Recalling segregationist Biden            

                                                           

There are many fine reasons to desire Joe Biden's political defeat, not least of which are preservation of nationalism over globalism, adherence to constitutional ideals, defense of electoral integrity, and, as recently caused millions to shudder, the faltering president's pathetic debate spectacle.

Another can join the crowd: Turning America's back on earlier times' racial injustices necessitates consigning ignoble perpetrators to obscurity. One such miscreant is Joe Biden.

Like several 1970s Democrat senators, he inveighed against bussing to integrate schools. 

“Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point!” Delaware Senator Biden thundered on a 1977 senate floor.

A 2019 NBC News subheadline summed up the divisive senator’s impact: “Joe Biden helped give America the language that is still used to oppose school integration today, legislative and education history experts say.”

NBC’s story revealed that in 1975, Biden had sponsored legislation that limited courts’ authority to integrate schools, and also an amendment that prohibited the federal government’s withholding tax monies from segregated institutions.

During that era, chroniclers note, he maintained friendships with ardent office-ensconced segregationists James Eastland, Herman Talmadge, John Stennis, Strom Thurmond, and erstwhile KKK leader and long-serving Democrat Robert Byrd. During his later eulogizing of Byrd, Biden lauded him as a "mentor."

His fetid background returned to plague him during a 2019 presidential-candidate debate. Then-competitor Kamala Harris confronted Biden.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school everyday, and that little girl was me.”

In that same encounter, Harris said: “It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. It was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing.”

(Not long after this, of course, Harris dispensed with cultivated outrage and gigglingly became Biden’s vice-presidential colleague.)

When majority opinion evolved, career-politician Biden suitably reinvented himself. No longer did he preach the supposed virtues of school segregation. Old racist pals had become liabilities. Today, he does not speak of them.  

As a traditional Catholic, I believe in forgiveness and understand that people can change. One should not be forever condemned for past misdoings that no longer reflect character. 

But to my knowledge, Biden has never apologized for his wretched maneuvering to give legal armor to segregation, nor for camaraderie with similarly foul Democrat fellows. Instead, he contrives a false resume in which he agitated against the very rot he actually championed.

As a nation committed to leaving racial inequities behind, we cannot allow segegation's unrepentant proponents to enjoy enduring viability. We must slam the door and leave them behind it.

A version of this essay appeared on the American Thinker website.