Nixon saw interracial pregnancy as grounds for abortion

[Christa]

Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases, such as interracial pregnancies.

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding: “Or a rape.”

Barack Obama was 11 at the time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/politics/24nixon.html

[ThomWV]

1. and more than half of the country considered it cause for a lynching.

[CreekDog]

4. i don't think in 1971 they did

not half. no way.

[ThomWV]

6. Then explain the "Southern Strategy?

In truth I'd guess that there has never been more than a percent or two of the population that would take their hatred to violence no matter what the subject group might be - but the success of the Southern Strategy in gaining over half the vote (look at the landslide it lead to for Reagan) indicates that there was sympathy for the bigotry it represented by far more than half the population.

[get the red out]

2. He was one crazy guy

The only way to see Nixon as sane is to compare him to W.

[ThomWV]

5. How nuts was he when he signed the EPA into existance?

Did you know that under Nixon social spending exceeded Defense spending in this country, that it was Nixon that initiated automatic cost-of-living raises to Social Security? Of course, and in the Republican tradition, Nixon tried to shift the responsibility for social programs to the states, but between 1968 and 1972 he increased the grants to states for such programs by roughly a third, to about a half a billion dollars (real money 40 years ago). He also attempted to set a guaranteed annual income through the Family Assistance Progam (killed by Congress).

He have have been horribly flawed but it is unfair to compare him to the idiot son.

[get the red out]

7. I know about that, why wouldn't I?

That's why I think W is so much worse. Until W people thought Nixon was really out there because of his hate lists and paranoia. He had some good policies, which makes it more of a tragedy in a way that his mental health issues helped to bring him to ruin. W Bush was just beyond hope from the beginning. Nixon believed in diplomacy also, which was not the case in the US for the past 8 years.

To say Nixon probably had mental health issues is not to say all his policies were awful.

People can always be compared, especially when looking at national attitudes historically. Our definition of insane and crook has definitely changed.

[CreekDog]

3. Nixon was a verified bigot --plain and simple

He had issues with "the Jews" and used the term in overtly derogatory ways.

He clearly had backward (even for that time) thinking on race.

He had a flawed understanding of the law.

And he had substance abuse problems.

The guy was a train wreck from beginning to end. That the media rehabilitated him is unconscionable.

[bullwinkle428]

8. Kind of the way Fundies would do a 180° on abortion if

there was a test to show the existence of a "gay gene" present in a fetus...