The "Idyllic Circumstances" of 1930's Deep South
John from AmericaBlog addresses James Dobson's fantasy account of growing up in 1930s/40s Louisiana:
What’s Dobson’s background? - He was born in Louisiana in 1936, and remembers his hometown as an idyllic slice of heartland America. “There were no drugs in my racially mixed, public high school,” he wrote. “There were no punkers, no skinheads, no neo-Nazis, no freaks, no witches, and no gay or lesbian activists.” The only child of a minister in the Church of the Nazarene, which emphasizes study of the Scripture and opposes alcohol, tobacco, and premarital intercourse, Dobson committed himself to God when he was 3. He was attending Sunday services, and his father invited those who felt like doing so to gather at the front of the church. Dobson toddled down the aisle. “I recall crying and asking Jesus to forgive my sins.”
What are Dobson’s political beliefs? - They’re solidly on the right, sometimes stridently so. He says that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, has unleashed the “biggest holocaust in world history.”
First of all, I find it incredibly hard to believe there were desegregated public schools in Louisana back then. I mean, it's POSSIBLE. There were free black & mulattos in New Orleans back in the 1700's, so who knows.
But regardless of whether he went to a racially mixed school or not, it's ridiculous to talk about the 1930's Deep South as some kind of idyllic "heartland America". And while we're comparing abortion to a holocaust, let's talk about a real holocaust:
Before the Civil War, most lynching victims were white. But, after federal troops withdrew from the South at the end of Reconstruction, lynchings of African-Americans began to rise. This reached a peak in 1892 when 71 whites and 155 blacks were lynched in the United States. Between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,743 persons lynched in the United States; over 70 percent of the victims were African-Americans.
Although lynchings decreased in most parts of the country after 1892, the proportion of those taking place in the South rose. By the late 1920s, 95 percent of all lynchings in the nation took place in the South. The victims were almost always African-Americans, and few lynch mob participants ever went to jail. Police and other eye-witnesses refused to identify lynch mob members, and Southern all-white juries rarely convicted them.
Doesn't seem so idyllic to me.
What’s Dobson’s background? - He was born in Louisiana in 1936, and remembers his hometown as an idyllic slice of heartland America. “There were no drugs in my racially mixed, public high school,” he wrote. “There were no punkers, no skinheads, no neo-Nazis, no freaks, no witches, and no gay or lesbian activists.” The only child of a minister in the Church of the Nazarene, which emphasizes study of the Scripture and opposes alcohol, tobacco, and premarital intercourse, Dobson committed himself to God when he was 3. He was attending Sunday services, and his father invited those who felt like doing so to gather at the front of the church. Dobson toddled down the aisle. “I recall crying and asking Jesus to forgive my sins.”
What are Dobson’s political beliefs? - They’re solidly on the right, sometimes stridently so. He says that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, has unleashed the “biggest holocaust in world history.”
First of all, I find it incredibly hard to believe there were desegregated public schools in Louisana back then. I mean, it's POSSIBLE. There were free black & mulattos in New Orleans back in the 1700's, so who knows.
But regardless of whether he went to a racially mixed school or not, it's ridiculous to talk about the 1930's Deep South as some kind of idyllic "heartland America". And while we're comparing abortion to a holocaust, let's talk about a real holocaust:
Before the Civil War, most lynching victims were white. But, after federal troops withdrew from the South at the end of Reconstruction, lynchings of African-Americans began to rise. This reached a peak in 1892 when 71 whites and 155 blacks were lynched in the United States. Between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,743 persons lynched in the United States; over 70 percent of the victims were African-Americans.
Although lynchings decreased in most parts of the country after 1892, the proportion of those taking place in the South rose. By the late 1920s, 95 percent of all lynchings in the nation took place in the South. The victims were almost always African-Americans, and few lynch mob participants ever went to jail. Police and other eye-witnesses refused to identify lynch mob members, and Southern all-white juries rarely convicted them.
Doesn't seem so idyllic to me.