The Republican National Committee has said that the GOP wants to reach out to racial minorities and women.
There are simple ways Republicans can make that happen.
One of the best ways for the Republicans to reach out to more diverse groups is to propose policies that racial minorities and women could support. The other is to stop embracing people that are offensive to racial minorities and women.
Republicans have to stop trying to score cheap political points with people who have questionable backgrounds and are likely to make denigrating remarks about racial minorities and women.
Recently Republican politicians had to renounce the remarks of rock musician and gun-rights advocate Ted Nugent.
Nugent was quoted in an interview with Guns.com as calling President Obama a “subhuman mongrel.”
The words, “subhuman mongrel” were used by the Nazis to justify the genocide of Jewish people.
Now many prominent Republicans have to once again denounce the remarks of someone they once embraced.
Many Republican politicians from around the country have recently rallied to Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who became a conservative hero for standing up to the government in a fight over grazing rights.
These same Republicans now have to renounce Bundy after he wondered aloud in an interview with the New York Times whether African Americans were “better off as slaves” than “under government subsidy.”
“I’m a-wondering, are they better off with their young women aborting their children, are they better off with their young men in prison, and are they better off with the older people on the sidewalks in front of their government-issued homes?” he asked.
He questioned whether African Americans were ‘happier than they was when they was in the South in front of their homes with their chickens and their gardens and their children around them and their men having something to do.”
“Are they better off?” he asked.
Bundy’s remarks are so racist and ridiculous they are not deserving of a response. How do you respond to a racist who believes that a people were better off under a system of brutal dehumanization?
But Bundy is the latest of a long line of people on the fringe that the Republican Party has embraced. Whether it’s embracing “birthers” who still claim that Obama is not a legitimate president because he is not a “natural-born citizen”, talk show host Rush Limbaugh and his frequent fear-mongering and race-baiting remarks, or Nugent, Bundy and other extremists, the GOP is harming any chance of reaching out to diverse groups by embracing these extremists who are not deserving of mainstream political support.
(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune)
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