A member of the Nebraska State Board of Education came under fire late last week when it emerged he operated a right-leaning blog that was a steaming pile of hate and bigotry. Despite demands from across the spectrum for his resignation, he refuses to step down.
Pat McPherson was recently elected to a four-year term as the representative of District 8, which includes the Omaha area. Although the board is technically nonpartisan, McPherson is known to be a Republican; he is the former chairman of the Douglas County GOP and was one of three school board candidates explicitly endorsed by the state Republican Party in the 2014 election. Last week, the Omaha World-Herald discovered a number of disturbing posts in “Objective Conservative,” a blog he has run since at least 2007 (per the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine). No fewer than five posts dating back to 2011 call President Obama a “half-breed.” Read samples of them here. People for the American Way has discovered a number of other disturbing posts, which among other things share birther jokes and liken gay marriage to bestiality.
Those posts were scrubbed late last Monday, along with all other content on the blog. All that’s left is a statement from Peterson disavowing the “racist tones evident” in the last of the posts, entitled “No Free Lunch.” That post was written after Obama announced a proposal to give a free community college education to all deserving Americans. The others calling Obama a half-breed were written in response to Obama’s immigration policy, the ugly “rodeo clown” stunt in Missouri, calls to change the name of Washington’s NFL team, and in response to Ted Nugent calling Obama a “subhuman mongrel.” Three of them were signed “Objective Conservative,” and made heavy use of the pronoun “we”–as if they were the opinion of the blog itself.
To put it mildly, McPherson’s response would insult the intelligence of any fair-minded American, regardless of political shade.? He denies writing those posts, instead fobbing them off on one of six or seven people who have the password to his blog. However, he refuses to identify the culprit, saying that he or she was “a private person.” He hasn’t said anything about who wrote the other offensive posts found by other outlets. He did, however, promise to shut down the blog.
That wasn’t good enough for newly sworn-in governor Pete Ricketts. Less than 24 hours after saying that Obama was “deserving of the same civility and respect we give one another,” Ricketts demanded that McPherson resign, saying his continued presence on the board would be a distraction. His call has been echoed by the state Democratic Party, the editorial board of the Lincoln Journal Star, the Omaha and Lincoln chapters of the NAACP,? the Nebraska State Education Association, and others. Additionally, no fewer than four of the board’s other seven members have said it would be very difficult to accomplish anything with McPherson among them.
However, McPherson isn’t backing down one inch. He claims he isn’t willing to resign because–wait for it–it would be “a tacit admission” that he’s a racist when he really isn’t one. He also said that he hasn’t breached any laws or constitutional provisions, and denounces the entire effort to push him out as a partisan hatchet job–even though the state’s Republican governor has joined the chorus calling for him to go. Ricketts repeated his call for McPherson to step down on Friday, and several members of the state’s unicameral state legislature are considering whether to censure him. One of them, senator Burke Harr (all state legislators in Nebraska are called senators), put it bluntly–if McPherson doesn’t own up to who made those posts, he should step down. “Part of taking responsibility is taking the blame,” he said.
Pharr couldn’t have put it any better. To put it mildly, McPherson is being irresponsible in the extreme by using the law and the state constitution to hide the fact that–at the very least–he was disengaged in a way that no reputable blogger or blog owner can be. If possible, his refusal to admit who wrote these posts is at least as bad as the posts themselves. From where I’m sitting, his only remorse is that he got called out for failing to exercise the most basic oversight over the content in his blog. If he were in private business and were to peddle this excuse, the velocity with which he’d have been fired would have created enough of a breeze that I’d have felt it here in Charlotte. McPherson needs to go, and he needs to go yesterday.
There was a Facebook page calling for McPherson’s ouster, but apparently it’s been deleted. I took it upon myself to draft a petition calling for McPherson to go. Sign here.
