AKA: repugican Outreach
According to
freedictionary,
outreach means “the act of reaching out.” This is a foreign concept to
the repugican cabal. They have been in the business of alienating
people for so long, that even those who see the merit in changing with
the times in the name of political expediency struggle with the
concept. Others seem to think that outreach either means uttering your racial slurs, sexist and homophobic statements with a smile or proposing bigoted policies with pretty sounding names.
If Steve King and Jim Inhoffe got the outreach memo, they fall in the
latter group. They introduced the latest version of an English only
act calling it
English Language Unity Act (with 37 repugican
co-sponsors in the House of Representatives) and also has five Republican Senators as co-sponsors.
The law requires “all official functions of the United States to be
conducted in English.” Contrary to its name, this has absolutely little
to do with unity. Among other things, this law is a backdoor attack on
voting rights, because nothing says unity like trying to suppress a
targeted group’s right to vote.
Think Progress reports:
One major impact King’s bill could have is to stop the decades-long
practice of printing non-English ballots in areas where there’s a
significant non-English language group. Indeed, Section 203 of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 currently
requires local jurisdictions with a substantial number of non-English speakers to allow them to vote in other languages.
Voter ID laws, restrictions on or eliminating early voting and same
day registration were intended to target the groups of people most
likely to take advantage of those provisions. Studies prove the
likelihood that these laws make it harder for the targeted groups to
vote. Aside from the fact that people in the targeted groups are less
likely to have the state required ID, a new
study
by Washington University – St. Louis, shows the discriminatory nature
by which these laws were applied to young voters during the 2012
Election. According to the study:
Black (72.9 percent) and Latino (60.8 percent) youth were asked to
show identification before being allowed to vote at disproportionately
higher rates than white youth (50.8 percent).
Black (65.2 percent) and Latino youth (57.0 percent) were also asked
to show photo identification at significantly higher rates than white
youth (42.3 percent).
Even in states that don’t have voter ID laws, 65.5 percent of Black
youth were asked to show identification when voting, compared with 55.3
percent of Latino youth and 42.8 percent of white youth.
According to the study, while 5% of young white voters were
discouraged because of voter ID laws, 17.3% of young Blacks and 8.1% of
young Latinos said they didn’t vote because they didn’t have proper
identification.
Since the election, there has been an epidemic of voter suppression laws. On Tuesday,
Arkansas‘ governor signed their version of a war on the voter bill. On Wednesday,
Virginia joined the pack. North Carolina’s “moderate” repugican Governor had a busy week in outreach. As we
reported, he decided to close the State’s Latino outreach office.
Meanwhile, his compatriots in the State House introduced their version
of a
voter suppression bill.
Of course, these efforts at outreach pale in comparison to the effort
to gut the Voting Rights Act under the pretense that racist voting laws
are in the past.
Hey, just because repugicans keep passing laws that make it harder
for people in some racial groups to vote and apply those laws
disproportionately to those groups, that doesn’t the Department of
Justice should have oversight over the states that have a long history
of racist voting laws.
In a separate attempt at outreach, North Carolina’s State House flew
the confederate flag to mark the sesquicentennial of the Civil War for a
week, but hey, they’re taking it down after civil rights leaders raised
concerns. Of course, no one in the new outreaching repugican cabal
could have seen that reaction coming.
In the end, the repugican cabal’s outreach to immigrants and
American born racial minorities will continue to fall short because the
fact remains that Republicans on a fundamental level don’t respect
Immigrants, racial minorities, or for that matter women and the LGBT
community.
It’s the absence of respect that makes it possible for repugicans to
believe that sending people to rape boot camp to “fix mistakes” is a
better way to reach out to women then say recognizing that rape is a
crime and the only person who is at fault is the rapist. The small
government talking point might have more credibility if repugicans
stopped passing increasingly draconian laws to nationalize women’s
vaginas.
It’s the absence of respect that makes it possible for repugicans to believe saying
thank you for picking our food
while claiming that Immigrants are takers – especially since the data
proves that Immigrants are, in fact, the “makers” that repugicans say
they love so much. If repugicans really wanted to be taken seriously by
immigrants, they wouldn’t spend time trying to make voting harder, or
impossible, making up Nazistic drivers’ licenses or pushing English only
laws. Instead, they would spend more time on job creation, recognizing
that anyone who works needs a living wage (which will also benefit the
economy) and immigration reform. If they really want to think outside
the box, repugicans could think of recruiting people who recognize that
“wetback” was never acceptable.
While some repugicans may be “evolving” toward recognizing marriage equality, claiming that same sex relationships are akin to
bestiality or blaming the LGBT community for “half of all murders”
only reaffirm the presence of homophobia in the repugican cabal. If
they were serious about outreach to the LGBT community, repugicans
wouldn’t have taken up the cause of defending of the unconstitutional
DOMA. For that matter, they wouldn’t insist on gay repugicans staying
in the closet, while others make homophobic statements.
Obviously the repugican cabal continues to cling to the illusion that continuing
to hate and oppress is okay, as long as they do it with a smile. The
thing is the adverse effect of the repugican cabal’s sexist, racist and homophobic
attitudes and policies extend beyond the groups most directly affected.
The
curators of George Washington's estate at Mount Vernon periodically
sell whiskey made from the first president's recipe. Whether you'd want
to drink it is your own decision, because in its day, Washington's
whiskey wasn't regarded as the greatest, or even average.
Neither
a borrower nor a lender be, said William Shakespeare in Hamlet,
but according to researchers from Aberystwyth University in Wales, he
didn't exactly practice what he preached.
Some
animals seem to have gotten the short end of the stick from evolution.
In a humorous post at Scientific American, some of these animals let
their grievances be made known. A letter from an Emperor penguin starts
out:
