Talk:Ku Klux Klan/Archive 4

message: The first paragraph on the creation of the second Klan currently reads like this:
The founding of the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915 was a demonstration of the newfound power of the modern mass media. The year saw three closely related events:
* The film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan.
* Leo Frank, a Jewish man accused of the rape and murder of a young white girl named Mary Phagan, was lynched against a backdrop of media frenzy.
* The second Ku Klux Klan was founded with a new anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic agenda. The bulk of the founders were from an organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, and the new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the original Klan presented in The Birth of a Nation.
User 132.241.245.49 had changed the third point so it reads like this:
* An explosion of anti-foreign, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic sentimet.
and split off the following text to a new paragraph:
The bulk of the founders were from an organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, and the new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the original Klan presented in The Birth of a Nation.
I've reverted this edit twice. I feel the language is overly dramatic and POVish. I also don't think there's any evidence that the year 1915 saw "An explosion of anti-foreign, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic sentimet." In the second iteration of reverts, 132.241.245.49's comment read "these attitudes existed before the klan," which is true, and would seem to contradict what he says in his own version.--Bcrowell 02:15, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi. I agree with what you're saying, but I don't understand how it relates to your edit to the article. Please sign your comments by clicking on the little button (second from the right) above the text window.--Bcrowell 03:53, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: edit by 132.241.245.49

message: Interesting, although goofy, edit just now by David Justin, with a link to http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/Controversies/1107362364.html, which I assume is his own web page. He inserted some material about the Klan's anti-alcohol activities at a ridiculously inappropriate point in the article. His web page includes such bizarre statements as:
# Enforcement of Prohibition, in fact, was a central, and perhaps the strongest, goal of the Ku Klux Klan
# The Klan was revived in Atlanta in 1915 to defend Prohibition.
# The anti-alcohol tradition of the KKK is now carried forward by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), the Alcohol Policies Project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CASA), Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP),and other neo-temperance groups.
Though kooky, it's interesting. I assume there is at least some truth to the assertion that the Klan was heavily involved in the temperance movement, and I hadn't known that. Unfortunately I've just returned all my books to the library. If it checks out, this might merit a brief (and more appropriate) mention in the article. Anyone know anything about this? (I reverted his edit because there were so many problems with it.)--Bcrowell 03:37, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: alcohol

message: An anon inserted a mention of homophobia in the lead of the article. I deleted it, for the following reasons: (1) I've never seen any mention of this as a major Klan issue in anything I've read about the Klan, so if this is going to go in the article, I'd like to see a verifiable source. (2) Even if the Klan did concern itself with issues like temperance and opposition to homosexuality, they're not the organization's core issues, and don't deserve such prominent mention. (3) The Klan's core agenda was set in 1915, and homophobia wasn't even a concept then. In 1915, gay sex was commonly considered a crime, not a lifestyle choice. It's conceivable that later Klans took up the issue, but that would make it misleading to state that it was a general issue for the 20th century Klan.--Bcrowell 03:54, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: homophobia?