Thread: Bethel's Pastor Johnson coming under fire for abortion meme

Originally Posted by FireBrand

Not just an over sensitivity but the added and prevelant hyper vigilance to find an error that can be exploited. You know, the stuff that bitter people do.

Bingo.

More recent facts:

https://www.vox.com/2014/12/10/73724...lan-republican

In the midcentury South, the organized political expression of white supremacist politics was the Democratic Party. Indeed, number of prominent Democratic politicians — including Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, Supreme Court justice and Senator Hugo Black, and Mississippi governor and Senator Theodore Bilbo — were members of the Klan. But in the course of the 1960s, the northern wing of the Democrats joined with Republican elected officials (almost all of them northern) to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

After that, southern presidential politics rapidly re-aligned with newly enfranchised black voters supporting Democrats and most whites voting for GOP candidates. If the Klan was successful in suppressing African-American turnout or in pulling white people into the electoral process, that would boost the fortunes of Republican candidates.

And at least in some cases, the Klan actively supported Republican candidates. "Certainly, generating support for specific Republican presidential candidates or the Republican Party in general was not a primary goal of the Klan," the authors write, but "while the Klan was perhaps best known for its violent tactics in the 1960s, the movement did invest significant energy in attempting to influence voting outcomes ... Klan members advocated for Goldwater's Republican candidacy in 1964 while incessantly criticizing Democratic incumbents' intensifying support for civil rights."

http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/...ary-arm-democ/

Eric Foner, a Columbia University history professor, noted the Klan was a "military force."

"In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy," he said. "Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society."

But serving the interests of the party is not the same as being part of the party. Consider the political landscape today, where super PACs and other entities work outside the formal party structure.

In a June 10, 2013, PolitiFact Virginia article, Carole Emberton, associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo, noted that the "party lines of the 1860s/1870s are not the party lines of today."

"Although the names stayed the same, the platforms of the two parties reversed each other in the mid-20th century, due in large part to white ‘Dixiecrats’ flight out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," she said. "By then, the Democratic Party had become the party of ‘reform,’ supporting a variety of ‘liberal’ causes, including civil rights, women’s rights, etc. whereas this had been the banner of the Republican Party in the nineteenth century."

Our rating

The Republican Party of Dane County claimed "the KKK was founded as the military arm of the Democratic Party."

There is little doubt that the political interests of the Klan and the Democratic Party, at least in the early years, intersected. But there is no evidence that it was founded as part of the Democratic Party, or that the party ever even had an official "military arm."

If a Democrat today claimed the KKK is the military arm of the Republican Party, we’d have a similar point of view.

We rate the claim False.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.a9479ecc5c31

Put another way: The people who started the Klan were probably Democrats, just as they were mostly Southerners. That’s the early Klan, that emerged during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War in Tennessee. The reemergent Klan of the 1910s was also started in the South, as the animation above indicates, and at the time, those states were still Democratic. It’s more fair to credit the geography with creating the Klan than it is the politics, since we can at least be certain of geographic origin. The political aims of the Klan overlapped with the political aims of Democrats after the war and a century ago, but there’s no indication that the party deliberately created the organization any more than there is an indication that Canada deliberately created Nickelback.

Better: It’s like blaming the Unabomber on the Montana Territory — pinning fault on a sort-of-recognizable but not-really-related thing that also doesn’t exist anymore. It’s critical to point out that talking about the Democratic Party of early 20th century Alabama is like talking about Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone in relation to the iPhone. It’s … not really the same thing.

...

But the point isn’t to make an historically valid point about the nature of racism. The point is to take one of the few things that everyone agrees is bad and using it to stamp your opponents any way you can.

That's really not the point of the thread. The point is the over reaction by over sensitive people and not realizing it was originally posted by a black man and don't have the critical evaluation skills to understand the post wasn't trying to 'justify' or make the KKK seem 'less' horrible then they were/are but try and raise the awareness of how horrible abortion is but it is accepted while the klan is seen as the worst of the worst.

Looking at abortion, let us read one of the quotes from an incredibly racist, anti-black females which incidentally launched planned parenthood, the illustrious Margaret Sanger:


12) “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” Sanger wrote. —Letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble on Dec., 10, 1939

Originally Posted by fuego

That's really not the point of the thread. The point is the over reaction by over sensitive people and not realizing it was originally posted by a black man and don't have the critical evaluation skills to understand the post wasn't trying to 'justify' or make the KKK seem 'less' horrible then they were/are but try and raise the awareness of how horrible abortion is but it is accepted while the klan is seen as the worst of the worst.

(1) Both the KKK and abortion are "the worst of the worst", not neither/or.

(2) I was addressing the intellectually dishonest assertion about the KKK and Democrats that is used sometimes to shut arguments down re: why black people tend to vote heavily Democratic. In other words, deflection. Talking about things that happened two centuries ago which has nothing to do with today's climate.

(3) the fact that it was originally posted by a black person doesn't automatically give it a "pass". the use of the image of a noose was intended to (again) shut down the argument as to why black folks vote Democrat for the most part, and elicit a emotional response from people when it was not necessary.

(4)The creator of the meme IS trying to say one is worse than the other, and in turn, attempting to parlay folk into turning against the Democratic party. I wonder who would be behind that agenda? The meme creator could have made his point without the "noose" and it would have carried the same weight.

(5) The Johnsons were right about removing the meme, as it displays insensitivity to a portion (I don't know how large of a portion tho) of their audience and it doesn't fit into their (Bethel's) culture of honor.

Originally Posted by FaithfulOne

(1) Both the KKK and abortion are "the worst of the worst", not neither/or.

(2) I was addressing the intellectually dishonest assertion about the KKK and Democrats that is used sometimes to shut arguments down re: why black people tend to vote heavily Democratic. In other words, deflection. Talking about things that happened two centuries ago which has nothing to do with today's climate.

(3) the fact that it was originally posted by a black person doesn't automatically give it a "pass". the use of the image of a noose was intended to (again) shut down the argument as to why black folks vote Democrat for the most part, and elicit a emotional response from people when it was not necessary.

(4)The creator of the meme IS trying to say one is worse than the other, and in turn, attempting to parlay folk into turning against the Democratic party. I wonder who would be behind that agenda? The meme creator could have made his point without the "noose" and it would have carried the same weight.

(5) The Johnsons were right about removing the meme, as it displays insensitivity to a portion (I don't know how large of a portion tho) of their audience and it doesn't fit into their (Bethel's) culture of honor.

Naturally the democratic party and the republican party stands for equality and justice for all...... not.... To understand the democrats you have to understand their theology yes I said theology. The theology of progression and economic captivity. The "Great Society" legislation by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 - 1967 comes to mind here if you will indulge me.

https://www.weeklystandard.com/james...-great-society

The damage to the black family was horrendous...

http://www.theamericanconservative.c...uclear-family/

May I quote a section here...

Johnson incorporated Moynihan’s study into a speech at Washington’s Howard University that suggested that poor black families should be given a guaranteed, government-provided income. Johnson and his policy team believed that expanding government funding for broken families would help save them. Instead, it incentivized single mothers to remain unmarried. By expanding welfare state programs to Americans who were already experiencing serious stress and hardship, it deepened the problems of illegitimacy, fatherless homes, and other cultural problems. Millions of Americans soon were engulfed in permanent chaos and dysfunction. A plague of fatherlessness ensued, with nearly 72 percent of all American black children being born to single mothers by 2015.

Did it have to be this way? When Johnson came to office in late 1963, more than 90 percent of American babies were in homes with married parents. The 1960 census showed that nearly 9 of every 10 children from birth to 18 years of age lived with married parents. While illegitimacy had grown to about 8 percent from 4 percent between 1940 and 1965, it then exploded. By 1990 the rate would be nearly 30 percent.

Today more than 40 percent of all Americans are born to unmarried mothers. More than 3 of every 10 children live in some arrangement other than a two-parent home. Cohabitation continues to climb, and has become the acceptable norm for millions of Americans. The most recent Census Bureau report says barely half of all American children are living with both married biological parents.

and this as well...

This syndrome had perhaps its most profound impact in some of America’s most difficult neighborhoods, where unparalleled family breakdown is, in part, the sad result of Lyndon Johnson’s well-meaning miscalculations. We are living through the collapse of the traditional family and marriage as the norm and expectation for millions of Americans, especially in low-income communities.

Writer Myron Magnet observed that the “dream’’ of the Great Society has become a “nightmare’’ for the very people that the Great Society was designed to help. Poverty and single-mother childbearing were both higher after the Great Society than before, and the number of intact families has declined significantly.

The black nuclear family barely is hanging on and I might add here both republicans and democrats agreed on the 200 plus pieces of the great society legislation from 64 through 69. There's more but I will stop here.

Writer Myron Magnet observed that the "dream'' of the Great Society has become a "nightmare'' for the very people that the Great Society was designed to help. Poverty and single-mother childbearing were both higher after the Great Society than before, and the number of intact families has declined significantly.

The black nuclear family barely is hanging on and I might add here both republicans and democrats agreed on the 200 plus pieces of the great society legislation from 64 through 69. There's more but I will stop here.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...tz-book-216538

Since at least the early 1980s, Republicans have been committed to dismantling Lyndon Johnson's Great Society—a collection of programs the 36th president vowed would lead to "an end to poverty and racial injustice."

Twenty-one years later, in a scorching address delivered in 1983, President Ronald Reagan denounced the Great Society as a bundle of expensive and failed initiatives that contributed to, rather than alleviated, suffering. Johnson's legacy reinforced the what Reagan called the "central political error of our time": the flawed notion that "government and bureaucracy" were the "primary vehicle for social change."

A Democratic Congress blocked Reagan in his attempts to unravel Johnson's work, but no such obstacle encumbers President Donald Trump. Congressional Republicans control both chambers and are far more conservative in their views than they were in Reagan's time. Many signature items of Johnson's legacy—from civil and voting rights to environmental protections and aid to public schools—are today under assault. Indeed, there is no more a dogged advocate of overhauling the Great Society's antipoverty programs than House Speaker Paul Ryan, who claims that their "top-down approach" "created and perpetuated a debilitating culture of dependency, wrecking families and communities."

Yet for all Johnson's grandiose rhetoric, the Great Society was more centrist—and is more critical to the nation's social and economic fabric—than has been commonly understood. The presidential aides who conceived and implemented its component parts rejected policies that would enforce equality of income, wealth or condition. They did not broadly support quantitative measures like cash transfers or a guaranteed minimum income but, rather, believed that qualitative measures like education, workforce training, access to health care, food security and full political empowerment would ensure each American a level playing field and equal opportunity to share in the nation's prosperity.

Continued...

"After 1973, this belief no longer seemed tenable. Owing in part to spending on the Vietnam War, as well as a series of supply shocks in the food and energy sectors, Americans faced more than a decade of runaway inflation. Inflation was accompanied, in turn, by rising unemployment, particularly in the manufacturing sector, which for many years had formed the backbone of America’s prosperous, postwar middle class. Stagflation—the combination of high unemployment and inflation—was the very repudiation of liberal economic theory, and it undercut the entire premise of opportunity theory.

Experts lost control of the economic levers, and increasingly it has become clear that all the education and training in the world will not help poor people in urban ghettos, declining coal towns in Appalachia or midsized cities in the Midwest. Poor people need jobs and income, not qualitative assistance to help them capture prosperity that no longer exists.

..."But if Great Society merits reconsideration, the key consideration should be how to strengthen it—not weaken or dismantle it. One-hundred thirty million people—roughly 40 percent of the country—rely on it for health care. Thirty million children rely on it for school meals—20 million families for nutritional assistance. To pull the rug out on so large a population without a viable alternative is both cruel and precipitous."

and just to emphasize a point, all this hasn't only affected poor Black Americans. Poor White Americans, many who voted FOR Trump, will be affected as well IF the dismantling of Johnson's Great Society happens.