MSNBC's Al Sharpton is repeating the celebrated civil rights march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, Ala., but instead of protesting Jim Crow segregation and police brutality, he's opposing voter ID laws, right-to-work laws, and the Alabama illegal immigration bill.Sharpton is a buffoon whose credibility died many years ago with the Tawana Brawley case. This desperation to make everything a civil rights issue is simply embarrassing.
Sharpton isn't fighting the new civil rights issue of our time, he's just engaging in left-wing activism. "We're here about voter ID, we're here because the most reactionary immigration law is in Alabama," Shaprton said on Morning Joe today, "and thirdly, workers' rights -- it's against the law to organize unions here . . . we have our rally -- Martin Luther King III and many of the labor leaders and I."
As public relations stunts go, Sharpton's is notably ill-informed. Most glaringly, it's not against the law to organize unions in Alabama. "Alabama workers may choose to join a union or decline to do so," the Alabama Department of Labor explains. So, there is no ban on unions, just a ban on mandating membership in the union, much to the distress of the "labor leaders" for whom Sharpton is advocating.
And in another sign that the civil rights movement is all but dead, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was founded to root out discrimination and provide legal support for civil rights, is now spending its time looking for women haters:
The so-called “manosphere” is peopled with hundreds of websites, blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists in particular and women, very typically American women, in general. Although some of the sites make an attempt at civility and try to back their arguments with facts, they are almost all thick with misogynistic attacks that can be astounding for the guttural hatred they express. What follows are brief descriptions of a dozen of these sites. Another resource is the Man Boobz website (manboobz.com), a humorous pro-feminist blog (its tagline is “Misogyny: I Mock It”) that keeps a close eye on these and many other woman-hating sites.First, start with Bill Maher.
There's probably no better sign that discrimination is dead in America than these two stories.
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2 comments:
Al Sharpton is a poverty pimp. Useless as a human being and a terrible liar on his show.
Actually, Al Sharpton stands for the "working poor and middle class."
Americans continue to regard the millions of unemployed (i.e., not working) as something less than human, undeserving of fundamental human rights (food, shelter and medical care). When it comes to our extreme economic disparities, American progressives, and this generation of the middle class, are every bit as elitist as the right wingers. This is America, and we do indeed determine human worth on the basis of one's economic status.
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