One thing the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 did was reveal just how far we have yet to go with bigotry in this country, whether it be of the racist, sexist or homophobic variety. It’s been an ugly, embarrassing mark on our history for generations, and recent statements from GOP candidates have proven that bigotry against anyone not old, straight, white and male is still very much alive and well, and shamefully – yet shamelessly – on display.
During the Republican primaries, the deep-seated animosity toward minorities of any kind, whether it be women, African-Americans, homosexuals, Muslims, Hispanics, young people, poor people, you name it, has been accepted rhetoric on the right because it plays well to their backward-thinking, poor-equals-evil, ageist, Bible-as-literal, white-supremacist base. It’s a dangerous game of painting fellow Americans as a threatening “other-kind” that’s not quite American, not quite patriotic enough and sucking the system dry.
Take, for example, a recent comment made by Republican candidate Newt Gingrich, a subtle dig aimed at the African-American community, which has been hit doubly hard by the recession and crippling unemployment:
“Now there’s no neighborhood I know of in America where, if you went around and asked people would you rather your children have food stamps or paychecks, you wouldn’t have a majority saying they’d rather have paychecks.”
Gingrich doubled down on his position when asked about that particular dog whistle, and made himself look like more of a jerk than when he started:
“And so I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention to talk about why the African-American community should demand pay checks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”
Of course, in Gingrich’s world, that means that the African-American community should pull itself up by the bootstraps and demand to be America’s janitorial service (read: slaves):
“It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.
“You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple model. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”
There are so many dog whistles in that statement: anti-union, ant-child labor regulation, anti-education, and blatantly racist.
Well, one brave citizen had the guts to call Gingrich out in New Hampshire. Yvan Lamothe, an African-American small business owner, laid it out pretty succinctly:
“My point is, about a week ago — some time ago — you mentioned that black people should be able to earn a paycheck, not be on welfare, implying that black people in general are on welfare,” said Lamothe. “And I really took exception to that because it demeans my accomplishments, my hard work, because I have worked all my life. I have never been on welfare. You know about history. You know that back in the 1930s, Hitler started talking in Germany about a Jewish problem. My question to you is, do you think that blacks represent an American problem, and if you don’t think that, will you stop using blacks in general as a stepping stone or a punching bag?“
Unfortunately, Gingrich isn’t the only GOPer reveling in this sort of douchebaggery. Rick Santorum, he of the googley, frothy mixture, had this to say:
“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”
He too was confronted by a rightfully angry African-American woman in New Hampshire, who took exception to his casting of African-Americans as America’s only free-loaders:
“Mr. Santorum, why do you have a problem against black people?” she asked. “We are the only ones who need aid?”
And just like earlier in the week, Santorum denied he said the statements that have caused him problems.
“I didn’t say that, I understand that,” he said.
The woman replied: “OK, then why’d you say that?”
Why did he say that? Because it scores him points with the GOP base, which has no time and no tolerance for the non-white, non-male, non-wealthy “other-kind”, and which is frothing at the mouth at the idea of America’s social safety net being jettisoned in favor of privatization, which will be a boom in profit to those the Republican Party serves.
But the African-American community isn’t the only one to be targeted by the GOP’s vitriol. The LGBT community has been a particular favorite of Santorum, who recently told children of gay people that they’d be better off having parents who are in prison:
For the second time in as many days, Rick Santorum waded into the issue of gay marriage, suggesting it was so important for children to have both a father and mother that an imprisoned father was preferable to a same-sex parent.
Citing the work of one anti-poverty expert, Santorum said, “He found that even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children’s lives.”
Allowing gays to marry and raise children, Santorum said, amounts to “robbing children of something they need, they deserve, they have a right to. You may rationalize that that isn’t true, but in your own life and in your own heart, you know it’s true.”
All of this – and many others too numerous to recount – is a glaring example of just how far the Republican Party has regressed, and how they want to drag the rest of the country along, kicking and screaming, on their path of devolution into a new Dark Age, filled with bigotry, discrimination and hatred.
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