Monday, February 15, 2010

Anti-Abortion Race Bigots Strike in GA

Race-card playing billboard - put up by anti-abortionists in Georgia to exploit black people


It’s way past ironic, if that’s the term, when confirmed racist bigots who’d have no truck at all with any black person – nor helping them, or assisting them – now wish to warn them of “black genocide” via abortion. See e.g.

http://www.blackgenocide.org/sanger.html

Of course none of this playing of the race card rings true – the associated and demented evangelicals are merely trying to exploit black fear to advance their abortion agenda- like they exploited long time African -American fear (in California in the 2008 elections) to enact Proposition 8 – overturning a state court ruling that granted gays and lesbians marriage rights.

The truth is the real black genocide has been on going in the South (and much of the country) since the Civil War and extends to:
1) Helping to destroy welfare – by disparaging black women with children as “welfare queens”, and replacing it with “workfare” where beneficiaries can collect a pittance provided they work for less than minimum wage. Last I checked, with the exception of waiters, waitresses (who earn tips) that amounts to indentured servitude – or slavery!

2) These bigots have also consistently blocked all affirmative action efforts, to the point now that many universities have abandoned them – thereby leaving more blacks unemployed in the wake.

3) Also little known, and very rarely mentioned, are tracts they have circulated- since the 1980s, offering that black births be increased to “fill the armed forces” – while more white births be generated to "provide more consumers" (since consumers are now responsible for 70% of GDP). This was from the notorious book, The Birth Dearth, by Ben Wattenberg.

4) Oh, let’s also recall – as reported in recent issues of The Southern Poverty Law Center Report, that these same racists (including in Georgia where they’re putting up these odious billboards (see photo)) were going around beating the daylights of thousands of blacks after the November, 2008 election – since they blamed them for Obama’s victory.

5) And since we’re on the same topic, let’s quickly recall the mass of black people were also blamed for the economic collapse at the end of 2008 because “ACORN workers” signed them up for home purchases when they “had no money”. They were attacking black people by savaging the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).

Totally ignored or missed in playing this disreputable race card to pin the economic meltdown on African-Americans were these facts:

1) The CRA only applied to banks that got federal insurance, which excluded 75% of those that made the sub-prime loans.

2) No clause, provision or code existed anywhere in the Act which required a bank to make a sub-prime loan to any borrower. Indeed, at 180 degrees from this – the Act called on banks in needy communities to make loans “consistent with the safe and sound operation of the lending institution”

3) Contrary to other Limbaugh-esque blovation, a number of studies have shown that the CRA recipients paid their bills on time and ultimately became successful homeowners. Thus, the claim by the Rights’ blowhards that the CRA unleashed millions of deadbeats who caused the system to melt down is pure, unadorned bollocks.

Even IF it were true that ALL the CRA loans were bad, and all were packaged apart from all other mortgage loans (in CDOs or collateralized debt obligations) they still would not have created or incepted the financial wreckage (mainly in the investment banks, but also many commercial banks we behold. The sad fact of the matter is that the “home loans to the poor did it” is just a nasty excuse to avoid blaming the real villains on Wall Street. The so called “quants” who devised extremely risky and obscure instruments called credit default swaps which the banks then purchased. (See, e.g. FORTUNE (October, 2008, p. 135, ‘The $55 TRILLION QUESTION’)

As the piece observed:

You can guess how Wall Street's cowboys responded to the opportunity to make deals that:

1) can be struck in a minute,

2) require little or no cash upfront and

3) can cover anything
.”

But, of course, facts count for nothing when hyperbolic racists distort and destroy them to promote an agenda of hate and destruction. Because IF these race card playing anti-abortionist "Christians" really cared about black people as much as they claimed, they’d:

- Make sure every black person has affordable health care, as opposed to having to run to emergency rooms at the most critical time

- Make sure every poor black woman on “workfare” has available FREE child care so she can keep what little she earns for her family as opposed to losing it to pay for child care.

- Make sure every black married couple – already stretched to the limit economically – has the access to affordable birth control (which Margaret Sanger fought for) to be able to elect to have no more children. As opposed to having them, then having to resort to abortion to correct the bad choice afterward.

By way of example, in Barbados, The Barbados Family Planning Association enables ALL poor women total access to either the pill or condoms, no questions asked. Because of this, Barbados has been able to keep its population under control to the point it doesn’t put scarce resources at risk. The island unemployment rate, while still high (~15%) has not been so high as many other island states. (In addition, Barbados doesn't "fudge" its unemployment statistics like the U.S., e.g. dropping everyone off the rolls after 6 months and relabelling them "discouraged"!)

As for the calumny against Margaret Sanger, this is simply another part of the hate leveled at those who seek to improve the human condition and totally without basis. (Planned Parenthood has rejected all the claims and exposed their faux basis in its last two reports). Indeed, those who engage in such hate mongering either are ignorant or misled that the source of the slanders against Sanger actually emerged from Evangelicals of the time – who had soaked up the “survival of the fittest” drivel of Rev, Josiah Strong. Recall from the blog on his excesses (Evangelical go to bed with Social Darwinians) that HE was the one who merged American evangelicalism with the crass teachings of Herbert Spencer. Strong himself not only believed blacks to be “inferior races” but also to be “at least one fourth part demon or devil spawn”. Much as many of these same bigots today portray atheists, or any unbelievers in their perverted messages.

This belief had been present in many Confederates (mostly bible punchers to their core) at the time of the Civil War, and after. What these pretenders need to do is read how exactly Sanger (and others) were slandered because they flouted the egregious “Comstock law” Passed in 1873 in response to pressure from a crusader named Anthony Comstock, the law defined information about contraception or abortion as obscenity.

Sanger ignored the law because as a nurse she’d beheld for herself the true evils that unfolded when a family had more children than it could possibly afford. In Sanger’s era maternal mortality was 99 percent higher than it is today; 40 percent of those deaths were caused by infection, of which half resulted from illegal or self-induced abortion. THAT is how desperate people were, and Sanger stepped in to assist them. (See also: 'The War on Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women’s Rights and How to Fight Back', by Gloria Feldt)

In response to the latest anti-abortion ploy – to exploit black babies these bigots would otherwise never seek health care or child care for, Spellman College professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall has correctly referred to the strategy as a “gimmick”. As she notes:

To use racist arguments to try to bait black people to get them to be anti-abortion is just disgusting. These one-issue approaches are not about saving the black family or black children – it’s just a big distraction. Many black people don’t know who Margaret Sanger is and could care less”

We’d also advise these same black people targeted by these noisome billboards to recall what these same bigots putting them up once said of them in the 1980s: ‘Too damned many welfare queens livin’ off gubmint”.

Like they also blamed them last year for bringing on the housing collapse by signing up for “homes they couldn’t afford”

Who are the REAL racists? Not long dead Margaret Sanger, but the current anti-Obama bigots and their evangelical ilk – who will use any slander, debasing hate site or calumny to get what they want. In order to try to disparage the other side. NO wonder this nation is going to hell in a hand basket. Not from “relativistic morals” but from determined haters who’ve lost the ability for civil debate.

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