A detail of a billboard lampooning President Barack Obama as a Mulsim stands over a used car lot on November 21, 2009 in Wheat Ridge, Colorado (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
Blacks have lived in America for centuries, before it was really America. Yet their fight to become accepted as Americans has followed them through slavery, segregation, the civil rights movement, and even in the Obama era. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, a slave-owning chief justice of the Supreme Court concluded that "They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."
And yet, they fought in every war to be accepted, including the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War, where nearly 180,000 of them served, and 40,000 lost their lives. African-Americans served bravely in the second World War, flying with the Tuskegee Airmen and liberating Nazi death camps.
After fighting for democracy and freedom in Europe and the Pacific, some black soldiers returned to the South only to face lynching while still in their uniforms. And we needed more than a birth certificate to win the right to vote, send our children to school or even eat at a lunch counter. Those accomplishments required the shedding of blood -- the blood of black and white civil rights workers who sacrificed their lives in a country that failed to live up to its constitutional promise.
And this week, with Trump's blessing, the Arizona Senate just approved a birther bill requiring presidential candidates to produce their birth certificate and prove they are U.S. citizens eligible to run for office. This, as lawmakers in states such as Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Texas introduce similar legislation, with birther bills efforts failing to gather momentum in Tennessee, New Hampshire and Georgia. I am curious to know how many of these birther lawmakers ever owned a passport, but that is for another discussion.
The U.S. presidency is the ultimate symbol of American prestige, power and influence, and the ultimate role model. And birthers believe that the position should only be held by a real American, which in their view cannot include a person of color, and certainly not someone with a name such as Barack Hussein Obama. A black man has nothing to teach their children, so they believe, and will do nothing less than brainwash and indoctrinate them.
Just what AZ needs...more millions of dollars spent on ridiculous lawsuits because we've got a bunch of ignoramuses who dominate our batcrap crazy state legislature.
Each state CANNOT decide who can/cannot run for nat'l office, but that never was the purpose of AZ's bill - the impetus of the bill is politics, pure and simple...The goal of AZ Repubs is for the gullible, read: dumb, teabaggers to keep voting for them - especially in 2012, when it will be difficult for all Repub pols.
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