Mugged (26 page)

It was different world—the birds were singing, the sun was shining and lives were no longer being held hostage to frivolous charges of racism. In the eighties, any white person could get a standing ovation for droning on about racism. But after OJ, all the grandstanding nonsense—“That’s right, I’m courageous enough to say white people are racist”—was over.

With the decline of the racial agitators, it turned out there were other black people in America besides Jackson and Sharpton. We got a brief glimpse of wildly talented blacks during the Clarence Thomas hearings back in 1991, when, one after another, they testified on Thomas’s behalf. Then—poof!—they all disappeared again.

Perhaps it was the advent of the Internet and cable news, but, post-OJ, there seemed to be a renaissance of black people with opinions different from Jesse Jackson’s—Deneen Borelli, Ron Christie, Ken Blackwell, Niger Innis, Star Parker, Jesse Lee Peterson, Angela McGlowan, Michael
Meyers, David Webb, Allen West—and those are just a few from Fox News. There was also Marc Lamont Hill, Juan Williams, Sherrod Small—there are so many that you don’t even notice it anymore. Where had they been all that time? They were probably sitting at home, wondering why no one in the media ever asked them their opinion, instead going to Jesse Jackson for the “black perspective.”

Blacks had won the final civil rights battle: The right to be treated like adults. Liberals would have to find new victims to patronize.

As harmful as it was to blacks to have liberals take them on as their special projects, at least liberals got the beneficiary group right, even if their idea of “help” was idiotic. If any group deserves special treatment, it is the descendants of slavery and Jim Crow in this country. Civil rights aren’t supposed to be bounties for every self-obsessed group with a grievance.

But these days, liberals use blacks as a cat’s paw to promote the issues they really care about: national health care, blocking voter ID laws, abortion on demand, stripping the nation of religious imagery, amnesty for illegal aliens, gay marriage and girls in the military. These are not policies that help blacks, nor are they supported by most black people. But Democrats believe blacks should be like children: seen and not heard. Shut up and vote for us.

Democrats are always itching to expand the list of civil rights victims and thus enlarge their pool of debtors. Instead of basing favored treatment on a history of widespread injustice in America, liberals thought it should also be based on other forms of suffering, such as: being a housewife, having an abortion, having been born in Mexico, or being gay. If a single pelican had died as a result of the BP oil spill, pelicans would have replaced blacks as liberals’ new victim group.

The trend of describing every left-wing cause as a “civil rights” issue began before the ink on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was dry. These days, you could be forgiven for not realizing that civil rights ever had anything to do with black people. Indeed, according to the
New York Times
, in June 2012, “gay rights was the fastest-moving civil rights movement in our nation’s history”!
¹

Instead of discrimination based on skin color, judges began outlawing discrimination based on being a smelly homeless person menacing library patrons.
²
Instead of hoax racism charges, we started getting hoax rape
charges. Instead of blacks being denied admission to public schools and universities, gays were “denied” the ability to marry one another.

It must make blacks feel great being compared to smelly homeless people, daft women and lesbians who want to marry one another. Princeton ethics professor Peter Singer compares black people to apes, citing the black liberation movement as a model for the liberation of apes. We must “extend to other species,” he says, “the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species.”
³

Modern “civil rights” lawsuits are almost never about black people—they’re about women, Hispanics, gays, the foreign born, transgendered Eskimos in wheelchairs and so on. According to the Web site of the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, for more than a decade, 65 percent of all civil rights claims had absolutely nothing to do with race discrimination.
⁴
Claims of sexual harassment alone doubled between 1989 and 1993. The vast majority of those, by the way—95 percent—involved no groping, touching or demands for sex, but rather were “hostile environment” claims.
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Having to endure being called “honey” in the workplace is much like being lynched.

Civil rights now include the right not to have Bible verses printed on your paycheck, according to one Pennsylvania court,
⁶
or not to see construction signs that say “Men at Work,” according to the Kentucky Commission on Civil Rights,
⁷
or the “civil right” not to inform your husband that you’re aborting his child.
⁸

Blacks are just props to dress up the left’s pet causes.

In the 1998 Maryland gubernatorial race, Bob Shrum, consultant to the Democratic incumbent Parris Glendening, ran an ad against his Republican challenger Ellen Sauerbrey claiming she had voted against “the civil rights act.” Featuring pictures of sad black people and ominous music, the ad concluded with: “The real Ellen Sauerbrey—a civil rights record to be ashamed of.”

The only “civil rights” bill Sauerbrey had voted against had nothing to do with black people. It was a sexual harassment bill so nutty that the majority-Democrat Maryland legislature voted against it. A black legislator, Democrat Richard Dixon, complained that even calling it a civil rights bill was “a misnomer and misleading.” He had voted against it, too. Kurt Schmoke, the black Democratic mayor of Baltimore, publicly denounced the Shrum ad, saying he refused to “participate in a campaign to try to persuade people that [Sauerbrey] is a racist.” Only the
Washington Times
and
Hotline
reported the attacks on the Shrum ad by various Maryland black
leaders. Released the last week before the election, the ad increased Glendening’s black support in a tight race and he won the election.

Anyone who would make utterly baseless accusations of racism deserves to have his picture posted on Web sites, similar to sex offender Web sites. The public needs to be warned about such social predators, who instill racial hatreds to score political points. The rapid expansion of “civil rights” to encompass every left-wing cause—except real civil rights—proves that liberals never took the nation’s debt to black Americans seriously in the first place.

The most outrageous policy proposals are invariably described as the promotion of “civil rights.” As long as liberals label something a “right,” they never have to explain why it’s a good idea.

Thus, for example, the main argument for gay marriage is to baldly assert that it is a “civil right” and accuse opponents of opposing “civil rights.” Some would say that if you want to overturn a six-thousand-year-old institution like marriage, the burden should be on you to tell us why. The obligation shouldn’t be on defenders of marriage. But liberals sneak out of this obligation by chanting the mantra of “civil rights.”

Why isn’t a flat tax a “civil right”? Why not the right to smoke or to consume twenty-four-ounce sugary sodas? These days, calling something a “civil right” means nothing more than that liberals want it and they don’t feel the need to explain.

When gay marriage was first thrust on the nation by the Massachusetts Supreme Court during the 2004 presidential primary campaign, Senator John Kerry said what was at stake was “somebody’s right to live equally under the same laws as other people in the country.”

But of course, gays do live equally under the same laws as other people. There are no special speed limit laws or trespassing laws or murder laws for gays. What gays can’t do is get married to members of the same sex. Nor can heterosexuals, immigrants, whites, blacks, the rich, the poor or the homeless.

The Democrats’ comparison of gay marriage to civil rights ultimately led to the ridiculous spectacle of Kerry basically accusing a black woman of being a bigot because she did not appreciate the comparison of gays to blacks under the equal protection clause. It had to happen.

At a “town hall” meeting in Mississippi during the campaign, a black woman in the audience asked Kerry to reject the comparison of gay marriage to civil rights. “I don’t care what they say,” she said, “there is no correlation between gay rights and civil rights in terms of what black Americans have gone through.”
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In response, Kerry said it was important to recognize that “we have a Constitution which has an equal protection clause.” (Because black people had probably forgotten that.)

The woman “was not satisfied” with Kerry’s answer, in the delicate phrasing of the
New York Times
. She said: “My point is, homosexuality is an idea. You have never heard a doctor say, ‘Mr. and Mrs. John Doe, you have a bouncing baby homosexual.’ It’s an idea.”

Kerry again invoked the equal protection clause: “American citizens deserve the protection of the equal protection clause.” The left’s promiscuous expansion of civil rights had reached absurdity: John Kerry was lecturing a black woman in Mississippi about the meaning of the equal protection clause.

Liberals have spent decades acting as if they are the blacks’ biggest best friends—by defending black criminals like Damian Williams—but as soon as they have to choose between feminists and blacks or gays and blacks, it’s no contest. Feminists and gays win. Gays have more money and the ladies have more votes.

A few years ago, when the black actor Isaiah Washington got in a fight with a fellow cast member and called him a “faggot,” even he suddenly became Bull Connor.

If you thought blacks were already being taken for granted by the left, wait until Democrats notice that Hispanics outnumber blacks.

The reason that is happening is that Senator Ted Kennedy needed his own civil rights bill, just like brothers John and Bobby. Teddy thought:
Let’s treat people who live in other countries like they’re blacks who suffered through slavery in this country!
His 1965 immigration bill ensured that the vast majority—85 percent—of new immigrants would come from the third world, while severely limiting immigration from the nationalities that had populated America before there was a welfare state.
¹⁰

Blacks already paid a price when the new immigrants flooded into low-skilled jobs, driving down wages. The eminent Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz calculated that immigrants arriving between 1980 and 2000 had the effect of lowering the wages of the average American worker by 3.3 percent—but lowered the wages of high school dropouts by 8 percent.
¹¹
During the same time period, the drop-out rate for blacks was roughly twice that of whites.
¹²
Similarly, Vanderbilt law professor Carol Swain, author of
Debate Immigration,
says illegal immigration “hurts low-skilled, low-wage workers of all races, but blacks are harmed the most because they’re disproportionately low-skilled.”
¹³

The problem with defining “civil rights” as anything that benefits the Democratic Party was expressed beautifully by “T. J. in California” during a CNN call-in segment on “civil rights” for illegal immigrants:

CNN’s illegal-immigration activist, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, was unimpressed and continued insisting that amnesty for illegal aliens was the same as the black struggle for civil rights. Illegals, she said, “have the same history that you do.…These two struggles are extremely related.” True, illegal aliens had crossed the border illegally, she said, but: “Was it legal to bring slaves to the United States?”
QED. I rest my case, Your Honor.
(Actually, it was.)

But no aspiring victim group has commandeered the black experience like the feminists. I can’t help but notice that women voters substantially outnumber blacks.

In 1970—a mere six years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964—New York State legalized abortion, on the grounds that killing the unborn was just another “civil right.” State senator Manfred Ohrenstein of Manhattan explained: “It was the end of the civil rights era, and we viewed this as a civil right.”
¹⁵

Two years after that, the Supreme Court found that abortion was a constitutional right—just like the equal protection clause, except not actually written in the Constitution. In the Court’s haste to make abortion a basic right of every American, liberals didn’t notice that there is no abortion clause.

The abortion ladies even used an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to try to shut down abortion clinic protests. The Ku Klux Klan Law of 1871 forbade conspiracies
against a “class of persons.” But abortion protesters weren’t conspiring against a “class of persons.” They were “conspiring” against abortion, just as Planned Parenthood “conspires” for abortion. Mercifully, the majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia noted that the law prohibited conspiracies based on invidious discrimination against a race or class of people, and concluded that “Women seeking abortion is not a qualifying class.”
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