Or just deport them?
How many times must troubled young white men engage in these terroristic acts that make public space unsafe for everyone before we admit that white male privilege kills? While Mark Cuban is busy crossing the street at any sign of a black male in a hoodie, or clutching his wallet a bit tighter at the sign of a tatted-up white guy, he may find a bullet whizzing by his head from a young, clean-cut white man, child of a Hollywood film director, upset that he does not have a certain level of clout and status with the ladies. ...Salon
I don't want to get racist here, but we seem to have a problem. Ironically, the white power plumber over there, the one in the frayed baseball cap, states the case for his ticket to the loony-bin quite succinctly. "Joe the Plumber" writes a letter to the father of a victim of the Santa Barbara shooting spree and ends his condolences with "Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights" -- as a gun owner, that is.
Memeorandum has a grey cloud of links to these reports -- and comments on them -- this morning. My attention was drawn to report of a new study of where all this bile comes from. One crucial (no pun intended) source of support for white American machismo is fundamentalism and via crucis. Christian Fundamentalism sponsors not just ignorance but deliberate ignorance -- the choice to remain in ignorance.
Since Bryan College’s founding in 1930, its statement of belief, which professors have to sign as part of their employment contracts, included a 41-word section summing up the institution’s conservative views on creation and evolution, including the statement: “The origin of man was by fiat of God.” But in February, college officials decided that professors had to agree to an additional clarification declaring that Adam and Eve “are historical persons created by God in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life-forms.”
For administrators and many members of the governing board at Bryan, the new language is a buffer against what they see as a marked erosion of Christian values and beliefs across the country. ...NYT
Adam and Eve were, you'll remember, pale white. Scroll away at Google Images -- scroll till your median nerve shrieks -- and you won't see Adam and Eve as anything but lilywhite and looking chilly and self-conscious.
(As a kicker, Eve was the one who screwed things up, not Adam. Wimmin!)
But one perception is changing. Randall Balmer, writing at Politico on the origins of the religious right, finds that it wasn't Roe v. Wade that did the trick.
The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.
This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.
Some of these anti-Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.
Doesn't really matter which particular atrocity accounts for the wrath of the very white male religious right. The tribal believes strongly in the preeminence -- the "natural" domination -- of the white male. You could see where women getting out of hand and making their own decisions about their bodies could rile them. But the enemy isn't their women. The enemy is who gets freedom, full human rights to self-determination. That, buddy, is reserved to white males.
Giving non-whites full freedom and political equity has been received as treachery by generations of white male tribes. The final blow came in 1970 with the
Green v. Connally* ruling from the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Segregation in any form was out the door.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders, especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. ...Balmer,Politico
This is what turned the corner, gave the right a new constituency and political power. It's always handy to have an enemy if you're a politician or a political party. Commies. Blacks. Ay-rabs. Atheists. Acorn. And on and on. Joe the Plumber and his friends and gun toters have plenty targets.
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*The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”
