Politics: GOP is mostly white

Two pieces of misinformation in your June 18 letters need to be corrected. Richard Albrecht says Bill Frist voted for cloture to stop the filibuster against Bill Clinton’s appointment of Richard Paez to a federal judgeship. In fact, Frist voted against cloture, to permit the filibuster. For Frist now to accuse Democrats of abusing Senate rules when they filibuster Bush’s judicial nominees is at best hypocritical.

Jeff Adams defames Howard Dean and many of us when he says “Mr. Dean and the Democrats think being a Christian is a bad thing.”

When Dean observed that the Republican Party was made up mostly of white Christians, he was not “deriding” Christians, but rather pointing out that there’s not much diversity in that party.

Asked about this on “Meet the Press,” Dean said, “I’m a committed Christian . . . since when do Christians get tagged liberal or conservative? You either believe in the teachings of Jesus or don’t. I do.”

I saw some numbers that Jeff Adams can check and correct me if they are inaccurate: 99 percent of Republicans in the state legislatures of all 50 states and in Congress are white. Only 44 out of 3,643 Republicans in state legislatures are minorities (that’s 1.2 percent). Even in legislatures of states with large minority populations, almost all of the Republicans are white Christians. Texas, for example, has a minority population of 47 percent. There are 106 Republicans in the Texas legislature, and not one of them is African-American or Hispanic. In Washington, D.C., Republicans hold 274 of the 535 House and Senate seats. Only five of these 274 Republicans are minorities.

Anne Adams

Oak Harbor

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