A comment by pyroman_99 on the story regarding the Texas state senate deleting pretty-near everything but the sanitized history of White America from its Department of Education curriculum made me go down the rabbit hole of history to read the state’s Articles of Secession from 1861.
Glory be, it could be used, virtually word-for-word, on a current Fox News program to describe the various grievances conservatives and Donald Trump have. Okay, maybe not “word-for-word.” You really should change “slave-holding” to “conservative,” and replace “non-slave-holding” or “abolitionist” with Democrats, but you get the idea.
Texas was spilling over with grievances, according to the document, including echoes of the same things conservative politicians and commentators whine about today: promoting voting rights, empowering poor populations, reporting Texas’s malfeasance through the free press, and refusing to protect Texas against “ruthless savages”–which in 1861 were Indians and Mexicans, but now it’s just Mexicans.
“By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding [red] States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments” seems to be an argument against anti-gerrymandering laws.
“[Those dang Washington elites] have proclaimed, and at the ballot box sustained,” the so-called Declaration of Causes asserts, “the revolutionary doctrine that there is a ‘higher law’ than the constitution and laws of our Federal Union, and virtually that they will disregard their oaths and trample upon our rights.”
The parallel 21st Century grievance, of course, is slightly different: Liberals want all people held to the same standard under the law, regardless of skin color or it their last name is “Trump.” Not one law for minorities and another for the white and/or wealthy.
“… [T]hrough the press their leading men and a fanatical pulpit have bestowed praise upon the actors and assassins in these crimes…” could be shortened to “Fake News” at a GOP rally.
“They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance,” equals “They’re welfare states! We should stop paying taxes!”
And the kicker: “They have refused to vote appropriations for protecting Texas against ruthless savages, for the sole reason that she is a slave-holding State.”
Their decision, again, sounds like something you’d hear on Hannity, although slightly more non-racial: “That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.”