Speaker Commits Congress to Making King's Dream a Reality

WASHINGTON, July 23, 2003

Speaker Dennis Hastert made the following statement today:

"Good afternoon, I want to thank Rep. John Lewis for having me. I also want to pay tribute to the other five Americans, who helped to issue the national call for the March on Washington, but have since passed on. May God bless them and their families for putting our country on the right path.

"'Fellow Americans, we are gathered here in the largest demonstration in the history of this nation. We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.' With those very words, A. Philip Randolph, the late civil rights leader opened the March on Washington and initiated a journey we're still on today.

"It is my privilege and honor to stand here today and work toward the very same principles that he and many other leaders fought for 40 years ago on August 28th, 1963. More than 200,000 blacks and whites, musicians and politicians, workers and those looking for work came to the Washington Mall that day. Their path started that morning, at the Washington Monument, took them along Independence and Constitution Avenues, and culminated at the Lincoln Memorial. This diverse group marched peacefully side-by-side for jobs, freedom and equality. Most importantly, their journey did not end at the Lincoln Memorial -- that's the site where their mission actually began.

"Rep. Lewis, as you so eloquently stated on that day, 'By the force of this demand, our determination and our numbers... we have and will continue to splinter segregation into a thousand pieces, and put them back together in the image of God and Democracy.'

"We will continue to work toward the mission laid out on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by working in Congress to ensure that Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech embodies more than an American Dream, but an American reality and way of life.

"My friends, the journey continues with the same passion, focus, and vision as was started 40 years ago. Thank you."

See: http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=139-07232003

"When it comes to a Government Run Institution, such as the University of Alabama, no such right exists. What Wallace did was illegal under his own State's Constitution as well as the Federal Constitution." -- Diogenes



But what about PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS, Diogenes???

Would you support George Wallace if he was instead defending the segregationist policies of a private university?

-- OR --

Would you support John F Kennedy and the Federal government for protecting the Civil Rights of the integrated students at a private university?

"Would you believe ...?"

Wallace was not defending Segregation at a Private Institution so your hypothetical is just that hypothetical and irrelevant to your original question.

However I will answer as a general priniciple: Private Institutions are by definition Private. What they choose to do is their own business. Whether I approve or disapprove is irrelevant. I do not believe in using government as a weapon against opinions I disagree with. In a FREE society private individuals and groups have the right to have an unpopular, or wrong, opinion. It is their right to be stupid, so long as their actions do not actively infringe on the rights of another. A private institution harms primarily itself by following Prejudicial Policies. So what? As long as they are harming no one it is their right to be ignorant fucks.

Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 and won 39 Southern electoral votes as part of a states' rights uprising against President Harry Truman's support for civil rights. Nearly a decade later, he set the Senate record for filibustering that still stands when he spoke against a 1957 civil rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes...

Like many one-time segregationists, Thurmond insisted the issue in the 1957 Civil Rights Act wasn't race but "federal power vs. state power" – though the state power he wanted to preserve was the power to segregate.

"The question of integration was only one facet of that matter," he said in a November 1992 interview.

...Thurmond switched to the Republican Party in 1964, complaining that Democrats were "leading the evolution of our nation to a socialistic dictatorship." (One year after the historic March on Washington)

South Carolina was then overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats, but his switch helped begin the political evolution that led to Republicans beating Democrats in most statewide races. In 1968, Thurmond played a pivotal role in the "Southern Strategy" that helped Richard Nixon win the White House...

See: http://www.theitem.com/CityDesk/030627a_news.cfm

Concerns with FEAR and THREAT, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of conservatism - an endorsement of INEQUALITY, a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, SEGREGATIONIST politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South S.C.).

Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were RIGHT-WING CONSERVATIVES because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way...

...As for conservatives' penchant for ACCEPTING inequality, he said, one contemporary example is liberals' general endorsement of extending rights and liberties to DISADVANTAGED MINORITIES such as gays and lesbians, compared to conservatives' opposing position...

As an example... when President George W. BUSH was asked to explain himself, the REPUBLICAN president told assembled world leaders, "I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is RIGHT." And in 2002, Bush told a British reporter, "Look, my job isn't to nuance."

"Would you support George Wallace if he was instead defending the segregationist policies of a private university?"

I would! It's private money. What private people do with their private money as long as it doesn't harm anyone else is their own business. If someone wants to build a college that is blacks-only or whites-only, etc... that's his/her. their business. They aren't harming me.

Please leave me out of this. Your arguments need a lot more help than that.

from "The Free Market - The Mises Institute monthly"

December 1995

Volume 13, Number 12

Schools and Judicial Tyranny

William J. Watkins, Jr.

..Neighborhood schools, with a maximum local control, offer parents an opportunity to take an active role in their children's education. For those who are unable to homeschool or send their children to private schools, local control of public schools makes the best out of a bad situation.

A return of local control would mean a REPUDIATION of the statist, centralizing, and egalitarian principles of BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION. But that is exactly what is needed to end judicial control, return to fiscal responsibility, create coherent communities, and reinvigorate an educational system that works for students and parents.

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute is the research and educational center of classical liberalism, LIBERTARIAN political theory, and the Austrian School of economics. Working in the intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard.