McCain’s appearance at the NAACP convention Wednesday fits into his effort to reach out to groups that aren’t traditionally courted by Republican presidential candidates. Opportunity and education will be the theme of his remarks, according to Brian Rogers, a McCain campaign spokesman.
“Sen. McCain reaches out to all voters,” Rogers said. “It’s not just lip service. He actually goes, makes his case, not only to tell about his vision, but to hear from them.”
Yeah. Talk about a court battle waiting to happen. This, from the BBC:
An Italian court has ordered the government to pay 100,000 euros (£79,919) to a man who had to retake his driving test because he was gay.
Danilo Giuffrida, now 26, told doctors he was homosexual during a medical examination for military service.
The information was passed to the defence and transport ministries.
Mr Giuffrida was told to repeat his driving test or have his licence suspended because of his “sexual identity disturbance”.
Mr Giuffrida passed his test for the second time but his licence was renewed for just one year rather than the usual 10 years because of his homosexuality.
A court in Catania, Sicily, ordered the ministries to pay damages on the basis that Mr Giuffrida’s constitutional rights had been breached and that homosexuality could not be considered a “mental illness”.
The judge said the actions of the ministries showed “evident sexual discrimination”.
Mr Giuffrida welcomed the sentence as “a step forwards for civil rights.”
I don’t want to hear it. Do not send me any emails or comments telling me how sick I am, or how I speak ill of the dead. I’m just passing the message along.
In death, the sins of folks can be forgotten, white-washed and otherwise covered up. After days of hearing and reading nothing but praise about the late Helmes, I was interested in the article that was sent my way by Lisa Duggan of the Nation Magazine:
Did he plan it? Did he struggle on life support until after the midnight hour, timing his last breath? Or had he been dead for days, his associates keeping the body on ice for the holiday announcement? Jesse Helms, dead on the Fourth of July.
Helms would have appreciated the symbolism, confirming his own mythic identity as a Proud American, but Helms’s other legacy as a big fat bigot is well established. From his racist tirades on the radio and television in North Carolina during the 1950s and ’60s to his vicious homophobic rants of the 1980s and 90s, he left a highly quotable record of hate.
On the civil rights movement: “ ’Candy’ is hardly the word for either the topless swimsuit or the Civil Rights Bill. In our judgment, neither has a place in America–unless we have completely lost our sense of morality.”
“The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.”
On sexual politics and public health: “The government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.”
In death it’s easy to dismiss Jesse Helms as a colorful buffoon or a relic of the bad old days of segregation and sexism, but that doesn’t do Helms’s bigotry justice.
Jesse Helms was an important bigot. He didn’t just fume and huff. He used the language of cultural politics–called “morality” or “values” or just “freedom”–to shrink the state, reduce the social wage, enhance the interests of ruthless corporate profit mongering and promote US military interventions around the world. He’s the poster boy for how cultural politics works, not as an arena separated from the “real” political economy but as the site of the language and emotion through which people live politics and economics everyday.
A lone Oklahoma U.S. senator has finally dropped his inexplicable opposition to a congressional bill that would created a U.S. Justice Department “cold case unit” to investigate unsolved civil rights crimes.
With White House support, the U.S. House voted 422 to 2 in support in the proposed “Emmett Till Cold Case Bill” - named after the 15-year-old African-American youth from Chicago who was murdered in Money, Miss., in 1955 for whistling at a white woman.
The legislation would authorize $10 million per year over the next 10 years for the Justice Department to revive its crack cold-case unit to prosecute pre-1970 civil rights murders. Read more »
As a historian, I am painfully aware of how overused the term “historic” is. But what we are witnessing right now and throughout this presidential election year is the very definition of the word.
For all intents and purposes, Barack Obama has won the Democratic presidential nomination.
Consider the stunning symbolism of the following two chronological parallels:
Senator Obama will give his acceptance speech on August 28, the forty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Assuming he wins in November (which, with 81% of Americans believing the nation has “pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track” and Republican candidate John McCain wanting to keep going in that direction, is very likely), Obama will be inaugurated less than three weeks before Abraham Lincoln’s two-hundredth birthday.
The symbolism of the first major party African-American presidential nominee accepting his party’s endorsement on the day when King, four-and-a-half decades earlier, had called on the nation to fulfill its long-deferred ideals, and of the first African-American president being inaugurated less than a month before the nation celebrates the bicentennial of the “Great Emancipator” should be enough to bring tears to the eyes of even hardened political cynics.
But the deep historical significance of what is currently happening goes even farther.
Dr. Boyce Watkins is a genius, in case you didn’t know; the fact that Bill O’Reilly hates him so much should make this a no-brainer, but here’s another reason to jump on the Watkin’s train:
“I put together a list of suggested denunciations that can keep Senator Obama out of trouble in this campaign. He’s already denounced several black religious leaders and abandoned his church of the last 20 years, so he might as well get rid of anything else that might keep him from having a chance to receive complete validation from America. Black children should learn a lesson from all this: give up whatever you must in order to become successful. You are not quite good enough by being who you are, so disowning all threatening aspects of your culture is a necessity for “mainstream” acceptance.
Suggested denunciations for Senator Barack Obama:
Medgar Evers
Martin Luther King
Other Black rabble rousers
Fried Chicken and Soul Food (yes, this means grits and greens folks)
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Sable Verity
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. -Barack Obama
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.
~George Washington Carver
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.
~Frederick Douglass
Sable
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