He may have had an illegitimate child, but clearly it was Strom Thurmond who was the bastard. Andrew Sullivan ponders a man who fought tooth and nail to keep racial discrimination as the law of the land, yet clearly had no problem exploiting underage employees of his for sexual pleasure regardless of their race. The revelation of Thurmond’s fathering a child with a black woman makes him even more loathsome in my eyes, if that’s possible; to him, black people may not have been good enough to go to the same schools or eat at the same counters or drink from the same water fountains and probably even to vote, if that were possible, but they were good enough to fuck and then discard.
Strom Thurmond was scum, and it’s to this country’s everlasting shame that he remained in its highest legislative body until the 21st Century. And I feel much the same when I hear the noxious Klansman Robert Byrd’s latest pronouncements against our efforts to defeat fascism, particularly odious considering he spent his formative years espousing the American brand.