Will be later. Still have a couple more days here and we're getting rid of the car today. . . . .so it's going to be much more relaxing.
I'm Muslim....
- Thread starter ChrryBlstr
- Start date
Will be later. Still have a couple more days here and we're getting rid of the car today. . . . .so it's going to be much more relaxing.
I'm enjoying the ride following. Great parents giving those little girls the time of their lives.
Enjoy it while they're little, time flies by. :toast:
My baby boy is 28 years old now. Holy shit, what happened, it was just a little while ago we were at Disney. Wow! :scared
Now we talk football. :toast:
I'll try to explain it to you.
I'll type reeaaallyy slow. Try to keep up.
I despise anyone who tires to enact laws forcing their own particular brand of religious fantasy on everyone else.
There are many Christians in public office trying to do just that.
Is there one Moslem in public office in this country trying to to use the law to force his religion on you?
If Xtians would practice their religious fantasies and leave the rest of us alone, I wouldn't care.
We're having a blast and we're all learning a ton. Would think about retiring here if there weren't so many damn hills.
I'm sure Leslie will have an update today
:toast:
51 percent of U.S. Muslims prefer Shariah
There are now an estimated 3 million Muslims residing in the United States as citizens or with permanent legal status, and more than 250,000 new Muslim residents enter the U.S. per year as refugees, on work visas and student-based visas, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
A poll commissioned in May 2015 by the Center for Security Policy showed that 51 percent of American Muslims preferred that they should have their own Shariah courts outside of the legal system ruled by the U.S. Constitution. And nearly a quarter believed the use of violent jihad was justified in establishing Shariah.
"That would translate into roughly 300,000 Muslims living in the United States who believe that Shariah is 'The Muslim God Allah's law that Muslims must follow and impose worldwide by Jihad,'" writes Frank Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy.
if they could they would.
we got to shut that quarter million stream down says Trump
we will soon be a USA of foreigners
I've got nuze for you. We're already a nation of foreigners.
Black people were brought in by force, by the boatload.
Native Americans were here before the Europeans arrived.
Many Hispanics were here before the Europeans. That's why those cities are named Los Angeles and San Francisco and El Paso.
Millions came here from Italy, Germany, Ireland and everywhere else on the globe.
Do you know that there are towns in western ND where the predominant language is still German?
And Catholics, all 80 million of them, would like to see their religious laws become the law of the land.
As would the six million Jews.
How about this: We all follow the laws of the USA, and you and Donald Trump stop your fear-mongering?
So tell us, Jaxx-off, if you actually know - how did your ancestors arrive here? Did they get entry permits from the Native Americans who owned this country?
:bigear:
Like you, I hate Americans who join pseudo-religious terrorist organizations and carry out acts of terrorism, murder, rape and torture in the name of religious and ethnic purity.
Like you, I hate Americans who join pseudo-religious terrorist organizations and carry out acts of terrorism, murder, rape and torture in the name of religious and ethnic purity.
Ku Klux Klan members in United States politics
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This article discusses notable figures in U.S. national politics who were alleged to have been members of the Ku Klux Klan prior to their public careers.
Contents [hide]
1 Known members 1.1 Harry Truman
1.2 Robert Byrd
1.3 Hugo Black
1.4 Theodore G. Bilbo
1.5 Rice W. Means
1.6 Bibb Graves
1.7 Clifford Walker
1.8 George Gordon
1.9 John Clinton Porter
1.10 Warren G. Harding 1.10.1 Evidence for Harding's membership
1.10.2 Evidence against Harding's membership
1.11 David Duke
1.12 Benjamin Stapleton
2 Footnotes
3 References
Known members[edit]
Harry Truman[edit]
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman, the Democratic Missouri politician who became president in 1945, dabbled with the Klan briefly. In 1924, he was a judge in Jackson County, Missouri, which includes Kansas City. Truman was up for reelection, and his friends Edgar Hinde and Spencer Salisbury advised him to join the Klan. The Klan was politically powerful in Jackson County, and two of Truman's opponents in the Democratic primary had Klan support. Truman refused at first, but paid the Klan's $10 membership fee, and a meeting with a Klan officer was arranged.[1]
According to Salisbury's version of the story, Truman was inducted, but afterward ?was never active; he was just a member who wouldn't do anything?. Salisbury, however, told the story after he became Truman's bitter enemy, so historians are reluctant to believe his claims.[2]
According to Hinde and Truman's accounts, the Klan officer demanded that Truman pledge not to hire any Catholics or Jews if he was reelected. Truman refused, and demanded the return of his $10 membership fee; most of the men he had commanded in World War I had been local Irish Catholics.[3]
Truman had at least one other strong reason to object to the anti-Catholic requirement, which was that the Catholic Pendergast family, which operated a political machine in Jackson County, were his patrons; Pendergast family lore has it that Truman was originally accepted for patronage without even meeting him, on the basis of his family background plus the requirement that he was not a member of any anti-Catholic organization such as the Klan.[4] The Pendergast faction of the Democratic Party was known as the ?Goats?, as opposed to the rival Shannon machine's ?Rabbits?. The battle lines were drawn when Truman put only Goats on the county payroll,[5] and the Klan began encouraging voters to support Protestant, ?100% American? candidates, which was anathema to the Catholic Pendergasts. The Klan allied itself against Truman and with the Rabbits, and Shannon instructed his people to vote Republican in the election, which Truman lost.[6] Truman later claimed that the Klan ?threatened to kill me, and I went out to one of their meetings and dared them to try?, speculating that if Truman's armed friends had shown up earlier, violence might have resulted. However, biographer Alonzo Hamby believes that this story, which is not supported by any recorded facts, was a confabulation based on a meeting with a hostile and menacing group of Democrats that contained many Klansmen, showing Truman's ?Walter Mitty-like tendency [?] to rewrite his personal history?.[7] Sympathetic observers see Truman's flirtation with the Klan as a momentary aberration and point out that his close friend and business partner Eddie Jacobson was Jewish, and assert that in later years, Truman's presidency marked the first significant improvement in the federal government's record on civil rights since the post-Reconstruction nadir marked by the Wilson administration.[8]
Robert Byrd[edit]
Senator Robert Byrd was a Kleagle, a Klan recruiter, in his 20s and 30s.
West Virginia's Southern Democratic United States Senator Robert C. Byrd was a recruiter for the Klan while in his 20s and 30s, rising to the title of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops of his local chapter. After leaving the group, Byrd spoke in favor of the Klan during his early political career. Though he claimed to have left the organization in 1943, Byrd wrote a letter in 1946 to the group's Imperial Wizard stating "The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia." Byrd defended the Klan in his 1958 U.S. Senate campaign when he was 41 years old.[9]
Despite being the only Senator to vote against both African American U.S. Supreme Court nominees (liberal Thurgood Marshall and conservative Clarence Thomas) and filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Byrd has since said joining the Klan was his "greatest mistake." The NAACP gave him a 100% rating on their issues during the 108th Congress.[10] However, in a 2001 incident Byrd repeatedly used the phrase "white niggers" on a national television broadcast.[11]
Hugo Black[edit]
Supreme Court justice Hugo Black.
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Hugo Black, a Southern Democrat. In 1921, Black successfully defended E. R. Stephenson in the sensational trial for the murder of a Catholic priest Fr. James E. Coyle. He joined the Ku Klux Klan shortly after, in order to gain votes from the anti-Catholic element in Alabama. His membership ignited a national scandal when he was appointed to the Supreme Court. Black later said that joining the Klan was a mistake, but he went on to say "I would have joined any group if it helped get me votes."[12][13]
Theodore G. Bilbo[edit]
Senator Theodore G. Bilbo.
Theodore G. Bilbo, a Southern Democratic United States Senator from Mississippi revealed his membership in the Ku Klux Klan in an interview on the radio program Meet the Press. He said, "No man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that. Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux."[14]
Rice W. Means[edit]
Rice W. Means, a Republican United States Senator from Colorado, was endorsed by the Klan in Colorado, but lost renomination anyway.[15]
Bibb Graves[edit]
Bibb Graves, a Southern Democrat, was the 38th Governor of Alabama lost his first campaign for governor in 1922, but four years later, with the secret endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan, he was elected to his first term as governor. Almost certainly Graves was the Exalted Cyclops (chapter president) of the Montgomery chapter of the Klan, but both Graves and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, another Alabama Klan member, were more opportunists than ideologues, politicians who used the temporary strength of the Klan to further their careers.[16]
Clifford Walker[edit]
Governor Clifford Walker.
Clifford Walker, a Southern Democrat, the 64th Governor of Georgia, was revealed to be a Klan member by the press in 1924.[17]
George Gordon[edit]
George Gordon, a Southern Democratic Congressman for Tennessee's 10th congressional district became one of the Klan's first members. In 1867, Gordon became the Klan's first Grand Dragon for the Realm of Tennessee, and wrote its "Precept," a book describing its organization, purpose, and principles.
John Clinton Porter[edit]
John Clinton Porter, an Independent, was a member of the Klan in the early 1920s, but was no longer a member when he was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1928.[18]
Warren G. Harding[edit]
Warren G. Harding, a Republican, was allegedly a Ku Klux Klan member. Allegations that President Harding was a member are all based on a third-hand account of a second-hand recollection in 1985 of a deathbed statement made sometime in the late 1940s of an incident in the early 1920s. Independent investigations have turned up many contradictions and no supporting evidence. Historians reject the claim and note that Harding in fact publicly fought against the Klan.
Evidence for Harding's membership[edit]
Wyn Craig Wade states Harding's membership as fact and gives a detailed account of a secret swearing-in ceremony in the White House, but bases this claim on a private communication in 1985 from journalist Stetson Kennedy. Kennedy, in turn had, along with Elizabeth Gardner, tape recorded the "late 1940s" deathbed confession of former Imperial Klokard Alton Young, who claimed to have been a member of the "Presidential Induction Team" as Young was dying in a New Jersey Hospital. Young also claimed to have repudiated racism on his deathbed.[19] Wade claims that,[20]
Governor Bibb Graves.
"Simmons' ultimate vindication came when President Warren G. Harding agreed to be sworn in as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. A five-man ?Imperial induction team,? headed by Simmons, conducted the ceremony in the Green Room of the White House. Members of the team were so nervous that they forgot their Bible in the car, so Harding had to send for the White House Bible. In consideration of his status, Harding was permitted to rest his elbow on the desk, as he knelt on the floor during the long oath taking. Afterward, the President appreciatively gave members of the team War Department license tags that allowed them to run red lights all across the nation."
Evidence against Harding's membership[edit]
Wade states that ?This matter was a major issue in letters sent to Coolidge during the 1924 election?, and gives a reference to ?Case File 28, Calvin Coolidge papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.? In this file there is a letter from Wizard Edward Young Clarke to President Calvin Coolidge on 27 December 1923, charging Wizard Hiram W. Evens with trying to turn the Klan into a ?cheap political machine?. ?It [the Klan] was to be an organization designed to up-build and develop spirituality, morality, and physically the Protestant white man of America.?
In their 2005 book Freakonomics, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner alluded to Warren Harding's possible Klan affiliation. However, in a New York Times Magazine Freakonomics column, entitled "Hoodwinked? Does it matter if an activist who exposes the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan isn't open about how he got those secrets?",[21] Dubner and Levitt said that they no longer accepted Stetson Kennedy's testimony about Harding and the Klan.
Primary source material on file at the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus does not contain evidence of Harding's alleged membership in the Klan.[citation needed] Primary source material on file at the Marion County (Ohio) Historical Society (Warren G. Harding Collection) also does not confirm or indicate any involvement in the Klan, nor support the idea of Harding?s alleged Klan membership.[citation needed] The Site Administrator[who?] of the Harding Home Museum (Ohio Historical Society property) in Marion, Ohio, draws a relationship between Harding's alleged Klan activities directly to the rumor-mill stirred up after the President died in 1923 and Mrs. Harding in 1924.
The 1920 Republican Party platform, which essentially expressed Harding's political philosophy, calls for Congress to pass laws combating lynching.[22] Harding was the first American President to publicly denounce lynching and did so in a landmark 21 October 1921 speech in Birmingham, Alabama, which was covered in the national press. Harding also vigorously supported an anti-lynching bill in Congress during his term in the White House. While the bill was defeated in the Senate, such activities would be in direct conflict with Klan membership.
In his book, The Strange Deaths of President Harding, historian Robert Ferrell says he was unable to find any records of any such "ceremony" in which Harding was brought into the Klan in the White House. John Dean, in his 2004 book Warren Harding also could find no proof of Klan membership or activity on the part of Harding. Review of the personal records of Harding's Personal White House Secretary, George Christian Jr., also do not support the contention that Harding received members of the Klan while in office. Appointment books maintained in the White House, detailing President Harding's daily schedules, do not show any such event.
Payne argues that the Klan was so angry with Harding's attacks on the KKK that it originated and spread the false rumor that he was a member.[23]
Carl S. Anthony, biographer of Harding's wife found no such proof of Harding's membership in the Klan, he does however discuss the events leading up to the period when the alleged Klan ceremony was held in June 1923:
...knowing that the some branches of the Shriners were anti-Catholic and in that sense sympathetic to the Ku Klax Klan and that the Klan itself was holding a demonstration less than a half mile from Washington, Harding censured hate groups in his Shriners speech. The press "considered [it] a direct attack" on the Klan, particularly in light of his criticism weeks earlier of "factions of hatred and prejudice and violence [that] challeng[ed] both civil and religious liberty".[24]
In 2005, The Straight Dope presented a summary of many of these arguments against Harding's membership, and noted that, while it might have been politically expedient for him to join the KKK in public, to do it in private would have been of no benefit to him.[25]
David Duke[edit]
David Duke, a Southern Democrat turned Republican, and a well-known white nationalist pundit, was openly involved in the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan.[26] He was founder and Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1970s; he re-titled his position as "National Director" and said that the KKK needed to "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms." He claims to have left the organization in 1980. He ran for president in the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries. In 1989 Duke switched political parties from Democrat to Republican.[27] In 1989, he became a member of the Louisiana State Legislature from the 81st district, and was Republican Party chairman for St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana.[28]
Benjamin Stapleton[edit]
Stapleton, a Democrat, was mayor of Denver in the 1920s-1940s. He was a Klan member in the early 1920s and appointed fellow Klansmen to most positions in municipal government.[29]
