Saturday, July 25, 2020

Ban Democrats?

Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) has proposed banning the Democratic Party.  Why?  The Democrats were the party of the Confederacy, slavery, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan.  If all those Confederate statues have to go, how about the party that represented it?

My initial reaction was to see this as a gag.  However, if Democrats and their supporters are so eager to tear down Jefferson, Jackson, and Wilson - all Democrats - then they should abolish the party that those men represented.  The Republican party was founded as an anti-slavery party.  Even after the Civil War, the Democrats didn't embrace the anti-slavery platform.  No, they instituted poll taxes, established the KKK, and enacted Jim Crow laws.  When Woodrow Wilson was elected to the presidency in 1912, he brought segregation to federal workplaces.  Huh.  So it wasn't segregated during the Taft (R), Roosevelt (R), or McKinley (R) Administrations?  From Lincoln's inauguration in 1861 to Wilson's in 1913, only 1 Democrat had been elected: Grover Cleveland.  Cleveland was a Democrat from Buffalo, New York, and somewhat milquetoast on the Jim Crow and voting rights issues.  Wilson's mother had been a southern belle and he was ready to bring Democratic Party values into the federal government.

If we are going to toss out all the good that Jefferson or Washington did because they were slave owners, how can we not cancel this party that supported slavery for decades and then oppressed blacks for at least a century after the Civil War?  The majority of the party history is horrendous.

Ban the Democratic Party!

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