To the editor:
Wow, late June was not good for the Tea Partying, New American Right.
First, the Supreme Court struck down three of the four major provisions of Arizona's onerous immigration law.
And the provision they allowed to stand all but guarantees the law will be challenged yet again, because that provision all but guarantees Arizona law enforcement will be engaging in some form of racial or ethnic profiling in its pursuit of people who are suspected of being in the country illegally.
I don't think smokin' Joe Arpaio, the Tea Party sheriff of Maricopa County, and his deputies are going to be asking for confirmation of one's immigration status from people who look like John and Cindy McCain. But they will, and already have, demanded that information from people like my friends Mike and Esther, who are native born Arizonans of Mexican descent in a routine traffic stop.
Ironically, Mike is a retired U.S. Customs officer whose specialty was training dogs to sniff out drugs and explosives.
Last winter in Costa Rica, Mike, who now works part time in Afghanistan for a private firm that trains dogs for those purposes in order to help keep US troops safer, shared his anger and outrage with me over the way he and Esther were treated in a routine traffic stop by a young Anglo officer who was not even an Arizona native.
Then, of course, there is the Supreme Court ruling that upheld President Obama's health care reform law — even the individual mandate that Republicans had long advocated, until President Obama incorporated into his legislation and it suddenly became socialistic and unconstitutional.
Liberals, independents, and moderates who are troubled by the extremism that has emerged within the GOP in recent years should be both heartened and motivated.
And they should all be reminding others of a like mindset how important it is to not let the extremists who now dominate the once great party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, and Margaret Chase Smith prevail come November.
MICHAEL COOK
Gloucester
