Gates of Vienna tells a most depressing tale; that of a man losing his job for calling a Mexican coworker a...Mexican:
Pipe welder Bill Hendeley Jr. said he was fired from his job Wednesday for using the word “Mexican” in describing a person from Mexico at a group safety meeting.
Hendeley, who recently moved to Burlington, said he has never been fired, has never even been reprimanded for making inappropriate comments, and co-workers describe him as a model employee.
At a group safety meeting Wednesday, however, Hendeley singled out supervisors and a Hispanic worker for smoking in inappropriate places. Smoking is only allowed in a designated area across the road from the plant.“ I guess if you’re a supervisor or a Mexican, you can smoke anywhere you like,” Hendeley reportedly told an Hispanic safety supervisor...
May I comment with the following?
Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection. - Colin Powell
There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have. - Harry S. Truman
And we already know what Jean-Luc Picard has to say on this subject....
In the same post, Gates of Vienna gives us this laugher from Britain:
Use of the word immigrant as an insult can amount to proof of racial hostility, the court of appeal ruled yesterday.
I'll reply by endorsing these words spoken by FDR:
If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Somewhere, George Orwell is smiling; he was prescient, albiet 20-odd years late...
3 comments:
The only thing the American left takes from the legacy of FDR is his social programs; they conveniently ignore his pride in America, his faith in its peoples, and his willingness to fight for its survival.
Perhaps, as all around us nations are falling either to tin-pot despots or radical Islamism, the Democrats would be wise to take heed of another of FDR's warnings, made back in 1941:
"I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship."
Indeed.
There is something quite funny about this, the gradula abridging of what we consider to be our most fundamental right.
This is how we die; not with a bang, but with a quiet aquiecsence {spelling?} to the strippings of our freedoms by modern-day liberals wearing the cloak of rightousness. We are still offered the ability to speak freely, we are hastily assured, but with the caveat that we stay within the strict boundries that our betters have set down for us.
And we nod.
Anonymous has it right. Free speech, within strict boundaries. Can't insult the Mexicans, illegal aliens (oops, immigrants), Muslims ...
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