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A conservative activist says the appointment of the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network to head the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Safe Schools is the equivalent of putting O.J. Simpson in charge of women’s safety.
This is how a piece at the American Family Association‘s OneNewsNow is began by author Jim Brown. The piece is entitled GLSEN founder overseeing safety of nation’s schools?
In the OneNewsNow piece, Mission America‘s founder Linda Harvey laments the hire of former GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings as the Department of Education Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools‘ deputy secretary — she unfavorably compares his hiring to an African American’s alleged killing of a white woman.
Do I really need to draw the parallel between Dr. George Tiller being killed after anti-abortion activists repeatedly referring to him as a “child murderer” (and “Tiller The Baby Killer”) and his death to Linda Harvey’s using a racially charged murder case to make a point about the Kevin Jennings’ hiring at the department of Education?
Linda Harvey’s speech seems to be hate speech to me, but it’s protected free speech — and it definitely should remain federally protected free speech. Yet, if Linda Harvey is attempting to use hyperbole to make her points, then her use of the form seems a bit too over the top in application. In other words, that she can freely state her ideas, but it doesn’t mean that those of us who object to her particular language can’t freely condemn her speech, as well as freely condemn her penchant to make statements that seem to folk like me to encourage violence.
But, what a surprise — Mission America and Linda Harvey are against anti-bullying and hate crime legislation because Harvey considers it “thought crime” legislation:
Attempts at “speech codes” by universities are a related idea, but have produced a mountain of litigation, mostly over slurs or insults. These laws have been struck down as unconstitutional by courts throughout the country. Hate crimes laws and in schools, “anti-harassment” and anti-bullying policies based on sexual orientation, are just a back-door attempt to get the same goal accomplished: to use the force of law to elevate certain groups and individuals over others, to squash ideas and debate some find “offensive,” and to thereby legitimize questionable social behavior.
I don’t want to squash Harvey’s speech or idea’s, but expose her ideas — especially this recent one regarding the hire of Kevin Jennings at the Department of Education — to the light of day. It seems poignant on the day after Dr. George Tillman’s murder to point out the imagery of Lind Harvey’s comments; I believe comments like Linda Harvey’s equating a government hire to a murder tell us where a good number of conservative “Christians” are coming from.
And, that place that these comments are coming from isn’t a place of love, but instead it’s pretty obvious these are coming from a place of hate.
There is terrorism in our midst. Even as we battle it in faraway lands, let’s conduct counter-terrorism operations here on American soil as well. At stake is the integrity of nothing less than the human race itself.
And to me, it reads like she’s using her free speech to advocate for anti-gay and anti-transgender violence.
But that said, perhaps I’m a little bit sensitive to hate speech after hearing the speech I heard at the Angie Zapata trial; I know hate speech sometimes gets paired with hate violence.
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That whole “hate crime = thought crime” meme bugs meWe have a lot of laws where motive has been a deciding factor. Consider, if you will, the different categories of unlawfully taking a human life. The law makes a distinction between murder (killing someone “with intent” or premeditation), voluntary manslaughter (a person had intent to kill someone, but there were mitigating factors such as circumstances or state of mind) and involuntary manslaughter (no intent, but there is still legal culpability.) Most jurisdictions make further distinctions with manslaughter, such as “mentally unfit,” “criminal disregard for human life” and whether the killing took place during the commission of another crime such as armed robbery or rape.
According to people pushing this meme, a battered wife who grabs a kitchen knife and stabs her husband to death while he is viciously beating her is just as guilty as a woman who carefully planned and carried out the murder of her husband so as to avoid a nasty divorce that would have left her with only the Malibu beach-front condo and a measly $25,000 a month in alimony.
The mind boggles at the short-sighted stupidity of some people.
So we respond with a more accurate meme –“Hate crime = terrorism”. I certainly don’t support most of the Bush/Obama responses to “terrorism” (i.e. trashing everyone’s rights “just to be safe”), but it is important to recognize that what makes hate crimes different is that they’re acts aimed at terrorizing a whole community in addition to victimizing their immediate target.
I’m fine with thatIt’s not just a scare tactic, it’s a fact. Hate crimes are acts of terrorism at their core.
Harvey is irrelevantHarvey’s credibility is comparable to Janet Porter’s.
OneNewsNow is getting wing-nuttier by the day. I suspect that TownHall.com cleansed itself of some of their crazier “columnists” who went on to write for WND and ONN. Barber, for example, seems to have worn out his TownHall welcome.
It’s no wonder that The Little Peter embraces both Harvey and Barber. Together, the three have the intellectual energy of a Rottweiler. In fact, the average Rotty (I am in the process of getting one) is probably brighter.
I’ve described it thus myselfThat does not change the short-sighted stupidity of the people making the “thought crime” “argument.” If they spent just ten seconds thinking about the matter, they would see that there are many legal situations where motive and intent are vitally important when it comes to assessing guilt and a fair punishment. The problem is, they are too stupid, too lazy or too ignorant to manage those ten seconds.
Here’s an analogyPutting Linda Harvey as head of the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Safe Schools would be like putting Stephen King’s Carrie in charge of the Prom. Talk about bullies……..
speechsomehow free protected speech is kind of irrelevant.
I don’t think we’d have much lucktargeting the people making the “thought crime” argument — at least not yet. (Hell, they can’t even see the ridiculousness of demanding a state-backed prohibition on public disagreement with reactionary theocrats — it’s “Christian-bashing”, after all — but they accuse us of pushing “thought crimes”?) Still, I think we might have more luck pushing our more accurate meme with the people who are targets of the “thought-crime” bullshit. That meme is engineered to appeal to people’s civil-libertarian sensibilities; it’s aimed at people who might tend to be our allies in our opposition to the sort of theocratic terrorism which is often given a pass by police.