Not all Republicans are racists, but almost all racists are Republicans----Bill Maher
http://ccrgop.us/CivilRights.htm
Honoring 150 Years of Republican Civil Rights Achievements
This year marks an important anniversary -- and it’s a big one. Our party is a century and a half old this year. That is a big, big event: after all -- a 150th anniversary doesn’t come along but once … every 150 years.
It was 150 years ago this year that our party was founded in a small midwest town. Take a moment to think what was going on 150 years ago: John Phillip Sousa was born. Sacramento became the capital of our state. The San Francisco Gas Company illuminated its first gaslights. That’s the world in which a few people in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin came together to map strategy and to form the Republican Party.
The history of our party is as remarkable as it is untold, and it is under-appreciated for that reason. Just in the area of civil rights, there is no way in these brief comments that I can do anything like a comprehensive presentation. But I can tell you that for the last two years, the Republican Policy Committee in the United States Congress has been working to chronicle the Republican civil rights history, gathering thousands of facts, dates, and events. And today we are proudly issuing the 2005 Republican Freedom Calendar.
Unfortunately, the Republican Freedom Calendar has only 365 days. And so we have had to pick 365 out of hundreds and hundreds of additional civil rights accomplishments. It is truly impressive to go through this. I have learned an extraordinary amount about our party as a result of this project.
The Republican Party, I am absolutely confident in saying, is the most effective political organization in the history of the world in advancing the cause of freedom. Frankly, we haven’t had any competition.
The mission of our party was clearly stated by Abraham Lincoln: “to lift the artificial weights from all shoulders, and clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.” His use of the word “pursuit” recalls Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence. Just as America’s founding document declared our right to pursue happiness, the Republican philosophy has always been focused on opportunity -- not equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity. The “artificial weight” that Lincoln is talking about is, of course, the weight of the state. In the
most egregious form of statism, the government imposed slavery on millions of Americans.
Today, the animating spirit of the Republican Party is exactly the same as it was at its founding: free minds, free markets, free expression, and unlimited opportunity. Leading the organized opposition to these ideas 150 years ago, just as today, was the Democratic Party -- in the form, then as now, of politically correct speech; a preference for government control over individual decision making (and of course slavery was the most extreme form of government control); government control of enterprise; and an insistence on seeing people as members of groups, rather than as individuals. It was that refusal to see the unique value of every individual that
was at the heart of the Democrats’ support of slavery.
So on this 150th anniversary, it is useful to look back. This morning, I will speak briefly on four of the significant accomplishments of the Republican Party in the area of individual rights and freedoms:
First, the role of our party in bringing an end to slavery in the United States.
Second, the role of our party in extending the right to vote to men and women of all backgrounds, of all races, and of all creeds.
Third, the leadership role of our party in ushering in the modern civil rights era.
And fourth, the leading role of our party in establishing an American policy of peace through strength that has freed hundreds of millions of people around the world from slavery and brought freedom, democracy, women’s rights, and minority rights to the former Soviet Empire and across central and eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
From President Lincoln’s victory in the Civil War, to President Reagan’s victory in the Cold War, to President Bush’s liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the policies of the Republican Party have brought freedom to a major portion of the planet’s population that previously lived in slavery.
These astounding achievements are the result of our party’s establishment with a fundamentally different vision than the Democrats whom we formed to oppose 150 years ago.
We started our party with the express intent to protect the American people from the Democrats’ pro-slavery policies that made people inferior to the state. The Democrats didn’t just oppose Republicans, or merely tolerate racial discrimination; they were aggressively pro-slavery -- so much so that they were alternately referred
to as the “Slaveocrats.”
So on March 20, 1854, our founders decided to take them on. They drafted plans and platforms, and in the space of a few months, put together Republican Party organizations across the Northern and Western portions of the United States.
The first Republican state convention was held in Jackson, Michigan just a few months later in July. The first meeting of the Republican National Committee was two years later. Three months after that, the first Republican National Convention was held in Philadelphia.
That first Republican National Convention nominated our first presidential candidate, who -- as everyone here knows -- was a former U.S. Senator from California, John C. Fremont. He didn’t win, but just four years later, a former member of the House did win, carrying the Republican standard. And not only did Lincoln win the presidency, but his coattails were so long and so broad that Republicans won majorities -- big majorities -- in both the House and in the Senate.
In fact, after the election of 1860, every single governor in every northern state in the United States was a Republican. This was phenomenal progress in the space of just a few years. It was possible because our party was based on such a powerful idea. We know now that we don’t win elections unless we have ideas behind us. The history of the Republican Party is an amazing example of how much can be accomplished if your ideas are big enough.
These Republican majorities, and the strength of our ideas, enabled us to fight and win the Civil War. This same Republican commitment to individual freedom led our nation through Reconstruction, and guided our policies to the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, to make the United States of America what it is today: a beacon of hope and freedom for the entire world.
Military histories of the Civil War are commonplace. There is an enormous industry dedicated to producing DVDs, videos, movies, and books about the military aspects of the Civil War. But all too little attention is paid to the political aspects of the Civil War. For many years after the Civil War, the history books accurately described the Republican Party’s leading role in preserving the Union and ending slavery. But as history faded, and college professors became more partisan and politically tendentious, the facts were lost. “History” changed. The facts didn’t change, but our history books did.
