Dream delayed as we play with race and gender cards

If you dropped into our society today from an alien world, you might assume Martin Luther King Jr. is famous for inventing the mattress. Why else would we honor him with a day of taking 60 percent off already rock-bottom bedding prices?

Nearly 40 years after King's assassination, we still struggle with issues of race, civil rights and prejudices of all kinds.

"Playing the race card" and "playing the gender card" (and blasting those accused of doing so) are part of political gamesman/womanship.

We ask if society is ready to elect a black man or a woman? Or a Mormon? Or an Italian-American? Or a clueless white guy? (Oh, wait, we already did that.)

These issues -- while distracting from important national concerns such as war, the recession and whether a shortstop took steroids -- are complicated and convoluted.

Consider the relatively simple case of the King holiday: Legislation proclaiming Martin Luther King Jr. Day was introduced in Congress just four days after the great civil rights leader was assassinated in 1968. But politicians delayed it for years.

Unwilling to wait, Illinois in 1973 became the first state to adopt a Martin Luther King Day. A decade later, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill making King Day an official national holiday starting in 1986.

Arizona rescinded the holiday the following year, and the protest that followed cost Phoenix the 1991 Super Bowl. States squabbled and played name games, and it wasn't until 2000 that Utah became the last state to recognize the King holiday by name. Virginia gave King his own day, instead of making him share it with Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. And South Carolina agreed to make King Day a paid holiday for state employees, just like Confederate Memorial Day.

Recent comments about King fanned a flash fire of racial politics between the camps of Obama and Clinton, who had just come off a week where her teary eyes had fanned a similar gender debate. Meanwhile, a female golf announcer got suspended for her poor choice of words while joking about the dominance of Tiger Woods, even though Woods said it was a non-issue.

In these debates about blacks and women, who better to add perspective than a white male?

While I've been touting Obama as presidential timber since a column on March 2, 2004, and think his election would send a message to the world, I believe women in this nation also have gotten the short end of the stick.

The 15th Amendment gave black men the vote in 1870. American women didn't win that right until the 19th Amendment was ratified a half-century later.

John M. Langston, whose mother was a slave, became the first black person admitted to the bar in 1854. He was elected clerk of a rural Ohio township in 1855.

No woman was allowed to practice law until 1869, when Iowa let Arabelle Mansfield argue cases. It wasn't until 1887 that Susanna Salter became a Kansas mayor and the first woman elected to office.

The House welcomed its first black congressman, Joseph Rainey, in 1870. It didn't swear in a woman until 1917, when Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first female member of Congress.

Hiram Revels, a mixed-race man, is considered the first black to serve in the U.S. Senate, when Mississippi voters sent him there in 1870. Sixty-two years later, Hattie Caraway of Arizona became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

Susan B. Anthony and Sakajawea, unlike any black man, did get their faces on money, but only on unpopular coins.

Thurgood Marshall became our first black Supreme Court justice in 1967. We had to wait until 1981 before Sandra Day O'Connor got a seat.

This presidential election could give us another first to add to those lists.

Until we answer all those questions of "Could a (blank) win?" those old issues of race and gender will continue to be hot topics for voters. Only when we can move past all of that, will we be left with King's command that we judge people solely by the "content of their character."