Freedom of speech vs. hate crime
Yesterday I saw a story on New York 1 about how a LGBT (Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender) center in NYC lowered a huge Rainbow (gay) flag from their headquarters. The flag was said to be a show of solidarity and defiance after a rainbow flag was burned and left outside of the center on April 14th.
I must confess that I somehow missed this important news story when it happened. The only reason that I even glimpse at New York 1 is because it’s the default channel when I turn on my Time Warner Cable. The story I heard yesterday made me take a look at the original story.
What immediately amused me was the fact that the NYPD and local politicians are calling this a “hate crime.”
Wait a minute! Hasn’t the Supreme Court ruled that burning the American flag is protected under the first amendment? Hasn’t the Left and their cronies at the ACLU consistently defended this act?
So let’s get this straight. Burning the American flag is freedom of speech, but burning the Rainbow flag is a hate crime – give me a freakin break already! Maybe burning the Rainbow flag in front of the LGBT center was stupid, or even distasteful, but a hate crime?
This incident made me wonder if the American flag is the only flag that you can get away with burning in this country.
Let’s see:
Would burning the Mexican flag be construed as a hate crime against Mexican immigrants? What I do know is that illegal Mexican aliens have burned and stomped on the American flag during their May Day rallies in support of blanket amnesty and open borders. Check out YouTube if you have any doubt.
Would burning the Lebanese or Iraqi flag on a street in Dearborn, Michigan be considered a hate crime against Arabs and Muslims, or political free speech? I wouldn’t want to volunteer to carry out that social experiment. Meanwhile, one can go on YouTube and find dozens of videos of Muslims living in America burning and stomping on our flag. What a great country – eh?
I fully understand the argument of the difference between burning the American flag as opposed to the Rainbow flag. I realize that the stars and stripes represent a nation, and can therefore be seen to represent the nation’s political policies, while the Rainbow flag represents a minority group, but calling this a hate crime is really pushing it. A true hate crime (if you believe in the classification to begin with) should be limited to physically causing a person bodily harm, or killing them. Hate crimes shouldn’t be watered down and expanded to include protection of symbolic inanimate objects. What’s next? Maybe tearing up a poster of the Village People, or destroying a Celine Dion CD in public – please!
The NYPD should be concentrating on stifling the city’s increasing crime rate. They should focus on developing strategies for preventing vicious flash-mobs from forming before some innocent person finally gets killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. By comparison, the Rainbow flag burning is pretty trivial. If caught, the person responsible should probably face misdemeanor charges depending on the details of how the burning took place. According to reports, the burned flag wasn’t the property of the center, so perhaps the perpetrator is guilty of trespassing and maybe violating some fire code – at most. My intuition also alerts me to the possibility that this was an “inside job” pulled off to highlight all of the hate that’s supposedly being spread around by the vicious right-wingers in the Tea Party movement. The Left is really getting desperate so I wouldn’t put anything past them.
Stupid – yes.
Hoax – maybe.
Hate crime – no.
