The GOP Shows Its True Colors on Selma—Again

GOP leaders have paid much lip service in the past couple of years to the claim that wants to make the party a minority friendly party. And say they will do everything possible to promote diversity. The GOP's treatment of the 50th anniversary commemoration of the landmark Selma march on March 7 in Selma is a textbook mock of that claim.  President Obama, scores of top civil rights leaders, and Democratic legislators and party officials will be there.  But not one member of the GOP House leadership will be among them. They didn't even bother to give the usual duck and dodge reason of prior commitments or scheduling conflicts. They said nothing.

The snub is par for the GOP course. It fits in neatly with its long, blatant, and infuriating history of racial exclusion, neglect and race baiting, and polarization. This history can't be blithely sloughed off with pious pronouncements about diversity, broadening out the party, let alone propping up a scattering of black Republican candidates.

But then again, maybe the GOP's MIA on Selma is entirely appropriate in a perverse sense given its relentless and ruthless legal and extra-legal war of voter suppression of minority votes. And its full court press to gut the very Voting Rights Act that the Selma march was all about anyway. The GOP just simply showed its true colors again with its absence.