Last week on July 12, Phoenix hosted the Major League Baseball All Star Game, and despite calls from liberal activists and media activists to boycott Arizona, the event came off as a great success for the city and the state.
As many of you know, Arizona’s state legislature passed Senate Bill 1070, which was signed into law by the courageous Governor Jan Brewer. The legislation enables law enforcement officials to check on the immigration status of anyone they stop on suspicion of violating another law. When the bill was signed, the national media did a terrific job of distorting the law to the extent that many people who were ignorant about the law actually believed that police were just randomly stopping anyone they suspected of solely being here illegally. It didn’t matter to the activists and the liberal advocates in the media that the law specifically prohibited law enforcement officials from solely stopping anyone just to check immigration status.
Nevertheless, a campaign developed to get Major League Baseball to move the All Star Game from Phoenix as a form of protest to the anti-immigrant legislation, which was not really anti-immigrant. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig refused to buckle to the pressure, and so activists and advocates used their misinformation campaign to call for a boycott of Arizona during the All Star festivities.
Fortunately for the State of Arizona, truth won out, and the boycotts failed. All the events of the All Star week were packed, and the game, itself, was a complete sellout. Early indications are that the event was an economic boom for both Phoenix and the state.
Of course, there were a few demonstration by activists trying to get people to avoid the events. However, in most cases these activists were actually outnumbered by pro-Arizona demonstrators.
There were also a few added bonuses for Phoenix and Arizona during this period. A liberal columnist from the Washington Post Writers Group, Esther Cepeda, came to Arizona and wrote a glowing piece about her recent 10-day visit to the state. She began her article by admitting that she came looking for the intolerance that activists had reported existed in Arizona. What she found was quite different. Cepeda wrote, “Unless I inadvertently lucked into some Utopian Twilight Zone, everywhere I went – fast food joints, town squares, water parks – Hispanics and Whites seemed to work and play together peacefully.” She also noted in her story that “Arizona is full of lots of really, nice regular people.”
Finally, Forbes Magazine recently declared Phoenix one of the top ten cities best positioned to proper in the coming decade. The magazine indicated that although Phoenix has not done well in the recession, it still has more jobs now than in 2000. Forbes also stated that “demographics remain surprisingly robust.”
There you have it. Despite the efforts of major media and liberal activists to paint Arizona as a racist, bigoted and intolerant state, Arizona has seemingly won the debate in the minds of regular Americans who have embraced the truth and ignored the lies and distortions. It is heartening to know that sometimes the truth really does win out.
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