About Rape. As a volunteer, she warns rape survivors about a harm which she faced-she tells them, “if you lose your insurance, you might not be able to get it back.” This is exactly what happened to Chris.

A few months following her rape, Chris needed to find new health insurance on the individual market.

Conservatives would argue that this was somehow her fault for a variety of reasons and find some way to blame her for her insurance company’s decision, or at best would claim that her attacker should be the one responsible for the medical costs she’s incurred (if they had some shred of decency), but I’d take things a step further than that even: that Turner shouldn’t be victimized again by an insurance company that sees her as a liability now that she needs medical care, and preventative care, at that.

It absolutely floors me that any medical organization that claims that “health care” is its business would see fit to treat someone this way – but, contrary to the assumptions and disconnections of the far right and their libertarian allies, this is the America we live in, where we’re too scared to see a doctor for preventative care, much less get sick, even if we do have quality health insurance, for fear of being abused, mistreated, and eventually given the boot, only to find out that we don’t have the right or the privilege of being so abused again – even if we need insurance to be.

[ Insurance Company Tells Rape Victim Her Assault Would be a Pre-Existing Condition ]
Source: RH Reality Check (via AlterNet)

The title isn’t hyperbole, and it’s not false. It’s absolutely true. 30 senators, mostly White, Republican, men, voted to protect corporations “rights” and financial interests rather than women from being gang raped. The measure passed regardless, and as much as the senators who voted this way can whine about how it was an amendment attached to a defense authorization bill (which frankly, I think it absolutely should have been because it dealt specifically with defense contractors and their legal accountability – if you’re going to authorize the money to pay for them, you should be able to make the rules that police them) but we all know that these men wouldn’t have voted for the bill even if it were stand-alone and made it through hours upon hours of committee and floor debate.

So then, here’s the scoop, lifted from MyDD.com:

It is stunning that 30 Republican members of the United States Senate would vote to protect a corporation, in this case Halliburton/KBR, over a woman who was gang raped. The details from Think Progress:

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. She was detained in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” (Jones was not an isolated case.) Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Offering Ms. Jones legal relief was Senator Al Franken of Minnesota who offered an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”

Seems simple enough. And yet, to GOP Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions of Alabama allowing victims of sexual assault a day in court is tantamount to a “political attack” at Halliburton. That 29 others, all men, chose to join him in opposing the Franken amendment is simply mind-boggling.

…

In the debate, Senator Sessions maintained that Franken’s amendment overreached into the private sector and suggested that it violated the due process clause of the Constitution.

To which, Senator Franken fired back quoting the Constitution. “Article 1 Section 8 of our Constitution gives Congress the right to spend money for the welfare of our citizens. Because of this, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, ‘Congress may attach conditions on the receipt of federal funds and has repeatedly employed that power to further broad policy objectives,’” Franken said. “That is why Congress could pass laws cutting off highway funds to states that didn’t raise their drinking age to 21. That’s why this whole bill [the Defense Appropriations bill] is full of limitations on contractors — what bonuses they can give and what kind of health care they can offer. The spending power is a broad power and my amendment is well within it.”

God I love it when Senator Franken quotes the Constitution. Not every Republican was so clueless. Ten voted for the Franken amendment including the GOP’s female contingent of Senators (Snowe, Collins, Hutchinson and Murkowski).

“We need to put assurances into the law that those kind of instances [the Jamie Leigh Jones case] are not capable of being repeated,” said Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted in favor of Franken’s amendment. “I want to make sure that a woman, any individual who is a victim of a terrible act, knows that they have got protections.”

Murkowski said that she considered the arguments that Sessions made about the amendment being too expansive before she decided to vote for the legislation.

“I looked at it,” said Murkowski. “And, I tell you, you look at some of the things we do and you have to say, ‘OK, you have a specific instance we’re trying to address and does this go above and beyond?’ But when you have to err on the side of protecting an individual, I erred on the side of greater generosity, I guess.”

Republican Sen. George LeMieux of Florida echoed some of Murkowski’s sentiments.

“I can’t see in any circumstance that a woman who was a victim of sexual assault shouldn’t have her right to go to court,” LeMieux said. “So, that is why I voted for it.”

Although Franken chatted up LeMieux on the Senate floor before the vote, LeMieux said that he had already made his decision. But, LeMieux added, Franken’s talk didn’t hurt.

“I had decided to vote for it before I came here, but I was happy to hear his argument for it,” LeMieux said. “He did what a senator should do, which was he was working it. He was working for his amendment.” I’ll add, Al Franken is everything a United States Senator should be.

As for Jamie Leigh Jones, she was nothing but elated and thankful. “It means the world to me,” Jones said of the amendment’s passage. “It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it.”

And for the GOP, it is a new low.

Way to lay the constitutional smackdown, Franken. I mean wow – that’s amazing.

And because I didn’t want to let the list go by and get buried in the text of the article, let’s lay it out for you right here.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are the 30 men who voted against this amendment, who would rather a woman be gang raped and not be able to face her accusers or the company that allowed it to happen and protected the people involved, than at least let her have her day in court:

Here are those who vote to protect a corporation over a victim of rape:

Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)

Remember them when you head to the polls.

[ 30 GOP Senators Vote to Defend Gang Rape ]
Source: MyDD.com

Seriously folks, you can’t make this stuff up – and frankly, why would you even want to?

This is another article that goes in the “proof positive conservatives are crazy” file – ready to pull out the next time someone want to claim that it’s the political left that’s lost their minds:

Number 5: John Derbyshire takes a bold stand against women’s suffrage
…

Number 4: Erick Erickson threatens to dissolve his own town’s police department
…

Number 3: John L. Perry urges a military coup against Obama
…

Number 2: Dan Riehl suggests that dead census worker could have been a “child predator”
…

Number 1: Conservatives everywhere declare that it’s their patriotic duty to stop America from hosting the Olympics

Oh yeah – it’s been a great week. Some of these stories are predictable, and the whole Derbyshire bit I mentioned in another article, but they’re all fantastic. I remmeber hearing the story of the people who wanted to stop Chicago from hosting the Olympics because they “thought Chicago should have other priorities,” which I think is logical, but it’s not like any government can only focus on one thing at a time, and I really did think that there was something more insidious about it – and now we know it’s true.

And suggesting that the census worker that was hanged with “Fed” scrawled across his chest may have been a child predator is not only disgusting and actively desecrating the memory of a murdered man, it still wouldn’t be an excuse for the criminals in Kansas who killed him.

You can be sure that anything – from the smallest, most tangentially related issue to the most absolutely absurd, the conservative right will be there to betray their nutjob roots and make fools of themselves: they don’t need anyone else to do it for them.

Get a rundown of the full stories behind each at the link below:

[ 5 Crazy Right-Wing Freak-Outs in Just One Glorious Week ]
Source: AlterNet

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone, but that makes it all that much more important to make note when conservatives do things like this – especially when there are women who stand with them thinking that conservative politicians have their best interests at heart. Seriously folks – do we need a history lesson to remind us that it’s been the American conservative that’s stood against giving the vote to every minority and disenfranchised group in American history – including women? Conservatives stood against Susan B Anthony and the suffrage movement, conservatives stood against giving Black Americans the vote, and even today conservatives still try to undermine efforts to get out the vote. They stand against things like offering ex-cons who have served their time the vote and they willingly smear any organization that works to register people to vote – organizations like ACORN.

But this, this is a whole new level of disgusting. One writer for the conservative rag The National Review, takes a stand publicly against the right of women to vote in America.

The National Review writer initially said “women lean hard to the left,” which isn’t necessarily true, and certainly isn’t a rationale for denying women the right to participate in democracy. So, Colmes pressed further. Faiz Shakir posted a transcript:

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this — if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.

COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

He added that the United States “got along like that for 130 years,” and added that the Civil Rights Act may also lack value because you “shouldn’t try to force people to be good.”

Just so we’re clear, a leading conservative writer at one of the premier conservative political outlets, argued publicly against a woman’s right to vote and against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Make no mistake where your side of the political spectrum stands, Republicans and conservatives – these people aren’t the center. They’re far far off the deep end, and far to the right.

[ National Review Writer Takes Stand Against Female Suffrage ]
Source: Alternet (courtesy of the Washington Monthly)

Regardless of how you might try to explain it, and how some people seem to think this is nothing serious and just another example of the black community getting riled up over what the privileged community perceives to be “nothing,” the whole “Magic Negro” controversy has some very important lessons to be learned, and they have little to do with the subject of the song or the people the song demeans and everything to do with the people who publicized the song and the people who seem willing to step up to its defense as “satire” and “humor.”

Some brilliant commentary about what this means for the Republican party from Dr. Wilmer J Leon III, writing at TruthOut:

Most people are “hypersensitive” to being insulted and demeaned. As it relates to African-Americans and the Republican Party, one only has to reflect upon recent history to understand their sensitivity. The Republican Party has a history of using race to create fear and galvanize its base. Examples include the Southern Strategy, Willie Horton, the attack on affirmative action, tying Harold Ford in Tennessee to relationships with white women, and the constant quoting of President-elect Obama’s middle name in a veiled attempt to make him appear a threat and un-American. With this history, one must ask, can the Republican Party ever become a party of inclusion?

As the Republican Party tries to reinvent itself and appeal to a broader cross-section of the electorate, it must come to grips with the reality that words without deeds ring hollow. The Republican Party lost control of the House, Senate and Executive Branch for a number of reasons. One of which is that over time, reality caught up with their rhetoric and the two were not consistent.

The right’s attack on the black community is more than well documented, historically and anecdotally. The transgressions continue today as white Americans seem to think it’s just hilarious to make claims that a wing of the White House will now be home to a KFC or that Watermelon will be planted over the Rose Garden or that grape soda sales will shoot through the roof now for some absurd reason. Apparently black people are loud in movie theatres as well, although that’s not something I’ve ever experienced – at least not to any extent that’s greater than white people or people of any other race or ethnicity. If this is what the right thinks is “humor,” and if their only definition of funny is something that’s subsequently demeaning, then they’re farther behind the rest of us than I could have possibly imagined.

There’s proof to this point, as the original song was distributed by the party leadership:

This past December, Republican National Committee chair candidate John “Chip” Saltsman distributed a CD to fellow party officials entitled “We Hate the USA.” One of the songs on the CD is entitled “Barack the Magic Negro.” It was written by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin and aired on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program.

The title of the song is based on a March 19, 2007, Los Angeles Times article entitled Obama the “Magic Negro,” written by David Ehrenstein. In the article, Ehrenstein makes the argument that then-Senator Obama lends himself to white America’s idealized standards of a less-than-real black man. According to Ehrenstein, “For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems; the more desirable he becomes.”

The song is a parody of Rev. Al Sharpton lamenting the fact that much of the national spotlight has shifted away from him and now shines brightly on President-elect Obama. The song (sung to “Puff the Magic Dragon”) opens with:

Barack the Magic Negro lives in D.C. The L.A. Times they called him that ’cause he’s not authentic like me … See, real black men like Snoop Dogg or me or Farrakhan; have talked-the-talk and walked-the-walk, not come in late and won.

This song is one of forty-one on the CD entitled “We Hate the USA.” Other titles include “Bank of Amigo;” “The Star-Spanglish Banner;” “Mister Tan Marine Man;” and “I am Woman.” At a time when the Republican Party is seeking to reinvent itself and expand its base, America is not well-served by such futile attempts at humor.

Sharpton’s arrogance and jealousy aside (with note that I wish he would simply step aside and let a new generation of leaders step up), his own ignorance and anger has turned into a weapon to be used against the very community he claims to serve (although in reality, it’s been clear for years that he serves no one but himself and his own interests). But the point here is the climate in the Republican party that brings them to so clearly “satire” the people they obviously hate: blacks, women, and hispanics.

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that while the Republicans were out front courting votes and approval from all of these groups during the campaign, they were -as they usually do- snickering and laughing and admonishing them in the background. If there’s any doubt that the party on the right is the party of hate, let it be quelled now.

[ The RNC and the "Magic Negro" ]
Source: TruthOut

While I don’t think David Rosen’s suggestions would really halt the culture wars (if anything, it might anger the far-right more), I definitely think his suggestions are solid and we should move towards them as soon as possible. When the conservatives took control of the Congress and the White House, they made every attempt possible to criminalize sex and sexuality and punish anyone who dared speak openly about it; there’s a lot of work required to undo the damage.

From safeguarding Roe v. Wade to ending abstinence-only sex education and getting religion out of our classrooms for good, Rosen’s ideas would bring us up to speed to a real, solid, fact-and-evidence based sexual policy and bring some sanity to the way America deals with sex and sexuality. Maybe then the rest of the world (excluding super-religious states like those in the Middle East, of course) will stop laughing at us for being essentially a nation whose sexual policy is descended from the Puritans who fled from Europe because they couldn’t deal with anyone who differed from them.

[ A New Sexual Agenda: 9 Ways to Halt the Right Wing Culture Wars and Bring Sanity to Sexual Policy ]
Source: CounterPunch