“Support for same-sex marriage has received a boost, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research survey released Tuesday.
The poll indicates that more than half of all Americans believe that marriages between gay or lesbian couples should be legally valid. With 51 percent of respondents saying that same-sex marriages should be legal, it is the first time that a CNN poll has found majority support for same-sex marriage.
Although more Americans agree on this issue, a generation-and gender-gap still remains. Sixty percent of Americans under 50 support same-sex marriage, but only four in ten of those over 50 feel the same. More than half of men are against legalizing marriage between gay or lesbian couples, but 57 percent of women are in favor of it.” — CNN
This is a landmark in our culture, just a couple of decades ago anybody who advocated for the rights of gays and lesbians to marry was perceived as a lunatic or a deviant.
Those of us who believe that everyone, regardless of gender, religion, sexual orientation or race, is entitled to all the rights guaranteed by the constitution are thrilled by the results of this poll.
But we won’t be satisfied until over 90 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. It’s an outrage that 49 percent of Americans would deny homosexuals the right to marry.
Society is moving in the right direction, and ten or 15 years from now people who don’t believe in same-sex marriage will be looked upon as Neanderthals.
Herman Cain’s shtick is a version of race minstrelsy where he performs “authentic negritude” as wish fulfillment for White Conservative fantasies. Like the fountain at Lourdes, Cain in his designated role as black Conservative mascot, absolves the White racial reactionaries of their sins. This is a refined performance that Black Conservatives have perfected over many decades and centuries of practice. — Chauncey DeVega [ READ MORE ]
[By: Dr. Boyce Watkins] Herman Cain Plays the Race Card Against Barack Obama: It appears that Herman Cain, who is expected to be a black presidential candidate, has the race card locked and loaded for his sprint toward the White House.
Recently, Cain was asked about race during a New Hampshire campaign speech. When asked about this controversial topic, Cain had this to say:
“Now people are over this first black president thing,” he said. “But there are some people who will say, ‘I’m not going to vote for another black guy because this one didn’t work out. And my response is, ‘Well, what about those 43 white guys you put in there? How did they work out? Don’t condemn me because the first black one was bad.”
There was another interesting episode when Cain was asked on his radio show why he speaks so highly of the founding fathers, even though they owned slaves.
“They set the bar high when they said all men were created equal,” Cain said. “They could have set it where they were that day. They set it high so this nation could work up to that ideal.”
Herman Cain — A ‘Butt-Licking’ Uncle Tom
One thing that people can say about Herman Cain is that he was a successful businessman. As the CEO and part owner of Godfather’s Pizza, Cain has accumulated enough wealth and success to consider himself to be a serious candidate for the presidency. With that said, Cain also has a set of views that are reflective of the diversity of opinions within the African-American community, presenting an interesting contrast to those who want to put all black people into a nice, neat, little “liberal” box.
Let’s be clear, I don’t agree with Herman Cain. I have a difficult time appreciating any African American who panders for votes by effectively saying, “I stand with you in your disdain for the way black people behave. I assure you that I’m different from the rest of them.”
Such a divide-and-conquer political strategy has been used since we had the house negro/field negro divide during slavery (there is no faster route to the top of the political heap than by becoming a black Republican). Rather than using hatred toward President Obama as a weapon for his own political advancement, Cain might be more respectable if he simply stood on his own credentials (as his fellow conservative Colin Powell might do). Being a black conservative presidential candidate doesn’t mean you have to disrespect the first black president.
With that said, many of Cain’s views reflect a peculiar paradox within the black community: the fact that black people are actually incredibly conservative. When it comes to views on gay marriage, abortion, the separation of church and state, etc., African Americans have quite a few viewpoints that align more closely with the Republican right than with liberals who’ve come to “save us.” The problem for Republicans, however, is that they insist on advocating for programs that hurt the poor, which has a disproportionate impact on the African-American community. Their opposition to Affirmative Action and constant attacks on President Obama don’t help their cause very much either.
While the existence of men like Herman Cain represents a stomach-churning example of how the disease of racism continues to affect our society, the truth is that Cain also represents the very best of what America can possibly be. I won’t vote for Herman Cain, but I am glad that there are black politicians who allow African Americans to jump outside of predefined stereotypes given to us by the media and our political leaders. There’s no one way to be black, and both Herman Cain and President Obama reflect the diversity of the black experience in America.
[ By: Greg Grandin ] For decades, progressives and Democrats have searched in vain for a wedge issue to call their own, something that could match the success Republicans have had in using race, abortion and homosexuality to split the electorate.
Yet unable even to leverage environmental catastrophe, drastic economic inequality and near global financial collapse to their advantage, Democrats have instead mastered trimming and triangulating, accepting much of the conservative agenda while promising to implement it more effectively.
But if Democrats could overcome their shortsightedness and embrace immigrants’ rights — as passionately as Republicans mobilize around tax cuts, fetuses and war — they may find the holy grail they’ve been looking for, one with the power to transform domestic and foreign policy. Here are nine reasons immigration reform, especially legislation that will grant citizenship to the millions of undocumented Latinos, is a progressive game changer:
1. Immigration reform ends the Southern strategy. For more than four decades, the conservative movement’s base has been the segregationist South, subsidized by an archaic Electoral College system that grants disproportionate power to majority white voters in Southern states. The enfranchisement of millions of undocumented Latino workers, combined with the votes of Latino citizens, would change that, turning red states purple and purple states blue. Almost 10 million Latinos voted in 2008, 7.4 percent of the total, and a large majority voted for Barack Obama. Analysts believe Latinos were responsible for giving the president larger than expected victories in key swing states like Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. They helped him squeak out a win in North Carolina and forced John McCain to defend Republican strongholds like Georgia. Then there are Texas’s thirty-four electoral votes, without which the GOP’s chances of winning national office collapse. Latinos make up more than 20 percent of registered voters there, with their turnout increasing 30 percent between 2000 and 2008. Even direr for Republicans, in ten years Latinos are expected to be the state’s largest ethnic group, surpassing whites. By 2040 they will be an absolute majority.
Every election cycle, the number of registered Latinos, as well as actual voters, increases. They are trending Democratic — 67 percent voted for Obama, up from 59 percent for Kerry in 2004. Democratic support for reform would ensure that this trend continues. Seventy-eight percent of Latino voters identified immigration as important to them and their families; 62 percent say they know someone who is undocumented. Forget futile efforts to abolish the Electoral College; the best way to wrench the dead hand of the Confederacy off the throat of the political system is to enfranchise Latinos.
2. It wins back the Catholic Church to social justice. Catholics, mostly white ethnic working-class migrants, were stalwarts of the New Deal coalition. But they began to peel away in 1980, with the backlash to Roe v. Wade. In 2004 the future pope Benedict XVI, then the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, helped Karl Rove execute his “Catholic strategy,” urging priests to deny communion to politicians who support abortion (i.e., Kerry). The combined Catholic vote roughly split that year, with white Catholics breaking for Bush and Latinos for Kerry.
But immigration reform now has the potential to trump abortion as a wedge issue. Latinos, who make up one-third of its membership, are the best shot the US Catholic Church has of remaining viable. And though the church has become increasingly conservative over the past two decades, when it comes to immigration its social justice ethos is still intact. Priests and congregations have been vocal in opposing Arizona’s SB 1070, and central in providing safe havens and basic services to migrants. Even the Vatican’s recently appointed conservative archbishop of Los Angeles, Mexican-born José Gómez, a member of Opus Dei, has stated that in “Catholic teaching, the right to migrate is among the most basic human rights. It’s very close to the right to life. Why? Because God has created the good things of this world to be shared by all men and women — not just a privileged few.”
3. It slows the inclusion of Latino evangelicals into the religious right. “Woe to the legislators of infamous laws, to those who issue tyrannical decrees, who refuse justice to the unfortunate and cheat the poor among my people of their rights…. What will you do on the day of punishment, when, from afar off, destruction comes? To whom will you run for help?” This bit of fire and brimstone from the Book of Isaiah was recently cited by the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the nation’s largest Hispanic Christian organization, to condemn SB 1070.
The religious right is actively courting Latinos, who make up a small but growing percentage of evangelicals. But the poor, precarious situation of many congregations limits their inclusion in conservative politics. Like their Catholic counterparts, Protestant pastors spend much of their frontline ministry helping undocumented workers. After a recent meeting with Obama, Pentecostal pastor Samuel Rodriguez, who has been wooed by 2012 Republican hopefuls, said that the president’s position is “99.9 percent” in line with evangelical doctrine. Likewise, Latino Mormons are demanding that leaders of the Mormon church take a stand against the Arizona law, even while many conservative white Mormons — like State Senator Russell Pearce, who sponsored SB 1070, and Utah Representative Stephen Sandstrom, who hopes to implement a similar law in Utah — are on the other side of the issue, insisting that church law demands enforcing immigration laws.
4. It is lose-lose for Republicans. Put immigration reform on the docket before the midterm elections and watch Republicans squirm. If they support it, they enrage their Tea Party base. If they oppose it, they keep the Tea Party and might win, even big, in November, but will so anger the more electorally important Latinos that not even Spanish-speaking Jeb Bush, with help from his Mexican-born wife, will be able to win them back. As Ruy Teixeira notes, the “GOP dilemma” is that the Tea Party might help Republicans win in November but that short-term gain will be a long-term loss, a death embrace with a rump political movement that “concentrates in one place the most extreme and reactionary views.” By pushing immigration reform before the midterm elections, the Democrats would magnify this dilemma. Let South Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley explain to Latino voters why she calls for stepped-up deportation, opposes amnesty and applauds SB 1070 in the name of “states’ rights.” Immigration reform could also short-circuit any attempt to restore the Bush dynasty through Jeb, who has spoken out against the Arizona law and in favor of reform.
5. It splits the conservative coalition in other ways. A fight over immigrants’ rights drives a wedge between business Republicans and the GOP’s “no-amnesty,” know-nothing wing. Last year, the powerful National Association of Evangelicals issued a statement calling for comprehensive, dignified reform, which was strongly criticized by the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy. And the “purity” of Ron and Rand Paul’s libertarianism — as the mainstream media never cease to describe what is largely a rebranding of paleoconservatism — seems a lot less pure when they get started talking about “electronic fences,” “helicopter stations” and “making English the official language of all documents and contracts.” So much for the right to engage in economic transactions as one wishes.
6. It revitalizes the union movement. Latino immigrants have already helped turn Los Angeles, Las Vegas and other cities into union towns. They’ve often done so against great odds and with impressive courage, since many undocumented union workers are not fully covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Imagine what they could do if they were protected by labor law. Despite all the Republican talk about Latinos being natural conservatives, committed to family, religion and hard work, most reject the extreme economic individualism that is the bedrock of the GOP. They come from countries where democracy means social democracy, including workers’ rights, welfare and economic justice.
7. It dilutes the power of Florida Cubans. Since the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Cuban exiles have had a toxic effect on US domestic and foreign policy. They have repeatedly helped deliver Florida’s large number of electoral votes to Republicans and in 2000 served as the shock troops for the infamous “Brooks Brothers Riot,” which shut down Dade County’s recount of its disputed presidential ballot, a critical event that helped hand the election to Bush. Beyond forcing Washington to keep up its pointless embargo of Cuba — which handicaps US diplomacy in the rest of Latin America — they have backed a hardline foreign policy, supporting Ronald Reagan’s patronage of death squads in Central America and last year’s coup in Honduras. Their power is on the wane; in 2008 other Florida Latinos helped deliver the state to Obama, overriding the Miami Cuban-American vote, which went for McCain. But candidate Obama still felt compelled to genuflect before them, traveling to Miami to criticize Bush from the right for losing Latin America to leftist “demagogues.” Legislating a way to citizenship for Latino immigrants would dampen Florida Cubans’ ability to influence foreign policy, as well as change the terms of the debate: even Cuban-Americans are in favor of immigration reform.
8. It helps America’s cities. I lived in Durham, North Carolina, for a few years, and for all the romance of Southern porch culture, it was mostly Latinos, nearly all of them undocumented laborers from Mexico and Central America, who were outside, facing the street, talking, listening to music, raising families. The city’s more settled residents were inside with their air-conditioners and TVs. Throughout the United States, Latinos are re-energizing neighborhoods and populating downtowns, opening stores and pumping money into established small businesses. Not too long ago cities were rearguards of a progressive ethos in retreat. Today, with the help of Latinos, one of the fastest growing urban demographics, they are again vital hubs of social democracy. Google the words “Latinos,” “cities” and “revitalize” and you will be led to any number of stories about how stressed city centers in Detroit, Dallas, Memphis, Newark and the Hudson Valley are being rescued by Latinos. No wonder the right hates them.
9. It is the morally right thing to do. And as a result, it is strategically smart. Progressives need not just wedge issues but driving righteousness, and the heart-rending plight of more than 10 million vulnerable residents who are denied basic human rights and hunted by random raids, their families split apart, is as morally urgent an issue as the civil rights movement was in its heyday. Considering the role Latinos would play in burying, once and for all, the Southern strategy, the issue needs to be understood as essential in finally achieving the promise of the original civil rights movement. With one eye on November’s midterm elections and another on polls showing support for Arizona’s SB 1070, many Democrats are reverting to hedging. It’s a “toxic subject,” says Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee. For all the reasons above — plus the fact that many Latinos might just wash their hands of the Democrats if betrayed — that temerity itself is toxic. And considering Democrats’ perpetual minority status in Tennessee, if I were a Democrat there, I’d want as liberalized an immigration policy as possible.
About The Author: Greg Grandin is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including most recently Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan 2009). A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Fordlandia was picked by the New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and NPR for their “best of” lists, and Amazon.com named it the best history book of 2009.
Timothy Rutten of the The Los Angeles Times writes of Fordlandia: “Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed . . . a marginal event. . . and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry’s contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told. . . Fordlandia is precisely that–a genuinely readable history recounted with a novelist’s sense of pace and an eye for character. It’s a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and engrossingly enjoyable.” And The American Scholar says that “Grandin takes full command of a complicated narrative with numerous threads, and the story spills out in precisely the right tone–about midway between Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh.”
Grandin is also the author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Empire (Metropolitan 2005), The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America During the Cold War (University of Chicago Press 2004), and Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Duke University Press, 2000), which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for the best book published on Latin America in any discipline.
A professor of history at NYU and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Grandin writes on US foreign policy, Latin America, genocide, and human rights. He has published in The New York Times, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, and The American Historical Review. He has been a frequent guest on Democracy Now! and has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show. Grandin also served as a consultant to the United Nations truth commission on Guatemala and has been the recipient of a number of prestigious fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. His most recent book, edited with Gil Joseph, A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War, will be published by Duke University Press in September. Visit his web site at: http://greggrandin.com/.
“There is no man who can be a man without the aid of a woman today to help him, because you have the power to tear us down with your mouth. You look for the weakness in your man, and if you hit him and keep hitting him, you run him out of the house to the lady down the street who is not concerned about his strength.” — Louis Farrakhan
Cathy Hughes interviews Louis Farrakhan on a variety of issues: Brother Farrakhan
• It appears that there is a genocidal plan against Black people.
• Many of the Jews who owned the homes, the apartments in the black community, we considered them bloodsuckers because they took from our community and built their community but didn’t offer anything back to our community.
• Naturally, when one makes progressive steps, there may be some who see it as a betrayal of their goals and interests.
• Not that I regret saying what I believed to be the truth, but I regret anything that I might have written or spoken that could have been used in a way to help to foster that atmosphere out of which came the loss of life of Brother Malcolm.
• Overall, the challenge of leadership is both moral and one of developing the characteristics that make us respected by one another.
• Qaddafi is hated because he is the leader of a small country that is rich, but he uses his money to finance liberation struggles.
• So, this war is against the Islam that the West does not control.
• The Bush administration does not desire to see Islam practiced in its pristine purity.
• The die is set and Malcolm will not escape for the foolish talk he spoke against his benefactor, such a man, is worthy of death, and it would have been so, were it not for Muhammad’s confidence that God would give him the victory over the enemies.
• The Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man.
• There is no one right now in my judgment that can unite the Black electorate in such a way to present our agenda to a nominee to have them forthrightly address our concerns.
• There really can be no peace without justice. There can be no justice without truth. And there can be no truth, unless someone rises up to tell you the truth.
• They call them terrorists, I call them freedom fighters.
• They should regard me as what I am. I am a spiritual leader and teacher.
• We are all gifted, but we have to discover the gift, uncover the gift, nurture and develop the gift and use it for the Glory of God and for the liberation struggle of our people.
• What President Bush did in his doctrine of preemptive strike and in his war in Afghanistan and in Iraq was to turn even his allies in Europe negatively toward America.
• Without an advocate for the poor, without a new state of mind in America, the country lies on the brink of anarchy.
• You must recognize that the way to get the good out of your brother and your sister is not to return evil for evil.
• America will always side with those whom she can direct, give orders to and have those orders obeyed.
• Anarchy may await America, due to the daily injustices suffered by the people.
• And I hope that five years and 10 years from now, I’ll be a better man, a more mature man, a wiser man, a more humble man and a more spirited man to serve the good of my people and the good of humanity.
• As a result of that, America desires a moderate Islam; an Islam that America can control; an Islam that America can give direction to and give orders to its leaders.
• Because as a youngster I longed to see the Black man free and I longed to see anyone stand up for us.
• Because wherever I am today, I still owe it to God and I owe it to two men – the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X and of course, two very special women, my mother and my wife.
• Black leadership has to recognize that principles more than speech, character more than a claim, is greater in advancing the cause of our liberation than what has transpired thus far.
• But if I thought on it, I would like to be remembered as a brother who loved his people and did everything that I knew to fight for them, the liberation of our people.
• But when I reintroduced the Nation of Islam, and began to host meetings in cities and thousands and thousands of people come out.
• Could it be that my circle is largely black and that it is why I am influential in black circles but not in white circles?
• Everything that I’m attempting to do is based on my understanding of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and what he wanted for his people.
• However, those who have used those words use half the sentence to fit their purpose, which, of course, I believe is to discredit me and the new Nation of Islam that has come up around me.
• I am hoping that in this year of the family we will go into our families and reconcile differences.
• I don’t think about my legacy, if indeed, I have one.
• I loved Elijah Muhammad with a love that I can’t adequately describe.
• I think that ego-driven leaders will be a thing of the past because the masses are tired.
• I think that rather than condemning Islam, Islam needs to be studied by those who are sincere.
• I was never named in the early years as having anything to do with the assassination of Malcolm.
• If we don’t make earnest moves toward real solutions, then each day we move one day closer to revolution and anarchy in this country. This is the sad, and yet potentially joyous, state of America.
The Tea Party is a Frankenstein movement — an odd collection of factions, loosely stitched together, where the head, to the extent that it exists, fails to control the body. Their other strategy is to repress, deny and redefine. Following their logic, racial views not visible are nonexistent and those who raise the issue are simply projecting. It’s a fete of Freudian delusions.
By: Charles M. Blow Racist. Tea Party.
Are those separate concepts or a single one? Depends on whom you ask.
According to an article accompanying a Washington Post/ABC News poll released last Wednesday: “About 61 percent of tea party opponents say racism has a lot to do with the movement, a view held by just 7 percent of tea party supporters.”
This gulf of perception has left Tea Party organizers struggling to scrub the stain of racism from its image, but those efforts may fly in the face of the facts.
On Thursday, Amy Kremer, the director of the Tea Party Express, sat down on “The View.” Prompted to disavow supporters who might be motivated by racism, she looked into the camera and said: “This is not a racist movement. We don’t want you here. Go away if that’s what you’re about. We’re about the fiscal issues and about being American.”
Tea Party Express’s Amy Kremer on ABC’s The View
There’s no reason to doubt her sincerity, but there seems to be a gap between things as they are and things as she would have them.
The Tea Party is a Frankenstein movement — an odd collection of factions, loosely stitched together, where the head, to the extent that it exists, fails to control the body.
It has attracted hordes of the disaffected with differing interests, including some who’ve openly expressed their dark racial prejudices and others who polls suggest harbor more subtle and less visible biases. Opposition to President Obama triggers a political Pavlovian response among some of these people, and they want to ally themselves with others around a common enemy.
It’s unlikely that appeals from the top, however earnest, will expunge them.
There is no way to know how many Tea Party supporters — or supporters of any group — are motivated by racism, or to what degree. For instance, one could legitimately ask: to what degree is African-American support of the president motivated by racial pride, and when does that pride cross over into prejudice?
There are no easy answers, but blanket accusations and denials are worthless and disingenuous.
Kremer credits the Tea Party’s racial problems, to the extent that she would agree they existed, to an unwelcome “fringe.” This seems plausible at first blush. There is often rabble at rallies.
However, widely cited polling, like the multistate University of Washington survey released last month, has found that large swaths among those who show strong support for the Tea Party also hold the most extreme views on a range of racial issues. The fringe theory is a farce.
Their other strategy is to repress, deny and redefine. Following their logic, racial views not visible are nonexistent and those who raise the issue are simply projecting. It’s a fete of Freudian delusions.
Tea Party organizers may want to run away from the facts, but they’re not that fast, and the American people are not that slow.
About The Author: Charles M. Blow — is The New York Times’s visual Op-Ed columist. His column appears in The Times on Saturday.
Mr. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper’s graphics director, a position he held for nine years. In that role, he led The Times to a best of show award from the Society of News Design for the Times’s information graphics coverage of 9/11, the first time the award had been given for graphics coverage.
He also led the paper to its first two best in show awards from the Malofiej International Infographics Summit for work that included coverage of the Iraq war.
Mr. Blow went on to become the paper’s Design Director for News before leaving in 2006 to become the Art Director of National Geographic Magazine. Before coming to The Times, Mr. Blow had been a graphic artist at The Detroit News.
Mr. Blow graduated magna cum laude from Grambling State University in Louisiana, where he received a B.A. in mass communications. He lives in Brooklyn with his three children.
Republican Healthcare Reform Terrorism [CLICK PLAYLIST FOR MENU] Almost ALL The Goons Interviewed Below Have No IDEA What They are Opposing — Pathetic!
For decades, progressives and Democrats have searched in vain for a wedge issue to call their own, something that could match the success Republicans have had in using race, abortion and homosexuality to split the electorate. 
The religious right is actively courting Latinos, who make up a small but growing percentage of evangelicals. But the poor, precarious situation of many congregations limits their inclusion in conservative politics. Like their Catholic counterparts, Protestant pastors spend much of their frontline ministry helping undocumented workers. After a recent meeting with Obama, Pentecostal pastor Samuel Rodriguez, who has been wooed by 2012 Republican hopefuls, said that the president’s position is “99.9 percent” in line with evangelical doctrine. Likewise, Latino Mormons are demanding that leaders of the Mormon church take a stand against the Arizona law, even while many conservative white Mormons — like State Senator Russell Pearce, who sponsored SB 1070, and Utah Representative Stephen Sandstrom, who hopes to implement a similar law in Utah — are on the other side of the issue, insisting that church law demands enforcing immigration laws.
