Ann Coulter on ABC This Week: Civil Rights are Only for Blacks

Impact

On Sunday, ABC's This Week took the plunge by inviting conservative columnist Ann Coulter, who wasted no time in going Full Coulter during a discussion on immigration reform:

“That’s why the Democrats are dropping the blacks and moving on to the Hispanics, because they're a larger group of Hispanics now.”

Coulter went on to give an unusual take on civil rights, saying, “I think what — the way liberals have treated blacks like children and many of their policies have been harmful to blacks, at least they got the beneficiary group right,” she said. “There is the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. We don’t owe the homeless. We don’t owe feminists. We don’t owe women who are desirous of having abortions, but that’s — or gays who want to get married to one another. That’s what civil rights has become for much of the left.”

Asked by moderator George Stephanopoulos whether immigrant rights were civil rights, Coulter replied, “No. I think civil rights are for blacks ... What have we done to the immigrants? We owe black people something. We have a legacy of slavery. Immigrants haven’t even been in this country.”

Coulter's view that civil rights are exclusively the province of African-Americans is simply wrong, as it completely misunderstands what civil rights are. Although "civil rights" may conjure images of Martin Luther King Jr., bus boycotts, and protesters being blasted with fire hoses, civil rights simply enable citizens to fully and freely participate in the political process. To assert that civil rights are only for one group is to assert that there really are no civil rights, since the whole idea is predicated upon equality and non-discrimination.