One of the more memorable lines in Tennessee Williams’ play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” is “Big Daddy’s” reference to the “strong odor of mendacity” he detects in his house, when people don’t say what they really think.

I had the same feeling as I watched and read about conservative Republicans piously praising the late Rosa Parks.

The reality is that conservatives, then and now, stand in opposition to Mrs. Parks’ commitment to social and economic justice. Her defiance of the racist culture of the Deep South in 1955 earned her nothing but scorn from conservatives of both parties. Even a decade later, conservatives like Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater and George H.W. Bush opposed the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.

Now the heirs of Reagan, Goldwater and Bush, after going through the motions of mourning Mrs. Parks, can go back to doing what they do best: awarding tax breaks to the rich while assaulting Medicare and Medicaid, raising interest rates on student loans, attacking the environment, and in general weakening the laws created in the wake of the revolution Rosa Parks helped start.

But the “strong odor of mendacity” will not go away.

Lynn H. Parsons

Castine