Guess who said this: “It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we prohibited it.”

by David Safier

Who, talking about something we do here in Arizona, said, "It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it"?

Was it Raul Grijalva? Dolores Huerta? Al Sharpton?

Nope, nope and nope.

It was Tom Horne.

And he was talking about (drum roll, please) TUSD's Ethnic Studies program, and the anti-Ethnic Studies bill the Accidental Guv just signed.

State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the bill for years, said he believes the Tucson school district's Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.

Public schools should not be encouraging students to resent a particular race, he said.

"It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it," Horne said.

So let me get this straight, Tom. Ethnic Studies is like the old South — which enslaved, then persecuted blacks on the basis of their supposed racial inferiority — because classes teach that Hispanics in the U.S. are regularly persecuted on the basis of their supposed ethnic and cultural inferiority.

Tom Horne likes to let us know he walked in Civil Rights marches. I guess that
gives him the right to distort the aims of the Civil Rights movement and everything
Martin Luther King said and stood for.

Horne, by the way is a Harvard educated lawyer. And his family escaped Poland before the Nazis swarmed in and sent Jewish families like his to concentration camps.

One part of me says, goddammit, the guy should know better, based on his intelligence, education and family history. But another part of me reminds the first part that Horne is an ex-Democrat running for Attorney General as a Republican, which means he has to run away from the "too liberal for today's Republican Party" label.

It's past time for otherwise intelligent people in the Republican Party, who find themselves having to act like idiots to get elected, to say, Enough!