The Quiet Part Out Loud

“But when the wrong word goes in the right ear, I know you’ve been lying to me.” — Cy Curnin

There are stories that come up that defy belief. They almost always involve someone saying the quiet part out loud. Justin Lafferty did that in the Tennessee legislature this week when he tried his hand at defending the three-fifths compromise.

If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole I suppose I can try to sum up the argument for you. Lafferty praised the compromise because it limited the power of slave owning states. By counting African Americans as less than a person, it limited the number of representatives they were able to send to Congress and thus limited their political power.

Excellent. The fact that it took 78 years and a bloody civil war to end slavery is neither here nor there. Rafferty went on the offensive and said that those that questioned his views were just looking for something to fight about.

“I did not say anything on the floor with any malice toward any of my friends on the other side.”

Justin Rafferty’

Indeed. He went on to say that if people are looking for trouble they will usually find it. Nope, I wasn’t looking for this one. This one just kind of fell in my lap. Others have argued that the compromise didn’t impugn anyone’s humanity. Huh? What in the holy hell are they talking about?

This is exactly like the folks that go out of their way to find ways to praise Adolf Hitler, but always try to qualify it somehow. Sure, he did bad things, but he had an excellent singing voice and never passed gas at all during his time in the bunker. So, I suppose that somehow balances out the genocide. Yup, I see where you’re going there.

At the end of the day, I don’t want to censure this guy or silence him in any way. For the love of all that is good and holy, don’t get in his way on the way to microphone. Let them announce their stupidity to the world so that everyone knows exactly where these folks are at.

You can call it cancel culture, wokeness, virtue signaling, political correctness, or whatever other catch phrase you want to call it. What it basically amounts to is that polite society has figured out that some beliefs are repugnant. It doesn’t mean they go away. They just get driven under ground. When you utter them out loud you get rebuked and/or shunned.

The last administration made it okay to say these things. Suddenly, these people were brave for speaking their truth. Facts didn’t matter anymore. You cannot impugn their feelings. Everyone is allowed to feel what they want and he feels like the three-fifths compromise was a good thing. Good for him. The rest of us get to think he’s a racist dumbass. Congratulations.

There has to be a delicate balance to these things. We need to know who these people are and God forbid anyone silence them. Yet, they need to be out of power. As much as they want to attack Robert Byrd (who has been dead for awhile) or point out something Joe Biden might have said in the 1970s, racism is a Republican problem. No, not all Republicans are racist and no, not even most Republicans are racist. Yet, if you are racist you are probably a Republican and recent trends seem to indicate that its power is growing in the party. Therefore, if good and decent people want to push back against racism they need to vote against Republicans until they get their house in order.