Mourner gather flowers for the Charleston shooting victims, June 18, 2015
The mass shooting of nine parishioners at a black church in South Carolina by a white supremacist has been very distressing. Even worse has been a
complete sense of denial from conservatives that it had anything to do with race, with
many claiming it was an attack on Christians (by the way, there's a good chance that Dylann Roof is a Christian).
It's especially bad when you consider the last time a hate crime of this degree happened, and how prominent conservatives responded. Back in 1996, a suspicious string of fires in predominantly black churches in the South emerged. The U.S. Justice Department—as requested by the NAACP—opened up a civil rights investigation into the church burnings. Here is how Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, responded at the time—as the Washington Post reported on June 19, 1996:
The head of the conservative Christian Coalition today said his group would join forces with black Christians to stem the wave of suspicious fires sweeping black churches in the South and to help the affected congregations raise money to rebuild.
Ralph Reed, executive director of the group, which claims 100,000 member churches, said he hoped his promise would be the first step toward a long-term working relationship with black churches, which he acknowledged have previously enjoyed little support from the mostly white congregations that make up much of the Christian Coalition. Reed also apologized for the white evangelical church, which he said was on the "sidelines" or on "the wrong side" of many racial issues during the turbulent civil rights years.
"We come today bearing the burden of that history with broken hearts, a repentant spirit and ready hands to fight this senseless violence," Reed said. He was in Atlanta to meet with black pastors whose churches have been hit by the recent wave of suspicious fires.
Have Jeb Bush or Nikki Haley said they hoped this is a first step toward a long-term working relationship with black churches? Have Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee been willing to apologize on behalf of the white evangelical community for not always being on the right side of history? Hell no. They won't even acknowledge that a white supremacist killing nine black church parishioners had anything to do with race.
Hate crimes committed against African-American churches is nothing new, and has been going on for decades. It is not a "partisan" issue to acknowledge why Dylann Roof did what he did, and just 19 years ago a lot of right-wing conservatives acknowledged that. But that was before Fox News, before the tea party and before the right wing brought a truly toxic aspect into our political debate.
When I have to bring up Ralph Reed as an example of how conservatives should react, you know they have truly fallen off the deep end.