The GOP has sold it soul to right wing Christian fundamentalists. They are no longer the party of small government. They are the party of opposition to civil rights.
The Civil Rights Act was put forward by JFK, a liberal.
If you're not a left-wing atheist who thinks Christians should be banned from all participation in political activity, you've "sold your soul" to the fundamentalists. It's amazing how the alleged "champions of tolerance" still remain so goddamned intolerant. All they did was change which mob of bigots they fronted for.
When the Democrats react to government debts and deficits with calls for spending cuts rather than calls for tax increases FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A CENTURY, you MIGHT have the credibility to criticize the GOP for not being the party of small government. In the meantime . . . pot, meet kettle. Hypocrite, meet the mirror.
The GOP is the party of opposition to civil rights, are they? So why is it that they 1) were formed specifically for the purpose of opposing slavery, 2) elected the President who actually ended slavery in America, 3) passed the 13th Amendment, granting slaves their freedom, 4) passed the 14th Amendment, granting freed slaves citizenship, 5) passed the 15th Amendment, giving former slaves the right to vote, 6) sent troops into the post-Civil War South to actually enforce those rights against the opposition from Democrats, 7) passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (I know you liberals like to call the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "The Civil Rights Act" as though there only ever was one, but it's not true), 8) passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, 8) signed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 into law via the Republican President, Ulysses S. Grant, 9) proposed a bill to protect black voters in 1890, antilynching bills in 1922, 1935, and 1938, and anti-poll tax bills in 1942, 1944, and 1946, all of which were blocked by Democrats, 10) denounced Democrat President Woodrow Wilson's institutional segregation of the federal government, 11) officially endorsed the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 in their 1956 party platform (the Democrats did not), 12) desegregated the military in 1948 under Eisenhower's administration, 13) put blacks in prominent positions of Eisenhower's administration, 14) promoted and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which was subsequently gutted by Lyndon Johnson, 15) created the US Civil Rights Commission under Eisenhower's administration, which prompted the Democrats to stage the longest filibuster in history, 16) passed the 1960 Civil Rights Act, on which every single vote against came from a Democrat, including George McGovern, who later was chosen as the Presidential candidate for the Democrat Party, 17) supported and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with huge majorities, although it's noticeable that when the Democrats started jumping on the bandwagon with THIS bill, it suddenly started including provisions that were arguably Unconstitutional, 18) ran as its Presidential candidate in 1964 the man who helped found the Arizona chapter of the NAACP, desegregated the Arizona National Guard while he was head of it, helped end segregation in Arizona schools, and personally decided to desegregate his privately-owned family business, 19) desegregated schools in the Nixon administration to such an extent that his first term can claim more school desegregation statistically than any other historical period, going from 68% of black students attending all-black schools to 18.4% in just two years, 20) instituted Nixon's "Philadelphia Plan", the first government affirmative action program, which imposed racial quotas and timelines in hiring in the building trades, (admittedly, conservatives don't like racial quotas, but the point remains that it was a Republican President who was trying to undo the racial discrimination in construction unions), 21) defeated Orval Faubus, a lifelong Democrat and segregationist, for governor in a state with only 11% registered Republicans (Arkansas), primarily by running on a platform of integration, 22) immediately desegregated Arkansas's schools and draft boards upon beating Faubus (by the way, did you know that Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, invited Faubus to his gubernatorial inauguration?).
What's the Democrat track record on modern civil rights? Jumping on the bandwagon in 1964 (primarily because too many black people were voting for them to win), turning it into just another racket to gain power and undermine the Constitution, and spending the next 40-50 years inflaming racial hatreds and divisions so they could extend a war that had already been won to crazy-ass ideas that no one had ever viewed as "civil rights" before in the history of the world?
Time to put up or shut up.
I don't think Christians should be banned from politics. I think they should run openly, not as "stealth candidates". Truth is, the GOP is PWNED by Christian fundamentalists.
The GOP of Lincoln's time no longer exists.
BTW you ought to put in links. You're quoting a source other than yourself.
The Democrats in my lifetime who are civil rights activists include Jesse Jackson, RFK, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy etc.
Southern Democrats opposed civil rights, like Strom Thurmond, (who became a Republican).
"Stealth candidates". Does that mean daring to discuss any topic OTHER than religion during their campaigns? Acting as though there's more to their political positions than their religious beliefs, or any issue that the left can claim is based on their religious beliefs? What, precisely, makes a Christian candidate a "stealth candidate", and please provide examples?
Shockingly, not all information in the world comes from Internet sites. It's a little hard to "put up links" to books. Since the information you are so assiduously avoiding addressing comes from a variety of books in my possession, and since I am not directly quoting any of them, there is no need to cite them. Every single thing I've said is true, and easily verifiable from any number of sources. If you can prove any of them false, feel free to do so. Otherwise, don't waste my time trying to divert attention to specious claims of plagiarism.
Strom Thurmond is the ONLY segregationist Democrat who ever switched parties, and he did it EIGHTEEN YEARS after running for President on a segregation platform.
Let's talk about your list of Democrat civil rights activists, shall we? (Unlike you, I'm fully prepared to discuss my opponents' points in depth, rather than blowing them off with a vague statement of "The GOP of Lincoln's time doesn't exist". It's the sign of a strong position based on reality.)
Jesse Jackson - Arguably the most famous single utterance by this "great liberal champion of racial equality" is this: "That's all Hymie wants to talk about, is Israel; every time you go to Hymietown, that's all they want to talk about." In 2001, he verbally attacked and his son, Jonathan, physically assaulted a black minister, Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, simply for asking a Toyota executive, in a public forum, whether he was required to go through Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in order to participate in Toyota's "diversity program". Toyota launched the diversity program in question after Jackson threatened a boycott of them in response to an advertisement that he deemed "racist". Toyota is far from the only corporation to fall victim to Jackson's shakedown techniques, in which he publicly attacks and threatens the companies, then refers members of his Rainbow/PUSH Trade Bureau to those companies to set up lucrative contracts to administer "diversity programs" to repair the damage Jackson himself has done to their public image. Other targets include Texaco, Coca-Cola, Ford, and Anheuser-Busch.
It is clear to anyone who cares to look objectively that Jackson's only interest in "championing civil rights" is to cynically and ruthlessly use it as a tool to enrich and aggrandize himself.
Robert Francis Kennedy - So far as I can tell, this Kennedy's biggest claim to fame as a "civil rights activist" was to talk a good game. He gets a lot of credit for "pushing desegregation initiatives", but it's noticeable that very little actual, effective desegregation took place during the Kennedy administration. That, as I commented before, was left to the Nixon administration to accomplish.
Oh, one other claim to fame: he authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't liberals scream and caterwaul incessantly in the recent past about how wiretaps were a violation of civil rights?
John Fitzgerald Kennedy - Also talked a good game, but really did very little of consequence on the subject. It is interesting to note that in the 1964 Civil Rights Act - the only one the Democrats even pretended to support, and that only because too many blacks were voting by that time - Kennedy wanted federal funds withholding for programs practicing discrimination to be discretionary, rather than mandatory, as Goldwater insisted.
Kennedy has been lavishly praised for decades because he made a two-minute phone call to Coretta Scott King while her husband was imprisoned in Georgia. His campaign printed up and distributed pamphlets about it entitled
"No Comment" Nixon Versus a Candidate With a Heart, Senator Kennedy. Never mind the fact that it was a lame symbolic gesture that did nothing of substance for civil rights. The fact was that Kennedy only made the call after his advisers pressured him into it. But we've been hearing about it ever since.
While it's true that Kennedy didn't have a whole lot of time to do much while President, what with being assassinated and all, it is possible to glean much about his attitude concerning civil rights from his Senate record (which most liberals curiously pretend doesn't exist). When the Civil Rights Act of 1957 came up for vote, Kennedy voted against it. Indeed, it wasn't until he ran for President that he suddenly "converted" to a civil rights champion, and then almost exclusively by way of symbolic gestures that did nothing, such as speeches and his vaunted phone call.
The truth is that the single biggest thing JFK ever did to make himself a "champion of civil rights" was to be assassinated in office, so that the grief of a nation and an unwillingness to speak ill of the dead would prevent anyone from challenging the rewriting of his legacy.
Lyndon Baines Johnson -
You are making it way too easy with this one. During the deliberation on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, then-Senator Lyndon Johnson warned his fellow segregationist Democrats - and I quote - "Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again." Johnson was instrumental in destroying the enforcement provisions written into that act, ensuring that anyone actually accused of violating a person's voting rights would be able to avoid conviction through jury nullification.
While in Congress, Johnson voted consistently against anti-lynching bills, anti-poll tax legislation, and withholding of federal funding for segregated schools.
It is no accident that Johnson, widely viewed as one the most unprincipled opportunists in modern American political history, only supported civil rights when it was either meaningless and/or allowed him to pander for votes. It's also not an accident that every time he made one of his meaningless gestures to the black community prior to his Presidency, he immediately ran out and sucked up to the white racist contingent. For example, he reluctantly signed on to support for the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision, but promptly explained it by saying that racial tensions were making the South unattractive to investors.
Lyndon Baines Johnson is the poster child for what I've been saying about Democrats and civil rights all along: they only jumped on the bandwagon after blacks began voting in large enough numbers to interefere with their elections.
Jimmy Carter - You have GOT to be kidding. He establishes Martin Luther King Day as a holiday in Georgia while governor there, and now he's a major civil rights activist?! Talk about being king of the empty, meaningless gesture.
Would it shock you to know that conservatives consider talk to be cheap, and not at all the same as actions?
Edward "Ted" Kennedy - Ahh, the modern-day champions of "black people are pitiful dependents who can't achieve anything on their own." I fully realize that you hail this Kennedy as a "civil rights activist" on the basis of his unrelenting desire to give taxpayer handouts which transformed much the black community into a perpetual underclass with 70% illegitimate birth rates and violent crime as the number one cause of death among young black men, but that just proves what I've been saying about you and other liberals all along, doesn't it? Conservatives fight civil rights battles that free blacks from slavery and ensure their citizenship; liberals fight civil rights battles that re-enslave blacks to the federal welfare system and race-baiting hustlers.
While I realize that you are no more going to read this post than you did the last one, let alone respond to any of the points in it, it was still worth the excessive amount of time this took to compose, since your immediate avoidance of anything with substance just underlines which side has the facts and which one doesn't.
