Connemaras would be better off in Obama’s America

The Connemara society reminds me of the Republican party: completely blind to the fact that its future base will be a diverse population that doesn’t take kindly to discrimination.

While predominantly female, the board has a history of behaving like a group of old white men.

It’s scared of change. Scared of color. Scared of anything that doesn’t reflect its rich white image. It’s elitist, and more than a few owners have told me over the years that they were treated like second-class citizens by this exclusionary group at meetings.

Much like the Republicans, the Connemara society needs to evolve.

To quote syndicated columnist Nicholas D. Kristof following Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 presidential election: “A coalition of aging white men is a recipe for failure in a nation that increasingly looks like a rainbow.”

NBC broke down the 2012 voting “rainbow” this way the morning after the election:

“What happened last night was a demographic time bomb that had been ticking and that blew up in GOP faces. As the Obama campaign had assumed more than a year ago, the white portion of the electorate dropped to 72 percent, and the president won just 39 percent of that vote. But he carried a whopping 93 percent of black voters (representing 13 percent of the electorate), 71 percent of Latinos (representing 10 percent), and also 73 percent of Asians (3 percent). What’s more, despite all the predictions that youth turnout would be down, voters 18 to 29 made up 19 percent of last night’s voting population — up from 18 percent four years ago — and President Obama took 60 percent from that group.”

America is changing.

This is the face of the future owners of horses, if horses survive at all in a world where climate change and urban sprawl are making it impossible for them to find room.

To whom do Connemara owners intend to sell their horses when their well of white buyers runs dry?

How will they develop a plan to draw in blacks, Hispanics and Asians as Connemara members when their very bylaws are designed to exclude diversity?

The Connemara society requires that horses be the same make and model, thanks to inspection rules that went into effect in the early 2000s. The society favors white horses and even bans certain pigment patterns in horses. And yet pigment is the thing changing the most in the American landscape.

“That’s the future of America,” Kristof concludes, “and if the Republican Party remains a purist cohort built around grumpy old white men, it is committing suicide.”

“Purist” is passe in America. It’s synonymous with eugenics.

There may be pockets of bigots in this country who hate variation in color and beliefs, but they are being silenced by those who welcome diversity with open arms, including the children of bigots who are turning their backs on their parents’ unevolved thinking as they grow up with kids of every background.

Basically, Americans are fed up with snobs. Voters said, “Barack Obama may not be perfect, but at least he’s not a snob.”

Matt Taibbi of The Huffington Post summed up best what killed the Republicans across the board on Election Day: “Their whole belief system is inherently insulting to everyone outside the tent.”

How long do the movers and shakers in the Connemara society think they can run their little game of requiring everyone to breed horses that fit a certain mold and color?

How long do they think the society can survive if they continue to try to control who enters the tent?

What group of future Americans is going to want to breed horses in such a restrictive, unwelcoming environment?

At some point, it’s likely no one will want to enter the tent.

How do the Connemara society’s current values fit in a country whose president gave the following post-election remarks? “I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.”

If I were a Connemara, I’d much rather grow up in Obama’s America than the one being run by the American Connemara Pony Society.