A favorite topic of the religious right is America’s horrible decline in moral values. And in some ways you have to admit they are absolutely right about that. Morality in some quarters has taken a belly flop right into the gutter. Let us call Bryan Fischer exhibit ‘A’ in that regard:
Fischer: It Was Liberals who Opposed the Fight for Civil Rights
Ladies and gentlemen, who was it that abolished the institution of slavery? It was the Republican Party, it was a Republican President, it was a conservative who abolished the institution of slavery.
Who was it that filibustered the Civil Rights Acts in the Sixties? It was liberals, it was progressives. It was conservative Republicans that voted in greater percentages that voted for the Civil Rights Act then Democrats did.
Who where the ones that were standing hosing people off with fire hoses? Those were Democrats, those were liberals that were doing that.
Fischer is no uneducated ignoramus. He knows his history and he knows the subtle as a serpent lie he’s telling his listeners. The slight of hand here is when he says, and correctly, that it was democrats who turned the fire hoses on civil rights protestors back in the 1950s and 60s. What he fails to mention is the rest of the story, that southern democrats switched parties in droves after LBJ signed the civil rights act. Yes they were democrats. Then. No they weren’t liberals. Ever.
And the Nixon republicans welcomed them in, seeing a path open to breaking up the New Deal coalition and winning future elections. But what does it say about you when love of power matters more then love of country? There is no virtue of character or culture that grows from a garden of carefully cultivated lies. There is only deceit piling on top of deceit. The good person, the decent person, is one who will not lie to himself, or to others. We may not always know with certainty the way forward, we may disagree on which is the right path, but the one who loves his country will not try to build its tomorrows out of lies. There is no tomorrow there.
When LBJ said after signing the civil rights act into law that democrats had lost the south for a generation he was only foretelling part of the tragedy. The democratic party lost the south, and the republican party lost its soul. Hear the empty rattle from the void where love of country once lived every day between 1 and 3PM on Fischer’s radio program. Among others.
