Answer to Leftist Demagogues Re: Civil Rights Act
May 21, 2010
The radical Left often attacks folks, who hold honorable libertarian or
constitutionalist views, via the 1964 Civil Rights act.
I am so disgusted seeing these
decent people caught flat-footed, stammering out
incomprehensible strings of verbiage; half apologetic, half intellectual
claptrap, in the face of this moral trap laid by these immoral swine.
The trap manifests in the form of a question something like this:
"Would you have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the basis of its
constitutionality?"
The implication is that the victim of this tactic would hide behind the
Constitution to advance segregation and slavery; that he is a closet racist. The
amazing thing is that the party and ideology to which the questioner owes his
allegiance is the one that actually used that tactic to continue Jim Crow and
segregation!
It was the Democrat Ku Klux Klan that enforced segregation and the oppression of
blacks in the aftermath of the Civil War. It was such notable Democrats as
Alabama governor George Wallace who blocked the schoolhouse door after the Brown
decision in 1963, and Democrat Georgia governor, Lester Maddox who refused
blacks entrance to his restaurant after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and
Democrat Bull Connor with his dogs and fire hoses, and KKK Democrat Robert Byrd
who waged a 14 hour filibuster against the 1964 act on constitutional grounds.
But, the shameless hypocrisy of the Left is nothing new. Let's get back to the
rational argument for passage of the act then, and for its repeal today.
In the history of our constitutional republic it has occasionally been necessary
to abrogate constitutional constraints in an emergency situation. As has been so
eloquently expressed, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact". Lincoln
suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War. FDR rounded up and incarcerated
American citizens in WWII. Congress tread close to the line in the enactment of
the Patriot Act in the face of the Islamo-Nazi enemy that reared its kufiyaed
head on 9/11. These are only the more notorious examples, from the many, where
constitutional limits and restraints have been put aside in dire straits.
Habeas Corpus was restored after the Civil War. The Japanese were released after
World War Two. And, when the Muslim has been driven back to the sandy shitholes
from which he crawled, we can relax our vigilance against that threat too.
By 1964, the issue of segregation had become an intolerable threat to the
survival of our nation. It had been 100 years since the Civil War and the
Emancipation Proclamation. Through all those years, 3 constitutional amendments,
and countless laws and court rulings, the loathsome notion that a race of people
were not endowed with the same rights and privileges as another race remained in
force, in law and practice, wherever the Democrat Party held sway.
In the vanquished South members of the black race continued to be relegated to
non-person status by poll taxes, literacy tests, segregation, beatings,
intimidation, Jim Crow laws and, when a stubborn black might resist, or a white
Republican might advocate on his behalf, through lynching, carried out by the
Democrat KKK.
Despite a tireless, valiant effort, over a hundred years of struggle, the
oppression of the black race remained enshrined in law.
A nation that practiced such immoral evil was doomed and, in 1964, that doom had
finally become visible on the horizon. The only remedy that remained to save the
nation from disintegration was to enact laws that would allow for the arrest and
incarceration of the backward, racial miscreants, and their enablers in the
Democrat Party, who refused to recognize the black race as fellow human beings.
There were constitutional concerns raised when we debated criminalizing the
ability of a person to select the clientele of his private business in the
public accommodations clause of the act. There were also constitutional concerns
regarding states' rights and those concerns were also valid and worthy of
debate.
But, those who argued against these constitutional constraints were, in this
case, correct.
This was an existential national emergency.
So, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed; necessarily and righteously so,
constitutional flaws and all.
However, its time has long passed and its repeal is overdue.
Does anyone believe that a nation that has elected a black president would leap
upon the opportunity to
restore slavery and segregation as soon as the law that banned these
practices so long ago was repealed? Such things are as antiquated and improbable in modern western
civilizations as is bleeding and witch burning.
There might be a few businesses that would exclude people based on race or other
factors, but those establishments would be ridiculed, shunned and boycotted
through the effective, tried and true mechanisms of the civil society. We
have speech today that is just as vile as would be the practice of racial
exclusion, but we allow it, and we ridicule it, shun it and boycott it. This is
part of the animating contest of freedom. The damage done by these few cases, if
not totally visited upon the miscreants themselves, would be
mitigated by the freedom enjoyed by all and would be revelatory of the
evil that would hide among us.
The institutionalized segregation that was addressed by the 1964 act is long
gone, never to return. Even if you desired to bring those days back, how would you even make the determination who is black
and who is not after all these decades of inter-marrying and immigration from
dark-skinned nations like India and the middle East?
It's ridiculous to contemplate this nation going back to Jim Crow, and any
Leftist interviewer who would accuse a libertarian or conservative of holding
views that would usher in such an outcome is an idiot or a disingenuous
hate-monger and should be exposed as such.
When your house is on fire, you allow strangers to smash down your doors and
windows and rampage through your home with an axe and a hose wreaking havoc and
destruction. You don't ask them for a warrant. You don't invoke your 4th
amendment rights. And you don't sue them later.
But, once the emergency is behind you, you do not allow people to come in and
perform those same actions based upon the memory of the previous emergency, day
after day, forever and ever.
Human affairs are messy. Humans are flawed. No charter devised by humans can be
applied rigidly to every time and every situation. It is not only conceivable,
but
inevitable that a principled person who reveres constitutional constraints on
government will, in some extreme eventuality, allow those principles to be put aside for a time. It is to be
hoped that, when the emergency has subsided, that people of similar good will
and constitutional reverence will be in place to restore governmental limits.
(This restoration of normality is left only to an informed and educated voting
populace and nothing else.)
So, here is the proper answer to the sly, Leftist demagogue; an answer that
reflects the realities of the human condition.
"There were constitutional concerns at the time of the enactment of this law,
but, the national emergency at the time justified overriding those concerns and
I would have supported the law. However, the remedy has been successful. The
problems that gave rise to those measures have long since been resolved. The
constitutional protections abrogated in that emergency should be restored. And
the mischief being enacted today under the umbrella of that act is ample
evidence that it is past time for its repeal."
By the way, I would also support repeal of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.
They were enacted to address slavery and the aftermath of its demise. They are
anachronisms that have long since served their purpose.
And, yes, I emphasize the Democrat role in
slavery and segregation whenever I can, over and over, to counter-balance the
ubiquitous Leftist myth of Democrat virtue and Republican culpability on this
matter. This is perhaps the most enduring, pernicious and dishonest of all
in the arsenal of Leftist lies. The Democrat Party was the party of
slavery. The Republican Party was the abolitionist party - FACT!
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