Ryan Calls Bigotry An American Value

(The above cartoon is by Chris Britt in the U.S. News & World Report.)

Paul Ryan was brought on board Willard's campaign because it was believed that he could lie so well that he could make Republican "trickle-down" economics look like a viable alternative again (even though people still remember what it brought under Bush -- deep recession and millions of lost jobs). Unfortunately for Willard and Ryan, Bill Clinton shot that argument down easily with just one word -- "arithmetic" (it just doesn't add up).

What's a candidate to do? Well, Ryan decided to go back to that tried and true favorite of the right-wing -- bigotry. Here's what he told a Cincinnati audience last Tuesday:

“The things you talk about like traditional marriage and family and entrepreneurship. These aren’t values that are indicative to any one person or creed or color. These are American values, these are universal human values."

The operative phrase in that sentence is, of course, "traditional marriage". It doesn't matter that there's no such thing as traditional marriage (since it has changed several times just in the last couple of hundred years in this country). The term is a code that's easily recognizable by the fundamentalist teabagger base of the Republican Party. The know that "traditional marriage" is to be translated to mean "there's no way we're ever going to give lesbians and gays equal rights".

Paul tries to hide his bigotry behind a facade of patriotism, calling it an American value. But it doesn't matter whether it's hidden as patriotism or as religion -- it's still bigotry, and bigotry is not an American value or a universal human value. It wasn't a value when it was used to deny basic rights to minorities, and it wasn't a value when it was used to keep women as second-class citizens. And it's not a value when it's used as a tool to discriminate against homosexuals. It is just old-fashioned bigotry.

What is an American value is equal rights. It's such a big American value that it is included in the United States Constitution. That means the government (local, state, or federal) cannot single out a group and treat them differently, by denying them rights that are guaranteed to all other groups. In short, bigotry is unconstitutional -- even when disguised as patriotism or as religion.