Civility Should Be Extended To Trump’s Administration

The great thing about America is no matter what our differences in opinion may be, we are all still American.  This fact is what makes the states of America united through all strife and the strongest democracy in the history of Western civilization.

Last week, employees at a restaurant called the Red Hen asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary for President Donald Trump, to leave the restaurant.

America has a long, dangerous history of not taking kindly to others due to differences.  During the 1950s and 1960s, Americans who lived through the Civil Rights movement showed the ugliness of fascism as they angrily yelled racial epithets and expressed bigotry to those who only wanted to be treated equally.

Churches burned, violence increased and lives were lost.  Fast forward to the year 2018.

Churches are still burning in the wake of politically inspired hatred.  Violence is growing.  Lives are being lost.

In the wake of such acts of aggression and hostility toward Americans, does more aggression and hostility offer a chance for good resolution?

Friends at Fox News report that the left should be ashamed to even entertain the concept of protesting the treatment of detained children and partaking in Maxine Waters’ suggestion that Trump’s key administrators be challenged for supporting and defending the president’s agenda and Twitter messages.

The argument is that Martin Luther King said, “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend.”

Fox News has called for those being attacked and marginalized to be civil and what is coming to them.

Sure, Martin Luther King was assassinated and his wife, Coretta Scott King, warned of giving executive power to those who would happily use executive power to do anti-American things like oppress Americans:

The irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods. Twenty years ago, when we marched from Selma to Montgomery, the fear of voting was real, as the broken bones and bloody heads in Selma and Marion bore witness. As my husband wrote at the time, “it was not just a sick imagination that conjured up the vision of a public official, sworn to uphold the law, who forced an inhuman march upon hundreds of Negro children; who ordered the Rev. James Bevel to be chained to his sickbed; who clubbed a Negro woman registrant, and who callously inflicted repeated brutalities and indignities upon nonviolent Negroes peacefully petitioning for their constitutional right to vote.”

Free exercise of voting rights is so fundamental to American democracy that we can not tolerate any form of infringement of those rights. Of all the groups who have been disenfranchised in our nation’s history, none has struggled longer or suffered more in the attempt to win the vote than Black citizens. No group has had access to the ballot box denied so persistently and intently. Over the past century, a broad array of schemes have been used in attempts to block the Black vote. The range of techniques developed with the purpose of repressing black voting rights run the gamut from the — straightforward application of brutality against black citizens who tried to vote to such legalized frauds as “grandfather clause” exclusions and rigged literacy tests.

The actions taken by Mr. Sessions in regard to the 1984 voting fraud prosecutions represent just one more technique used to intimidate Black voters and thus deny them this most precious franchise. The investigations into the absentee voting process were conducted only in the Black Belt counties where blacks had finally achieved political power in the local government. Whites had been using the absentee process to their advantage for years, without incident. Then, when Blacks realizing its strength, began to use it with success, criminal investigations were begun.

In these investigations, Mr. Sessions, as U.S. Attorney, exhibited an eagerness to bring to trial and convict three leaders of the Perry County Civic League including Albert Turner despite evidence clearly demonstrating their innocence of any wrongdoing. Furthermore, in initiating the case, Mr. Sessions ignored allegations of similar behavior by whites, choosing instead to chill the exercise of the franchise by blacks by his misguided investigation. In fact, Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists, advisors and colleagues of my husband, who had been key figures in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among Blacks, had learned to use the process within the bounds of legality and had taught others to do the same. The only sin they committed was being too successful in gaining votes.

President Trump has of course appointed Sessions as the boss of America’s judicial system, but still, what is the worry?