Betty Winston Bayé: There Is Something Sinister At Work In Protests". I Say: YES, Indeed.

There is something sinister at work in protests
By Betty Winston Bayé

Hatred is always a recruiting tool for the “radical fringe” in American politics, but President Obama's election has sent the cause into overdrive, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and others who track hateful individuals and organizations. Historically, hate groups have been able to rely on true believers to finance their vile little newspapers, newsletters, magazines and books, and to promote their nutty ideas on low-frequency radio shows. Occasionally, the true believers even scrape up the money to field candidates with little chance of actually getting elected to public office, but who even so every now and then, in the interest of “fairness” and “balance” manage to get themselves heard alongside mainstream candidates on televised candidate forums.

Americans of a certain age have seen hateful mobs before.

We may even have seen or heard discussed at some time or another those photographs of men, women and sometimes children grinning and laughing, like they're at a church picnic, while watching some poor soul(s) being lynched or tar-and-feathered. And how about those slurs that some tea party activists have felt obliged to shout out at members of Congress on their way to voting for health care reform?

It was déjà vu, in fact, for Congressman John Lewis when he heard shouts of “Kill the bill, nigger!” Lewis, now 70 years old, was beaten nearly to death in Selma, Ala., in 1965 as he walked at the head of a nonviolent march advocating voting rights for black Americans.

Texas Congressman Ciro Rodriguez was born in Mexico, but was raised and educated in the United States, yet for his support of health care reform, he's been yelled at and called a “wetback.”

Openly gay Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who is no stranger to hatred, was greeted with shouts of “faggot” while Congressman Anthony Weiner, of New York, a Jew, has received notes containing swastikas and heard himself being called “Schlomo Weiner.”

Though new terms are coined every so often, the vocabulary of hate, like the minds of those who practice it, tends to be quite limited and predictable. Then there's the case of the tea bagger who apparently believes that his right to free speech entitles him to spit on people with whom he disagrees, most notably Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, an ordained minister, who made history in 1979 when he was elected the first black mayor of Kansas City, Mo. The man who spat is a creep and a punk who should have gotten jail time, but Cleaver, a veteran of Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, refused to press charges, and so the spitting man not only walked free, but perhaps felt proud about being able to see his nasty behavior repeatedly shown on national television. Of course, we've seen his kind before too, most notably 50 years ago when opponents of integration spat on college kids peacefully sitting in at segregated lunch counters and on little black boys and girls on the way to school. Those children needed armed federal marshals to guide them through gauntlets of people who hissed, cursed and spat at them.

This cursing, this spitting, this setting fire to congressional offices, and calling the families of members of Congress and threatening them with violence for supporting health care reform is not about ordinary political opposition. There's something more sinister at work; something that resides deep in the psyches of many Americans as they see America changing; and it's something that is easily exploited by new technology that allows anonymity and by a bombastic cast of characters who are paid well to syndicate hatred. Indeed, some unstable personalities have managed not only to worm their ways onto the talk show circuit, but into elective offices, including Congress, where whenever they find the rules of standard politeness too overbearing, they shout out as if they're still outside and part of the mob.

There will always be political differences in this country, and, sadly, there are people who just seem constitutionally incapable of engaging in civil discourse, and so they bully, curse, spit on and threaten people with whom they disagree. But what fascinates me most is that the most powerful Republican in Congress, who just so happens to be from Louisville, has not yet publicly and loudly condemned the ugly behavior of members of his party and the people in the streets who, like him, oppose health care reform. What are we to make of his silence?

Betty Winston Bayé is a Courier-Journal editorial writer and columnist. Her columns appear Thursdays on the editorial page. Read her online at www.courier-journal.com/opinion. Her e-mail address is bbaye@courier-journal.com.