The Gist Michelangelo Signorile
That Other Times
It's been almost comical watching the wolf pack of predominantly male commentators and media critics of every political persuasion ripping into The New York Times, which in their estimation is on a devious and dangerous crusade to compel a golf club to-heavens to Betsy!-actually admit womenfolk. The way Times editor Howell Raines is pushing this issue, they seem to be saying, you'd think it was the year 2002 or something!
And ever since it was revealed last week that the Times spiked a couple of male sportswriters' columns about the topic-columns the Times editors said didn't gel with their editorial policy, or whatever-and the specter of censorship has suddenly been raised (though the Times did eventually run the columns), well, we can all just talk about that now rather than discuss the threatening issue of gender parity.
Whew!
So, I'm sure you'll excuse me for focusing instead this week, once again, on the eerie goings-on at that other Times. I think in the end you'll agree that the viewpoints and values of a certain Washington Times editor are a lot more grotesque than Raines' sinister plot to foster equal rights.
Last week I quoted the scary Washington Times' backer, the Unification Church leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon ("Satan's harvest is America," was just one of that charmers' comments), whose paper Al Gore two weeks ago charged was "part and parcel of the Republican Party." Some people wrote in with the rather weak but nonetheless entertainable argument that Moon funds the paper but he has a "hands-off" approach and let's the editors do what they want. (George H.W. Bush made the same claim, by the way-even though a former Washington Times editor has stated otherwise-back in 1996, when Papa Bush collected $100,000 from Moon and his cult for a speaking engagement at which Bush praised the publication as "a paper that in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C.")
So, let's take a look at the views and not-so-hidden agenda of one of the actual editors of the paper, specifically, assistant national editor Robert Stacy McCain, who has a habit of posting commentary on message boards and elsewhere around the Internet:
"[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us."
Yes, you read that right: a "natural revulsion" and "THIS IS NOT RACISM."
That was posted by Robert Stacy McCain (who has contributed to New York Press in the past) on a website called Reclaiming the South. The Washington Times editor posts a lot on the right-wing FreeRepublic.com as well, using an assumed name (BurkeCalhounDabney) but often linking back to his personal website, where there are photos of him and the rest of his large family of Seventh Day Adventists (and which identifies him by his real name and as a Washington Times editor). Editor McCain, who hails from Rome, GA, is one of those Confederate types who still hasn't gotten over the Civil War and is trying to get the South to secede. He's a member of a Southern secessionist organization called League of the South. Here's a quote from that group's leader, Michael Hill:
"The day of Southern guilt is over-THE SOUTH WAS RIGHT-and let us not forget that salient fact. NO APOLOGIES FOR SLAVERY should be made. In both the Old and New Testaments slavery is sanctioned and regulated according to God's word. Thus, when practiced in accord with Holy Scripture, it is NOT A SIN. Our ancestors were not evil men because they held slaves. This issue is our Achilles Heel, and the only way to deal with it is to confront our accusers boldly and without guilt. After all, what we are really upholding is GOD'S WORD. Let us fear Him, and we'll fear no man."
Perhaps attempting (unsuccessfully, in my opinion) to distance himself just a bit from this repugnant and totally kooky extremist stuff, McCain has written, in a piece he posted on the Web titled "Down On Dixie: The Confederate Cause and the South's Scalawag Press," that "We may never all agree that The South Was Right!...but the least we owe our ancestors is a fair hearing and a balanced portrayal to our readers."
McCain, an editor and sometimes commentator at a paper that the gay Andrew Sullivan, the African-American Thomas Sowell and other right-leaning members of minority groups are only too happy to write columns for and take cash from, believes that Abraham Lincoln was a "war criminal" who should have been tried for "treason." (His reasoning, he writes, is that Lincoln and the Northerners were the true racists; something tells me-actually, studying his other comments and affiliations is what tells me-that that is not the real reason at all.)
In his Web postings McCain has stated that Harvard president Lawrence Summers should be "persecuted and run out of town" for supporting gay rights. He also believes that the civil rights movement directly resulted in "black criminality" because people were encouraged to break the law by getting arrested at demonstrations!
"I am disturbedŠby [Jesse] Jackson's idea that 'breaking white folks' rules' was somehow inherently just," he wrote on FreeRepublic.com. "If rules were to be broken merely because they were work of white folks, then hasn't Jackson gone a long way toward explaining the explosion of black criminality that began in the 1960s? This shows how the civil rights movement, to a great extent, represented a direct assault on tradition and law."
These viewpoints offer background for and insight into some of McCain's pieces in The Washington Times. This past October he warned about the "Backlash Building in White America," as the headline of his article blared, and he interviewed and promoted an obscure professor who claimed "that society should combat white nationalists in part by acknowledging the legitimacy of some of their grievances" and that white nationalism is "the monster that identity politics created." (Yes, blame it all on blacks themselves!)
Some of McCain's Washington Times articles are reprinted, presumably with his and his paper's permission, on a creepy website called American Renaissance (to which McCain has written at least one letter to the editor, offering "warm congratulations" on an article). Here's what the respected Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about that site: "Edited by white separatist Jared Taylor, American Renaissance is a magazine with a highfalutin tone that links IQ levels to racial groups and promotes eugenics, the 'science' of improving the human race through selective breeding."
I do realize that it's immensely important for the American press' intrepid media reporters and critics to leave no stone unturned in their investigation into Howell Raines' evil crusade on behalf of the female golfers of America. But don't you think they could turn over just one or two measly stones at the conservative paper of record? Seems to me they'd find a lot of rancid stuff under those rocks.
Michelangelo Signorile can be reached at <http://www.signorile.com>.