On March 23, United States Senators Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) brazenly stated that they would not vote to confirm any future Biden administration nominees who were not minorities or members of the LGBTQ community. “I am a no vote on the floor on all non-diversity nominees. I will vote for racial minorities and I will vote for LGBTQ, but anybody else, I’m not voting for,” said Duckworth. Senator Hirono expressed support for Duckworth’s “well-articulated, focused position” and was “prepared to join her in that.”
Such blatant bigotry should not surprise anyone who has followed the Democratic Party since the end of the Civil War. Even since the United States defeated the Confederacy and freed all slaves in the 1860’s, the Democratic Party has supported identity politics and discrimination against groups it opposes. Once Northern control of the southern states after the Civil War (known as Reconstruction) ended in the 1870’s, Democratic leaders in the South immediately began to implement racist policies that disenfranchised black voters and enforced a system of segregation that treated black Americans as worse than second-class citizens. Such Democratic support for discrimination against blacks continued well into the 1960’s; indeed, it was only Republican support for the landmark federal Civil Rights Law of 1964 and the Voting Rights law of 1965 that assured their passage. It must be remembered that the people who ordered water cannons and dogs to be used against civil rights demonstrators were all Democrats.
But after discrimination against blacks become outlawed in the land in the 1960’s, the Democratic Party merely switched the group of people it would discriminate against; now it would support discriminatory measures against anyone who was not a minority. Beginning in the 1970’s and continuing today, Democrats in government and their allies in big business, academia, Hollywood, big sports, and elsewhere have crafted affirmative action and quota policies that discriminate against non-minorities by explicitly or implicitly forcing proportional hiring, university admissions, and contracting based on skin color, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and sexual identity. Being qualified and having good character as the only standards on which to judge a person—and as required by the Civil Rights Law of 1964 and other state and federal laws—went out the window.
One can only imagine what would have happened if two United State senators declared that they would vote to confirm only nominees who were straight white males. The elites in our country would be up in arms calling for the resignation of the senators and the urgent need to end white supremacy in our country. All members of the senators’ party would be branded as racists and bigots and school curriculums characterizing all straight white males as oppressors would be put into effect. But then, schools are already doing this by indoctrinating students in Critical Race Theory.
However, the response to Duckworth and Hirono was muted. The Democratic party refused to criticize them, nor did the elites in the media or elsewhere do so. There were no calls for the senators to resign or apologize, or for Democrats to take mandatory anti-bigotry trainings. Why this silence? Because it was just business as usual for the Democratic party.
It is high time that we restore the vision of Martin Luther King, Jr.; to judge people on the basis of their character and competence rather than any other identity they may have. If we fail to do this, America will continue down the path of becoming a nation of squabbling identity groups, and the prediction of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev of 60 years ago will be realized: “America will destroy itself from within.”