Posted on 02/20/2008 1:33:57 PM PST by greyfoxx39
Sen. Chris Buttars was a no-show Tuesday for a meeting with leaders of the Salt Lake branch of the NAACP, saying the event had become a "cheap shot" after its organizers purportedly changed their minds about meeting with him in private and insisted the session be public.
NAACP board members expressed disappointment that Buttars didn't meet with them, and renewed their call that the West Jordan senator resign.
Buttars - under siege for a week after saying of a bill he opposed, "This baby is black. . . . It's a dark, ugly thing" - said he wanted to meet with the NAACP board, but told them hours in advance that he wouldn't attend if the media were invited.
Jeanetta Williams, president of the Salt Lake chapter of the NAACP, said she was disappointed he didn't attend, and that the organization would do everything in its power to force him to resign.
The organization also blasted Buttars for telling The Salt Lake Tribune on Monday that he has become a target of a "hate lynch mob" because of e-mails he has received condemning his remarks.
"The man knows nothing about what a lynch mob is," said Edward Lewis Jr., the former regional president of the NAACP, holding an article about a lynching in 1925 in Price. "It's an insult for the man to say he's being lynched when we know what real lynchings are."
Buttars was baffled by the reaction.
"Lynch mob is a Western term. You wouldn't find one person in 10,000 in Utah that thinks that's a racist term," Buttars said in a phone interview Tuesday evening. "That's not a racial term in my opinion. How do I know what words I'm supposed to use in front of those people?"
Buttars' statements Tuesday added to Williams' frustration with the senator.
"At first I thought maybe it could be a generational thing," said Williams, "but I know folks who are much older than he is who don't talk that way and don't refer to 'those people,' and 'lynch mob,' and 'babies that are black are ugly.' "
Guv says Buttars' future up to constituents; Senate President says it's the senator's call
Oh give me a break.... “lynch mob” is NOT a ‘racist term’.
Wow, this guy just keeps stepping in it.
That’s nuthin. Check this out
http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/2008/02/20/students_lead_a_sit-in
The way the tests were handed out was racist.
I assume he is a Republican. A democrat would never receive this kind of treatment from the ultra-liberal and thoroughly racist NAACP.
He is correct, but not PC about it. How many Westerns have you seen that use the term. I have seen many. The context in which the NAACP took it is all that matters.
On the story itself. What was he referring to.
Uh huh. Sure you do.
What a bunch of oversensitive crybabies!
I've heard the quote, and it's obvious that his comments were not racist in nature. The NAACP is just aching to find quotes to misinterpret and wail over.
Give it a rest already.
*I* have used that particular term, TODAY IN FACT....
Tuskegee Institute, which is today known as Tuskegee University, is the institution that has been recognized as the official expert charged with documenting lynching since 1882, and has defined conditions that constitute a recognized lynching:
"There must be legal evidence that a person was killed. That person must have met death illegally. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to Justice, Race, or Tradition."
Tuskegee remains the single complete source of statistics and records on this crime since 1882, and is the source for all other compiled statistics. As of 1959, which was the last time that their annual Lynch Report was published, a total of 4,733 persons had died as a result of lynching since 1882. To quote the report,
"Except for 1955, when three lynchings were reported in Mississippi, none has been recorded at Tuskegee since 1951. In 1945, 1947, and 1951, only one case per year was reported. The most recent case reported by the institute as a lynching was that of Emmett Till, 14, a Negro who was beaten, shot to death, and thrown into a river at Greenwood, Mississippi on August 28, 1955...
So unless these members of the NAACP were alive and, at least, an adolescent in 1955...They don't know what lynching is any more than anyone else.
I once saw Howard Dean make a statement down south about the confederate flag issue that pissed off both white voters and black voters (which is hard to do). Here is the beauty:
“I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” the former Vermont governor said in an interview published Saturday in the Des Moines Register. “We can’t beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats.”
This guy has managed to step in it to at least an equal level. Do they have an NAACP chapter in Utah though? And are all 15 blacks in the state in it?
From Wikipedia, for what it's worth:
"Lynching, as a form of punishment for presumed criminal offenses, performed by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes without due process of law took place in the United States even before the American Civil War and after all over the nation from southern states to western frontier settlements. The term "Lynch's Law" (and subsequently "lynch law" and "lynching") apparently originated during the American Revolution when Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the peace, ordered extralegal punishment for Tory acts. In the South, members of the abolitionist movement or other people opposing slavery were usually targets of lynch mob violence before the Civil War. After the war, lynching was a method of terrorism used to intimidate freed blacks who were voting and assuming political power. A study of vigilante justice during the period of 1868 to 1871 estimates that the Ku Klux Klan was involved in more than 400 lynchings. Blacks were lynched often because they were accused of crimes committed against whites, however, journalist Ida B. Wells showed in her investigations that many presumed crimes were exaggerated or didn't occur at all.[8]"
George Lynch better change his group’s name...pronto!!!!!!
The lynching referred to was “frontier justice” that just happened to involve a black suspect:
“Carbon County is believed to be the site of the last lynching in the American West — and the justice system failed to prosecute any of the 11 men arrested in connection with it.
“Robert Marshall, a black coal miner from Arkansas, was hanged on June 18, 1925. Although no trial was ever held, Marshall was believed to have shot J. Milton Burns, a watchman for Utah Fuel Co., at Castle Gate three days earlier. Officials at the time believed the shooting resulted from a grudge.”
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-7217167.html
During a break after the debate, Sen. Ross Romero approached Senate President John Valentine with concerns about the offensive remark and, when senators returned, Buttars apologized, but insisted it was not meant to be racist.
Bill= baby
Black= dark and ugly
It is fairly obvious that despite the poor choice of wording, the senator was labeling the bill under debate as dark and ugly.
It takes a major word contortion to twist it into a racist remark.
Of course, if the entire reason for your existence is to twist anything possible into a racist statement, then I understand how the NAACP can come up with such a twisted interpretation.
And if I were a parent of any race who lived to be offended, then I could say the remarks were offensive against all children who were not born beautiful.
Am I to understand along with other words, we can’t say the word Black any more. We won’t be able to say red= Am. Indians, yellow = chinese, brown=hispanic. OK that just leaves green, purple, blue, and orange, I believe. We’re down to 4 colors people!!!
Senator Buttars should never have touched that tar baby.
And the press isn't going to allow him to turn loose of it, it seems. Walsh: How many strikes does Buttars get
From the article:What Buttars has done is inexcusable - and reason for censure from his peers and a quick resignation or pledge not to run for re-election. Instead, Utah conservatives have closed ranks around him.
Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., nominal head of the state GOP, deflected the decision about whether Buttars should stay or go to his constituents - "based on their level of outrage." Senate Republicans defended Buttars on Monday as a "good man." The Eagle Forum planned - then wisely cancelled - a pro-Buttars rally. Attorney General Mark Shurtleff became Buttars' ambassador to the NAACP.
Salt Lake County Republican Party chairman and former legislator James Evans insisted in a Deseret Morning News story that Buttars' statements were not racist - after bloviating a few years ago about former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson's use of the word "slavish."
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