Today’s bigots do not make that argument. Like every group that cannot control themselves; that needs to publicly proclaim that they are superior to another group, they raise up among us their excuses to explain this un-American behavior. In the case of sexism, we are given a pedestal In the case of white racism we are given the transparent and despicable device called “separate but equal”.
This is the position of our president-elect, Barack Obama. Too clever to assert incompetence, and too learned to argue that gays do not want to marry, he politics the “civil union” card. “Civil union” is nothing but the puerile re-assertion of “separate but equal”.
Mr. Obama, if civil union is “good enough”, “just the same” or “serves the same purpose”, why didn’t you and Michelle chose that path?
We are all told that you acquired fine legal training, and that, in fact, you have a particular expertise in Constitutional Law. How then do you explain your support for the doctrine of separate but equal? How do you explain using the same reasoning, the same tired old arguments, that oppressed Americans for so long?
Perhaps you were out of the class campaigning for head of the “Harvard Review” the day they explained why Thurgood Marshall argued that “separate but equal” “caused substantial psychological damage”? Was the ivy in your eyes when it was explained how the Warren court decided that “separate but equal” “created a sense of inferiority”?
The rap, tap, tat of the drums, the clop, clop, clop of the rider-less stallion chorused with weeping as the box bearing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, like an empty chair, rolled past.
After twelve years, a grieving nation buried an apostle of change. Because this remained a southern city, a segregated capitol of “separate but equal”, some of those tears were for the hope that died, the change that had not occurred. For some crying, FDR had turned out to be only a man after all. A politician, he had to make a deal with racism to get his “New Deal” passed. The “negro question” would have to wait.
Words are funny. One day they mean one thing, and then, presto, like politicians, they mean something else. Words like “liberal” and “separate but equal” and “civil union” and “change” and “freedom” and “equality” and “civil rights”.
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