Free enterprise

[DonaldH675@aol.com]

Dear Visionaries,

Doug Wilson's email containing his interpretation of free enterprise is 
revealing.  In it, I detect more than a whiff of the putrefying spirit of the 
late Lester Maddox, segregationist Georgia governor and restaurant owner.  
Maddox, who owed a whites only establishment, based his lamentable political 
career on a pitiable sense of southern Anglo-Saxon entitlement; i.e., his 
inalienable privilege to preserve and protect the racial exclusivity of his 
eatery.  He staked this private property "right" on exactly the same 
philosophical grounds that Doug argues in his post.

One can tart up bigotry in classical allusions, ethnic superiority claims, 
religious conceits, or pseudo-political declarations, but it's still bigotry 
- plain and simple.  A pig in lipstick is still a pig.

The Civil Rights Movement shaped the perspective on human rights for most 
people of my generation.  Some of us chose then (and choose now) to stand 
beside those people who, with enormous courage and dignity, risk their lives 
to confront and overcome oppression.  Others chose then (and choose now) to 
defend and perpetuate the culture of oppression via spurious claims of 
property rights, white supremacy, romanticized and historically inaccurate 
views of the old South, chauvinism, and garden variety cultural ignorance.  

Doug and I may share on one conviction, however: the principles that one 
defends, define, at least in part, one's character and one's vision for a 
society.

Rosemary Huskey