You may ask, and well you should, "What the fuck?" The fuck is that that's Britney Spears up there kissing some handsome black dude named Columbus Short, a name you can forget now. Britney, bitch, is from Kentwood, Louisiana, where her family still lives. Which is in Tangipahoa Parish. Which is where Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell refused to sign a marriage license for white Beth Humphrey and black Terence McKay. About which Bardwell said, "I'm not a racist." He marries black couples, he says. He worries about possible interracial children because, one may assume, they blacken up the gene pool and might trick white people into thinking they're just extra tan.
To their credit, Senator Mary Landrieu, a white Democrat, and Governor Bobby Jindal, a not-white Republican, have condemned Bardwell and called on him to be fired. And if they wanted to get married, Bardwell would so not allow it.
But, shit, isn't Bardwell just doing what pharmacists and others have been allowed to do? State legislatures have legalized "freedom of conscience" for some medical professionals. If your man behind the counter at your town's only Walgreen's can say he won't fill your birth control prescription because if Jesus wants a whore to get pregnant, that fuckin' whore is gettin' pregnant, then Bardwell ought to be able to keep his job. Oh, right. Because that's what his fucking job is. Just like any medical professionals who want the right to refuse to treat someone or fill a prescription that they don't like, if you signed up to do a job, you do the job. If you don't like it, go into another career.
The Rude Pundit's been drunk many times in Tangipahoa Parish. There's great food there, but, shit, it's Louisiana. Places that don't serve great food get justifiably burned to the ground. Hammond is a shitty small city with a decent state college and a crappy mall that mostly serves as a piss stop along I-12. The town of Independence has a wacky Italian festival every year. Ponchatoula is fucking charming. Mostly, the races live together just fine in happy isolation from each other. You get shitfaced in some bar in tiny, rural craphole towns like Roseland or Amite, places, like Kentwood, with majority black populations, and you'll hear every complaint about black people you ever thought whites could make. But talking shit mostly stays in the beer puddles on the tables. Racists talk a good game, but they're almost all cowardly fuckers who won't ever act.
There were at least 24 recorded lynchings of black men in this parish with a relatively small population between 1879 and 1917. Lafayette Parish, which has always had roughly twice the number of people, had 4. Not something to be proud of, just a point of comparison. Kentwood, Britney's hometown, had a major Confederate army recruiting and training center. The history's there. What lies under the surface has a zombie-like way of returning to engorge once again.
The near unanimity of condemnation of Bardwell has been encouraging. Tangipahoa Parish has been "inundated" with calls of protest. Another Justice of the Peace in the parish, Terri Crosby, had mixed-race grandparents. She finds what happened an anomaly, saying to CNN, "I could never believe that this area is racist, no. I think that this is the most fair, loving people." She married the (now) McKays.
By the way, at least into the 1980s, if you were 1/32 black (which means back five generations, some white slave owner raped a slave in your family), you were considered black under Louisiana law. They like their white people lily.
In other words, this is just a fucking mess. But at least we've reached a point where, when some backwards ass country fuck of an official drawls shit like, "It's kind of hard to apologize for something that really, truly down in your heart, you don't feel like you've done wrong," as Bardwell has said, and others try to defend him by saying he's not racist (best line: Bardwell said that he's allowed black people to use his bathroom), most people line up to say it's wrong. Now, will they have the guts to actually fire him before he does this again, especially since he's done it before and he obviously has some fucked principle he's operating under?
As for Britney Spears, well, she almost married a dude from Afghanistan. So maybe the people of her home parish can take comfort in her forward thinking about fucking non-white guys. She speaks for all of us when she sings, "I have no chains around me, baby, can't you see?/ I could be anything you dream of but I gotta feel free." Truer words, homegirl, truer words.
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