September 1995: Washington Times Columnist Fired for Asserting White Dominance, Saying Bible Supports Slavery

Sam Francis. [Source: American Renaissance]Sam Francis, a senior columnist and writer for the conservative Washington Times, is fired after suggesting that white Americans must reassert what he believes is their innate dominance over other races. At the 1995 American Renaissance conference, hosted by the white supremacist organization of the same name, Francis tells his audience: “[Whites] must reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.” [Nation, 6/10/1996; Washington Times, 2/17/2005; National Council of La Raza, 2010 ] Francis’s last column for the Times also contributed to his dismissal. On July 27, 1995, he wrote, in part: “If the sin is hatred or exploitation, they [Southern Baptists repenting their support of slavery in the mid-1800s] may be on solid grounds, but neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin. Indeed, there are at least five clear passages in the letters of Paul that explicitly enjoin ‘servants’ to obey their masters, and the Greek words for ‘servants’ in the original text are identical to those for ‘slaves.’ Neither Jesus nor the apostles nor the early church condemned slavery, despite countless opportunities to do so, and there is no indication that slavery is contrary to Christian ethics or that any serious theologian before modern times ever thought it was. Not until the Enlightenment of the 18th century did a bastardized version of Christian ethics condemn slavery. Today we know that version under the label of ‘liberalism,’ or its more extreme cousin, communism.… What has happened in the centuries since the Enlightenment is the permeation of the pseudo-Christian poison of equality into the tissues of the West, to the point that the mainstream churches now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins like pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee pool. The Southern Baptists, because they were fortunate enough to flourish in a region where the false sun of the Enlightenment never shone, succeeded in escaping this grim fate, at least until last week.” [Media Matters, 12/13/2004]