Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Media Matters - Buchanan on Obama’s race speech: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

In a March 21 syndicated column headlined “A Brief for Whitey,” conservative commentator and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan asserted, “America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.” Buchanan was discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s March 18 speech addressing race and controversial comments by his former pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright. He continued, “Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.” Buchanan then asserted that “no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans.” Later in the column, Buchanan added: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

Biography of Jesse Helms Reviewed, New York Times, February 10, 2008

Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said. With prodding from Novak, he added that he’d been spanked as a child for using the N-word and noted (with a delicious hint of uncertainty), “I don’t think I’ve used it since.” As for the caller’s main point — the virtue of keeping down blacks — it passed without comment.

William A. Link, a historian at the University of Florida, recounts this incident in “Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism,” his hefty life of the blunt, bullheaded, hard-right leader who — more than anyone besides Ronald Reagan — embodied conservatism in the 1980s and beyond. Summoning a measure of sympathy for his rather unsympathetic subject, Link can be overly diplomatic in discussing, as he calls it, Helms’s “racial insensitivity.” But it’s to his credit that even when engaging Helms’s more odious views, he shuns stridency while still managing to demonstrate the centrality of Dixie-bred racism to Helms’s career — and to the book’s larger tale of Southern-style conservatism’s ascent since the 1960s.

By the 1990s, to be sure, this racism was rarely articulated so starkly, or even manifested so consciously, as it was by the talk-show caller. But for more than four decades in public life — first as an influential journalist defending Jim Crow in the 1960s in North Carolina, then as “the most important conservative spokesman in the Senate” — Helms was obsessed with race; it was his political weapon of choice. In 1972, as a recent convert to the Republican Party, he won election to the Senate on school busing and kindred issues. In 1990, he aggressively played the race card — broadcasting a TV ad that showed white hands crumpling a job rejection letter — to repulse a challenge from Harvey Gantt, an African-American. And in his five Senate terms Helms led most of the major fights against racial change, opposing the creation of a Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 and the civil rights bill of 1991.

Maryland state legislator declares: ‘No law created by man that is not in concert with God’s law can be any law at all.” Church and State, September 2007

On the Maryland conference’s final day, July 3, attendees at the Severn church were treated to a defiant rant from a Maryland state legislator. Del. Don Dwyer Jr. R-Anne Arundel kicked off his speech by alerting the gathering that he would not “speak in politically correct terms.”

He wasn’t kidding. The state lawmaker seemed to relish trashing secularists and progressive politicians, and he depicted an America awash in sin, while promoting his religious beliefs as superior to all others. Dwyer seemed to be really, really angry and, indeed, toward the end of his over-the-top lecture, he acknowledged that anger.

Dwyer groused about not being permitted to open House sessions with prayers in the name of Jesus Christ. He vowed that if he were ever allowed to give an invocation, he would do so his way, which means acknowledging Jesus….

“The law is what God says it is, first and foremost,” continued Dwyer, “The foundation of law. No law created by man that is not in concert with God’s law can be any law at all.”

Tony Perkins managed Woody Jenkins Senate campaign in 1996, MMA, 8/29/2007

….while managing Republican state representative Louis E. “Woody” Jenkins’ 1996 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Perkins paid $82,500 to use former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s phone bank for Jenkins’ run-off election with Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA). Jenkins was later fined $3,000 for “knowingly and willfully fil[ing] false disclosure reports showing Courtney Communications as the vendor.”

Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council…

The Boston Herald reported in an October 16, 2006, article, “In 2001, [Perkins] gave a speech at a meeting of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] considers a hate group.” Indeed, a Fall 2004 article in the SPLC’s Intelligence Report asserted that Perkins “spoke to the Louisiana Council of Conservative Citizens on May 19, 2001,” during his tenure as a Louisiana state legislator. The SPLC characterizes the CCC as a “white nationalist” organization, and has reported that the group is “the reincarnation of the racist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s.” The CCC declares in its statement of principles:

We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.