29 June 2015

It's really hard to rank 'worst days,' Sen. Cruz edition

Sen. Cruz: "Today is some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation's history," referring to the Supreme Court's dual rulings against a suit opposing healthcare expansion and against laws than forbid gay marriage.


I get it that people have different political opinions, and that to people like Sen. Cruz, marriages such as their own can only be valuable if other people cannot have them, and healthcare is only worth having if there is a class of people who cannot have that either.

That said, I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the, uh, unique ideological requirements of the view that the Court's ruling against those opinions is of a piece with Pearl Harbor, Sept. 11, The Challenger and Columbia disasters, the San Francisco earthquake, the Galveston hurricane, the Dred Scott decision, and the assault on Fort Sumter. (Well, I guess I admit I can see how Sen. Cruz thinks these two rulings are worse than Dred Scott and Sumter.)

No, the part of Sen. Cruz's statement that is so baffling to this correspondent is that it's really hard to argue that, regardless of one's views, these two rulings marked even the worst 24-hour period in America this month. I guess it's possible that Sen. Cruz's views on whether or not universal healthcare and marriage are worse than racist terrorism are still not fully settled. I think for him to elucidate this further would be a public service.

19 June 2015

Violent Hate Crimes Involve Both Hatred and Violence

The photo below appeared recently on the Facebook page of a far-right group called "Young Americans for Liberty."


It features a quote attributed to actor Samuel L. Jackson:
I don't think it's about more gun control. I grew up in the south with guns everywhere and we never shot anyone. This [shooting] is about people who aren't taught the value of life.
This is a cute sentiment, but it presupposes that events such as the terrorist attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC cannot be about both too many guns and too little respect for life. After all, the U.S. hasn't got a monopoly on hate; plenty of other Western industrialized nations have as many problems with hate as we do, but do not have anything close to the problems with gun violence that we've got.