LIBERALS WILL CONTINUE TO LIE ABOUT RACE AND GENDER IN 2015

When People magazine asked Michelle Obama about her personal experience with racism, she cited a 2011 visit to a Target store in Virginia.

"The only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf," the First Lady said.

Why is it "racist" for a short white woman to ask a taller woman (Ms. Obama is 5’11") who happens to be black to get a box of detergent for her from a high shelf?

The First Lady’s anecdote illustrates how difficult it is to find evidence for the charge many liberals make that racism and sexism are as rampant in America today as half a century ago.

Jim Crow was killed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since the 1970s, blacks have been admitted to colleges with grades and test scores far below those of other students, been given preference in hiring for many jobs.

Unthinkable in 1968, improbable in 1988, Americans in 2008 elected a (half) black man president. But some liberals say the fact so many who voted for Barack Obama then have soured on him since proves racism endures.

Half a century ago, career opportunities for women pretty much were limited to nursing, teaching school, the secretarial pool. Today women are doctors, lawyers, corporate CEOs, generals and admirals.

The pay gap has all but disappeared for women who work in the same fields as men, and have done so for as long. Young women in urban areas earned about 8 percent more than their male peers, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report in 2009.

Holly Lynne, my granddaughter, born last month, will be able to do pretty much whatever she wants to do, likely will be paid more for doing it than will boys her age.

The battle for workplace equality has been won. But feminism as a civil rights movement died when "the Sisterhood" embraced President Bill Clinton despite his serial abuse of women. Since then most feminists have been shrill, dishonest shills for Democrats.

Who to deny progress push their definition of "sexism" ever further into absurdity. Feminists in New York City wax indignant about "man-spreading," the tendency of male subway riders to sit with their knees spread apart.

Or lie, as do feminists who say there is a rape "epidemic" on college campuses. FBI data indicate the incidence of rape is the lowest in 41 years, barely half what it was in 1992. Coeds are less at risk than are young women who don’t go to college.

Hillary Clinton got to start at the top in elective politics because she’s Bill’s wife. She orchestrated the smear campaign against the women who accused him of sexual misconduct. Which makes Hillary a feminist heroine.

Elizabeth Warren – noted mostly for obtaining appointment to the Harvard Law School faculty by claiming, falsely, to be of Native American descent – and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke, who was fired for incompetence by the family firm, are feminist heroines too.

The first female fighter pilot to fly in combat, the first African-American secretary of state, the first female Hispanic governor aren’t, because they’re Republicans.

The greatest civil rights leader dreamed in 1963 "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

If liberals acknowledged Martin Luther King’s dream has come true, more blacks might wonder why all the "help" they’ve gotten from Democrats has done them so little good. So they pretend every year is 1963.

There is no greater domestic tragedy than the growth and increasing impoverishment of the black underclass in cities governed by Democrats for decades. Blaming mostly mythical white racism obscures the real causes, prevents solutions.

No one in politics does more harm, or is more despicable, than those who sow race and gender discord for partisan advantage.  The odds are vanishingly small that they will stop doing so in this new year of 2015.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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