No, professor. It’s one thing to hold one’s tongue in the immediate wake of a death. But when those “flaws” include a character defined by slanderous malice, casting him as a moral icon is simply dishonest and dishonorable.
It is beyond depressing how many voices on the Right -- Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, Robby George, even The Federalist here -- debased themselves by not merely praising Lewis' civil rights past but by dishonestly writing as if he was still that man.
His past as a civil rights hero makes his defamatory turn later in life WORSE, because his presumed authority on racism made his lies that much more plausible to the uninformed who saw them echoed on TV or in print.
breitbart.com/politics/2017/…
breitbart.com/politics/2017/…
Slandering people as racist is not a matter of differing politics, but of basic human decency. And for *at least* the past decade, Lewis not only failed that test, he actively spit on it.
Every damn "conservative" listed or linked above, and countless additional examples, who lies by omission about his present because of his past is a symptom of why our politics are so ugly. Because you people never make the perpetrators pay a price in their reputations.
To be clear, I am not saying the Right should've used his death as an occasion to scream about how morally repugnant he was. Honorable reactions would've been:
- silence
- simple sympathy for his family
- praising his *past* civil rights work
- silence
- simple sympathy for his family
- praising his *past* civil rights work
But the minute you cross the line from any of that into pretending he was still a good man and a hero *in the present day*, you are actively misleading your audiences, you are giving cover for bad behavior, and you invite discussion of the truth.
