Another turnip item… erm, another item turns up on CNN online tonight, involving an alleged “hate crime” - a gay basher who may try to use as a defense that he himself might be gay. Or straight. Or bisexual… who knows, this poor dumb kid just might be anywhere on the Kinsey map.
Story here. (again, I’m feeling lazy tonight, so I’ll bid you to read the story for the details).
No doubt, this wants to be the successor to the insanity plea, although according to the article, the NY State prosecution seems to be looking at the hate crime definition to exclude the perpetrator’s (potential) membership in a protected class or group of people (pretty much anyone who is not a straight white Christian male)… but simply that the targeted person was a member of a protected class.
The way I see it in the Bible, Jesus tells us that if we look at our neighbor and call him “Raca” (Aramaic: “Worthless, good-for-nothing fool!”) it is the same as murder. Pretty high standard, and it shows us Jesus’s regard for murderous and hateful thinking. Moreover, in the book of James, chapter 3, Jesus warns us about the dangers of letting our tongues go unchecked. Often words rashly spoken flame quickly into anger, and anger equally unyoked leads to actions rasher still.
From a Christian standpoint, I think that setting up special classes of people who are “protected” from critical speech or actions against them is both foolish and unnecessary. Any crime against their person, or slanderous words reflect a certain level of hate for the person (regardless of their political identity).
It is a hallmark of Democrat politics that demands that everyone be shoe-horned into specific pigeonholes of gender, race, sexual preference, and nationality, and age, whereby everyone is somehow a victim, and we ultimately spend more time checking our identity politics card every time someone looks at us funny.
Why not rather follow Jesus’s Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and then silently shred and burn these “race cards” and other identity politics cards that have managed to fetter us down into a worried, politically correct frame of mind.
Isn’t it better to be Biblically correct after everything is said and done?
I don’t know, Seek. Everything I’ve written on the blogs, especially at Goomba’s and DC’s, will be read back to me in the Hereafter.
Comment by Rhod — 18 October 2007 @ 12:50 am
Good to see you, Rhod! I don’t get around to updating this thing with anywhere near the frequency that DC or Nicky Goomba did theirs, so my apologies for the belated greeting.
Concerning them two, I’ve found a lot of good reading between those two sites to keep me going in the mornings. Hopefully DC gets back in the saddle in the near future, was always enjoyable reading his posts.
Comment by seekeronos — 31 October 2007 @ 12:38 pm