Reflecting on The March on Washington 50 years later, Where will those unalienable rights go when America is no longer?

August 30, 2013

As an American born two and a half years after the August, 1963 March on Washington, our parents instilled in my brother and me Dr. King’s admonition to “judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”


Today, however, Dr. King’s dream has been subverted by the very Left who hypocritical claims his legacy. The Leftist race hustlers of the 21st century look first at the color of their fellow Americans’ skin, implore us not to judge bad character while attributing the motive of hatred to anyone who disagrees with them.

“Civil rights” leaders Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson (who have made careers creating a civil rights industry based on inflaming prejudice), pundits and politicians including President Obama and AG Eric Holder, who have invoked race into several recent issues, attempt to silence as racist, dissenters from the this administration’s treacherous agenda.

Contrary to Dr. King’s dream and our constitutionally guaranteed God given right to free speech, they demagogue race to silence debate.

Supporters of national sovereignty through border control and voter identification are routinely impugned as racists. Americans who attempt to correctly identify our enemies as Islamic Extremists are labeled Islamaphobes. Police trying to reduce crime especially in minority areas through proven law enforcement techniques like stop and frisk are assailed by the ACLU. Even the great United States Military, has participated in quelling our first amendment right to free speech. Just recently a Department of Defense memo referred to the Founders of our nation as “extremists” implying they would be potential terrorists today. This is outrageous!

Less than 12 years after Dr. King’s words of national unity and only 7 years after his assassination, my 33 year old father, Frank Connor was murdered by the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN while eating lunch with clients at New York’s historic Fraunces Tavern, because of the color of his skin. Quoting the FALN’s words in their January 24, 1975 communiqué, they targeted Fraunces to kill “Reactionary Corporate Executives.”

After our father’s murder, we continued to live by Dr. King’s creed and never heard our mother or our grandma Connor utter a word of hatred against the Puerto Rican people. Even after 9/11 when our father’s god son, cousin Steve Schlag was killed, we did not raise the next generation to hate.

We were however raised to tell the truth and fight for what is right regardless of the consequences. As a proud American and a family member twice hit by terrorism, I resent the implication that We the People who believe in the wisdom of our Founders and the God given rights of man are somehow threats while those who hijacked Dr. King’s legacy seeking to destroy our society from within somehow hold the moral high ground.

We have to stand up America and hold each other and our leaders to the beliefs of Dr. King and our Founders. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights….”

Where will those unalienable rights go when America is no longer?


One Response to Reflecting on The March on Washington 50 years later, Where will those unalienable rights go when America is no longer?

  1. Omar Vera on August 30, 2013 at 6:47 pm

    Great article, Mr. Connor. Good job exposing the real agenda of the political left, which is trying to exploit the civil rights legacy of Dr. King in order to advance their own political agendas. It is undeniable that the contemporary left has hijacked and destroyed a historical movement, which unlike the cronies running the current administration, truly campaigned for equal rights and justice in American society. It is also undeniable that the left has also supported the extremist agenda of Communist totalitarian organizations like the FALN and the Weather Underground for a long time. The left in the acedemia, the MSM (mainstream media) and America’s enemies like the Castro dictatorship in Cuba and the Chavez/Maduro autocracy (named for both the late autocrat Hugo Chavez and his hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, who is even more extreme than his predecessor) in Venezuela have been either supporting or falsely depicting the FALN terrorists as “political prisoners” and “victims” of so-called American “imperialism”. As recent as this past May, there were leftist protesters demanding the release of so-called “political prisoner”, Oscar Lopez, who recently wrote a book denouncing American society for his current “condition” in prison. Around the same time as the misguided protests, the fraudulent “governor” of Puerto Rico, Alejandro Garcia Padilla (of the Popular Democratic Party, which either supports Puerto Rico’s current status as a territory, or favors an “enhanced” commonwealth option [explained later]), had a meeting with Eric Holder to discuss about the “fraudulent” results of the island’s status plebiscite held this past November, at the same time as the elections in the U.S. mainland. During the meeting with Holder, the fraudulent “governor” (I put the word governor in quotes because I do not recognize the legitimacy of the Garcia Padilla administration in PR) also expressed his support for the release of Oscar Lopez from prison by using the same false argument that he was placed there for having a “different opinion” from the rest of American society. Garcia Padilla (or AGP as he is known in Puerto Rico) has stated that the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico is a “nation-state” and that the U.S. is “another country”, which is clearly false. AGP and his Popular Democratic Party has been influenced by the far-left separatists in Puerto Rico (those same separatists who waged war against their fellow American citizens during the 20th century). That influence is notable by the fact that the PDP has called for a “constitutional convention” on the political status of Puerto Rico. They have made that call despite the fact that the island held a plebiscite this past November in which 54% of voters who participated in the plebiscite rejected the current territory status and in which a supermajority of 61% of voters who participated chose permanent union with the United States through statehood. The PDP has complained that the plebiscite was “fraudulent” and “unfair” because it did not include an “enhanced” commonwealth option that is supported by the PDP’s own leadership. The enhanced commonwealth option would permanently bound the U.S. to Puerto Rico. Under enhanced commonwealth, the U.S. government would be required to maintain American citizenship to the people of Puerto Rico, as well as provide more federal funding to the island. At the same time, under that option, Puerto Rico would decide what federal laws would apply to the island as well as enter into multinational agreements with other countries. In other words, enhanced commonwealth would make the U.S. a colony of Puerto Rico. The past four U.S. presidential administrations (including the current one) and Congress have repeatedly rejected enhanced commonwealth as an option because it is totally unconstitutional and contradicts the principles of democracy, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Contrary to the PDP’s claims, the plebiscite was correctly conducted, and a majority of islanders want PR to become a state of the union. The New Progressive Party (the party supporting statehood for the island, as well as the party representing the interests of the majority of Puerto Ricans) has rejected the call for an undemocratic “convention” and has instead pushed for a more democratic path to resolving the status issue. This past May, the Puerto Rico Status Resolution Act, was introduced to Congress, and currently enjoys the support of around 120 members of the House of Representatives. The bill would provide for a yes-or-no vote on whether Puerto Rico should be admitted as a state of the Union. If a majority of voters in PR say yes (which is very likely, considering that support for statehood has increased over the years and has increased even more since the November plebiscite), then the president and Congress would have no more than 180 days to introduce legislation to admit Puerto Rico as a state after a brief transitional period. The so-called “constitutional convention” the PDP is trying to hold is supported by separatists as well as those favoring free association (which is a status that three countries in the Pacific-Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau-have with the United States. As with any treaty, free association can be terminated by either country). Opponents of statehood want an undemocratic “constitutional convention” because they want to undermine progress, the statehood movement and the will of the majority of the people of Puerto Rico who are patriotic American citizens who want their island to become a state. Unfortunately, the PDP is also seeking to divide the conservative movement in America into opposing statehood for Puerto Rico by funding lobbyists like Charlie Black and lawmakers like Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) into repeating their propaganda against the plebiscite results, the NPP and the statehood movement. The PDP has been trying to divide and undermine the historical support between the conservative movement and the PR statehood movement (even though the statehood movement is bi-partisan, it is predominantly conservative, as the founder of the NPP, Luis Ferre, was a lifelong conservative Republican. I mentioned in my letter to you back in April that past Republican presidents like Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes have all expressed support for statehood for Puerto Rico) since 1996, when the NPP, under the leadership of then-Governor Pedro Rossello, won a landslide re-election by winning more than one million votes. The PDP realized that in order to undermine the NPP and the statehood movement’s efforts to bring equality to the American citizens of Puerto Rico, they needed to turn the conservative movement in the U.S. mainland against the statehooders. One of the PDP’s propaganda techniques was to convince Republican lawmakers in Congress and conservative media pundits that supporting statehood for Puerto Rico would only bring in more votes for the Democrats and benefit the Democratic Party as a whole (that claim is weird and ridiculous, considering the fact that the PDP has no active Republicans and its membership consists of about 95% Democrat and 5% other, while the NPP’s membership is 75% Republican, 20% Democrat and 5% other). Nevertheless, many Republican lawmakers and conservative figures bought the PDP’s propaganda and repeat it whenever there is a debate in Congress over the political status of Puerto Rico. Furthermore, the false perception that PR would only become a Democrat state only became widely accepted after 1998, when then-Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-MS) stated that a state of Puerto Rico would sent in two Democratic Senators and six Democratic Representatives to Congress, thus repeating the PDP’s lobbying propaganda against statehood. The statehood movement in Puerto Rico is the real modern day civil rights movement. Unlike the separatist movement in Puerto Rico (which believes in a Castro-style Communist totalitarian state allied with despotic regimes like the ones in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe and their allies) and the Popular Democratic Party and other supporters of the current territory status, free association or the impossible and unconstitutional “enhanced” commonwealth (which is trying to undermine the road to equality and progress in American society for the people of Puerto Rico), the statehood movement in Puerto Rico led by the New Progressive Party truly believes in the American Dream and in the legacies of the Founding Fathers and Dr. King. The statehood movement in Puerto Rico believes in the moral principles of American society, as well as American exceptionalism. Ronald Reagan, the president who created the holiday honoring Dr. King, was one of the most vocal supporters of statehood for Puerto Rico (the link to the statement is here: Today, we face many challenges ahead, but we can succeed if we work together to overcome our adversaries (by exposing their true agendas to the public), both in America and around the world.

    Omar Vera

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