Sure, they’re easy targets for the late night comics, and those goofy tea baggers never seem to run out of crazy things to say. Their events always have the color, flavor and whizbang atmosphere of a redneck circus, the signs they carry are side-splitters and who doesn’t get a kick out of all the misspelled words?
Crazy things to say? Tea baggers never run out of them. Entertaining things like how the sky is falling and we’re all coming under the rule of evil czars and mysterious agents of a socialist despot with a Muslim middle name! My God… there’s a non-white, non-Christian, Harvard educated, non-just-the-same-as-we-are liberal in the White House!!!!!
They seem harmless enough… except that they aren’t! They really aren’t. There was precious little to laugh about at this week’s Tea Party National Convention here in Nashville. (continued below the cartoon.)
If there’s one thing a tea bagger loves, it’s the Constitution. They worship the Constitution like the rednecks in my neck of the woods worshipped the Dukes of Hazzard back in its heyday. If they could, they’d paint the Constitution orange like Luke Duke’s Dodge Charger and drive it with utter abandon, pedal to the metal. To them, just like that car, the Constitution is a metaphor for power and swashbuckling personal freedom. Trouble is, they’ve never actually seen the real thing.
The Constitution, to these people, exists only as it has been described to them by Rush Limbaugh, Ron Paul and Glenn Beck. It is a make believe, magic document that grants to them powers and privileges that the real Constitution, the old one in Washington, does not. They’ve been sold a new and different Constitution, a Boss Hogg kind of Constitution, that makes its creators rich by appealing to the prejudice, greed and hate brewing inside all those little tea bagger hearts and percolating in the Tea Party pot. The tea baggers aren’t smart enough to smell the game.
Think I’m exaggerating? Think again. Take just a moment to consider a few ideas that brought robust rounds of applause from the Tea Party delegates in Nashville this past week. We’ll start with Tom Tancredo.
You may remember Tancredo. He is a former congressional representative from Colorado who ran for the Republican presidential nomination during the last round of primaries. He is a bigot, a racist and a generally disagreeable man. Need proof? Watch the video and hear it for yourself.
You caught the cheering, right? Tancredo is a perennial favorite with the “ain’t-no-racists-’round-here” tea baggin’ crowd. (Note: If you didn’t watch the video, Tancredo suggests that passing a civics test should be a requirement for exercising the right to vote, and scornfully laments that illiterate immigrant voters who cannot speak English elected a socialist ideologue to the presidency. It is all hateful and classically racist.)
We all understand, of course, that our Constitution, the real one in Washington, does not allow civics tests, literacy tests or any other kind of test to be administered in connection with qualifying voters to vote. In fact, the real Constitution plainly prohibits just about anything designed to deny voting rights to any citizen. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been on the books quite a while now (since 1965), and the Supreme Court has upheld its constitutionality on several occasions. The law in this area is simple. If you’re a citizen, you get to vote.
You and I know all that, but the tea baggers don’t. They were asleep back in the sixth grade when the teacher talked about how civics tests, literacy tests and poll taxes were used to exclude various ethnic groups from the voting booth during very ugly periods in our nation’s past, and how all of that became central to the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s and ’60s. No sir, all the tea baggers know about is that fictional constitution Glenn Beck talks about. The one that says it’s okay to hate immigrants and poor people, and it’s okay to deny citizens who speak another language the right to vote, or to get health care or to be treated like human beings. They know about that constitution and, by God, they like it!
I wonder if the Tea Party hockey moms who scream about returning the country to 1776 realize that the real Constitution would not have allowed them to vote back then? Nope. In 1776, voting was for white males only. That’s why we don’t do everything just the way the Founding Fathers envisioned.
Another constitutional luminary in a star-studded roster at the Tea Party convention was none other than the noted jurist, former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore. If anybody ought to know about the Constitution, it would be him. Right?
Roy probably does know and understand the Constitution. It’s hard to believe that he doesn’t. It’s just that he’s so consumed with hate and bigotry that he can’t see through the brown, malodorous film covering his eyes.
Back in 2002 he wrote the following in a decision rendered as Alabama’s Chief Justice:
“Homosexual behavior is a ground for divorce, an act of sexual misconduct punishable as a crime in Alabama, a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it.”
Okay, so he’s a homophobic bigot. How about his constitutional creds?
Let’s not forget why Roy Moore is no longer chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. You may recall that in 2003 he was removed from office by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary for defying a federal court order to remove an enormous, granite monument to the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court building. The federal appeals court made it plain that the display violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, the real constitution in Washington, D.C. Moore fell on his sword and became the de facto leader of American religious bigots, a sort of Bigot In Chief, by forcing the court to strip him of his robe.
The tea baggers don’t see it that way, though. To them, Roy Moore is a hero. They lined up at Moore’s table at the Tea Party convention to buy his book, shake his hand and get an autographed copy of the constitution according to Judge Roy Moore.
From the podium at the Nashville hootenanny on Friday night Moore had the following to say about President Obama:
“He has ignored our history and our heritage, arrogantly declaring to the world that we are no longer a Christian nation. He’s elevated immorality to a new level, setting aside the entire month of June last to celebrate Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender pride…He has apologized to the Arab world for our past, subjugated our national sovereignty by bowing down to the king of Saudi Arabia. He has pursued a socialist agenda by taking control of private companies and pushing a national health-care plan with a public option…”
There’s a lot more, but you get the picture. The Tea Party delegates howled their approval. In Judge Roy Moore’s constitution Christianity is the state religion, and equal protection does not apply to GLBT people or anyone else unlike the tea baggers. That’s the constitution they love.
Okay, enough is enough. It’s important, though, that you understand. When the Tea Party people implore us to honor and follow the Constitution, they are talking about something very different than the Constitution of the United States. They are talking about an ugly, vicious, thankfully fictitious, constitution that embodies and empowers all their ignorance, prejudice, greed and hate. They are talking about a constitution that justifies their selfishness, canonizes their bigotry and which, were it real, would take America to a very dark place where the poor would be eaten, torn from limb from limb, by mob rule and laissez-faire capitalism.
Tea Baggers revere the Constitution just as Cotton Mather revered the Christian Holy Scriptures. You know, the fake Holy Scriptures which demand that witches be burned at the stake. Somehow, at the Tea Party convention burning crosses weren’t all that hard to imagine. No sir, there wasn’t much to laugh about in Nashville.
