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Paul Elisha: The Reformicons

On February 18th, 1860, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a feminist founder of the first Woman’s Suffrage Congress, in the United States, said this in a speech to members of the New York State Legislature: “The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex.  It is produced by the same cause,…..The Negro’s skin and the woman’s sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man.”

In a pointedly consequential article, headlined on the New York Times Sunday Magazine cover, this past July 6th, the question was outlined: “THE PARTY OF FAMILY VALUES – TAX CUTS – NATIONAL SECURITY – REFORM ? (The first three of these marred by large black lines)…..then followed by the question: “Can the G.O.P. be a party of ideas?   The article then proceeds to herald the launching of a new group of ‘so-called’ REFORM CONSERVATIVES, with the tacked-on question: “Can the so-called Reform Conservatives win back their party?”  This proud pundit of liberal thought and action believes they neither can nor will, for the same insightful reasons given in 1860, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Prejudice, of the kind referred to here, dies hard.  This is especially true, when the prejudice is ingrained by a refusal to accept what has resisted reality that’s been written into legal history and stipulated in this nation’s (until now) most revered document.  Ideas are only as strong as the desire and determination that informs an imbued majority that their time has come. Alas, those who’ve formed “THE REFORMICONS,” as its founders decided to call it, are playing with campaign slogans, not history in the making.  In this case, they really must deal with history that may never yet have taken place.  This commentator believes this may be the tragic truth, for certain White-Anglo Saxon-Males, in some geographic locales of  this still emotionally and literally segregated dis-united States of America, whose minds and hearts simply cannot face any possibility of it ever becoming a reality.  The question for the rest of us is: Can We…truly?

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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