By BJ Bjornson
It�s rare these days to find this much ignorance and bigotry all wrapped up together in one little package, well, broadcast publiclhy at least.
If we thought President Obama silenced all the birthers by releasing his long form birth certificate last year, think again. Apparently, some folks still have doubts and are taking it one step further: to court.
Tuesday, Gordon Warren Epperly filed a lawsuit in Alaska challenging President Obama's inclusion on the 2012 presidential ballot. What's Epperly's beef? Apparently, he feels Negroes and mulattoes can't be president because they aren't really citizens.
While this lawsuit, like all of the birther nonsense that has preceded it, will hopefully get laughed out of the court system, it is merely the most recent fringe example of what the �reasonable� opposition to Obama has been saying since he first came to power, Obama isn�t a �real� American.
They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn�t, he�s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he�s a Nazi, but on most others he�s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a �Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,� while the less adventurous say that he�s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.
Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.
Granted, some of these attacks would be leveled at any Democratic President (and, if the recent GOP campaign is any example, anyone with a more progressive worldview than Attila the Hun), but the virulence of the attacks on Obama speaks to something deeper than mere ideological differences, something the outright racism of Epperly�s lawsuit simply makes explicit.
Here's another pertinent link. Molly Ivins must be smiling down on Charles Pierce.
ReplyDelete...Old childhood plagues are making a comeback. It's also not promising, as the WaPo report points out, that pediatricians have started telling their anti-vaccination patients to go climb a tree.
This is a real-world consequence of our tendency to enable nonsense to the point that it actually has an effect on public policy. This is a real-world consequence of our current taste for non-science, or anti-science, to borrow a useful term from the history of Mother Church. This is the public-health face of climate-change denial, to name only the most obvious parallel. Create your own "science," sell it enthusiastically, get enough people to believe it so that the teenage bookers at cable news notice the dust you've kicked up, and you've got yourself a movement, regardless of what the people who actually know what they're talking about think.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/indiana-measles-outbreak-6863798
So first conservatives insisted that Americans must pass an ideological purity test in order to be card-carrying members of the Republican Party.
ReplyDeleteThen Franklin Graham declared that people must pass a religious conviction purity test to be accepted as a true Christians.
And now this clown -- apparently enamored with pre-WWII Germany's Aryan race philosophy -- is claiming that Americans must pass an ethnic purity test in order to be regarded as naturally born citizens.
Welcome to your new, improved Republican Party.