Pat Buchanan hates civil disobedience – except when it targets gay people

Responding to SCOTUS marriage equality decision, he calls for "civil disobedience." He wasn't always so fond of it

Published October 10, 2014 4:33PM (EDT)

Pat Buchanan           (AP/Cliff Owen)
Pat Buchanan (AP/Cliff Owen)

Right-wing polemicist Pat Buchanan’s latest jeremiad assails the U.S. Supreme Court for its decision Monday to let stand a series of lower court rulings in favor of marriage equality, charging that Americans now live “under the rule of a judicial dictatorship.”

The push for marriage equality, Buchanan writes, is part of a concerted “de-Christianization” of America. The onetime aide to Presidents Nixon and Reagan asserts that the Supreme Court has, by “edict,” established secular humanism as “our established religion,” citing its rulings against school prayer and in favor of “forced busing” of African-American schoolchildren, abortion rights, and “homosexual sodomy.”

Lamenting this state of affairs, Buchanan seizes on the Supreme Court's latest decision to issue his call to arms.

“Why,” Buchanan asks, has there not been “massive civil disobedience against this anti-Christian discrimination, as there was against segregation?”

Rich stuff coming from a notorious racial bigot and associate of white nationalists. Even richer coming from a guy who wrote these words on Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil disobedience:

To black Americans and many whites, Dr. King was the essence of everything good about America.

To millions of others, not all of them racists, he was something else: the most divisive figure in the century’s most divisive decade. A partisan who made the tactics of civil disobedience and mass demonstration the first resort of dissidents – when in a Democratic republic it should be the last. An ideolog of the socialist wing of the Democratic Party who lent his prestige to an antiwar movement which bears moral responsibility for the continuing tragedy in Southeast Asia.


By Luke Brinker

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