I TOLD you to keep your head down and your helmet on. You forgot.
He understands that an attack on a person's cherished beliefs and customs is an attack on that person, and that we should be very careful about stirring up anger and division in society by clumsy attempts to interfere with community norms and private traditions.
Well, isn't that a bizarre thing to say? You can't attack, oh, say, keeping slaves as they do in Mauritania? Or as was formerly done right here in these United States? How about Clitorectomy? Stoning adulterers? Whipping rape victims for shaming their family? How about what Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, should they not have attacked the cherished belief and custom that relegated blacks to the back of the bus? How about the cherished belief and custom that priests who rape children should be handled "in house," as it has been, while other child rapists get handled by calling the police? How about not educating women, only men? How about the belief and custom, so cherished in certain societies, that it's great to bomb infidels and go to heaven with the virgins?
Oh, yes, I'm not supposed to mention the g&dd*#n virgins except respectfully, I think.
Come on, Neo. Cut the crap. If that's what "conservative means, I guess I'm not one. Still a rightwinger, though, so Poet isn't likely to let me in LWP and JLA isn't likely to kick me out of RWET.
Oh, and there's another problem. It's this:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [NOTE: AND THAT INCLUDES ATHEISM OR AGNOSTICISM]; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
So regardless of whether you think your cherished beliefs should be protected from the likes of us or not, the basic law of the land says otherwise. And it rules. |
