Senator Byrd: homophobic, racist and historically illiterate

The late Ted Kennedy's memoirs were recently released; here’s a quote of interest, about what has got to be the single weirdest Oval Office discussion, ever:

But the meeting went on and on, for more than two hours - extraordinary by White House standards. Finally, my turn to speak came. I made a brief comment in support of allowing gays in the military, in which I mentioned that all the arguments against such a policy had already been made....Well, I was wrong about that. Almost all the arguments had been used before. The last senator to speak was Robert Byrd, and he came up with a new one on all of us.....He informed us, with many ornate flourishes, that there had been a terrible problem in ancient Rome with young military boys turned into sex slaves. I don't remember the exact details, but I think the story involved Tiberius Julius Caesar being captured and abused and used as a sex slave. He escaped and then years later he sought vengeance and killed his captors. Anyway, it was something like that. The room fell silent. The senator continued. Then President Clinton stood up. His response was short and sweet. 'Well,' he said. 'Moses went up to the mountain, and he came back with the tablets and there were ten commandments on those tablets. I've read those commandments. I know what they say, just like I know you do. And nowhere in those ten commandments will you find anything about homosexuality. Thank y'all for coming.' He ended the meeting and walked out of the room."

… I dunno which is more disturbing: Byrd’s incredibly random (and false) argument, or that President Clinton brought up the ten commandments as an “argument” for or against anything.

Scratch that; Byrd’s fallacious (and, again, hilariously strange) argument takes the cake. But, just for fun, let’s examine a quote from a letter Byrd sent to Senator Theodore Bilbo in 1944, complaining against President Truman desegregating the army, as found by Ed Brayton:

I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

Okay, no further examination necessary: this guy’s one hell of a hateful old gobshite. How does someone write such things and survive for so long?

(via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)
Technorati tags: Robert Byrd · racism · ignorance · history · Roman Empire · homosexuality · Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell · bigotry