'How is it not like that' I ask. 'Shut up,' they explain.

Douglas Wilson: On Taking Your Chimp to the Beautician -- Many others (including yours truly) have made the same point about "Jim Crow" that Mr Wilson makes so well here --

Liars are usually clever - you have to give them that. And one of the things the really smart ones know how to do is to use the last lie you caught them in as a basis for getting you to believe the lie they are currently telling. Take the specter of Jim Crow laws and the current “scratch a liberal, find a totalitarian” frenzy that we have going on right now. Or, as Iowahawk aptly put it, “Hey, great job, ‘coexist’ bumper sticker community.”

The enabling problem with Jim Crow laws was the fact that they were LAWS. The sin involved was bigotry. The crime involved was coercion by the state. Bigots focus on the fact that people are white or black, and they run screaming to their first refuge, which is “there oughta be a law” that mandates the imposition of their bigotries. Entrepreneurs notice that everybody’s money is green, and they don’t demand that anybody do anything. And in a mixed community, where the free market is allowed to work, the general result is cosmopolitan.

So Jim Crow laws did not simply allow bigoted business owners to refuse service to those they detested. You don’t need a law for that. Jim Crow laws required non-bigoted business owners to act in a way contrary to their consciences. Sound familiar? And Jim Crow laws enshrined bigotry in the law, such that institutions governed directly by the state (e.g. schools) maintained and enforced the currently approved bigotries.

Got that? The problem was the government. If you were a white restaurant owner in Alabama, and your conscience said that you should be able to serve anyone who came in your one and only front door, well, then, too bad for you.

“It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.”

Now why do people make such laws? They do it because if they didn’t make them, then other people would start to do the thing prohibited. Bigots don’t believe in argument because they consistently lose them. They routinely have bad experience with arguments. And so if you want to identify the bigots in any situation, then look for the screechers. Look for the people who are shouting everyone else down. Look for the coercion. In response to this the liberals say, “It is not like that at all.” “How is it not like that?” I ask. “Shut up,” they explain.
...
And even if these people were entirely wrong about it - which they are NOT - why the coercion? Leave the fellow alone, and quit trying to get your ham sandwich at the kosher deli.

So whatever they say (to the extent you can make it out under all the yelling), whether they like it or not, the current crop of progressives are the heirs of Jim Crow. They are the ones using the law to violate honest consciences. That’s just how they roll.

If I remember correctly, way back when the so-called Civil Rights Laws were being enacted, Barry Goldwater (*) warned that the way in which the GOP was using the Federal Government to invalidate the Democrats' "Jim Crow Laws" was contrary to liberty, and specifically to the right of freedom of association. Allow me to emphasize that -- contrary to some lies that Democrats continue to spread about Goldwater, he wasn't objecting *that* the Democrats' "Jim Crow Laws" were being invalidated by the Federal Government, he was objecting to the anti-liberty and anti-Constitutional *manner* in which they were being invalidated.

But the Republican Establishment of the day -- "progressive" then as now -- was giddy on sticking it to the Democrats. And now, the Democrats (who have since devolved into full-bore leftists) have figured out how to use the Republicans' sticking it to their grandfathers to stick it to everyone.


(*) Who, ironically, would probably be in favor of the current regime of using governmental force-and-violence to impose the "Gay Agenda" upon the nation.