Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet
Rewriting history is standard operating procedure on the right. Here
are just some of the stranger examples
With conservative commentators dogpiling President Obama for bringing
home Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, many are scratching their heads in confusion.
After all, didn’t conservatives used to pride themselves on their
devotion to making sure that every POW possible was returned home
safely? Isn’t the POW/MIA flag a favorite to hang right under the
American flag in many red states? Wasn’t it one of the few issues they
had where they actually seemed righteous and generous, instead of
stingy bordering on malicious?
The sudden rewriting of everything we’ve known the right to stand for
may seem odd, but, in fact, rewriting history is standard operating
procedure on the right. Here are just some of the stranger examples.
1. The religious right started because of segregation, not abortion.
As Randall Balmer, a Darthmouth professor writing in Politico,
explained in a recent article, the organized religious right started
as a movement to protect white-only schools from federally mandated
desegregation. As Balmer explains, there were many other attempts to
rally evangelical Christians to become a conservative movement to
support Republicans—“pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed
Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion”—but none
took. Under the guidance of Jerry Falwell, however, it was discovered
that evangelical leaders would rally to keep black students out of
private schools set up specifically so white kids didn’t have to go to
desegregated public schools. Even though it was actually the Nixon
administration that kickstarted the process of the IRS stripping
tax-exempt status from “whites only” school, Falwell and his buddies
blamed Jimmy Carter and used the issue to start rallying support for
Ronald Reagan’s challenge. It was only after the evangelical right was
organized that they started expanding into other issues, like
abortion.
2. NRA used to support gun control.
The NRA is a gun industry lobby that likes to present itself as a
“rights” group. With that level of deceit, no wonder many people,
especially on the right, assume that the group has always existed to
lobby against any restriction on access to firearms, or that gun
control is a relatively new phenomenon only invented by pansy liberals
in the past few decades. In reality, the government has been
controlling access to guns for a long, long time. While there have
been limits on gun ownership throughout the country’s history—often
for sexist and racist reasons, such as bans on black people owning
guns—the first modern federal gun control law passed in 1934, to stop
the proliferation of automatic sub-machine guns that were popular with
organized criminals. Prior to that, many states passed laws regulating
guns, laws conservatives would reject today, such as waiting periods
and requiring gun sellers to share information with police. The NRA
actually helped write these laws.
And why not? The NRA was started as a marksman and sporting club, so
there was no real reason to oppose gun control laws, until recent
decades when it morphed into a lobby to protect the profits of gun
manufacturers. Even as late as 1963, the NRA supported gun control
laws. It was only as the culture wars began to build and the
conservative movement developed that the NRA turned into the
organization it is now, feeding paranoia and faux-patriotism to
gullible conservatives in order to convince them to buy more guns.
3. Conservatives have always been the voting bloc to stop civil rights.
A lot of pundits and other charlatans like to deflect discussion of
modern racism by claiming that Democrats were the ones who tried to
stop the Civil Rights Act and Republicans were the ones who tried to
pass it. Considering that it was a liberal Democrat—Lyndon B.
Johnson—who signed the CRA, it’s clear that it was much more
complicated than that. Yes, it’s true that some Democrats opposed the
CRA and plenty of Republicans supported it. But the party lines were
not drawn the same back then. Back then, both parties had a mix of
liberals and conservatives, and since then, the parties have
realigned, with all the conservatives—who voted against the
CRA—stampeding to the Republican party and all the liberals—who voted
for the CRA—running to the Democrats.
More:
http://www.alternet.org/4-
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