by Joshua Greene

Created on: April 22, 2009

A deceptive, misleading, or false notion, belief, etc.

This is the definition of fallacy. Before I started writing what you see before you, I read the #1 "Yes" article to this debate, and I was astonished by the fallacies that were provided to the other writers at Helium and passed as truths, just to attack a party that one disagrees with. For the record here, I am not a republican. I am an Independent voter. I have voted Democrat, and I have voted Republican, but in order for education to truly exist and understanding to occur, we have to look at facts, not fallacies.

Martin Luther King Jr. once told that "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity", and he is very much so correct. When people spread hate by spreading fallacies and lies, it only destroys understanding as a society, and leads to more hate. So let's look at a few key points why hate-mongers think that the Republican party is racist, and I'll make a few of my own points.

The first point that people who write "Yes" on this article tell you is that Republicans we're against the Civil Rights Movement. This is inherently false. In the 26 major civil rights votes after 1933, a majority of Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over 80 percent of the votes. By contrast, the Republican majority favored civil rights in over 96 percent of the votes. If you really wish to label a party as racist due to the civil rights movement, I would call the Democratic party racist as they voted against civil rights for minorities 21 of 26 times. Wow, that Republican party is really racist for wanting to give those minorities the rights that they deserve. Damn them! Those racist bigots. The ill-educated who make uninformed claims upset me so much when it is so easy to actually find the facts.

Let's take a look at the most well known piece of Civil Rights legislation, The Civil Rights Act of 1964. There was a big Democratic majority at the time. Of the Democratic party 152 Democrats supported it while 96 opposed it. In the Republican Party 138 Republicans supported it and only 34 opposed it. Mathematically speaking, only 61% of Democrats supported this legislation, while over 80% of Republicans supported this legislation. Once again, hate and fallacy has been proven false.

Now that I've cleared the fallacies up, let us take a gander at why Republicans are not a racist party (other than the two points that were just provided to you) Firstly, They were bigger proponents of the civil rights movement than Democrats (You've already discovered that though). Secondly, The party that Lincoln built was the one that freed the slaves. Afterwards, Jim Crow laws were created and upheld through a Democratic south and a Democratic court. This happened all the way up until 1956, when southern resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education resulted in a resolution called the Southern Manifesto. It was a document against the integration of public schools. It was read into the Congressional Record and supported by 96 southern congressmen and senators, all but two of them Southern Democrats.

Something that actually exists; reality; truth

This is the definition of fact, and that's what I have provided you with today. You are free to think whatever you want when it comes to your beliefs. I am no one to tell you what to believe in. I can however, ask you to use fact as the foundation of your beliefs rather than fallacy, as fallacies destroy understanding and spread hate.

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