Political Discourse 2020

  Question posed on a local discussion newspaper board:   As far as Indian mascots, I need one thing explained to me. Teams have had Indian names for decades and decades but why are they only offensive now? If the name is so horribly racist and offensive, why was the name used in the first place? Or, if it's so bad then why wasn't it changed 50 years ago? Or 25 years ago? Why is it only a problem now? What am I missing?   Response: By way of analogy, why did it take until 1965 to abolish legal segregation? Didn’t people realize it was immoral earlier? Sometimes it takes a rise of historical consciousness plus the passage of laws for such matters to take effect. Otherwise, we would still have laws and supportive mores against interracial marriage and legal segregation would have remained intact.   Elaboration: To provide additional context, legal segregation was widely accepted in the South from the late 19th century until the 1960s. Through the collective impact...

The question on the docket in the recent hearing on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court was the request to provide a definition of a woman. It was not only Senator Blackburn who asked such an absurd question, but Senators Cruz, Hawley, Graham, Cotton, and Graham. Their collective hissy fits had nothing to do with the candidate's judicial rulings, and surely lacked any reference to the 500-plus cases Judge Jackson oversaw, actual matters of law, the basis by which she could have been evaluated. Rather, these political opportunists went straight for the hot button issues that rouse their base. They sought to demonize and dehumanize Judge Jackson. That collective line of questioning reflected more on the questioners than on Ketanji Brown Jackson.   This was not the uniform Republican tactic. Senators Grassley, Cornyn, Lee, Sasse, and Kennedy at least made the right gestures and (sometimes) engaged in serious discourse with the judge on judicial matters s...