AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole pulled votes from just about every faction of South Carolina’s Republican Party to give him a major boost going into a crucial set of presidential primaries this week. Dole easily won Saturday’s first in the South primary, getting 45% to Patrick Buchanan’s 29%. Steve Forbes had 13%, Lamar Alexander 10. The statewide win, coupled with Dole’s victory in each of the state’s six congressional districts, gave Dole all 37 of South Carolina’s delegates to the GOP National Convention. There was also a GOP contest Saturday in Wyoming, where Dole picked up at least five delegates at county conventions. Dole also got a landslide win in Puerto Rico’s primary yesterday, picking up another 14 delegates.

South Carolina’s primary was critical for Dole, in part because it has served as a catalyst before to other Southern states, as Dole learned so painfully in 1988. George Bush all but ended Dole’s presidential hopes that year in part because of the organizational support of Governor Carroll Campbell. Campbell, who left office in '95, and his successor, GOP Governor David Beasley, this time were on Dole's side. The help from Beasley, a darling of social conservatives, may have given Dole a special entrée into the influential Christian-right vote.

As we move into the Southern primaries tomorrow — Georgia is one of those primaries — we turn to Loretta Ross, executive director of the National Center for Human Rights Education, based in Atlanta, Georgia. We talked to her outside the Media and Democracy Congress yesterday in San Francisco and asked her just what the Center for Human Rights Education is all about.

LORETTA ROSS: Well, it’s a kitchen table operation. You know, the best feminist work is done at our kitchen tables, apparently. That really teaches grassroots activists, folks who are on the frontline in a lot of human rights struggles how to use the international treaties, the international documents and the world conferences to their best advantage. For example, environmental racism activists need to understand how what they’re fighting violates the Treaty on Genocide, and use this. And you can often use these treaties that our government has signed, and hold your local and national officials accountable to them.

AMY GOODMAN: But how binding are they?

LORETTA ROSS: You know, treaty law is the third-highest law in America. There’s first the U.S. Constitution, then there’s Supreme Court interpretation, and then there’s treaty law. Treaty law even overrides state law. So it’s the third-strongest law we have in the land.

AMY GOODMAN: For example, what is the Convention on Genocide?

LORETTA ROSS: Well, for example, it prohibits a government, through either action or inaction, doing things that contribute to the death of its citizens, particularly — and minorities are particularly protected. But it also speaks to death by neglect. And when you think of how our government has been complicit, for example, in the placement of hazardous waste near minority communities, it has actively contributed to the cancer clusters that we’re seeing, etc., etc. So, it has violated its own treaty.

AMY GOODMAN: At this Media and Democracy Congress, you’ve been putting forward this agenda of redefining the language that progressives use when fighting for a new agenda to educate people. Can you talk about that?

LORETTA ROSS: What I think is that most of the time, we’re always finding a series of injustices based on identity politics. If we’re Black, we’re finding racism. If we’re women, we’re finding gender discrimination; gay and lesbian, homophobia, etc., etc., etc. What I first — the first thing I’d like us to do is shift the paradigm. I like to describe our injustices as human rights violations. And I like the people who cause these injustices to be called human rights violators, because that’s what they are. They’re just not people with a bad attitude. They are people who, in fact, are attacking my right to common humanity. And I think all of these movements are about the right to be treated as fully human. I mean, nothing special. But I want the same level of humanity that white men are afforded in this society. And so, I think all of our movements are, in essence, a human rights movement, that I know would benefit from, first of all, self-acknowledging that human rights aspect of the movement, which would then allow us to build strong ideological solidarity, that we would be — instead of the women’s rights movement, we’d be the human rights movement for women; instead of the gay and lesbian movement, we’d be the human rights movement for gays, lesbian, transgendered, etc., etc. And so, we need that ideological solidarity.

But we also need the strategic solidarity. This divide and conquer of the right is not being benefited by the narrowness of our identity politics. We need to come together across issues, across identity, and build a real united front. And I think by identifying ourselves as wings of a global movement, because the human rights movement really is least developed in America, as part of a global movement, then we transcend a lot of issues around sovereignty in the United States and our disconnect from the people around the world and our disconnect from each other in our various social movements.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Loretta Ross, a longtime human rights activist. She formerly was with the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta, Georgia, and now is with the Center for Human Rights Education. Right now we’re in the middle of the presidential primaries, and we are moving south. Can you talk a little about how your perspective fits in with electoral politics? Is there anything that people can do? Are you training activists? For example, are you challenging candidates or the rhetoric that is coming out now?

LORETTA ROSS: Well, first, I’d like to talk about the problem, then the solution. The problem, as I see it, is that we’ve had a lot of racist candidates run from the South. And even though they haven’t won, like David Duke has not won, like Pat Buchanan probably is not going to win, the messenger is defeated, and his message lingers. And we have this problem: This meanness that we used to associate with Mississippi is now national. And so, they’re coming to the South. Particularly the more far right of the candidates, like Buchanan, are coming to the South, basically, to get the endorsement of the boys in the hoods. And, unfortunately, they don’t all wear sheets now. So, we’re dealing with a very meanness of spirit, a poverty of imagination amongst these people. And I’m from Newt’s district. And so, it’s very painful to realize that if the left or the anti-Republican forces had been better organized, 2,000 votes could have kept Newt out of office. And he’s up for reelection soon, and yet I don’t see a national mobilization around supporting us local activists who would love to not send him back to Washington, you know? And so, that’s the problem, as I see it.

Now, on the solution end, I do believe that we need to establish a set of human rights values around defining housing as a human right, a job as a human right, healtcare as a human right, fixing the economy as a human right, that we need to hold all presidential candidates accountable to. We’re no longer going to let you just get away and talk about the disposability of our lives and seek to be president, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, or a third party. And so, I’m actually doing a lot of training of people who really focus on electoral politics, like with the League of Women Voters, so that when they do these candidate debates, they can ask them some questions that are human rights in nature.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you do? What do you tell them? And who are they?

LORETTA ROSS: Well, first of all, I talk about the indivisibility of human rights. When we think of human rights in America, we have this very prejudiced picture of act of torture of a political prisoner somewhere overseas. We don’t see the everyday wrongs as human rights wrongs. And the Universal Declaration, which is kind of technical and I’m not going to get into, but it defines for us cultural human rights, which this whole Media and Democracy Congress has been about, the right of people to know, the right of people to have their culture respected, the right of our public — the obligation of our public institutions to be about, you know, peace, justice, pursuit of happiness, life, liberty and all of those things, but it also defines very specifically economic human rights.

If we had a culture that understood economic human rights, we would look at the genocidal nature of the debate on welfare reform, that it is actually illegal for our country to even talk about not feeding or providing healthcare services to portions of its population just because they’re on welfare or just because they’re immigrants. And so, we are violating human rights standards that have been established for 50 years. And I think most of us who are participating as violators don’t even know that there’s a standard we’re violating. And so, I would like to educate people on what that standard is. Now, if we choose to be a violator, that’s one thing, but to violate by ignorance because of the lack of human rights education in this country, I think, is shameful, and it’s something that can be corrected.

AMY GOODMAN: You were a longtime researcher into the right wing in this country, and you were an anti — and you were a pro-choice activist, etc. You are a pro-choice activist. What can you tell us about the South and what is happening in the South today in terms of right-wing politics?

LORETTA ROSS: Well, what happened is something actually we predicted several years ago. In the late '80s and the early ’90s, there was this real proliferation of far-right candidates into the political system, mostly extremely locally. And while most of them did not win, except for Kirk Fordice as governor of Mississippi, what we found was that they introduced into the electoral process a real set of hardcore far-right people that have lingered, and then they moved into the Republican Party, joining forces in many ways with the Christian Coalition. And that's what’s producing that hard nut within the Republican Party right now. And a lot of that energy, the synergy, is coming out of the South. Right now the Christian Coalition and other far-right forces control most of the Republican Party apparati in the South, and they’re having their impact on national politics. They’re determining our debates on race. They’re determining our debates on crime, on the economy, etc. And I think that’s really a shame, because I’m not so sure that the values of a South that’s still trying to fight the Civil War should be national values. I mean, we’re still in trying to get the Confederate flag out of the South as our basic symbol.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, Patrick Buchanan was standing in front of a Confederate flag a lot as he campaigns through the South.

LORETTA ROSS: And that’s as unmistakable a message as when Reagan announced his reelection in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where those three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964.

AMY GOODMAN: What does the Confederate flag mean to you?

LORETTA ROSS: It means that, first of all, we have states that are still not in respect of the authority that the federal government has over basic issues around feeding poor people. I mean, the reason that the federal government, for example, directly administers the food stamp programs is because states like Mississippi refuse to accept the program so that poor people could be fed. That’s the reason it’s not a state-run program to this day. The reason the federal government has to intervene on civil rights legislation is because of the inability and the refusal of states to deal with racial justice issues at the state level, to conduct competent investigation into hate crimes, into murders, into just discrimination. I have one case that I’m dealing with where school children, starting in the second grade, Black African American male school children, are being given Ritalin, without the permission of their parents, because they’re being diagnosed — because they speak out in class, they’re being diagnosed as psychologically unteachable. And so, we need federal intervention in those types of injustices. So the Confederate flag, to me, represents the resistance to the imposition of federal human rights standards.

And they’re still fighting the Civil War, and they won’t give it up. I had a debate with someone on the Confederate flag the other day, and he said, “Well, you know, Georgia was forced to stay in the Union.” I’m like, “A hundred and some-odd years later, you’re still pissed because you’re part of the United States? I mean, what do you do with this? Do you fight the Civil War all over again?” I mean, but this is the deep-seated anger. So, when they talk about their anti-government feelings, they’re not talking about the fact that they don’t like government handouts. Newt’s district was built with government handouts. I mean, it’s gotten more contracts from the federal government to build Marietta, which — you know, Martin Marietta. I mean, let’s be clear, there’s a relationship here. What they don’t like is federal intervention on economic and social issues that create a level playing field between white men and everybody else. That’s specifically the portion of the government that they dislike. And I’m not confused by the rhetoric, because there’s no way you can sit up there and be in line for huge defense contracts, which are one form of federal handout, and then at the same time oppose free breakfast programs for poor children.

AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, any final words you’d like to say about Georgia itself, your home state, any specific naming of names, any referenda?

LORETTA ROSS: Well, as I said, we have a flood of far-right candidates into our political system. We have a woman named Nancy Schaefer, another one of those big hair women that you kind of see, you know, looks like Tammy Baker a little, who ran for mayor unsuccessfully last year, but she has become a strong political force, blocking every progressive legislation, I mean, from passing a bill to protect battered women — she opposes that — a bill to make hate crimes illegal or to enhance the penalties around hate crimes — she opposes that. Needless to say, anything around gay and lesbian rights, she opposes. She wants to deconstruct our public school system, which is already in very poor shape and is under court-ordered desegregation policies. Now what she wants to revert us back to, to why the court intervened. So, she’s there. Bob Barr, who ran — who is in Congress, and he’s not as well known, but he is probably one of the more scarier people. He’s kind of like the Ollie North of Georgia politics.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s in Congress today?

LORETTA ROSS: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Cynthia McKinney’s district is challenged.

LORETTA ROSS: I was going to say, Cynthia’s district is under challenge, because we had the court-ordered reapportionment, because the way the white men, of course, were historically drawing the lines was to close out any concentration of Black voting strength that could make a difference. And so we went through a 30-year process to redraw our lines just to have the Supreme Court call our snake-like districts, to use Sandra Day O’Connor’s words, a form of apartheid. I’m serious. She said this. And what is really apartheid is the closure of Blacks out of participating in the democratic process to elect the representatives that they want representing them.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’ve been listening to Loretta Ross, executive director of the National Center for Human Rights Education, based in Atlanta, Georgia, where one of a number of primaries is going to take place tomorrow.

Democracy Now! is produced by Julie Drizin, with assistance from Pat Greenfield, and engineered by Kenneth Mason. You can reach us by email at democracy@pacifica.org. That’s democracy@pacifica.org. For a copy of today’s program, you can call the Pacifica Archives at 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. I’m Amy Goodman. Join me tomorrow for coverage of Junior Tuesday primaries on Democracy Now!, Pacifica’s daily grassroots election show.