this was worth it for the headline alone.

I recently read that exact Atwater quote in this book - The One: The Life and Music of James Brown by RJ Smith.

Soul Brother #1 and Atwater were good friends. Brown was also close friends with Strom Thurmond.

Alex Gibney's documentary Mr. Dynamite goes into Brown's politics a little. How he went from supporting Hubert Humphrey in 1968, to supporting Nixon in 1972.

http://www.amazon.com/The-One-Music-James-Brown/dp/B00EBFN4U8

And I'm not sure if Atwater was himself a racist or simply an amoral racist-enabling douchebag who put his job above his personal convictions.

Thurmond, on the other hand... most certainly a racist.

In any event, Brown's change in politics doesn't surprise me much. The years between Kennedy and Ford saw a lot of "conversions" from left to right. Frank Sinatra, notably.

Where it was impossible to segregate blacks and whites - we lived right next door to each other. At least when I was a little kid, there were only 2 places I didn't ever see black people: in church and in school.

My ex-wife grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, OH. She said once that she never saw a black person in the flesh until she was 7 or 8 years old. I couldn't imagine that.

And some things always transcended race in the South. If I went and played with the black kids next door, and "sassed" their mother, she would beat my ass. And she would tell my mother, who would probably beat my ass again, just to make sure I learned my lesson.

It wasn't particularly academic, but the author tried to generalize, very broadly, the difference between Northern and Southern racism (and this may explain Thurmond's fondness for James Brown). The South, the author claimed, hated blacks as a group but loved them individually, while in the North the opposite was more the case.

Growing up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, I found that line of thought immediately familiar. All of these little podunk towns in the woods--Newtown, New Milford, Sherman, Bethel--pride themselves in their small-town liberalism... in the segregated, upper-middle class kind of way. They'll say they're open-minded and opposed to racism, but they are the whitest fucking towns on the face of the Earth. And, hilariously enough, most of these little towns owe their current demographics to the "White Flight" of the mid-twentieth century... when middle class urban whites packed up their shit and high-tailed it out into the boonies, leaving cities like Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport to crumble from lack of revenue.

If I can to be a smartass about it, the thought process is best summed up like this: "I love black people... as long as they don't live next door."

I mean as long as everyone is a consenting adult?

There's the diff between gay marriage and all the other stupid stuff they try to connect it with like beastiality or marrying a toaster. An animal is not a consenting adult. Neither is anyone underage.

Polyamory is where it's just a group of people of any gender makeup.

Ask any of these people if they support general group marriages, or a woman with 5 husbands, or 5 men all married to each other.

They also don't want an equal partnership between all members, it's the man at the head, and the wives are all subservient to him, you can bet that the wives sharing a bed is way out.

Well, if everyone in the marriage agrees to that and is OK with it....

I personally think it's ridiculous. I wouldn't want to do it.... but then I don't want to get married in any way shape or form.

But to be precise.... you are talking about, specifically "polygyny". If it is a wife with more than one husband, its called "polyandry".

So your definition of "polygamy" is wrong. It just means multiple partners.

Polygyny occurs much more than polyandry most likely because of biological reasons. When it comes to these types of relationships, biology has a much firmer grasp than most people would care to admit.

and if the believers in the world ever actually used the real definitions of words then we wouldn't have these discussions. Just re-read my comment as if the proper definitions were there, and replace "Polygamy" with "polygyny."

It's not about "If everyone's ok with it" it's "That's what we want legal" and everything else I said, with correct definitions...

That is Graham Crackering up as usual.

What is news is his announcement that he thinks he should run for the presidency. It isn't often that you see the deeply rooted insanity and delusional thinking pop out like that. THAT is breaking news.

mind's eye sees "Senate Asshole Committee Chair".