The South Fought to Keep Slavery, Period

By LEONARD PITTS JR.

"We went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery. Men fight from sentiment. After the fight is over they invent some fanciful theory on which they imagine that they fought.'' -- Confederate Col. John Mosby

Ten years ago, I received an e-mail from a reader who signed him or herself ``J.D.'' ``I am a white racist,'' wrote J.D., ``a white supremacist, and I do not deny it.''

From that, you'd suspect J.D. had nothing of value to say. You'd be mistaken. J.D. wrote in response to a column documenting the fact that preservation of slavery was the prime directive of the Southern Confederacy. ``I was most pleased to see you write what we both know to be the truth,'' the e-mail said. ``I never cease to be amazed at the Sons of Confederate Veterans and similar `heritage not hate' groups who are constantly whining that the Confederacy was not a white, racist government . . .''

That argument, noted J.D. with wry amusement, plays well with ``white people who want to be Confederates without any controversy.''

It was an astute observation, the truth of which was deftly illustrated recently by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. Seems he issued a proclamation declaring April Confederate History Month in the Commonwealth. Said proclamation contained not the barest mention that the Confederacy went to war to preserve slavery, an omission that got the governor pilloried in the court of public opinion.

So McDonnell apologized and tried again, inserting into his proclamation a paragraph observing that this Confederacy we are invited to commemorate was built upon an ``evil'' and ``inhumane'' practice. That little bit of cognitive dissonance neatly accomplished, the proclamation was duly reissued.

But there's still a flaw in it. Namely in a line that speaks of how ``the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America.'' See, no one asked half a million of ``the people of Virginia'' about joining any Confederacy. As they were owned by their fellow citizens, they had no say in the matter.

And so it goes in the ongoing effort by apologists for the Confederacy to convince the rest of us that an act of high treason committed in the name of preserving human bondage somehow deserves honor and respect. It's a case that cannot be made on its own dubious merits, so they are obliged to pretend the cause wasn't what it was, to write slaves and slavery out of the story.

McDonnell is hardly the first. Indeed, the practice is nearly as old as the Civil War itself. Confederate ``President'' Jefferson Davis once flatly cited ``the labor of African slaves'' as the cause of the rebellion. After the war, with that cause repudiated, he wrote, ``slavery was in no wise the cause of the conflict.'' It's a straight line from Davis' amnesia to McDonnell's omission.

The governor seeks to render the Confederacy harmless, to be a Confederate without controversy. He seeks to validate the vestigial southern impulse which insists, contrary to logic, that the tragic suffering and incontestable bravery of Confederate forebears must somehow redeem the awful cause for which they fought. But the simple truth is, they do not. Nor can they until or unless we agree to murder memory, to kill recollection of our greatest national trauma, to enter into a conspiracy of romantic lies.

Confederate hero John Mosby, quoted above, understood this. Even J.D., the unrepentant racist, did.

It is past time the entire remnant of the Confederacy, all its apologists and battle flag fetishists, understood it, too. The alternative is to continue insisting upon sophistry as truth, and to periodically embarrass themselves and mystify the rest of us with their stubborn fealty to the stinking corpse of a long lost cause. It is to learn for the umpteen-millionth time what the governor was just taught.

Memory dies hard.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/14/1578171/the-south-fought-to-keep-slavery.html#ixzz0l63Slkk1

An Evil with Many Masters

An evil with many masters
By LEONARD PITTS JR.

A few words about Christian terrorism.

And I suppose the first words should be about those words: ``Christian terrorism.'' The term will seem jarring to those who've grown comfortable regarding terrorism as something exclusive to Islam.

That this is a self-deluding fallacy should have long since been apparent to anyone who's been paying attention. From Eric Rudolph's bombing of the Atlanta Olympics, a gay nightclub and two abortion clinics to the so-called Phineas Priests who bombed banks, a newspaper and a Planned Parenthood office in Spokane, from Matt Hale soliciting the murder of a federal judge in Chicago to Scott Roeder's assassination of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, from brothers Matthew and Tyler Williams murdering a gay couple near Redding, Calif., to Timothy McVeigh destroying a federal building and 168 lives in Oklahoma City, we have seen no shortage of ``Christians'' who believe Jesus requires -- or at least allows -- them to commit murder.

If federal officials are correct, we now have one more name to add to the dishonor roll. That name would be Hutaree, a self-styled Christian militia in Michigan, nine members of which have been arrested and accused of plotting to kill police officers in hopes of sparking an anti-government uprising.

Many of us would doubtless resist referring to plots like this as Christian terrorism, feeling it unfair to tar the great body of Christendom with the actions of its fringe radicals. And here, we will pause for Muslim readers to loudly clear their throats.

While they do, let the rest of us note that there is a larger moral to this story, and it has less to do with terminologies than similarities.

We are conditioned to think of terror wrought by Islamic fundamentalists as something strange and alien and other. It is the violence of men with long beards who jabber in weird languages and kill for mysterious reasons while worshipping God in ways that seem outlandish to middle-American sensibilities. And whatever quirk of nature or deficiency of humanity it is that allows them to do what they do, is, we think, unique. There is, we are pleased to believe, a hard, immutable line between us and Them.

Then you consider Hutaree and its alleged plan to kill in the name of God, and the idea of some innate, saving difference between us and those bearded others in other places begins to feel like a fiction we conjured to help us sleep at night.

``Preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive,'' it says on Hutaree's website. And you wonder: Who is this Jesus they worship and in what Bible is he found? Why does he bear so little resemblance to the Jesus others find in their Bibles, the one who said that if someone hits you on your right cheek, offer him your left, the one who said if someone forces you to go one mile with him, go two, the one who said love your enemies.

Why does their Jesus need the help of men in camo fatigues with guns and bombs? In this, he is much like the Allah for whom certain Muslims blow up marketplaces and crowded buses. Muslim and American terrorists, it seems, both apparently serve a puny and impotent God who can't do anything without their help.

Sometimes, I think the only things that keep us from becoming, say, Afghanistan, are a strong central government and a diverse population with a robust tradition of free speech. The idea that there is something more is a conceit that blows apart like confetti every time there is, as there is now, a sense of cultural dislocation and economic uncertainty. That combination unfailingly moves people out to the fringes where they seek out scapegoats and embrace that feeble God. And watching, you can't help but realize the troubling truth about that line between ``us'' and ``Them.''

It's thinner than you think.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/07/1566736/an-evil-with-many-masters.html#ixzz0l62KRcOS

Challenge to GOP: Condemn the violence

By LEONARD PITTS

Hi, boys and girls! As a public service, I've prepared the following statement for Republican leaders to use when some disgruntled opponent of health care reform injures somebody -- or worse. Given recent reports of threats against Democratic lawmakers in the wake of last week's historic vote, that moment has come to feel inevitable.

When it happens, don't you want your favorite GOP lawmaker to be ready? You can ensure that he or she is simply by clipping this statement and mailing it to them. That way, when the time comes, all your lawmaker will have to do is circle the appropriate choices and fill in the blank!

***

``We condemn, in the strongest terms, the recent bombing/stabbing/beating/shooting that wounded/killed Senator/Representative/President __________________. There is no place in our democracy for that kind of thing and our party stands foursquare against those who would bring violence into political debate. We extend our best wishes/heartfelt condolences and join with other Americans in hoping the perpetrators of this heinous act will be swiftly caught and punished.

``At the same time, we must also reject the suggestion, made by some, that our behavior over the course of this long debate on healthcare somehow set the scene for this tragic incident which, as we have already said, we condemn.

``Some have contended that -- through incidents like Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst where he called the president a liar during a joint session of Congress, and the one where members of our party cheered hecklers in the public gallery during last week's debate and that thing where Rep. Randy Neugebauer yelled `baby killer!' and that comment by Rep. John Boehner that Rep. Steve Driehaus `may be a dead man' because of his vote -- we have contributed to a coarsening of political discourse that made this tragedy entirely predictable. This tragedy that we, of course, strongly, strongly condemn.

``Some have gone so far as to suggest that the tea party patriots who have led the charge against the socialistic/communistic/tyrannical/satanichealthcare bill are themselves a graver threat to the nation than the legislation they oppose. The tea partiers have been characterized as dangerous and intolerant extremists by people who have read their signs and listened to their rhetoric.

``We object to this slander of these concerned Americans. Just because at least ten representatives have reported death threats since the bill was passed and Rep. Dennis Cardoza says he's been physically threatened, and vandals broke the door of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's office, and bricks have been thrown through the windows of other representatives' offices and just because a tea party leader posted what he thought was Rep. Thomas Perriello's home phone number and address with an invitation for tea party members to `drop by,' and just because the information was actually for Perriello's brother, Bo, who has four children at home, none older than eight, and just because somebody cut a gas line at that house, and just because police and the FBI are taking all these threats seriously and now there's this latest bombing/stabbing/beating/

shooting (that we strongly condemn), is no reason to cast aspersions upon the entire tea party movement.

``By attempting to focus the nation's attention on all these isolated incidents, leftwing Democrats and their allies in the media seek to divert us from what should be the real story here. Namely, the fact that we in the Republican Party are working nonstop to repeal this monstrous/disgusting/demonic/diabolical bill. To that end, we are pursuing all available legal challenges and procedural options.

``We are also inventing a time machine.

``As this important work goes on, we are proud to have the able assistance of the patriotic Americans in the tea party movement. Some have suggested that the Republican party, the party of Reagan and Lincoln, should be ashamed of its close affiliation with these patriots.

``We reject that idea. Indeed, if our critics know nothing else about us after this long and rancorous debate, they should know this:

``We have no shame.''



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/27/1550273/challenge-to-gop-condemn-the-violence.html#ixzz0jsQnnScV

Tea Party Demonstrates Hate

Tea partiers proved that I was right


Tea partiers vow revenge over health overhaul
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com
So it turns out that, contrary to what I argued in this space a few weeks back, racism is not ``a major component'' of the so-called tea party movement. I am informed of this by dozens of tea party activists indignant and insulted that I would even suggest such a thing.

In other news tea party protesters called John Lewis a ``nigger'' the other day in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol.

For the record, Lewis wasn't their only target.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver was spat upon.

Rep. Barney Frank, who is gay, was called ``faggot.''

But it is Lewis' involvement that gives the Saturday incident its bittersweet resonance. The 70-year-old representative from Georgia is, after all, among the last living icons of the Civil Rights Movement. Or, as Lewis himself put it, ``I've faced this before.''

Indeed. He faced it in Nashville in 1960 when he was locked inside a whites-only fast-food restaurant and gassed by a fumigation machine for ordering a hamburger.

He faced it in Birmingham in 1961 when a group of Freedom Riders was attacked and he was knocked unconscious for riding a Greyhound bus.

Most famously, he faced it on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma 45 years ago this month when his skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers who charged a group of demonstrators seeking their right to vote.

In the very arc of his life, Lewis provides a yardstick for measuring American progress. The fact that he rose from that bridge to become a member of Congress says something about this country. But the fact that people demonstrating against healthcare reform chose to chant at him, ``Kill the bill, nigger!'' well, that says something, too.

Which is why tea party leaders have spent much of the last few days spinning the incident, deflecting renewed suggestions that their stated fears -- socialism, communism, liberalism -- are just proxies for the one fear most of them no longer dare speak. Some even faxed the McClatchy news bureau in Washington to suggest, without offering a shred of evidence, that the episode was sparked by Democratic plants within the crowd.

Amy Kremer, coordinator of the Tea Party Express, went on Fox News to dismiss what she called an ``isolated'' incident. Your first instinct may be to cede the benefit of the doubt on that one. It seems unfair to tar nine reasonable people with the hateful behavior of one lunatic.

But ask yourself: When is the last time organizers of protests on other hot-button issues -- say, abortion rights or globalization -- had to apologize for ``isolated incidents'' like these?

Moreover, given how often tea party leaders have been forced to disavow hateful signs and slogans and even the presence of organized white supremacist groups in their midst, is it really fair to use the word ``isolated''?

Is there not a rottenness here? And is not the unwillingness to call that rottenness by name part and parcel of the reason it endures?

No, my argument is emphatically not that every American who opposes healthcare reform is a closet Klansman. Certainly, people can have earnest and honest disagreements about that.

But by the same token, as these ``isolated'' incidents mount, as the venom and the vitriol increase to the point where even proxy words no longer suffice, it insults intelligence to deny that race is in the mix.

Not that the denial surprises.

Often we tell ourselves lies to spare ourselves truths. Had you asked them, the people who locked John Lewis inside that restaurant, the ones who mauled him at that bus station and smashed him down on that bridge, would not have said they acted from a rottenness within.

No, like the ones who called him ``nigger'' half a century later, they would have told you they were good people fighting for principle, trying to save this country from the liberals, the socialists and the communists.

They would not have said they were racists. Racists never do.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/24/1544302/tea-partiers-proved-that-i-was.html#ixzz0j7cWHk89

And Now, Once Again, for Your Reading Pleasure, I Present the Man who Reads my Mind

The fierce urgency of now: justice
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com
`B lessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.'' -- Matthew 5:6

Ultimately, I suppose, what we're talking about is a clash between the sweet by and by and the fierce urgency of now.

The former is the refrain from a venerable gospel song that meditates on the bliss of life after life. The latter is a phrase from Martin Luther King's ``I Have A Dream,'' a passionate demand for justice, equality, and freedom, now.

Into the tension between these two disparate views of Christian mission stumbles one Glenn Beck. The Fox News showman recently ignited an uproar in the world of Christian ministry by attacking churches that preach a gospel of social and economic justice, i.e., a gospel that doesn't just promise relief in the sweet by and by, but seeks to effect change in the hard here and now. If your church preaches that, Beck told his radio audience, ``run as fast as you can.'' Social and economic justice, he said, are ``code words'' for communism and Nazism.

In response, the Rev. Jim Wallis, a preacher of the social gospel and president and CEO of the liberal religious activist group Sojourners, suggested on his blog that what Christians should run from is Beck himself. Beck, he wrote, attacks the very heart of their faith.

``When I was in seminary,'' he says, ``we made a study of the Bible and we found 2,000 verses in the Bible about the poor, about God's concern for the left out, left behind, the vulnerable and God's call for justice. If I were ever to talk to Glenn Beck, I would hand him that old Bible from seminary where we cut out of the Bible every single reference to the poor, to social justice, to economic justice, and when we were done, the Bible was just in shreds. And I would hand it to him and put a sticker on front and say, `This is the Glenn Beck Bible.'''

I ran Beck's comments by two other preachers of my acquaintance, and they seconded Wallis. But Beck, says the Rev. R. Joaquin Willis of Miami's Church of the Open Door, is not alone. Many others, he said, ``would like to see many of us as pastors just come to church and deal with the spiritual needs of the people and not address those difficult day-to-day issues that make life so hard.''

Beck, adds Willis, ``speaks from the perspective of the entitled and the relatively well off and they don't see a need for social improvement. Anybody that's trying to improve the society is a communist to him.''

``It's hard,'' says Rev. Tony Lee of Community of Hope in Temple Hills, Md., ``for a church to sit and talk to somebody about how to change their lives and how to turn things around when the institutions around that person are broken. It's hard for me to talk to young people about how God can make a way and how they can move forward and be all they can be through God -- but their educational system is in pieces. What Glenn Beck is saying is, `Don't have a role in the shaping of the educational system.'''

For the record, Martin Luther King preached a social gospel. Even the preachers in the anti-abortion movement preach a social gospel.

And the idea that such people are enemies of the state is as visceral a reminder as you're likely to get of the paranoia and intellectual discontinuity that afflicts extremist conservatism. Fifty years ago, they saw communists behind every movie marquee and schoolhouse door. Now, Beck sees them in pulpits, too.

And I suppose the way not to be a communist in his eyes is to embrace a gospel that promises uplift in the sweet by and by -- and only then. But that's a lazy, complacent gospel, a gospel of self-satisfaction and I got mine, of egocentricity and look out for number one -- and it doesn't square with the gospel of feed my sheep and love your neighbor as yourself.

He thinks we should flee the church that preaches social and economic justice? I think you should flee the one that does not.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/21/1539820/the-fierce-urgency-of-now-justice.html#ixzz0j6UMCrJI

They can't say what we can't accept By LEONARD PITTS JR.

Three little words.

That's what keeps bringing us back to this intersection of low comedy and pathos. Three words, none longer than three letters -- and yet, some of us still find them nearly impossible to say.

Three words: I am gay.

If he'd been able to say those words, who knows what Roy Ashburn might be today? But we already know what his inability has made him: an object of ridicule.

Ashburn is a Republican state senator in California. He has always been rather reliably anti-gay in his law making, voting against virtually every gay-friendly piece of legislation from marriage equality to a simple motion to set aside a day in honor of Harvey Milk, a gay political icon who was assassinated in 1978.

So naturally, we're all shocked -- shocked, I tell you, shocked! -- to learn that Ashburn himself is gay. This revelation came after he was arrested for drunk driving early this month. Turns out he'd done his drinking at a gay bar.

``I am gay,'' he told a conservative radio host. As for his anti-gay record? He said he was just following the wishes of the people he served.

Because who wants a leader who thinks for himself?

Then there's Eric Massa, a now-former Democratic representative from New York. He stands accused of sexual harassment by a number of his male staffers who claim he groped them. It has since come to light that he faced similar accusations two decades ago when he was in the Navy.

Massa who, according to The Washington Post, shares a townhouse with several unmarried male staffers, still declines to speak the three little words, but he confirmed the latest charges in a bizarre interview with Glenn Beck on Fox News. He also tried to portray it as non-sexual. ``Not only did I grope [a male staffer], I tickled him until he couldn't breathe, and then four guys jumped on top of me. It was my 50th birthday.''

Oh. Well, that explains it, right? When we turn 50, all us manly men like nothing better than to jump atop one another and tickle ourselves silly. Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Alan Greenspan . . . all the manly men do it.

Sorry. As I said, low comedy. And pathos.

Because for all the laughter these men evoke with their lies to self and tortured rationalizations to us, I find I have also, hidden in the breath between ha and ha, a certain bittersweet pity. There's just something ineffably pathetic in the inability of these middle-aged men, in the Year Of Our Lord 2010, post-Will & Grace, post Ellen DeGeneres, post-Barney Frank, Elton John, Meredith Baxter and Neil Patrick Harris, to simply stand up and say those three simple words.

Perhaps that sounds judgmental. Perhaps it is.

But if so, it is a judgment fueled by the cowardice and mendacity of those who lack the courage to be what they are, by anger at the hypocrisy of a Roy Ashburn willing to sell out his own for 40 shekels of political approval from those who would hate him if they only knew, and, ultimately, by the realization that we have been at this intersection too many times before.

So you have to wonder: how many Massas and Ashburns, how many James Wests, Ted Haggards, Mark Foleys and Larry Craigs do we have to see, how many shocked spouses and embarrassed children do we have to endure, how many lies, alibis and justifications do we need to hear, before we accept the obvious: Gay is not a choice, gay is not a sin, gay is not a shame.

Gay simply is.

And their inability to say ``I am gay,'' doesn't just speak poorly of gays and lesbians.

Because if what we see here at the intersection of low comedy and pathos indicts certain of them for cowardice and mendacity, you could argue that it indicts the rest of us for much the same thing.

After all, their inability to say what they are only reflects our inability to accept it.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/17/1532939/they-cant-say-what-we-cant-accept.html#ixzz0idooyzpX

Breeding Contempt for The Poor

By LEONARD PITTS JR.
Miami Herald
Feb. 1, 2010, 7:19PM
If he'd said it of Jews, he would still be apologizing.
If he'd said it of blacks, he'd be on BET, begging absolution.
If he'd said it of women, the National Organization for Women would have his carcass turning slowly on a spit over an open flame.
But he said it of the poor, so he got away with it.
“He” is South Carolina Lt. Gov. André Bauer, running for governor on the GOP ticket. Speaking of those who receive public assistance, he recently told an audience, “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better.”
You read that right. The would-be governor of one of the poorest states there is likens the poor to stray animals.
And though it drew some newspaper notice, a riposte from The Daily Show and rebukes from Bauer's opponents, it never quite rose to the level of national controversy, as it would've had Bauer compared, say, women or Jews to the dogs one feeds at one's back door. The relative silence stands as eloquent testimony to the powerlessness and invisibility of the American poor.
One is reminded how earnestly shocked news media were at the poverty they saw five years ago when New Orleans drowned. “Why didn't they get out?” observers kept asking — as if everyone has a car in the driveway and a wallet full of plastic.
The poor fare little better on television. The Evanses of Good Times and the Conners from Roseanne aside, television has been heavily weighted toward fresh-scrubbed middle- and upper-class families for 60 years.
Politicians? They'll elbow one another aside to pledge allegiance to the middle class; they are conspicuously less eager to align with those still trying to reach that level.
Who, then, speaks for the poor? Who raises a voice when they are scapegoated and marginalized? Who cries out when they are abused by police and failed by schools? Who takes a stand when they are exploited by employers and turned away by hospitals?
As near as I can tell, no one does.
Unfortunately, poor people have never learned to think of and conduct themselves as a voting bloc; historically, they have proved too readily divisible, usually by race. As Martin Luther King once observed: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the ‘poor' white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.”
It takes some helluva psychology to get two men stuck in the same leaking boat to fight each other. You'd think their priority would be to come together, if only long enough to bail water. But the moneyed interests in this country have somehow been able to con the poor into doing just that, fighting tooth and nail when they ought to be standing shoulder to shoulder.
One hopes André Bauer's words will provide a wake-up call — in South Carolina and elsewhere — for people who have been down too long and fooled too often, that it will encourage them to organize their votes, raise their voices, push their issues into the public discourse. In America, one is invisible and powerless only so long as one chooses to be.
And the Bauers of this world need to know: Sometimes stray animals bite.