A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on June 22nd, 2009 in US News

Call it the other side of the stupid Palin-Letterman fracas. Rusty DePass made a racist comment about Michelle Obama – and he has paid for it through the loss of his job and has become the public face of stupid racism. But DePass isn’t a public official. He was a private person making an offensive and public statement through Facebook.

There are positions where losing one’s job would be the proper outcome – if Mr. DePass were the equal opportunity officer at some public institution or an elected official. But he wasn’t. So what is it about being racist that should disqualify someone from a commercial real estate business? And if it’s so bad, how many thousands of others should be out of a job, too?

It isn’t illegal to be a racist. Nor should it be. First of all, we can’t legislate hate out of existence. In fact, attempts to do so are likely to only force that hatred into a deeper seat. Second of all, there’s this thing called “freedom of speech.”

The freedom to speak freely is useless unless it protects people who say offensive things. This is why I thought David Letterman was an idiot to apologize for what he said – he should have simply gone back at Palin for trying to bludgeon his First Amendment protections into oblivion. Yeah, it was offensive. So what? Turn on any comedian on any night of the week and you’ll get plenty of stuff to be offended about.

This is the part of including speech among “hate crimes” that bothers me. It isn’t enough to get someone to admit they were wrong, they have to be punished for having said something that was hateful. Good Lord, who among us couldn’t be convicted by that principle?

There are very few instances when speech rises to the level of a crime. This isn’t one of them. Unfortunately, there is no appeal from the court of public opinion.

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