On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 11:35:19PM -0500, Wirt Atmar wrote:
> As someone who grew up in the South, I know (and probably you do too) that
> "states rights" is merely a code phrase for a Southerner's claim to bigotry,
> racism, segregation, prejudice, ignorance and intolerance. "Put God back in our
> classroom and get the niggers out!" (My uncle Dewey, long after he moved from
> Houston to San Diego, still carried a pistol in the glove compartment of his
> car "to shoot niggers.")

Maybe in your family, but not in mine. I grew up in Houston believing both
in states' rights to be free from meddling from Washington and the basic
equality of all people, no matter their race or national origin.

> Prior to Nixon, the Republican Party was the still hated party of the Lincoln
> Reconstructionists -- and no good white Southerner would be caught dead
> calling himself a Republican. But all of that changed during the Nixon
> administration. The segregationist, intolerant, bible-thumping Dixiecrats bolted from the
> Democratic Party en masse, to no one in the Democratic Party's dismay, in
> great part because of the civil rights advances foisted on them first by
> Eisenhower but most especially later by Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and they
> have formed the basis of the "Solid South" on which the Republican Party has so
> heavily depended ever since.

This is so wrong it's not funny.

The South has shifted to the Republican Party because the people there -
who, until the 60s, thought of themselves as conservative Democrats - have
realized that the Democrat Party, if it ever did, certainly no longer
represents their thoughts and beliefs. The Democrats are far to the left of
where they were before the 60s, and the people of the South have finally
recognized that "conservative Democrat" is an oxymoron.

Of course, coming from you, the rhetoric painting Republicans and
Southerners as segregationist bigots is only to be expected. It must be hell
hating your roots so passionately.

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