Liberal victory week comes to a conclusion:Civil rights

As we look around at the culture in 2010, there are conflicting signs of just how successful and just how much of a failure the civil rights movement of the 1960s has been. We have a black president, who beat a white war hero soundly both in the popular vote and the electoral college. African Americans have been Secretaries of State, four star generals and achieved many other honors and ranks undreamed of fifty years ago. Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh may brag about their clout, but Oprah Winfrey could crush them like itty bitty bugs if she put her mind to it. On the other side, blacks are still regularly lower in test scores and higher in dropout rates than other races and both the military and prisons are over-represented statistically by blacks. Some blacks have succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams from fifty years ago, but there is still a long way to go for the vast majority.


Some conservatives, usually young and ignorant ones, will talk about how much of the opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1965 came from Democrats. They do not expect people to remember what a revolution the Democratic party in the South underwent in the late 1960s.

Here is the electoral map from 1956. Eisenhower was the biggest war hero to enter politics since Grant, and he had brought the bloody Korean conflict to an end with a quick armistice. The economy was good in 1956 and even Joe McCarthy, the Republican's most divisive figure, was becoming a dim memory. Look at the states Adlai Stevenson won. He did not win these because he was the most liberal candidate and these were the most liberal states. He won because Eisenhower the war hero had the same party affiliation as Abraham Lincoln, dead more than 90 years but still the great enemy of all things Southern. It wasn't until after his second victory in 1957 that he sent troops into Little Rock to enforce desegregation. This is just a small example of the intractability of the Southern Problem, a large region of our country who make heroes to this day out of traitors to our country and our way of life.

What is noticeable to someone my age is how much conservatives have stopped openly fighting the culture war over civil rights and now pretend they were always 100% behind equality for all citizens under the law. I remember when Muhammad Ali lit the torch at the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Olympics. There was certainly some pity involved for his plight battling Parkinson's, but he was treated as a beloved figure, not as the cocky and divisive person he was in the the 1960s and 1970s. In this week's episode of Mad Men, the historical event playing in the background is the second fight between Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay, who then wanted to be called Muhammad Ali. Don Draper, who for all his faults is not a racist, dislikes Clay both for the name change and for his big mouth. It was a very common opinion at the time.


But if the alleged universal love for Muhammad Ali is difficult to reconcile with the historical facts that are in my living memory, it is the theft of Martin Luther King, Jr. by modern conservatives that is much more surprising and appalling. The buffoonish huckster Glenn Beck says without apparent irony that the conservatives must "take the civil rights movement back", as though it was well off white suburbanites that made the difference in Montgomery and Selma. King was reviled as a communist on the floor of the Senate, and as recently as twenty years ago, the dead and unlamented Evan Meacham of Arizona could score political points by refusing to have a paid holiday in Martin Luther King's memory.

If some conservative wants to list the conservative victories of the last fifty years that have made a lasting impact on our culture, I'd be glad to hear them. I don't think they have a week's worth of material, especially if they aren't allowed to pull the "Reagan won the Cold War" bullshit. That would be like saying Truman won World War II. He's just the guy in office when it ends. There are plenty of liberals who were fierce Cold Warriors as well.

They've got nothing for the people. All their victories are for the corporations and moneyed interests. As I said during the Clinton years, I'd rather have a president that disappoints me than one who disgusts me. Even as I get older and hold positions more conservative than I used to hold, the definition of conservative is moving much faster to the right than I am.

Liberal victory week continues:Women's rights

Of all the struggles for human rights by groups denied full citizenship, the struggle for women's rights can be said to have come the farthest distance in the shortest period of time. Technically, former slaves were citizens when the 14th Amendment passed, which means the law said black males had the vote back in 1868. We know full well how that law was hamstrung and rendered moot, but it wasn't until 1920 that women of all races were given the franchise. To put it in personal perspective for me, when my grandmother was born, she did not have the simplest right of a citizen in a democracy, but by the time she came of age, that right was hers. My analogous story is that when I was born, it was fully expected that I would be drafted if my country was at war. When I came of age, my country was at war but the draft was gone.

The vote is one thing and equal opportunity is another. The power vested in all male private clubs, which when I was a lad included many of the nation's most prestigious universities, was very slow to be dismantled. In the 1970's, women fought to get an Equal Rights Amendment, but it failed to be ratified by enough states. Some conservative scholars said it was completely unnecessary because women were citizens under the 14th Amendment. In many court cases, liberal advocacy called their bluff, and there were victories as well as defeats.


One of the most remarkable victories of the women's movement was spear-headed by Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color to be elected to the House of Representatives, a second generation Japanese American woman from Hawaii. She was one of the authors of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which after she died was renamed the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act. The most important section of this law reads as follows:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance...

It made no specific mention of sports, but that is where Title IX made its most notable impact, increasing the funding of women's athletics and turning the United States into a perennial leader in any of a number of women's sports worldwide.



When a very large group is empowered, the law of unintended consequences goes immediately into effect. Consider Sarah Heath, the tough as nails point guard on the 1982 Alaska state high school championship Wasilla Warriors. She had opportunities given her by people like Patsy Mink, people she has happily spit upon throughout her life. She became Sarah Palin, and the myth of the tough point guard has followed her throughout her life, when as an adult, she is without question the whiniest little bitch on the public scene today, making political pronouncements on Facebook and Twitter like some snotty little 14 year old.

Years ago, I read a sports writer who said that there would be real equality between the races in sports when mediocre black players could see the same opportunities that mediocre white players saw. It took no particular courage for a general manager to sign someone like Willie Mays or Frank Robinson or Jim Brown. These guys were as good as it got, and if you wanted to win, you wanted guys like that on your team. Real equality was black journeymen players like A's second baseman Shooty Babbitt, or when the over-hyped lousy quarterback could be black Jamarcus Russell instead of white Ryan Leaf.

In 2010, we are seeing real signs of equality between the sexes in politics. There was a time that to be a successful idiot, you had to the son of a rich powerful man, much like the story of George W. Bush. Now, women who were incompetent as business leaders can try to have a political career like Carly Fiorina, and women who are genuinely dim like Palin, Sharron Angle and Jan Brewer have a chance to have a serious political career.

You've come a long way, baby, but you should have brought a GPS.

Liberal victory week continues:Gay rights

It was the wee small hours of a Saturday morning, June 28, 1969. The police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Such raids were common, because the Stonewall Inn was a gay bar and cops rousted the patrons every few months for wanting to meet people with whom they could have sex. The Stonewall was owned by the Mafia, but they had no interest in stepping in to protect their patrons. This was just part of life even in sophisticated, cosmopolitan New York and homosexuals who went to bars would just have to get used to it.

But for whatever reason, the patrons of the Stonewall decided not to take it quietly that night and they fought back. In retrospect, many people consider this a turning point in the gay rights movement.

It was not a national story. I went to the library to check what my local papers, the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle, reported on the incident. Nothing. No story on Saturday or Sunday or Monday. There were lots of riots back then. The Chronicle did mention in the Saturday edition that there were riots for the third night in a row in Newark, New Jersey, and even reported on riots in Buenos Aires and Naples. Both papers noted that on Friday, there was a large public memorial in New York for Judy Garland, who passed away earlier that week. Many people who write about the Stonewall uprising believe Garland's death was a contributing factor to the anger of the patrons that night.

In much the same way, Rosa Parks' arrest wasn't a national story, but it was the catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott, which did grab national headlines. Gay pride marches and demonstrations began in New York, Chicago and San Francisco on the weekend of the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

Like many other movements of the disenfranchised in this country, the courts were instrumental in moving forward their demands for equal protection under the law. As unmarried couples began to enjoy some of the same rights as married couples by extension of the 14th Amendment, so gay unmarried couples who were willing to come out also were given those rights. In large cities, many corporations unwilling to lose valued employees extended benefits to unmarried partners both straight and gay.

But all this slow progress might easily have subsided except that the bigots, the vast majority of them proudly conservative, went for a bridge too far, the so-called Briggs Initiative in California. The proposition was put to the voters that any professed homosexual could be fired as a teacher from the public schools.

Anyone with two functioning brain cells could see this was an open invitation to widespread blackmail. While I call this a liberal victory, and President Jimmy Carter made it clear that he was against the initiative when he did not need to have an opinion at all, the person whose opposition to the Briggs Initiative was likely the last nail in the coffin was Ronald Reagan.

Score one point for men married to fag hags.

Again, I am hesitant to call this a liberal victory because of the lukewarm support the left has given this cause. Of course the churches railed against gays, but when I was a kid, even the "liberal" psychiatric community labeled homosexuality a mental disorder. The gay political movement survived being blamed for the scariest plague of modern times, HIV/AIDS, and it is still vilified by the right to this day. "New York liberal" is code for Jew, "San Francisco liberal" is code for gay and "Hollywood liberal" is code for both.

We stand now at a crossroads where laws against gay marriage may be struck down as unconstitutional. No longer will the majority get to decide at the ballot box if a minority is allowed rights. Once again, the Constitution may be interpreted as saying that bigots do not have a Constitutional right to not be offended and people who do no one harm may live their lives in peace and enjoy the fruits of liberty all Americans claim as their birthright.

Liberal victory week continues:Reproductive rights

In 1879, the state of Connecticut passed a law banning the sale of any drug or device used for the purpose of preventing conception. It was on the books for decades and nearly never enforced until the 1960s when The Pill was invented. Doctors tried suing on behalf of their patients, but the courts said the doctors lacked standing to sue. In a 1961 case Poe v. Ullman, the court decided not to hear the case, but Justice Harlan dissented. The most famous quote from his dissent is as follows.

"...the full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints."

A few years later, Estelle Griswold of Connecticut Planned Parenthood and Dr. C. Lee Buxton of Yale opened a clinic in New Haven to test the law once again. They were arrested, tried and found guilty and fined $100 each. Clearly, they now had standing and the case went to the Supreme Court, who struck down the statute. In the 7-2 ruling, even those who dissented called the Connecticut law "uncommonly silly". Griswold established the right of married couples to buy contraceptives in Connecticut. A 1972 ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird gave the same rights to unmarried couples, using 14th Amendment rights of equal protection under the law.

Conservative scholars hate Griswold, and point to it as judicial activism. When you listen to our new army of "strict constitutional constructionalists" who listen to Glenn Beck and other ignorant pinheads, it's clear they think the government isn't allowed to do much of anything, using convoluted logic that makes the establishment of the right to privacy look pristine and direct in comparison.

We see in the Park 51 controversy the true colors of these sons and daughters of liberty. They accept the rights of others, but they want those rights to be trumped if any uninvolved party takes offense to the exercise of those rights. They want a weak and toothless government until such time as they want to use government to abrogate the rights of people to whom conservatives object. They claim to love liberty, but they keep courting bigotry and intolerance, hoarding liberty for themselves and denying it to people who aren't "real Americans".

They won't go away easily; they may never go away completely. But it's obvious who believes in the rights of all citizens and who believes those rights only belong to people the easily aroused mob finds unobjectionable.

Liberal victory week continues:The dismantling of the obscenity laws

We often hear the critics of the current administration talking about "taking our country back", which implies that the people running it today don't deserve it, despite winning in a landslide. There is also an implication that the country does NOT belong to the winners of the election, that the REAL America got gypped in 2008 just because their guy got about 10 million less votes than That Guy and missed getting an electoral majority by 97 electors.

A fair question to be asked when they want to take "their country back" is, exactly how far back? There is a nostalgia for the good old days felt by a lot of people who weren't there during the good old days or who have very bad memories.

Let me be honest and say I'm old enough to have been there. Let me be immodest and say my memory is much better than most.

Many people decry the crudeness of our society, and I would not argue that point. My point is that we have gained in freedom and made a more just society, but that did not come without a cost. I am glad to live in a country where you can't be arrested for buying or selling a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover or Tropic of Cancer. When I was a boy, there were places where that was against the law.


Censorship against the written word had been going on for a very long time, but when I was a kid the battle went from print to performance. While some of the Beat Poets were harassed by the law, one of the first performers known to the general public as a threat to the public morals for having a dirty mouth was Lenny Bruce. He had been a comic for quite a while, working in burlesque houses and nightclubs. There are old recordings of his act on TV, and his stuff was both clean and stale, the usual uninspired collection of mother-in-law jokes. But his nightclub act began to extend into what we now call observational humor, with lots of observations about sex where using dirty words was close to mandatory. Swearing in a nightclub act wasn't completely unheard of, but most "blue" comics told dirty jokes with a minimum of actual obscenities. Bruce crossed that line, and did so frequently. All around the country, police departments and district attorneys decided that he had to be arrested if he said those things in a nightclub, as though he had a bullhorn and was swearing in front of a schoolhouse or church. He was first arrested in 1961 in San Francisco, the first of many arrests around the country. He would not compromise on his act, hoping to be the vanguard, but he did not have the strength for it. He was tried for obscenity and lost in 1964. He died in 1966, ruined by drugs and a well-founded feeling of persecution.



If I may use a religious comparison sure to offend, Bruce was John the Baptist, paving the way for the one who would come. That young man actually was in the audience one night when Bruce was arrested. He told the police he did not believe in government-issued IDs, a position that should endear him to many Tea Party stalwarts. He was arrested and taken to jail with Bruce in the same vehicle. His name was George Carlin.

Carlin was actually still a clean-cut kid whose act was perfectly acceptable to Ed Sullivan when Bruce was still alive, but within a few years he took a left turn, started dressing like a hippie and letting his beard and hair grow. It was six years after Bruce died that Carlin was arrested yet again, this time for performing live in Milwaukee one of his most famous routines, The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television. Here is the famous preamble to that clarion call to freedom.

"There are seven words you can't say on television: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits. Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war."

Between 1964 and 1972, America underwent massive changes. In the earlier trial in New York, a three judge panel threw the book at Lenny Bruce and sentenced him to jail time in a workhouse. He was still free on bail with the conviction being appealed when he died. In 1972 in Milwaukee, the judge at the Carlin case decided his work was indecent but Carlin had the right to say it as long as he caused no public disturbance.

Carlin's comedy album also changed the airwaves. A father was listening with his son to Pacifica radio's WBAI in New York when the Seven Words skit was broadcast over the air. The man sued and the case went to the Supreme Court. The 5-4 decision was that routine was "indecent but not obscene" and the F.C.C. had the right to ban it at hours when children would be likely to listen. This meant that late night radio could be much more free.

It is true that the world has become more crass because of this, but free speech is meaningless if no one takes offense. If entertainment offends you, don't watch or don't listen. For me, American False Idol is a disgusting obscenity even if no one says anything more coarse than "Gosh!" On the other hand, I like it when Peggy Olson on Mad Men says "chickenshit" and means it.



Some localities still try to block stuff, but the Internet is hard to control. The greatest song of the Summer of 2010 is currently available only on The You Tubes, Cee Lo Green's infectiously catchy and upbeat new tune called Fuck You!

This is because liberals stood up for free speech when conservatives tried as hard as they could to deny it. When these self-professed rodeo clowns say they love the constitution, it's a still a pretty good bet that they don't.

Liberal victory week begins:Ending the draft

I saw a Gallup poll taken in 2009 that states only about 20% of Americans now self-identify as liberal, with 40% self-identified as conservative and 35% as moderate. I'm guessing the last 5% consider themselves Sandinista like my good buddy Padre Mickey. Party affiliations are much closer, with Democrats often in the lead as they were in 2008 when Obama crushed McCain. Party affiliation and position on the political spectrum aside, let it always be remembered that John McCain ran one of the worst campaigns for president in the last fifty years, showing less competence than George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis or Bob Dole, other candidates to took serious electoral ass-whuppings.

Now, the conservative movement thinks of themselves as the standard bearers of "liberty" and "freedom", which in their mind means paying lower taxes. I'm old enough to remember when freedom was the cause of liberals, and freedom meant "not getting your ass thrown in jail for no good cause". Many of the battles for freedom started in my lifetime, and time after time, people who self-identified as conservatives were against freedom and they got their asses kicked like the miserable cowardly dogs that they are.

A lot of young people didn't live through it, but I did. I had some personal stake in some of the changes that took place and nearly none in others, but that doesn't change the facts. Life in these United States is better for all our citizens because of the courage of liberal heroes who stood up against conservative villains.


I start this week of history lessons with one of the most remarkable and hard to predict victories of all, the end of the military draft. The United States has had a draft since the Civil War and there have always been people who complained. It was a real issue during World War I, when there were a lot of people in the country who were against foreign entanglements and didn't see the sinking of the Lusitania as provocation enough to enter a horrible slaughter thousands of miles away. The anti-draft movement of World War II and Korea were much less pronounced, but during Vietnam, it was a real political issue that divided the country along left-right lines.


One of the most vivid signs of that split was how people felt about Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxing champion who converted to the Black Muslims and claimed his religion allowed him to be a conscientious objector. Ali was deeply hated by a large segment of the population, so much so that Joe Frazier, a man who had to struggle against a racist system as well, was cast as an Uncle Tom because so many white scumbags pinned their hopes on him to beat Ali, since anyone with half a brain knew that there wasn't a white heavyweight who had a chance in hell of beating the mouthy and supremely talented boxer and showman.

Men who stood against the draft were seen as cowards, but they faced jail or exile for their beliefs, and quite simply, their argument that the draft was an infringement on their freedom was undeniable. The government could force them into a low paying and exceedingly hazardous job or throw them in jail. In the sixties, there didn't seem to be an alternative to the draft, but as about a half century has now gone by, we can say the draft protesters of the 1960s helped make life better for the generations that followed them, aided by two unlikely allies, the military itself and Richard Nixon.

The military has never liked the draft. Men forced into uniform don't make particularly good soldiers, and in Vietnam, they became a serious threat to the military structure with the not common but still troubling act of fragging. Fragging was slang for enlisted men seriously wounding or killing officers they disliked, named for the fragmentation grenade often used. The military brass knew the problem was draftees and cracking down on discipline would likely make matters worse. Nixon, for as much as he was reviled by liberals then (and now), was a very keen politician who understood that victories did not have to be the crushing of your opponents, but instead might work if you took a major issue away from your opponents. During his administration, the first steps were taken that turned the draft into a lottery which has since been effectively discontinued. The military lobbied hard to increase our military budget so steeply that we could field a smaller and exceedingly well equipped volunteer army to fight any war short of World War III without a draft, even when fighting two long wars today, started when conservative pinheads and military shirkers George W. Bush and Dick Cheney began two conflicts they had no idea how to end.

The end of the draft had a direct impact on my life. My dad was drafted and fought in Korea. He hated it deeply and instructed my brother in ways to make sure the Army rejected him when his time came. Even the lottery was discontinued when my time came and I could stay in school without worrying about it.

The people who fought hardest for this issue were liberals. Those who opposed change were, as usual, conservatives. We won and they lost. This is a steady, consistent pattern of the last half century and there are battles still to be fought or yet to be finished.

More tomorrow.