Who Are The Teapartiers?

Today's post is based on an article that appeared in the April 30, 2010 issue of The Week magazine. The article summarized the results from a CBS/New York Times poll that explored the demographic profile of those in support of the Tea Party movement. Before going over the results, keep in mind that the poll was not done by Fox News or some conservative cause group. It was done by the mainstream media which has shown itself to be much more closely aligned with the Democrats than the Republicans and who usually favor more government interference in our lives than the lower interference levels that the Tea Party advocates are looking for.

Results include the following:

• Tea Party participants are better educated than the average American.
• They are more affluent than the average American.
• 57% support gay marriage or civil unions while the President of the United States does not support gay marriage.
• 65% believe in legal access to abortion.
• A plurality do not deem Sarah Palin qualified for the Presidency.

Hardly sounds like a bunch of racists, lunatics or fringe Americans that some politicians and many media outlets try to make them out to be. However, that does not stop some people from trying to twist the poll data to make them look like racists. For example, Tim Rutten in the LA Times pointed out the following results from the poll:

• Nine out ten respondents are white.
• 59% are male and 43% are female.
• 75% are Republicans over the age of 45.

However, what Mr. Tutten fails to point out, which "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" does document in Step 45, is that 99% of the U.S. Senate and 90% of the House of Representatives are white and 16% of the Senate and 17% of the House of Representatives are female. Thus, if Mr. Tutten has a problem with the white/male breakdown of the Tea Party movement, he must hate the white/male breakdown of the U.S. Congress which is substantially whiter and more masculine than the Tea Party make up. His conclusion: Tea Party people are "angry white males." What does that make Congress?

Andrea Peyser writing in the New York Post also counters Mr. Tutten's racist implications by pointing out that the Tea Party movement sprung up not when an African-American man was elected President but after President Obama's administration and the Democratic Party's control of Congress over the past three plus years, where budgets are developed, resulted in record breaking deficits that far exceed all benchmarks of reasonableness (e.g. percentage of GDP), massive bailouts of high risk taking bankers, and the underhanded passage of a multi-TRILLION health care bill that will not cure the problem of rising health care costs. If Tea Party people were racists they would have been in the streets after the election, not after the reckless financial behavior of the political class, in this cycle led by the Democrats.

The bottom line is it should not matter who the Tea Partiers are. They are Americans and they are expressing a legitimate opinion and concern with the direction the country is taking. Even if they were 100% white male or 100% Latino women, they are all Americans. They have a right to protest government actions and not be branded as racists for their concerns. This throwing around of the toxic term "racist" for those protesting their government's behavior does a disservice to those Civil Rights pioneers from several decades ago who faced real racists (robed men, Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs) in their quest for equality and belittles the sacrifices they made for freedom.



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