I must defend conservative ideals in general and myself against the commentary written by Fred Slocum in the Dec. 6 opinion page, which overtly implied that racism lurks within the Republican Party and the hearts of its members. His assertions are nothing more than regurgitated inflammatory talking points crafted by the Democratic hierarchy.

Certainly there have been racists in politics, but they are dispersed in both parties throughout history and luckily becoming more and more rare.

The allegation or implication of racism should be used more responsibly and more carefully than Mr. Slocum asserted. A person who explicitly wishes to see a race of people exterminated or a race of people classified as a lower class of human being is a racist. Mr. Slocum failed to show any salient examples of this.

His arguments were nothing more than anecdotes, misrepresentations and innuendo. Regarding Sen. Barry Goldwater and his record: It’s true that he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The old, worn out liberal charge of discrimination is simply misstating the facts. Goldwater was a member of the Arizona NAACP and facilitated the desegregation of the Arizona National Guard. He was an ardent supporter of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and advocated for the constitutional amendment banning the poll tax.

His opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act was due to his libertarian views on government, not racial hatred. He believed that it wrongly extended the federal government’s commerce power to private citizens, furthering the government’s effort to “legislate morality” and restrict the rights of employers. One can agree with him or not on his libertarian views. But simply because one opposes a law due to its technical content rather than its philosophical content, that does not make that person an enemy of the original intent of the bill.

I suggest that Mr. Slocum read Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative.” His manifesto claims no divisiveness or discrimination. His inclusiveness and invitations to all people to the conservative movement regardless of their race, caste, or creed is anything but intolerant.

In defense of the GOP and Richard M. Nixon’s so-called “Southern Strategy,” I must point out that it was only an effort to rid the South of “Dixiecrat” legislators. The Democrats, even as late as 1968, held the region in a stranglehold of racial fear and explicit discrimination. Nixon’s Southern Strategy was his attempt to convince reasonable, moral people to quit voting for Democrats who did not share their values and who were still discriminating against African Americans.

Mr. Slocum also wrote about Bill Bennett. While I will never agree with his despicable comments on abortion and crime in a 2005 interview, I will not distort or take these comments out of context. The quote is “I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could abort — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in the country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to say.”

That last sentence was left out of Mr. Slocum’s article and was not presented in context. Bennett was actually responding to assertions in “Freakonomics,” a book much celebrated by liberals, written by Steven Levitt. In this book he states “legalized abortion led to the less unwantedness: unwantedness leads to high crime: Legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.”

Abortion is disproportionately practiced in black society. The parallel he implies is horrid and ugly. Steven Levitt was the toast of the liberal scene, hitting the talk show circuit where his morally corrupt conclusions were glossed over. Bill Bennett was excoriated and thrown to the wolves.

There are numerous examples of Democratic intolerance and, at times, open racism. The glaring example of this is Sen. Robert Byrd, D-WV. He was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan throughout his early life. His activities are detailed in his recently-published memoir. When he was elected to national office he ended his membership with the Klan but openly supported them afterwards through letters extending invitations to the “Grand Wizard” to re-emerge in his home state of West Virginia and to “see a rebirth…in every state of the Union.”

He later filibustered for 14 hours against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This fact is detailed in the Congressional Record. He also fought the nominations of African-Americans Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. He also infamously vowed in a letter attacking the desegregation of the Armed Forces to never fight “with a negro by my side. Rather to die a thousand times, and to see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

Sen. Byrd is highly regarded by the left and is seen as a wise elder statesman in the Senate by his Democratic colleagues.

The last and latest example of questionable tactics and rhetoric by the left came in the 2003 gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana. According to an account in the May 14, 2007 edition of National Review, Bobby Jindal, a natural born Indian-American, withstood a barrage of ethnic attacks.

The Democrats, in their propaganda, continually used Jindal’s given first name, Piyush, even though he legally changed his name to Bobby many years ago. This is reminiscent of the few people on the far right fringe who insisted on using President-Elect Barrack Obama’s middle name, Hussein, whenever referring to him. However that attack was from the fringe and not the Louisiana Democratic Party. This institution even implied that the authenticity of Gov. Jindal’s conversion to Catholicism as a teenager should be questioned. Jindal lost the race but captured the governorship in a later race.