Replies

"David Duke? You won't find him applauded here, but you will find him advocated on Overthrow.com"
...and supported by the Republican Party.

Quoting the Associated Press regarding Duke's failed attempt at running for Congress, "Running as a Republican even though the GOP has said it wants nothing to do with him, Duke becomes the eighth candidate in the May 1 contest."

I thought you said that you were interested in the truth? You see, it is precisely BS like this that gives credence to my assertion that liberals need to lie about Republicans, and it backs my original inclination to respond to you with hostility.

"If you talk about Americans dying for the cause of liberty, I will join you in saluting them. If you claim that the left has been respectful of them or has been more involved in actually taking part in such actions than conservatives, then you are putting forth a lie."
There have been just as many liberal Democrat soldiers who have died for this country as there have been conservative Republicans who have died. If you proclaim anything different, then you are putting forth a lie.

I would say that we really have no clue as to how many of our soldiers that died for this country were liberals or conservatives. So I would not say that putting forth that more of one group died than another is a lie. I would, however, say that asserting either way would be talking out of one's ass.

"If you say that conservatives want to keep the black man down, then you are putting forth yet another lie."
That's a ridiculous lie.

Once again, you prove that you have no interest in the truth, but instead need to promulgate a viscious untruth (that conservatives want to keep blacks down) to further your agenda. And you wonder why I respond with hostility to you, and dare to claim that you are interested in the truth?

Conservatives fought to prevent the passage of Title VII, preventing discrimination based on race.

Before I go back to a bit of the history of the battle to enact Title VII, let me ask you this. Which side now supports the tenets of Title VII, conservatives or liberals?

The legislative history of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, especially its famous section 703(j), is clear: it was intended to prohibit reverse discrimination and quotas. The Senate floor leader for the Civil Rights Act, Hubert Humphrey, declared that Title VII "would prohibit preferential treatment for any particular group," adding famously that if this proved not the case, he would eat the pages of the statute book where the Act appeared. "Do you want a society that is nothing but an endless power struggle among organized groups?" Humphrey asked. "Do you want a society where there is no place for the individual? I don't."
Neither did many other civil rights leaders. Frederick Douglass had opposed quotas back in 1871, writing that "equality of numbers has nothing to do with equality of attainment." Jack Greenberg of the NAACP said in the 1950s that "The chief problem with quotas is that they introduce a potentially retrogressive concept into the cherished notion of individual equality." And of course Martin Luther King held up a regime in which people were judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. [snip]
But, when it came time to choose sides on the California Civil Rights Initiative, which seeks to reestablish non-discriminatory principles with language virtually identical to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ACLU didn't even blink. It led the opposition in federal court the day after the election. ACLU executive director Nadine Strossen defends affirmative action as a "temporary" legal remedy for discrimination. Most amazingly, Strossen says she sees "no inconsistency between individual liberties and affirmative action." [Source]

It would seem that the positions conservatives now hold is more akin to what position liberals claimed was theirs back at the time of the legislation. Yet, you claim that conservatives now want to keep the black man down. I guess Herbert Humphrey wanted that too?

But let's get back to the history of Title VII a bit. Do you remember when during the campaign, Al Gore said that his father lost his Senate seat because he supported civil rights legislation? You are interested in facts, right? Al Gore Sr. voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Not only did Gore Sr. vote against this act, but he also attempted to defang it by amendments. Congressional Quarterly reported that Gore attempted to send the Act to the Senate Judiciary Committee with an amendment to say "in defiance of a court desegregation order, federal funds could not be held from any school districts."

So where were conservatives on the issue? Let's take that pariah of the left, Barry Goldwater. Goldwater voted against the Gore amendment. Goldwater eventually did vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its final form, and was forever branded a racist. His objection to it? He was afraid that the enforcement mechanisms would lead to a "police state". He was for the idea, but not the implementation. It was precisely the concerns of conservatives that Humphrey was trying to address when he said he would eat the act if it came to that. Goldwater, leading the conservatives, was unswayed. Time has borne out that his concerns were valid.

Yet liberals can't allow for the fact that a principled stand on the dangers of a particular implementation of an idea is about the implementation and not about the idea. It is much more convenient to demagogue the issue and brand conservatives as racist.

Yet even back then, the Republican party was the party of conservatives, as it had been for decades. And the Republican party voted 80% for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a much higher percentage than the Democrats.

Conservatives voted against civil rights reforms

Again, the winning margin for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came from- Republicans. The party of Robert A. Taft and Barry Goldwater.

and against the right of black soldiers to die next to their white brethren. Conservatives like Lester Maddox and George Wallace fought to keep black kids out of white high schools. Conservatives rallied against, spit upon, and sent dogs to attack Martin Luther King and the thousands of whites and blacks marching with him to promote racial equality. Conservatives fought politically and physically to keep restaurants and offices segregated.

What you attribute to "Conservatives" in each case here is more accurate if you instead called them "White Southern Democrats". Yet, you don't hold it against Democrats but do hold it against conservatives, when in fact the views of today's conservatives are right out of the mold of Goldwater and Taft.

Conservatives refuse to review the law that punishes crack offenders (most of whom are black) 10 times more harshly than cocaine offenders (most of whom are white), even though the two drugs are the same substance.

They are the same drug but in different forms with different levels of addictiveness and therefore different impacts upon society.

However, if you are honest and spend some time at this forum, you will find that amongst conservatives, there is little consensus about drug laws.

I, for one, think that our war on drugs is about as smart and as efficient as Prohibition was. It wastes money, it encourages government infringements on our liberties, and it makes us jail many young people (regardless of skin color) and makes them a captive audience for the prison ministrations of Ramsey Clark and his radical, hate-America leftist "charity" outreach organizations.

Conservatives are opposed to Federal help for inner city schools attended mostly by exceedingly poor black children.

Indeed we are.

Until you grasp the fact that the reasons we oppose it are not because we want to keep poor black children down, then you are nothing but a shameless demagogue, lying (intentionally or not) about people like me- and that earns my hostility towards you.

Conservatives oppose Federal help because it is not the Federal government's proper role. Consolidating power upwards in the Federal government has a number of negative effects that I would be glad to explain to you, if you truly have the desire for the truth. You would not have to accept the arguments as being correct, but to be an honest person in my eyes you would have to accept that these are the reasons that people like me, conservatives, oppose items of this sort, and not racism or a desire to keep anyone down.

And even if you were to make that admission, and personally would drop your belief that conservatives are racists, it wouldn't make much of a difference. The left in this country has found too much success in race baiting. They will keep doing it, regardless of the truth, despite the fact that in doing so they are fostering the racial divisions that they claim they want to heal.

And conservatives like W. Bush try to cut funding in their own states for subsidized school breakfasts for kids (many of them black) who have no food at home.

There you go again with the typical liberal lie- any conservative who opposes a liberal program must be doing so out of racist beliefs.