This opinion piece was published in the Colorado University school paper this past Monday, just two days before the 66th anniversary of FDR's Executive Order mandating the internment of Japanese-Americans across the country.
Today, a man admitted to drawing a swastika on campus property at St. Cloud state in Minnesota. The man is currently in police custody. Startlingly, this isn't anywhere near the first instance of hate graffiti recently. The article from the Strib says, "In recent months, more than a dozen swastikas and other racist images have been carved or scrawled on walls, elevators and bathroom stalls on the university campus."
What could be causing such rampant public hate anti-Semitic or racist scrawlings on college campuses? There's obviously not any one reason, but it probably in part has to do with the backlash against "politically correct" language and customs. Furthermore, the recent war has become broadly about Middle-Easterners, Muslims, or Arabs, without bothering to distinguish any specific groups. Such thinking is dangerous and fosters opening the door to all kinds of hate. After all, if one kind is tolerated, where do we stop?
I cringe to think that we live in a world where people even think of drawing such things. But at least the man in St. Cloud is in custody.
Everyone has probably already heard about the ruling against the Westboro Baptist Church ordering the organization to pay $10.9 million to the relatives of a Marine killed in action. Now, I believe I may be the only atheist who views this as a bad idea. I don’t know all the exact facts on the subject, but do know that the jury said that the church “invaded the privacy of the dead man’s family and inflicted emotional distress.” Which, of course, they did. But, even so, the First Amendment still protects freedom of religion and the right to peacefully assemble. Granted, the organization's posters and slogans can be viewed as being "not peaceful"--but these are just words. Hideous words, but still, just words.
If we allow the government to curtail the rights of religious organizations, we begin walking down a dangerous path. Where do we draw the line for what religious organizations are allowed to do? Do we start writing laws making certain religious practices illegal on the grounds that they offend the majority? For some reason I can’t help but think of the poem “First they came…” by Pastor Martin Niemoller.
Is my thinking flawed? Am I not seeing the bigger picture?
“The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this. ... And I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say: “You helped this happen.”
The founder of Moral Majority, the evangelist who made hate speech profitable and established fundamentalists as a viable political force, Jerry Falwell has died at age 73.
However, under current law, the federal government is not able to help in cases where women, gay, transgender or disabled Americans are victims of bias-motivated crimes for who they are. [emphasis added] For example, in Texas, in July 2005, four men brutally assaulted a gay man. While punching and kicking him, whipping him with a vacuum chord and assaulting him with daggers, the offenders told the victim that they attacked him because he was gay. Two of the men were sentenced to six years in prison under a plea bargain that dropped the charges that could have sent them to prison for life. Under this bill, federal authorities would have had the jurisdiction to prosecute the crime or could have provided local authorities resources that might have assisted them in pursuing a longer sentence.
There's no better way to let you know about the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crime Prevention Act (H.R. 1592) than to redirect you to LCCR's quick rundown about this key legislation that is being decided *today.*
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