By the 1880s the white elites had re-established their control over the political process, and had put the plantation system back together by transforming the former slave population into share-croppers bound to the land in what amounted to serfdom. It wasn't until the great migration north and the mechanization of agriculture and the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 60's that Jim Crow was dismantled. Conservative southern politicians have kept this country back from the sorts of social reforms that all the other major industrial democracies take for granted, and continue to be a major force in national politics. They lost the war, sure, but perhaps they won the peace.

The Republican Party's betrayal of the freedmen and Reconstruction doomed the country to its present dysfunction. The immediate post civil war period saw the South joining the North in terms of education and social services. That all went out the window when the old aristocracy was restored and defended by the Ku Klux Klan.

equate heterosexual marriage with slavery......!

State after state is approving marriage equality. What kind of sense does it make to be against that and at the same time make a comparison to states' rights?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Treat your body like a machine. Your mind like a castle.[/center][/font][hr]

you dumb fuck?

For what that's worth.

Fine, let them get their asses kicked again!