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bigotry

No-fault-murder laws like Florida’s
almost exclusively a red state thing

Mar 21st, 2012
by S.W. Anderson.
17 comments

Trayvon Martin

Trayvon Martin, who was 17 at the time he was killed last month.

We learned today that 21 states have so-called stand-your-ground laws like the Florida one that sent on his merry way the killer of an unarmed 17-year-old black youth — no muss, no fuss, no bother and still armed with his gun.

All self-appointed neighborhood watch vigilante George Zimmerman had to do to get away with murder was say he felt threatened, and the oh-so-accommodating cops of Sanford, Fla., were satisfied that Trayvon Martin, armed as he was with Skittles from a nearby 7-11, was the guilty party.

Being dead on the ground, young Martin couldn’t even make it his word against Zimmerman’s. How very neat and tidy.

In the aftermath, Martin’s body was checked for drugs and alcohol. Zimmerman underwent no such tests.

Here, from the USA Today story, is the attitude of a Florida legislator who sponsored the 2005 stand-your-ground law that was heartily endorsed and signed by then-Gov. Jeb Bush.

“Every time you have an adverse incident, immediately the anti-gun faction will say this law is the problem,” (Rep. Dennis) Baxley said, adding that violent crime in Florida has dropped since its implementation. “As public policy, it is fulfilling its purpose and working well. The perpetrators know everyone has the right to defend themselves. … I think that has been a strong deterrent.”

Critics of the law cite a dramatic increase in the number of “justifiable homicides” in Florida, rising from 43 in 2005 to 105 in 2009, the last year for which complete statistics are available.

What Baxley and others who back his license-to-kill law should have to reckon with is that not all gun-toting citizens are pure of heart and law-abiding.

“You want to know how you can kill somebody legally in Florida?” says Arthur Hayhoe, executive director of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “Make sure you have no witnesses, hunt the person down and then say you feared for your life.”

Hayhoe says he has about a dozen cases on his desk now similar to Trayvon’s case. He says in those cases, gunmen say they were defending themselves and have not been charged, leaving grieving relatives to wonder why the shooters have not been charged.

Exactly.

As federal authorities undertake the investigation Sanford’s no-account police should’ve begun weeks ago when they were called to the scene, Sanford’s City Council has given the town’s police chief a vote of no confidence. On MSNBC’s The Last Word tonight, Sanford’s city manager said he’s weighing dismissal of the chief.

Better late than never.

The 21 states with stand-your-ground laws are: Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, W. Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and Alaska.

Pardon our partisanship, but we can’t help but notice the striking correlation of these no-fault-murder states to the nation’s roster of red states.

If stand-your-ground laws can’t be overturned in the courts, an effort should be launched in Congress to enact a constitutional amendment banning them. The United States has a horrendous track record of nut cases using their easily obtained guns to deal death to innocent people, facilitated by the Second Amendment fanaticism of a militant minority. That’s bad enough, but giving the mean of spirit, the paranoid and bigoted, bullies, jealous spouses and so on, carte blanche to set someone up, kill the targeted person and then walk away, is simply intolerable.

As for Zimmerman, who was heard on the 9-11 call recording the day he killed his prey, saying, “F—–g c–ns,” we’re curious.

We wonder if it has occurred to Zimmerman that if those black people he has such a problem with were as criminally inclined as he thinks they are, he would surely be as stone-cold dead by now as the unarmed teenage boy he murdered.

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A great nation is a terrible thing to waste

Sep 5th, 2011
by S.W. Anderson.
14 comments

inverted flagProfound changes in the U.S. economy that began during the 1970′s should’ve triggered public-policy responses to mitigate their bad side effects, keeping the middle class strong and growing in part by increasing public-sector investment, maintaining the country’s manufacturing base and backstopping organized labor.

Instead, public policy accelerated, intensified and entrenched the bad side effects, with the predictable result that our manufacturing base is gutted, organized labor is a shadow of its former self, and our shrinking middle class is hurting in ways unknown since the Great Depression.

We can account for how the world’s largest, strongest, most dynamic economy was brought low, and how the democracy with the most productive, stable and affluent society ended up deep in debt, with high unemployment, no job security, a tattered social safety net and gridlocked government, in five words: ignorance, bigotry, ideology, inattention and selfishness.

Ignorance: Most Americans think they know more about our country — its geography, Constitution, history, government, society and economy — than they actually do. A few decades back, a reporter went out on the streets of midtown Manhattan and read the First Amendment to a random sampling of passers-by. He asked them if that should be the law in our country. A shockingly high percentage said no.

For an equally revealing exercise at home or at work, hand out sheets of paper and challenge your friends, family or co-workers to name the 50 states. Then, ask them to explain in a simple paragraph the main differences between U.S. senators and representatives. If those in your group are all or mostly college educated, see if even one can accurately define capitalism, democratic socialism, state socialism and communism. Finally, ask for a simple paragraph explaining how banks create money.

Good luck. And remember, in our system, the people decide who to trust with the levers of governmental power. The people decide who will make public policy affecting our society, and our national and economic security. Thus, it’s reasonable to expect that the less voters know, the more likely they are to let themselves be flim-flammed into electing ignorant, incompetent, dishonest, ideologically warped and/or crackpot-crazy public officials.

Bigotry: If you’ve ever used a shoehorn to ease a foot into a stiff new shoe, you can appreciate how useful people steeped in prejudice are to low-road politicians. A congressional district or state with a high percentage of racially biased people can be used to slide an unscrupulous and/or incompetent politician into a House of Representatives or Senate seat, or other high office, in much the same way. This explains the long, lucrative political careers of people like South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond and North Carolina’s Jesse Helms.

That these two examples are Southerners figures, because unfortunately, from Virginia to East Texas and including all or large parts of border states of the old Confederacy, a relatively high percentage of white residents are more or less prejudiced against people of different races and backgrounds. We want to be clear, however, that not all white Southerners are racists, and that those who are vary greatly in how far they’ll go in acting on prejudice. We also want to be clear that, unfortunately, bigots can be found in every part of the country.

Our reason for explaining the above is to make an unassailable point. That is, white Southern voters are overwhelmingly Republicans for reasons other than just a regionwide desire to shrink and weaken the federal government and limit federal taxation. Social, economic and political traditions, all of them intertwined with racial prejudice, are key factors in the relationship. Simmering resentment and elements of spite are no less so.

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Arizona’s loony legislators pass birther bill

Apr 15th, 2011
by S.W. Anderson.
8 comments

man sucking thumbArizona’s legislature has passed a bill requiring candidates for president and vice president to provide documents proving they’re native-born citizens, or else be denied a ballot line.

It’s essential that we bring back the integrity to the office,” Rep. Judy Burges, a Republican from Skull Valley, Ariz., said during a recent debate on one of the so-called birther measures.

Arizona legislators, presumably with a straight face, claim this has nothing to do with America’s first mixed-race chief executive.

Among documents deemed acceptable by Arizona’s sick-puppy solons is a circumcision certificate — a high hurdle for any future female candidate.

Gov. Jan “Let Them Pay for Their Own Transplant or Die” Brewer has five days to sign or veto the bill. It passes if she does nothing.

Should this hideous affront become law, Arizona will be the first state to impose such a requirement. Added to the state’s ridiculous “show me your papers” smack at non-Caucasian citizens, its mendacious senators, Jon Kyl and John McCain, the “show me your birth or circumcision certificate law will move Arizona deeper into laughingstock territory than even Texas and South Carolina.

It’s time for the sane, sensible Americans of Arizona and elsewhere to start handing out an annual Crackpot Country Award for this kind of exercise in legislative lunacy.

We can see the license plates now: “Come to Arizona — Crackpot Country and proud of it.”

Bigotry, idiocy stress-test our freedoms

Sep 7th, 2010
by S.W. Anderson.
8 comments

poison bottleWith anti-Muslim bigotry getting wildly out of hand across America, several mainstream religious leaders are speaking up to condemn what they deem a “frenzy” that ultimately endangers the religious freedom of all.

The clerics’ statement comes on a day when news emerged about the plans of a Gainesville, Fla., pastor – whose flock numbers 30 – to burn Korans Saturday, to mark the Sept. 11, 2001, anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took nearly 3,000 American lives.

Gen. David Petraeus, coalition forces commander in Afghanistan and Iraq, warned that such an affront will endanger the troops’ safety and set back their efforts to form strong working relationships with Muslims in countering terrorists.

Religious leaders, including Washington Roman Catholic Archbishop emeritus Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Dr. Michael Kinnamon of the National Council of Churches, released a statement saying they were “alarmed by the anti-Muslim frenzy” and “appalled by such disrespect for a sacred text.”

“To attack any religion in the United States is to do violence to the religious freedom of all Americans,” said the religious leaders, including Rabbi David Saperstein, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, and Rabbi Julie Schonfeld of the Association of Conservative Rabbis.

“The threatened burning of copies of the Holy Qu’ran this Saturday is a particularly egregious offense that demands the strongest possible condemnation by all who value civility in public life and seek to honor the sacred memory of those who lost their lives on September 11,” they said.

Pastor Terry Jones, the crackpot cleric who intends to burn Islamic holy books, was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on CNN this evening. We listened to what the man had to say. We were left wondering if he actually completed high school and what mail-order diploma mill his divinity credentials came from.

Jones is a good example of the kind of overbearing, egotistical little men who throughout history have exploited religion to gain money and power, and advance their own ambitions and too-often evil notions.

Our constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and freedom of expression come at a cost. With his idiotic Koran-burning plan, Pastor Jones reminds the decent and sensible majority of Americans how high and painful that price can be at times.

P.S.: There’s no denying that in the current atmosphere Jones’ book-burning plan is newsworthy. Even so, given the growing number of ugly incidents of acting out against Muslims, or those thought to be Muslims, and the situation of our troops in the Mideast, it’s fair to question the wisdom of publicizing Jones’ idiocy.

To be clear, we don’t question the right of news media to do this, any more than we question Jones’ right to burn Korans.

What we do question is news judgment that affords this crackpot with a tiny following the kind of coverage we might expect for some well-known cleric whose flock numbers in the hundreds or thousands.

Maybe shining the light of day on him and his ugly nonsense will send Pastor Jones where he belongs – under a rock somewhere. It’s entirely possible, however, that the publicity will be perceived in some quarters not as cleansing daylight but as the limelight. That could inspire Jones and others to try to top the Koran burning with some even more idiotic outrage.

Alas, press freedom comes at a price too.