A current of racial politics has run through the Republican Party for decades, exemplified by Ronald Reagan starting his 1980 campaign cheering on "States Rights" (code word for letting the South discriminate) at the very site when three civil rights workers were murdered not sixteen years before. It continues through Reagan's "welfare queen" speech, through Bush Senior's Willie Horton ads, rolls in Jesse Helms's entire career like a pig in mud, gloried in keeping 80000 black voters from the Florida polls in 2000 by claiming they were felons, and continues to this day in bogus voter-ID schemes.
Yet, somehow, a Republican main ally has stayed above the fray, saying they were about religious freedom and preventing the destruction of human life. Follow me over the hedgerow to find the lie.
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