March 7, 2014

Ralph Reed Compares Barack Obama to George Wallace

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wallace_at_University_of_Alabama_edit2.jpg">US News & World Report</a>Library of Congress

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Top social-conservative strategist Ralph Reed compared President Barack Obama to segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace on Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. 

“Fifty years ago George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door and said that African-Americans couldn’t come in,” said Reed, the founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, in response to the Department of Justice’s attempt to block Louisiana’s school voucher program. “Today, the Obama administration stands in that same door and says those children can’t leave. It was wrong then and it was wrong now and we say to President Obama, ‘Let those children go.'”

Remarkably, Reed wasn’t the first speaker at CPAC to compare the Obama administration’s policies to the Jim Crow South.

On Thursday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal made the same comparison in his address to the conference. “We’ve got Eric Holder and the Department of Justice trying to stand in the schoolhouse door,” he said.

But as I reported in a new profile of Jindal, Louisiana isn’t exactly a pillar of inclusiveness. Some schools that receive state funding under the voucher program promise to immediately expel any student who is found to be a homosexual—or to be promoting homosexuality in any form.

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