Human rights group hears about tea party

Two dozen people showed up Friday night to hear an anti-tea party speech at Flathead Valley Community College by Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights in Seattle.

The event was sponsored by the Montana Human Rights Network as part of a statewide celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

Bill LaCroix of the Bitterroot Human Rights Alliance emceed the event. LaCroix said the Montana Human Rights Network paid $200 for security at the event because of threats received by the college Friday. Three members of the Flathead sheriff’s posse were on hand. There was a verbal spat between a tea party member and another attendee.

Burghart told the audience most people involved with the tea party movement are decent, but there are some bad apples.

“The vast majority of folks involved in the tea party movement are good-hearted concerned individuals ... but part of it is being hijacked to take us back 100 years,” Burghart said.

According to Burghart, polls show 27 percent of the American public identify with the tea party, but 40 percent sympathize with at least some of the tea party’s ideas. The six tea party affiliate groups have 3 to 4 million members, he said, and a core group of 300,000 activists.

There are 3,000 local chapters across the United States, including 27 in Montana. The local tea party group belongs to the Tea Party Patriots, the largest of the six groups.

Tea party groups focus mainly on fiscal responsibility, limited government and sound monetary policy. Some local groups also focus on “race and racial nationalism,” he said. 

The 1776 Tea Party includes former Montana resident Martin “Red” Beckman, who lost his property after a fight about taxes with the Internal Revenue Service and now lives in Washington state. Burghart called Beckman an anti-Semite.

Tea Party Nation has brought in repugnant ideas, Burghart said. These include social issues such as anti-abortion, homophobia and questions about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

“Tea parties are trying to define who is an American,” Burghart said. They have embraced anti-immigrant policies for both legals and illegals, opposed the Dream Act which would legalize some illegals who finish high school in the United States and are promoting “Islamophobia.”

Burghart cited Karen Pack as a member of the Tea Party Patriots. Pack formerly was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. On the AmericanIndependent.com website, Pack said she was 16 at the time she was a member.

“At the mature age of 16, I should have easily read through the lines and known that a ‘Christian patriot’ was a code term for the KKK,” Pack scoffed, adding that there is “no excuse for being involved with the KKK.”

Burghart was asked what he thought about MSNBC’s Chris Matthews recently calling on Obama to produce a long-form birth certificate that shows the name of the doctor who delivered him along with the name of the hospital. “It’s irrelevant,” Burghart said. “Somehow people believe an African-American can’t be president. I frankly don’t care. I don’t really like to even discuss the issue.”

Burghart said that “five of six tea party factions have ‘birthers’ on their national staffs.”

Roan Garcia-Quintana is a member of the Patriot Action Network, Burghart said. The Cuban-born South Carolina resident is on the board of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which Burghart called the “literal reincarnation of the white citizens’ councils.” Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall called that group “the uptown klan.”

“We’re at a crucial crossroads” which will determine whether “the United States becomes a multi-racial and pluralistic society,” Burghart said.