With all the news stories about birthers, town hall teabaggers, and willfully ignorant lunatics whipped into a frothy rage against affordable healthcare, you might be tempted to think that a sizable portion of the country has suddenly gone batshit bonkers.  As it turns out, there’s nothing “sudden” about it.  Staunch conservatives have a long and colorful history of being adamantly opposed to every social advancement you care to name.

Before the “black helicopters” of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a “civil rights movement” had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would “enslave” whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn’t lack for subversives — anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and ’50s.

Conservatives opposing positive change despite all reason is nothing new. They’re just a bit more organized an publicized these days.  Luckily, if history is any indicator, they are always eventually dragged kicking and screaming into a better, fairer and more humane future.  (via Digg)