For the past several decades, Republican state governments have systematically targeted black citizens to deny them the right to vote. Republican courts have colluded.
We have a new Republican supreme court justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who sure as hell looked as if he flat out lied under oath in the face of persuasive evidence by a credible woman that he had sexually assaulted her. Not to mention a Republican president who brags about his serial sexual predations of women.
The common element is disgraceful conduct, coupled with cynical shamelessness. So who takes it on the chin for somewhat less systematic racial blunders and alleged sexual assaults?
The Democrats, of course.
I am not making light of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam dressing in blackface and allowing minstrelsy and a Klan photo to grace his yearbook page. Nor am I excusing Attorney General Mark Herring's blackening his face in a college party stunt. Even less do I condone Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax's alleged episode turning consensual kissing into what his accuser says was an assault.
This kind of stuff was all too normal a generation ago. No longer. There is no statute of moral or political limitations for racist symbols or sexual assault.
All of these Democrats have expressed degrees of remorse, while the Republican style is to do far worse, and to piously stonewall. In Virginia, this will likely end with at least one resignation, and some serious political damage to the Democrats. Yet the Republicans manage to engage in far more systematic racism and serial offenses against women and the rights of women—and to an appalling degree they get away with it.
Something is wrong here. If the Democrats are going to devour their own in the name of racial and gender justice, they owe it to themselves and to their country to hold the Republicans to at least as high a standard.
