Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley astounded a New Hampshire audience by saying the Civil War was fought over the role of government and not slavery, but she was right out of today’s Republican playbook (“Nikki Haley doesn’t mention slavery when asked what caused the Civil War. She later walks that back.” Dec. 28).
To open his presidential campaign in 1980, Ronald Reagan flew halfway across the country to speak at an obscure Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. Sixteen years earlier, just a few miles away, three civil rights workers (two white, one Black) had been tortured and lynched by a group of Klu Klux Klansmen and police officers. The crime was covered up by Mississippi authorities until the FBI investigated, found the three bodies in a hidden grave, and brought the racist murderers to court. Yet the former California governor only spoke about “state’s rights” while he was there.
Republican “traditional values” of today are a far stretch from Abe Lincoln’s. As Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote: they believe that “the equality that is the heart of democracy destroys a nation by welcoming immigration, which undermines national purity, and by treating women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people as equal to white, heteronormative men.”
— Stan Heuisler, Baltimore
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