Yes, it's 2009. Yes, we have an African-American president, but some people in the south still think it's the 1850s. Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace in Louisiana, refused a marriage license to a mixed-race couple.
"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told The Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."
Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them.
Imagine what how racist a person would have to be to qualify as one in this neanderthal's mind…
People like that never recognize their own shortcomings. He probably thinks he’s saving them from a horrible mistake, not realizing those folks likely went to the next name in the phone book and are happily married now.
In 1967, 17 Southern states (all the former slave states plus Oklahoma) still enforced laws prohibiting marriage between whites and people of color.
Famed Washington DC attorney Louis Gregory (Black) married a white woman from the UK in the USA prior to WW I. While the marriage was legal in the state where it took place, they could not find anyone to sell them a home or rent them an apartment! I think maybe they had her rent the place and claim that he was her overeducated butler who moonlighted as a lawyer because she underpaid him.
There is no need to back track on this country’s racist past…we are having trouble with marrying the gays nowadays…lets stay focused.
For about 18 months back in the early 90s, I lived in Meridian, MS. One of the guys in the office where I worked said a Black guy was doing yard work for him and asked for a glass of water – so he gave him one – and after the Black guy went back outside, my coworker threw the glass away. The behavior itself is appalling and bizarre enough, but that he told it at work the next day like an ancedote…even weirder.
What I found was they tried to treat Black people (to their face) as if everything was ok – but when only white people were around they would assume everyone there was on the same page (meaning completely racist) and would talk about Black people as if they weren’t human. Very disturbing.
“They use my bathroom” says it all. I have a friend, Gatz Hjortsberg, a New York-born screenwriter, who was traveling through a southern state long ago. (I think it was Oklahoma.) He needed to use a restroom. The Whites one was occupied so he went into the Colored one. When he got out, the patrons of the restaurant were all staring; the local cop detained him, railed against hippies, and then threw him out of town.
I’ve seen this on a couple of blogs now, and I’m glad this guy is being exposed for the idiot that he is. What a tool.
I don’t understand. What does the most prominent radio talk show host in America (Limbaugh) have to do with this? Has Limbaugh spoken out about mixed race marriage lately? Doesn’t seem like something he would say.
So you’ve heard Rush Limbaugh say racist things? Or you just imagine he would because he’s one of “those people”?
Just a hint: Conversative != racist, Lee.
Rush Limbaugh would think this guy a jackass as would the late Morton Downey, Jr. who was also regarded as a racist despite abundant evidence to the contrary.
Now, if you do a quick check among the hardcore left intellectuals, you’ll find plenty of white and black opponents of mixed marriage which are all ostensibly on the grounds of protecting blacks, despite the fact that it is an arrogant and condescending assumption that they need protecting in the first place and moreover that the black participant in the marriage needs anyone to second guess their choices as a free human being.
I’m a conservative white guy living in a mostly minority neighborhood and see white girls and black guys with babies in strollers all the time. More power to them for following their hearts.
Rush Limbaugh’s “color-blind” history of racially charged comments from Media Matters
People like that make me want to vomit.
One man is despicable yet you had to bring up Rush Limbaugh. What I don’t understand in the author blogs I read is why there needs to comments that alienate half the country, and hence, half your readership. Do you not see it? I’m disappointed.
PK,
Rush Limbaugh does not represent half the country. You’re drinking Rush’s Kool Aid. I have lots of Republican friends who find Rush as reprehensible an individual as I do. Not every Republican walks in lock-step with him (Thank God for us all!).
Lee
That last comment was right on, Lee. I’ll be sixty in a couple of weeks and have been a Republican as long as I’ve been old enough to vote. Limbaugh and his ilk, and their views, are repulsive to me and have me on the verge of switching parties for the first time.
I think if my readership is alienated because I think Rush Limbaugh is a tool, I don’t want them or need them anyway.
Kim,
I have lots of close friends with whom I disagree politically…and I’m sure I have readers who have different political, religious, and social views than I have…or that my characters have. I don’t have a problem with that.
Lee
Agreed, you don’t always want an “amen” corner reading your stuff. Better to “stir the pot” and get a variety of different view points. It is really the whole idea behind blogging.
What a tool.
An outdated, rust-rotted tool.
Let’s not ask him his policy about same-sex marriages, okay?
Lee,
I understand naming Rush Limbaugh in the post will garner hits, but you might check out the judge’s history of party affiliation here:
http://www400.sos.louisiana.gov/cgibin?rqstyp=comh1&rqsdta=26510100. I haven’t listened to Rush much in years, but most of the people who find him a tool haven’t listened to him and get their information from people who just call him a tool. He does humor, satire, and political commentary. The humor and satire are no worse than any late-night talk show host, just usually skewering those of a different political stripe. Rush may or may not be a blowhard, but he plays one on the radio. I thought the New WKRP episode with a thinly disguised, but certainly not thin, Limbaugh character got him exactly right–a very talented, pompous blowhard that people tried hard to blacklist.
The racist quotes circulating about Limbaugh are made up as even the CNN folks have half-heartedly admitted on the air. Only the Donovan McNabb quote is real, and that only said that McNabb was overrated (highly debatable), and that the press was rooting for him to succeed because he was a black quarterback when that was a rarity in the NFL (not only not debatable but laudatory on the press’ part).
Spreading the meme of Limbaugh being a racist on the basis of phony quotes is just vile gossip and character assassination whatever your political affiliation. There’s plenty for people to disagree with that he’s actually said. Letting people lie about someone and using that as a reason for shunning him is blacklisting of the worst sort.
I have listened to Rush many times and define him as a tool based on my own take, not because I gather my information from people telling me he is a tool. And I agree, he may only “play one on the radio” so I could amend it to say, “the Rush I hear on the radio is a tool” – however, the one who doctor shops for drugs in his free time, well…