Thursday, November 22, 2007

Sympathy for the devil

In deference to the troll who said he was creeped out by my occasional usage of monstrous images, I offer this clean, sanitized version of devilish doings. After all, isn't that what a certain swatch of the Right is doing, metaphorically, of course?

Today's sympathizers are Kate McMillan and Canadian Sentinel. Fining a self-described "full-time Nazi" for advocating the death of homosexuals has aroused their ire. And check out the comments at Kate's for more of the same.

Funny--no mention in either place of Beaumont's neo-Nazi sympathies and activities. But there are no scales and fangs on my smiley-face either.

H/t Canadian Cynic and Chet Scoville.

UPDATE: (November 23) Thanks to Doug Newton, who posted the link to the HRC judgment in the comments. Everyone should read this for themselves. The complaint listed thirty hate messages. Quotes from Leviticus occur in exactly one of them. Yet the whole issue is being framed by the usual suspects as a bare-faced attack on religion by the HRC. To call this disingenuous would be an understatement.

One also needs to look at the context (a neo-Nazi website) in which the Leviticus quotations were published. To argue that calling for the murder of homosexuals is protected speech because the means of doing so consists of quotations from the Bible, provides a fresh new instance of the devil citing Scripture for his purpose.

For example, uttering threats is a criminal act. Should I be able to claim protected speech if I email
an opponent, "We will burn your house around you with fire!" and then tell the police that I'm merely quoting Judges 12:1? Or if I exhort an angry crowd gathered outside a certain prominent conservative commentator's house: "Suffer not a witch to live" [Exodus 22:18]? Nope, wouldn't hold water. And you know what? The usual suspects wouldn't exactly be going to bat for me in the blogosphere, either.

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