shaDEz Report This Comment Date: December 05, 2007 08:40AM
Don't Believe the Hype (Ron Paul is Not Your Savior)
by Aura Bogado; November 14, 2007
Congressman and presidential hopeful Ron Paul has always opposed the Iraq war,
and that's
really, really great. I'm happy for him. The right wing ideologue actually gets
the war, the CIA's
practice of socalled extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo right – but the
balance of what he
gets wrong is glaring and is almost as frightening as the amount of friends and
colleagues I respect
that have signed on as Ron Paul supporters. People seem to like that he appears
to be an unusual
Republican candidate, but right below the surface of the libertarian mask that
Paul wears is an ultra
nationalist, gun loving Christian conservative that opposes affirmative action,
a woman's right to
choose and samesex marriage. And… oh yeah: he hates immigrants.
Paul is Not an AntiCapitalist
Despite his recordbreaking online fundraising effort, it's more likely that
pigs will fly before Paul
wins the Republican primary. Regardless, I'm dismayed at the leftwing,
anticapitalist buzz around
him, including the comparisons between him and Noam Chomsky. Paul's vision for
the harsh
privatization of everything from education to social security would only yield
monopolies that don't
work for everyday people, much like our current healthcare system. The
presidential candidate
advocates dismantling the few positive governmental regulations that secure
workingclass rights
and benefits, including welfare – again, clearly not anticapitalist. And
while I can admire that any
politician would call for ending the US' support of Israel, it follows in the
vein of Paul's nationalist,
isolationist concept of abolishing the United Nations and other diplomatic
efforts to conserve our
own opulence while leaving the rest of the world to waste.
I Loves My Guns
Paul calls himself a strict abider of the Constitution, and says that the
relationship between the
People and government is important. Unfortunately, I wonder how many people
would be left if we
adhered to this Texan's ideas surrounding the Second Amendment. Paul, who has
earned an A
rating by the National Rifle Association, champions the cause to allow people to
carry concealed
firearms. And although ruling after ruling has clarified that the Constitution
does not guarantee
people the right to run around lugging assault rifles, Paul loves his guns and
according to him the
issue is not even up for debate. Add to this the fact that legislation like the
1968 Gun Control Act
(which was approved after the John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F.
Kennedy were
killed with um… guns) was passed in a way in which Paul would likely interpret
as unconstitutional,
and you quickly realize how fanatical this man is about the Second
Amendment.
Paul and the Christian Right
Paul opposes the separation of Church and State. Yes, you read correctly, he
opposes it. He says
there is a war on religion, and that "Through perverse court decisions and
years of cultural
indoctrination, the elitist, secular Left has managed to convince many in our
nation that religion
must be driven from public view." We should remember that when writing
about the First
Amendment of the Constitution (which clearly states that "government will
make no law respecting
an establishment of religion"
, Thomas Jefferson coined the term
"separation of Church and State".
If Paul's theocratic concepts were instituted, we would have Old Testament
displays at the nation's
courthouses, and Christian prayers would be part of each child's school day.
His religious conservatism seems to inform his views on topics as elementary as
evolution when it
comes to education. When asked if he would encourage presenting socalled facts
to contradict the
theory of evolution in schools, he answered yes. This "alternative
view" on the theory of evolution
means teaching the concept of intelligent design– a pseudoscience which real
scientists dismiss as
another attempt to once again introduce creationism into public classrooms. No
thank you.
Intelligent design may have its place in church, on the street or at home, but
in terms of science, it
doesn't propose any hypotheses which can be tested through experiment; it's
simply not science.
Teachers should certainly not be forced to teach rightwing conservative
Christian ideals about God
in any classroom. When I take a biology course, I go to learn about accepted
theory. When I want
to hear about God, I'll go to church.
Paul also says that abortion is the tool by which the State achieves "a
program of mass murder". A
staunch prolifer who writes books on the topic in his spare time, he thinks
States should decide the
matter (read: allow states to overturn decisions like Roe v. Wade to allow new
laws to protect the
rights of what the Christian right calls "unborn people"
. Under Paul's proposal, States could
conceivably pass laws that bar women from obtaining abortions, including in
cases of rape or
incest, and even when the woman's life is at risk. Any person that values the
right of any woman to
choose what she will and will not do with her own body should take caution –
Paul is to the extreme
right of the political spectrum on this issue. I understand that Presidents do
not decide abortion
policy, but we have yet to see what Bush's Supreme Court appointments will yield
in terms of
abortion rights in the years to come. Any presidential candidate that would move
to allow States to
eradicate women's rights doesn't deserve the attention and praise he's getting
from the Left.
When it comes to samesex marriage, Paul says that federal government should
play no role in the
matter and that anyone can get married and call their relationship whatever they
want. On its
surface, that may sound fair enough. However, Paul was an original cosponsor
of the Marriage
Protection Act in the House. Passed in the House in 2004, the bill sought to
preclude federal courts
from transferring the recognition of samesex marriage across state lines. For
example, a samesex
marriage that took place in Massachusetts would not be acknowledged in Alabama.
Addressing the
House in 2004, Paul made clear that if he was a member of the Texas legislature
he would bar
judges from advocating "new definitions" of marriage. Those of us who
truly believe that anyone has
the right to be married and to be recognized as such should realize that Paul's
sometimes careful
wording around the issue camouflages his Christian conservatism which defines
marriage as
something that can solely occur between a man and a woman.
Affirmative What?
Both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. headed to Washington in March, 1964
to hear the
historic Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act. The legislation, which was
passed a few months
later, banned segregation in schools and public spaces and made it illegal to
discriminate in
housing and hiring processes. Malcolm, Martin, and millions of people of color
and their supporters
knew that such legislation would permanently influence and reduce de jure
discrimination across
entire nation, including the reach of Jim Crow laws in the South. They also knew
that it was a
necessary step towards reducing the de facto discrimination that followed. Yet
Ron Paul says that
the Civil Rights Act was a violation of the Constitution and that it reduced
individual liberties. Last
year, Paul was one of only 33 Congress members to vote against Voting Rights Act
renewal,
despite the fact that 390 of his colleagues voted for it. Paul seems to want to
go back to the times
when racial segregation was the norm and the law.
Paul is against affirmative action because, he says, no one should be punished
or privileged for
belonging to a group, and everyone should be treated as an individual. In
stating this, Paul
conveniently ignores the truth that individuals from the white group are treated
one way and
individuals from the people of color group are treated another way. He detests
calls for diversity,
and adds that those of us who base our identities on race are "inherently
racist". His logic in the
latter statement is so far removed from reality that it makes it difficult to
respond to – suffice to say
that people of color do not have the institutional power to be racist against
whites; his statement
instead illustrates his own racism. But it gets a lot worse: Paul's political
literature has stated that it
is sensible to be afraid of black men; that "95 percent of African
Americans in [Washington D.C.] are
semicriminal or entirely criminal"; that black male children (but not
white ones) should be treated
and tried as adults for crimes they commit beginning at age 13; and he referred
to two black men
that were interviewed by Ted Koppel after the Los Angeles 1992 uprising as
"animals". Kanye West
was right when he said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
Guess what? If his own
political literature is any indication, Ron Paul loathes black people.
Supporters who have gone as far as to donate money to Paul's campaign should
bear in mind that
he has knowingly also taken donations from white supremacist and former KKK
GrandWizard Don
Black. Other white supremacists like David Duke also support Paul's bid for
President. It's easy for
Paul to dismiss affirmative action as something that violates individual
liberty, but what hides behind
that is the fact that he is a hatespewing presidential candidate aligned with
some of the most
blatant, odious racists on the planet.
More "American" Than You and I
Not surprisingly, Paul offensive terms like "illegal alien",
"illegal immigrant" or plainold "illegals"
when referring to human beings who live in the United States without proper
documentation.
Besides "beaner", "spic" and "wetback", I cannot
immediately think of other words that approximate
the bigotry that these terms are loaded with. In this regard, however, nearly
all presidential
candidates and even wellmeaning everyday people continue to use these terms
– except that Paul
is not wellmeaning when it comes to the undocumented.
While addressing a group of supporters, Paul claimed that in terms of work
ethic, some
undocumented workers "are more American than some of us." WASP purists
like Paul employ a
type of historical amnesia which yields an artificial yet neutralsounding
identity that they call
"American". Perhaps if Paul wasn't such an isolationist he would
realize that there actually are two
continents worth of people that call themselves American, and that the ones that
do so in the United
States are not a chosen bunch. The truth is that the practice of pioneer
colonialism in the U.S.
illegally and immorally took land from various indigenous populations. Those
pioneer immigrants,
who illegally brought African slaves with them, tried to enforce and superimpose
their cultural and
linguistic practices on this stolen territory while almost completely
exterminating the people that they
took the land from. Those original populations that were not killed were
illegally displaced against
their will. In practice, these pioneer immigrants illegally crossed national
borders, and as a result
their decedents continue to reap the structural benefits that were created. But
instead of claiming
this pioneer immigrant identity (which requires a truthful look into an uneasy
past) they appropriate
a fearbased, racist "American" identity and demonize contemporary
immigrants instead.
In Paul's fuzzy logic, all immigrants are here to suck the country dry of its
welfare, education and
emergency healthcare systems. If it was up to Paul, those systems would be
voided for not only
undocumented, but for documented immigrants as well. Forget that both groups pay
into the
income, property and retail tax system. Ignore that time and time again, studies
indicate that the
undocumented pay more into the system than they take out. According to Paul,
even documented
immigrants should be stripped of any government subsidy. He also says that
children born to
undocumented immigrants on US soil should not be allowed to hold citizenship.
The socalled strict
abider of the Constitution wants to overturn the Fourteenth Amendment so that
children born to
undocumented immigrants are stripped of their birthright. Besides the serious
moral dilemmas
surrounding his radical proposal, the practical limitations are copious. What if
one parent is
documented but the other is not? What if both parents were undocumented, but
from different
countries? What if they were from the same country, but the country of origin
refused to recognize
the child as a citizen of that land? Paul's scheme (like so many of his others)
is completely absurd.
Deconstructing Ron Paul
It's really not very complicated: people who are or stand with workers, the
poor, women, queer
folks, people of color and immigrants will need to look far beyond this
candidate. Despite his
supporter's efforts to ignore the man behind the façade, it's time to get real
and deconstruct the
pretense. Ron Paul is a free market capitalist who doesn't care for the rights
of workers or the poor;
he is a gunloving friend of the NRA, he is a radical Christian conservative
who thinks that school
prayer and intelligent design have a Godgiven place in public schools, that a
woman's right to
choose should be crushed, and that samesex marriage is repugnant; he is a
Congressman that
has voted against affirmative action and thinks that desegregation somehow
violated the
Constitution; and he is a candidate that hates immigrants. Yes, we are sick and
tired of Washington,
but just because Bush has failed so deeply does not mean we can latch on to the
very first
presidential hopeful who wants to bring the troops home immediately, yet
simultaneously destroy
the rights and benefits we have struggled for centuries to achieve. Paul is
certainly not the answer
and we need to stop pretending that he is. I recognize and can appreciate that
he stands against
the Iraq War and everything that the socalled War on Terror has wreaked at
home and abroad. But
even a broken clock is right twice a day.
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voting for ron paul is about as revolutionary as what the cpusa prescribes...
voting for a democrat
"...quit fashioning everything that comes out of your mouth in terms of
the bourgeois right. Let's struggle about what humanity really needs" 
