From: puccio@media.mit.edu (Jim Puccio)
Subject: GOD, GOP, and the KKK
Organization: M.I.T. Media Laboratory
Distribution: alt
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 01:09:42 GMT

Family Values and the K.K.K.
  By Diane McWhorter [New York Times, 1-SEP-92]

  I entered a time warp recently while listening to a tape recording of a
political rally in May 1963.

  The 29-year-old celebrations of "family values" playing in my earphones were
strangely similar to the sentiments expressed at the Rebublican National
Convention two weeks ago.

  There were tributes to God ("We need to go back to the old-time religion")
and wives ("I wonder how the ladies can sit across the breakfast table anymore
and [not] ask your husband, Now what are you doing in this fight?  Don't you
love our children?")  There was a good cop-bad cop format that paired bland
civic pieties with apocalyptic denunciations of Communists, journalists and
Democrats.

  The 1963 spectacle was a Ku Klux Klan rally in Birmingham, Ala.

  Family values was the centerpiece of the old Klan ideology.  The knights of
the Fiery Cross were America's ultimate "religious warriors."  They insisted
that their anti-black terrorist mandate came from G-O-D.

  This year, race has not yet emerged as hot campaign demagogy, thanks to the
Democrats' own unabashed courtship of the white vote.

  The Republicans have thus sprayed their birdshot on everyone who is, you
know, "different."  And in its aversion to difference, the religious right-wing
of the Republican Party has less in common with the Klan of the 1960's than
with the Klan of the 1920's.  The nationwide phenomenon then punished everyone
not certified as "100 percent American."  Even President Warren Harding joined
up.

  The Klan's favorite quarry was Catholics, who were presumed to be carrying
out a plan to make America a Vatican colony by destroying the monogamous
Protestant family.  This, evidently, gave licence to lurid anti-Catholic
propaganda, as in one Georgia politician's assertion that the bishop of
Savannah kept a pen of white sex slaves.

  A Freudian dynamic was born again:  The nighttime missions of the Klansmen
were vicarious indulgences in vice, in the name of virtue.  They shone 
flashlights into cars on lovers lanes and wreaked vigilante justice on, for
example, a man who dug a tunnel under a public school restroom to spy on girls.
Today's family-values voyeurs need look no further than the newsstand for the
righteous thrill of catching a Presidential candidate in flagrante delicto.

  Just as cheap titillation is an understudy for genuine passion, so can a
political party's sophomoric mischief be a substitute for moral passion.
Members of the Republican Party's youth arm hit on a sublime outlet for
ideologically correct prurience when they trailed Nina Totenberg, a National
Public Radio correspondent, around the convention floor, asking her if she had
an affair.

  Patriotic high jinks have historically been a diversion from the more
spirit-deadening requirements of America's real business.  Employers encouraged
the culture police of the 1920's because white antipathy for hyphenated 
Americans was excellent insurance against unionization.

  Similarly, the Republicans of the 1980's were able to persuade non-immigrant
working people to reject their natural allies, in a backlash that still goes
by the label "Reagan Democrats."  But in the 1990's bust economy, can the limp
bait of family values seduce them anew into identifying with the priveliged
minority?

  The Klan of the 1920's collapsed when one of its leaders -- the Indiana
Grand Dragon -- was convicted of the rape and murder of a young woman.  The
Republican Party of 1992 won't need so grotesque a hypocricy to show how
corrupt the ideology of "family values" can be.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|   "My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will,    |
|   never, never surrender to what is right."                                |
|     -- Indiana native, Vice President James Danforth Quayle, speaking      |
|        before Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, 15-NOV-91               |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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