Charles Pierce on How "It's Not about Race Because Nothing Ever Is about Race."

Charles Pierce today at his "Politics" blog at Esquire, commenting on the "gerrymandered mess" the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature has made of the state's election maps, and about the arguments the lawyer representing the Republicans in the legislature is advancing to defend said mess:

It's not About Race because nothing ever is About Race. We all know that, right?

Well, many of us do know better: but see the arguments of leading Catholic journalists and scholars who continue to assert that, in allying themselves and their church with white evangelicals for whom race was (and remains: let's be honest) the fundamental underlying issue in the "culture wars," they are not complicit in said racism and don't have a racist bone in their bodies.

It's not about race. It's about abortion.

And about same-sex marriage.

And about libertarianism.

It can't be about race for Catholics, since they predominate outside the South and are staunch defenders of civil rights.

Well, of some civil rights.

And the movement of "culture-war" white Catholics in the North to the Republican party right as white Southerners made the transition to the Republican party following the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act just happens to have occurred, coincidentally, in the same time frame.

Since Catholics are by definition not ever motivated by racism and have never bought into the white supremacist ideology that is the United States' original sin and the source of so much of its cultural and political misery generation after generation.