Phyllis and her subtle racism

But she is racist nonetheless.

Because I like to see how the other half lives, I subscribe to her super-conservative website and podcast (Eagle Forum).  I routinely get email updates about the articles she and her fellow conspiracy theorists (and sometimes just plain old loonies) write.

Here is the latest one I just received:

Oh, How America Has Changed

August 19, 2011

USA TODAY published one of its colorful front pages last week detailing how America has not only grown dramatically in population over the last two decades, but has radically changed ethnically, geographically, and culturally. The most costly of the many changes is the fact that having children has become increasingly detached from marriage.  Illegitimate births for all Americans have risen from 26 percent in 1990 to 41 percent today "and could be headed higher." Among Hispanics, illegitimacy is 53 percent, among blacks it's 73 percent, and among whites it has risen to a shocking 29 percent.  Read column online

She is older now and thus falls into the "the sky is falling" camp that ceases to adjust to the new world that has evolved.  Since the world she came of age in has ceased to be - and she is not comfortable with the new one, though our youth always are and always will be - she thinks calamity is just around the corner.  Of course, the irony of this is that is exactly how she feels about those (like me) who buy into the global warming issue.  She says, "Oh, there's nothing to worry about.  The climate is cyclical."  But when it comes to anything besides global warming (and maybe evolution), well, the sky is falling and America better get its act together or we're all going to be liberal, Muslims before we know what hit us.

But besides those issues, just look at her subtle racism.  Note the rates of illegitimate births among Hispanics and blacks (notice the use of blacks and not African Americans).  And then notice the wonderful use of the adjective, 'shocking,' when it comes the whites illegitimate birth rate increase.  Hey, it's not that big of deal to have the minorities having babies out of wed lock - even when those numbers are insanely high.  But God help us when the superior people of the earth (in Phyllis's world view - the whites) have an increase in children out of wedlock, well it's shocking - even when that number is far lower than the other numbers offered.

Of course, one need just research what the immigrant shanty communities were like in the 1800's to see that illegitimate children are nothing new to American society.  Or how about the supposed golden era of America for the far, far righters (the 1950's) where kids were raised by two parents, but the father was an abusive drunk and the mother had to tolerate it because divorce was a dirty word?  I'm sure all of those children turned out to be morally upstanding young people simply because there was a mom and a dad in the home.

I recall visiting with one of our scholars as part of the MNHS grant.  He stated how one of his relatives (it might have been his grandmother or great grandmother) once told him - after her husband had passed, of course - that she wished she would have grown up in modern times because she would have divorced her husband because of how he drank and treated the kids.  But she couldn't.

Now, divorce is a horrible thing for any child to go through.  But isn't living with two parents who are neither in love nor happy pretty awful too?

To let you readers judge for yourselves, I was finally able to track down the USA Today story.  Since Phyllis is not a millennial, she never bothered to include a hyperlink in her article (and this is probably a good thing since the last time I tried to track down one of her claims, that teacher unions support abortion and gay marraige, by clicking on her link to the actual union website and found nothing to support her claims, she has wisely stopped including links.  Just like the extremists on either side - Olbermann, Limbaugh, Beck, Moore, Colter, and Palin, it's just plain easier to buy their lies rather than do the research yourself.

But I was eventually able to find it.  You be the judge.