Last week Ann Coulter made an appearance on the ABC News show “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” in order to discuss her new book, “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama.”
Unsurprisingly, Coulter made more than one controversial remark in “Mugged.” Stephanopoulos pointed out one statement in particular: “Various groups [including] feminists, gay rights groups, and those who are defending immigrants have commandeered the black civil rights experience.” Her attack on these “various groups” is an attempt to belittle the causes that have recently come to the forefront of social issues.
The fact is that civil rights are not just “for blacks,” as Coulter stated in the segment; they are for all members of the society. The fight for civil rights involves any group or individual who is being denied the basic freedoms that should be afforded to all people.
When asked about this statement Coulter said, “We don’t owe the homeless. We don’t owe feminists. We don’t owe women who are desirous of having abortions… or gays who want to get married to one another.” Just who is this “we” Coulter so fervently calls to? She seems to be missing the fact that all of the people she named are the individuals who compose this country.
Coulter also denied that immigrant rights are civil rights and asked, “What have we done to the immigrants?” and added “Immigrants haven’t even been in this country.” For someone who wrote an entire book on civil rights, she seems to either ignore or simply be ignorant of the actual history of civil rights in this country.
It would be interesting to learn if Coulter knows about the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots where American military personnel brutally beat young Mexican-American’s in Los Angeles or that in 1965 Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta founded the United Farm Workers association to fight against discrimination. So, yes, “we” have committed offenses against the immigrant population and contrary to Coulter’s beliefs, immigrants have in fact “been in this country.”
Both Univsion News Anchor Jorge Ramos and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich took issue with Coulter’s idea that immigrant rights are not civil rights. Reich pointed out the various threats Governor Romney has made to veto the Dream Act, further isolating this ever-growing section of the population. Ramos added to this idea and said, “If Republicans don’t do something with immigration and if Republicans are so far away from Latinos, they’re going to lose not only this election, they might lose the White House for generations.”
Ramos’s statement calls into question Coulter’s notion that immigrant rights are not civil rights by demonstrating just how detrimental it will be for the Republican’s, along with Mitt Romney, to hold onto that very idea.
Not only are they isolating themselves from the Latinos, they are isolating themselves from other groups that Coulter sees as thieves of the civil rights experience.
This country does owe something to the African American community, but Coulter would have people believe that they are the sole group deserving of civil rights. She seems to think that by calling attention to other groups who are being denied fair treatments in the eyes of the law is somehow a way of robbing African Americans of their rights.
Civil rights or the “civil rights experience” are not tangible items bestowed on any one group of individuals. I’m sure that if a law were put into place banning Caucasian women from publishing books, Coulter would feel as though her civil rights were definitely being taken from her. Yet, for some reason, Coulter does not see that civil rights are rights for the entire population. No one should be told that they are not entitled to any basic liberties.