Common Sense Democracy

Just wanted to post a quick entry to note the passing of Rosa Parks. She died today at the age of 92.

Sometimes it’s just a simple act of doing something ordinary that you believe to be right, that makes the world around you a better place. I’m sure she never imagined the events that would follow by her refusing to give up her seat.

Rest In Peace Rosa.

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A post at Proceed at your own risk: SCHINDLERS AND THE BUSH BROTHERS: ENEMIES OF MARRIAGE?.

How ironic is it that this horrific attack on the bonds of holy matrimony comes from the very people who almost daily claim to be the ones who are protecting the institution of marriage from such things as two same sex people in love who want to get married and raise a family. I suppose this inconsistency and hypocrisy is cut from the same cloth that has our President fighting stem cell research while at the same time authorizing the slaughter of innocents and our own troops in Iraq?

Shame on the Schindlers. Shame on Jeb Bush.

Well said.

Technorati Tags: Michael+Schiavo, Schindlers, Marriage, religious+right, Terry+Schiavo

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The Washington Monthly Political Animal posted a blog entry in follow-up to the story of Billy Ray Johnson of Texas, a 42-year-old mentally retarted black man who was beaten and then dumped on the side of the road on a mound of stinging fire ants. What caught me as surprising with this particular post was not so much the story itself but rather the reaction to it by people commenting on the blog. Most of the reaction is to a comment made by the town’s mayor,

The town’s mayor says none of this was racially motivated. “The black boy was somewhere he shouldn’t have been,” he told the Chicago Tribune, “although they brought him out there.”

Just the mere fact that the mayor chose the words, “the black boy” to describe a 42 year old black man, makes me wonder if there is anything that goes on in Linden Texas that isn’t racially motivated. “The black boy” just reeks with good ol’boy racism and supremacist language. That’s not an opinion or a position on the issue, that’s just fact. I think stories like this are clearly race motivated and I don’t know why the argument has to turn to politics and whether republicans or democrats have the right to declare it as such. As one commenter points out, it’s about human decency not politics.

Browse through the comments, some of them are quite disturbing. The optimist in me thinks that maybe some of these people are just posting to cause a stir and get people enraged but I think that the reality here is that there really are sick people out there who can rationalize stories like this in their own mind and not give it a second thought, like the mayor, who seems to think it’s not about the tragedy, it’s that the black boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Does that somehow justify the actions of the “white boys”?

Read the full post at Political Animal.

Technorati Tags: racism, discrimination, minorities, media, liberal, conservative

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