DOUGLAS OLSON — Freak show #7

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Freak show #7

By DOUGLAS OLSON

 

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Straining after a gnat

On March 30, the Washington Post ran a headline: "In Mass., A Vote to Ban Gay Marriage." Like so much else in the mass media, it was a lie; the truth is precisely the opposite. After much gnashing of teeth, the Massachusetts legislature approved a constitutional amendment that guarantees a "civil union" for same-sex couples, but does not actually call it "marriage." As the Senate majority leader put it, "We are providing every right, responsibility, and benefit for same-sex couples, with the exception of the word 'marriage.'" The amendment must be ratified by a popular vote before taking effect. It remains to be seen whether the professional homosexuals will tolerate a victory consisting of only 99.9 percent of everything they demanded, and whether the anti-homo-marriage crowd will accept total surrender disguised with a semantic fig leaf.

 
The truth hurts

A Jackson County, Alabama, man spent a day in jail for posting signs on his own property proclaiming, "Our Court System Is a Joke." The protest came after Judge Wallace Haralson ruled for Phillip Dean's ex-wife in a child-custody battle. Haralson ordered the sheriff to arrest Dean. "The signs were so derogatory to the court they could not be ignored," he declared. For his court appearance before Haralson, Dean says, the cops "put leg shackles, they put handcuffs, they put chains from my legs up to my waist. They put a chain around my waist...." Dean was released, but later dared to ask: "When it gets to where a man hadn't got any free speech in this world, what has he got?" After Dean filed a complaint, the state Judicial Inquiry Commission sent Haralson a letter suggesting that he be "more judicious in the future."

 
Vintage whine

Fresh from the dismissal of her first well-publicized lawsuit for slave reparations, Deadria Farmer-Paellmann and seven others have launched a new action seeking $1 billion from U.S. and British companies. Filed in New York, the suit names Lloyd's of London, R.J. Reynolds, and FleetBoston, accusing them of "aiding and abetting the commission of genocide" against the plaintiffs' ancestors. As far as can be determined, no similar legal action is planned against the jungle tribes that captured those ancestors and sold them to the slave traders.

 
Kristallnacht in Nigeria

Mobs in the Nigerian state of Kaduna burned a police station and at least eight churches after authorities took into custody a Christian youth accused of desecrating the Koran and refused to release him to the tender mercies of those practitioners of the "religion of peace." Violence between Muslims and Christians has been responsible for at least 3,000 deaths in Kaduna in the past four years. Thousands more are reported dead throughout the nation of 126 million, owing to both ethnic and religious fighting, in another glorious chapter of the wonders of diversity.

 
A tale of three shirts

For those few who still think that schools have something to do with education:

The New York City school system has agreed to pay $30,000 to a 15-year-old third-sexer who was suspended for one day in 2002 for wearing a T-shirt that read, "Barbie Is a Lesbian."

U.S. District Judge Patrick Duggan of Detroit ruled in October 2003 that a high school student had a right to wear a T-shirt bearing the face of George W. Bush and the words "International Terrorist." School officials feared the shirt would inflame passions, but, at the behest of the American Civil Liberties Union, Duggan ruled: "There is no evidence that the T-shirt created any disturbance or disruption."

In March of this year, a Virginia school declared that an anti-abortion T-shirt violated a ban on "profane or obscene language." The offending cloth read: "Abortion is Homicide. You will not silence my message. You will not mock my God. You will stop killing my generation. Rock for Life." The school relented after legal action was threatened.

 
Your taxes at work

Stephen Amos, former director of a Maryland state agency, is facing charges for diverting more than $6 million in federal funds to pay staff in the office of then-Lt. Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D) — of the Kennedys — and other purposes. Townsend, as befits a member of America's royal family, has not been charged with anything.

New York City teacher Elihu McMahon collects $77,000 a year for doing essentially nothing, after being removed from the classroom as a result of various complaints and administrative findings. Among other things, McMahon has been accused and found substantially guilty of making racist remarks to students (he is black), incompetence, improper grading, insubordination, and sexual harassment — yet he cannot be fired.

Just a few examples of this year's congressional pork, funded with money extorted from America's workers:

$60,000,000 for the Homeland Security Fellowship Program for students and universities

$13,250,000 for the United Nations Fund for Technical Cooperation in Human Rights

$3,000,000 for the "First Tee Program" in Florida, to encourage golfing among minorities

$2,000,000 for the "Tools for Tolerance Program" in California

$1,100,000 for an anti-bootlegging project in Alaska

$1,000,000 for the "Young Patriots Program," including "a video which promotes the significance of National Patriotic Holidays"

$500,000 for Anaheim (CA) Resort Transit, to buy buses for Disneyland

$400,000 for the New York Botanical Garden's "Virtual Herbarium Imaging Project"

$250,000 for Lincoln Christian College (no separation of church and state money!)

$225,000 for Hawaii's statehood celebration

$225,000 to rehabilitate a 61-year-old swimming pool in Sparks, Nevada, where Rep. Jim Gibbons (R) played as a child. "I cannot think of a better way to spend $225,000 than to give the children of Sparks a swimming pool," declared that shameless thief.

$150,000 for the Military Sexual Integrity Program

$100,000 to renovate a "historic" Coca-Cola building in Macon, GA. (Coca-Cola's net income for 2003 was $676 million, a 37 percent increase from the previous year.)

April 17, 2004

© 2004 Douglas Olson. All rights reserved.
 
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