Rejecting words and actions which perpetrate, support or encourage white supremacists

Tobacco Road said:

I’m not buying that residents have some undying pride in a closed down regional airport. That is just dumb. Who was the airport named after?

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Thinking back on those debates, I finally figured it out. The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly the same as the antebellum rhetoric I’d read so much of. The same exact words. The same exact arguments. Rhetoric, to be precise, in support of the slave-owning South.

If that sounds absurd — Shapiro and his compatriots aren’t defending slavery, after all — it may be because many Americans are unfamiliar with the South’s actual rhetoric. When I was a kid in public school, I learned the arguments of Sen. John C. Calhoun (D-S.C.), who called slavery a “positive good,” and Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president, who declared that the South’s ideological “cornerstone” rested “upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man.”

But such clear statements were not the norm. Proslavery rhetoricians talked little of slavery itself. Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of “reason,” free speech and “civility.” The prevalent line of argument in the antebellum South rested on the supposition that Southerners were simultaneously the keepers of an ancient faith and renegades — made martyrs by their dedication to facts, reason and civil discourse.

It might sound strange that America’s proslavery faction styled itself the guardian of freedom and minority rights. And yet it did. In a deep study of antebellum Southern rhetoric, Patricia Roberts-Miller, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin, characterizes the story that proslavery writers “wanted to tell” between the 1830s and 1860s as not one of “demanding more power, but of David resisting Goliath.”

They stressed the importance of logic, “facts,” “truth,” “science” and “nature” much more than Northern rhetoricians did. They chided their adversaries for being romantic idealists, ignoring the “experience of centuries.” Josiah Nott, a surgeon who laid out the purported science behind black inferiority, held that questions like slavery “should be left open to fair and honest investigation, and made to stand or fall according to the facts.” They claimed that they were the ones who truly had black people’s best interests at heart, thanks to their more realistic understanding of human biology. “No one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I,” John Wilkes Booth wrote shortly before he assassinated Lincoln. He alleged that any pragmatist could see that freeing black people into a cold, cruel world would actually cause their “annihilation.” Slavery, another Southern thinker argued, was natural, because if whites could work the sweltering South Carolina rice fields, they would. The “constitutions” of black men, on the other hand, were “perfectly adapted.”

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The most important thing to know about them, they held, was that they were not the oppressors. They were the oppressed. They were driven to feelings of isolation and shame purely on the basis of freely held ideas, the right of every thinking man. Rep. Alexander Sims (D-S.C.) claimed that America’s real problem was the way Southerners were made to suffer under “the sneers and fanatic ebullitions of ignorant and wicked pretenders to philanthropy.” Booth’s complaint, before he shot Lincoln, wasn’t that he could no longer practice slavery, something he’d never done anyway. Instead, he lamented that he no longer felt comfortable expressing “my thoughts or sentiments” on slavery freely in good company.

Let’s call this particular logic “antebellum reasoning.” Its appeal was that it identified pro-South rhetoricians as the upholders of America’s true heritage: They were, in their own reckoning, dedicated to truth — and persecuted by tyrants. Just as the early Americans found a sense of pride and worth in England’s inability to endure their dissent, so antebellum Southerners located their virtue in the passions set against them.

All of this is there in the reasonable right: The claim that they are the little people struggling against prevailing winds. The argument that they’re the ones championing reason and common sense. The allegation that their interlocutors aren’t so much wrong as excessive; they’re just trying to think freely and are being tormented. The reliance on hyperbole and slippery slopes to warn about their adversaries’ intentions and power. The depiction of their opponents as an “orthodoxy,” an epithet the antebellum South loved.

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WFFaithful said:

"First of all, we don't do gay weddings or mixed race, because of our Christian race — I mean, our Christian beliefs."

https://www.newsweek.com/no-gay-mixed-race-weddings-boones-camp-event-hall-mississippi-1457252

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WFFaithful said:

"First of all, we don't do gay weddings or mixed race, because of our Christian race — I mean, our Christian beliefs."

https://www.newsweek.com/no-gay-mixed-race-weddings-boones-camp-event-hall-mississippi-1457252

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Highland Deac said:

So now "religious liberty" includes the right to refuse service based on race as well as homosexuality. Good to know. It's almost as if religious liberty laws passed by some states are a way to get around other laws forbidding the denial of services based on race or other forms of bigotry. But surely that's not the case.

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Deacfreak07 said:

What do you mean “now”? That shit has been the MO of the religious right from the jump.

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Highland Deac said:

I was just being sarcastic that "religious liberty" isn't being limited to what the sponsors of these bills in state legislatures said it would. Of course what they said was bullshit, but now that these laws are on the books it's becoming very clear what the real intent was all along.

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Deacfreak07 said:

The whole idea of evangelical education started as a means of refusing service to people of color. These shitbirds don’t even bother trying to avoid saying the quiet parts out loud.

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