Rep. Trent Franks Claims 'The Left' Started The Civil War Because They Loved Slavery So Much

Arizona Congressman Trent Franks had a chat this Friday with Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Everett Piper on the Family Research Council's "Washington Watch" program allllll about how much he totally hates abortion and thinks it is just about one of the most super evil things to have ever happened. Which is pretty much par for the course for him. It is just as evil, he claims, as SLAVERY. And it is also just like slavery, because saying a real live person is not a person is just like saying a clump of cells is not a person.
Via Right Wing Watch:
When Piper asked Franks about President Obama’s opposition to so-called “born-alive” bills that are a favorite ofanti-choice activists, Franks responded that the president “knows that if this country ever wakes up and realizes that we’re in the center storm of the greatest human genocide in the history of humanity, what we’re doing to unborn children and newborn children, that there won’t be a Democrat left standing in the northern hemisphere… in an election, that is, if there’s ever a realization of what the Democrat Party has stood for.”“It’s so sad, because we’re just not students of history, Doctor,” he continued. “You know, the left gets very angry when we use the slavery parallel, but the parallel is so profoundly appropriate. Because the Supreme Court said in Dred Scott that the slave was not a person, that they were chattel, and you could do whatever you want.
Huh! Treating people like chattel, you say? You mean like getting to force them to breed whether they like it or not? Because that is also a thing you do with chattel. Chattel have no reproductive rights.
Abortion is also just like slavery, he claims, in that 'the left' loved slavery also, loved it so much that they started the Civil War over it.
“And there were a group of people, they called them Republicans, they began to coalesce as a new party, that said, no, these slaves are children of God and we as Americans stand for the notion that we’re all created equal and that includes slaves. And we stood up for them and the left was so committed to it that it precipitated a bloody civil war and we ended up shooting ourselves to doll rags. That’s how committed an irrational conclusion can become when there is an investment of these kinds of political proportions in a certain narrative.”
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.
You know, you would think -- student of history that he is -- that Trent Frank would be aware that the Republican Party of the 19th century was not, in fact, a right wing party. And that the Democrats of that time were not, in fact, left wing by any means. In what world has anyone ever thought of a slaveowner as a bleeding heart liberal? You might think that -- as a student of history -- Franks might have noticed that some things happened throughout the 20th century that caused the parties to switch sides on civil rights.
However, Rep. Franks clearly subscribes to the version of history which somehow cuts out the entirety of the 20th century and what happened during that period, and assumes that the entire South and nearly every card-carrying racist on the planet just started voting Republican for no apparent reason. And that there is also no reason why all the people defending the Confederate flag and trying to insist that the Civil War was actually about state's rights are also Republicans. Except for the times when it was about slavery, in which case they were the good guys who were fighting slavery, and have continued to be the party of anti-racism throughout the 20th century, and black people only vote against them because the Democrats stole them away with welfare benefits? And also the Southern Strategy never happened, and neither did the whole Civil Rights Act thing, and racism stopped existing some time in the late '60s, except for racism against white people. I think? I don't know.
I would actually really love to read some kind of rundown of what they think occurred, because I certainly can't figure it out, and as far as I can tell, they have no idea either.
Robyn Pennacchia is a brilliant, fabulously talented and visually stunning angel of a human being, who shrugged off what she is pretty sure would have been a Tony Award-winning career in musical theater in order to write about stuff on the internet. Follow her on Twitter at @RobynElyse