No Comparison

“More than four decades ago,” an American citizen led a rally on the Mall in Washington to protest policies and institutions that, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s principles, made unjust distinctions between one group of citizens and another. This past Monday, an American Senator insulted the memory of that citizen and the movement he led.

When Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy, while speaking to a rally held on the Mall in support of the violation of the nation’s laws regarding immigration, compared the recent spate of such demonstrations to the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s, it would have been a surprising insult to the legacy of those who took part in the movement and to the intelligence of the American people, had it not come from his lips. Mind you, it’s still an insult. It’s just not surprising that Ted Kennedy said it.

As a child of the deep South, I am as aware as anyone of the still-tender nerves that can be touched when discussions of the events of the sixties come up. And there may have been different ways for both the protestors of that day and the government to handle the issue before it was resolved. But there is no way to rationally and reasonably argue against the fact that the black American citizens at that time – many of whom had even fought and bled for the nation – had every right to expect that the U.S. government would be as protective of their rights, as citizens, as it would of white citizens. You see, they were citizens, who should be recognized as having all the rights and privileges that American citizenship confers upon the person so blessed. They were demanding that they be recognized as full equals, before the law, among law-abiding citizens.

Those who have gathered in recent weeks for the protest movements that Senator Kennedy has so grossly mischaracterized, by and large, have no such noble intents. Rather, there is little question among anybody that the majority of those engaging in the protests have entered the United States illegally. And, yes, “illegal” is the correct term to identify those who have violated the law. When I drive my car over seventy mile-per-hour on the interstate, I am traveling at an illegal rate of speed – not that I am prone to do that, though, but I digress. Anyway, it's hard to credibly make a claim to being law-abiding, when your very presence somewhere is in violation of the law, and you have no intent to conform your behavior to the law.

Being illegal residents of the United States, they are thus not citizens, and have no claim to the same rights that the marchers of the sixties – who, although they did have claim to those rights – were being denied. Indeed, it’s hard to see what these folks are being denied, short of the right to vote – though there is no doubt that many of them have voted anyway. They can receive public education in America’s schools, they can receive medical treatment on the American taxpayer’s dime, and they can use their money – earned while doing jobs “Americans won’t do” only because their wages are not subject to market forces – to eat in any restaurant or at any lunch counter they so desire. So how on earth can they be compared to the black citizens of the sixties? They can’t, and I suspect that Senator Kennedy knows that.

The attempt on the part of a liberal blowhard like Ted Kennedy to smudge the memory of Americans by this invalid comparison is nothing more than an attempt to put a respectable face on a non-respectable demonstration. And behind it all is simple electoral politics.