Title: Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union' (youtube) Source:
http://www.youtube.com URL Source:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU Published:Mar 18, 2008 Author:Barack Obama Post Date:2008-03-18 13:41:02 by robin Keywords:None Views:674 Comments:54
Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union' (~37 minutes)
Barack Obama speaks in Philadelphia, PA at Constitution Center, on matters not just of race and recent remarks but of the fundamental path by which America can work together to pursue a better future.
I made it about five minutes into this. The world is on fire and he has time to all this time to talk about being black. Sorry, but it's not good enough.
I have long been disgusted by his church, so I haven't looked at the "firestorms" as an issue. I'm actually more critical of his association with Saul Alinsky.
The church. I didn't focus on the preacher very much. I do recognize why black Americans might congregate together that way. His years of attendance there are a strong indication of the kind of chip I'd rather not see being carried into the White house on the shoulders of the president.
I do recognize why black Americans might congregate together that way.
The history of it is that Blacks originally congregated that way because the Methodist Episcopal churches where they went in the 1780s deemed them undesirable and chose to segregate them. Some were pulled off their knees and ordered to the back of the church. They left that church as a group and formed the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. After a series of lawsuits, they gained a victory in court against opposition, obtained a charter from the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, built a church, and opened in 1794.
Segregation and discrimination persisted for a while.
Does no one remember that forced segregation only ended a few decades ago? There are old people who remember the separate drinking fountains, separate restrooms, not being allowed to sit at the counter of a cafe and being denied service altogether. And of course separate schools (Brown vs Board of Education) and told to sit at the back of the bus (Rosa Parks).
As Obama said in his speech, (which a few here are refusing to read or watch), Sunday morning is the most segregated day of the week.
In CA, there are Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and Samoan churches, where the entire service is in their native tongue. The language makes for a reasonable excuse. But that's not why Blacks had to start their own churches.
Jimmy Carter's church was all White. There was one old Black man who liked to point it out by standing outside Carter's church. He did embarrass Carter too. As I recall, they finally said he was welcome to join them. Imagine what a warm experience that would have been for him.
In my family tree, in 1785 in KY, a few of my ancestors started a Baptist church that included 4 free Blacks. In the church minutes there was discussion about allowing them founding member status. A compromise was made, they would be allowed to be founding members, but they're names would not be mentioned. It's the Boone's Creek Baptist church.
I am a direct descendent of the Shortridges and Scholls. From what I can see in the photos of the current congregation, it is entirely white.
On my maternal side of my family tree, there was also tolerance and far more foundings of Baptist Churches starting in 1787, in VA, to Carter valley TN, to MO and then CA. They started only Baptist churches and were present at the first Southern Baptist convention. Because of their Christian faith, they rose above the intolerance around them (but not to the degree of allowing integration or true equality until more recently).
You've Got To Be Carefully Taught
How does that Catholic saying go, give us a child until he is 7? Something like that. But that also works for other types of training as well.
How does that Catholic saying go, give us a child until he is 7? Something like that.
"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man." -- Jesuit motto usually (but questionably) attributed to St. Francis Xavier, 1506-1552
Does no one remember that forced segregation only ended a few decades ago?
Not only did segregation exist, it was sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court as Constitutional [Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)] which was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) held that "separate but equal" was inherently UNequal.
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The first Federal naturalization law limited naturalization to free white persons. Chinese remained explicitly excluded, by law, until 1943.
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In Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), opinion by Mr. Justice Holmes,
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 , 25 S. Ct. 358, 3 Ann. Cas. 765. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
The famous quote refers to then Virginia state law which authorized forced sterilization if it was shown than there were three generations of imbeciles in the family. The state court had found that Carrie Buck's mother Emma was an imbecile, that Carrie herself was an imbecile, and that her daughter Vivian was an imbecile. Carrie was forcibly sterilized on October 19, 1927.
Little Vivian was given to the care of a family named Dobbs who enrolled her in school. Vivian, the third generation to be declared an imbecile to justify the sterilization of her mother, earned a place on the honor roll.
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The Tuskeegee Experiment continued until 1972 when the Public Health Service as very publically busted by the press.
For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis -- which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”
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By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.
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The story finally broke in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972, in an article by Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Her source was Peter Buxtun, a former PHS venereal disease interviewer and one of the few whistle blowers over the years. The PHS, however, remained unrepentant, claiming the men had been “volunteers” and “were always happy to see the doctors,” and an Alabama state health officer who had been involved claimed “somebody is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.”
Under the glare of publicity, the government ended their experiment, and for the first time provided the men with effective medical treatment for syphilis.