Ann Coulter’s Embarrassing Rewrite of Civil Rights History

{snip} Ann Coulter {snip} praises the Republican Party for giving us the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Republicans in Congress did this as an act of kindness to blacks, she says, who had been victimized by Democratic racists for many generations. {snip} This was to be “a onetime exception to the law [protecting private associations] for one specific group of people based on an emergency.”

Supposedly if it had not been for the history of Democratic segregation, it would not have been necessary for Republicans to address this “emergency” — and to do it by an overwhelming majority. But once Republican took this step, the Dems began engaging in their usual electoral tricks: “Instead of civil rights being used to remedy historic injuries done to a specific group of people, they’d use ‘civil rights’ as a false flag for their pet projects.” Ann considers this Democratic misuse of the Republican anti-discrimination law of 1964 to be an insult to American blacks. {snip}

{snip} Although 95 percent of Republicans in Congress supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, at least the same percentage of Northern Democrats did as well. Opponents came mostly from Southern and border state areas where legal segregation persisted. {snip} Those who voted for the Civil Rights Act were awarding special protections to women as well: it’s a figment of Ann’s imagination that the law pertained only to American blacks. Republicans also voted overwhelmingly for the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and for all of its extensions and amendments up until 2006. Affirmative action for blacks, which was rapidly extended to other designated groups, began under a Republican administration, that of Richard Nixon, with the Philadelphia Plan. Republicans, like Democrats, have supported a wide variety of anti-discrimination laws and directives since 1964. {snip}

Coulter also gives the misleading impression that {snip} everything should have ended with the random act of kindness shown by Ann’s party in 1964. But the Civil Rights Act created mechanisms for continuing the war against discrimination, like the EEOC and agencies within the Department of Justice and later the Department of Education. The legislation was also expanded to include other groups, like Hispanics and later homosexuals. Depicting the 1964 act as a once-and-done thing is obviously and perhaps willfully wrong.

{snip} That law created the conditions for a continuing war against discrimination on behalf of an expanding body of specifically protected groups. A connection does exist between the Civil Rights Act and the demand by organized gays that the government protect them against discrimination. One would have to be naïve to believe that once the government starts crusading against discrimination and is armed with the appropriate agencies, it will stop at precisely the point that Republican journalists decide it should.

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