4 Inconvenient Facts Conservatives Conveniently Ignore

http://www.alternet.org/4-inconvenient-facts-conservatives-conveniently-ignore


A video image released on June 4, 2014 by Taliban website Al-Emara appears to show US Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl sitting in a pick-up truck at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan before his handover to US forces after five years in captivity

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.

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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.

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4. They were for Common Core before they were against it.

The most recent and possibly silliest about-face of the modern conservative movement has to be the turnaround on Common Core, a program initiated by the National Governors Association to standardize and elevate educational standards across the country. Originally, conservatives were indifferent to outright supportive of the program—many Republican governors considered themselves fans—and pretty much all the criticism came from people on the left, who were concerned that it would be used as cover for attacks on teacher’s unions and would favor “teach the test”-style memorization over actual education.