TONGUE TIED ARCHIVE -- posts by John Ray

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December 03, 2005

"Stop Snitchin" is Banned Speech in Boston

The Mayor of "tolerant" Boston is trying to confiscate all t-shirts with the words "Stop snitchin" written on them. As it tartly says here: "It is unknown on what grounds the shirts will be seized, the move appearing to be in direct violation of the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments".

"Snitching" means to inform the authorities about lawbreaking among your friends and companions. In Australia it is called "dobbing" and is a national no-no. Whatever you think of it however, free-speech principles should allow you to say whatever you like about it.

Secretive Trial in Georgia

We read here that "A hearing is scheduled today [Friday] for the Carrollton High School history teacher accused of making racist remarks during a class lecture"

So what awful things did he say? Nobody is telling. But I guess this comment speaks volumes:

"We've investigated the situation extensively, and we believe these statements were made," said Wilson, who would not comment on what the remarks were. "Whether they were made intentionally or not, or taken out of context, is not the issue. It was inappropriate regardless," the superintendent said".

That sounds to me like the whole thing is one of our usual Leftist over-reactions to something innocent -- something that is "offensive" only IF it is taken out of context or with the intention distorted.

And what a GREAT education the students are being given when one of their senior administrators tells them that context and intention don't matter! It is one of the major foundations of the Western legal system that intention DOES matter. But not in Carrollton, Georgia, apparently. If I were a Georgian, I would be pretty annoyed about such a Hicksville picture of my State being given to the world.

Sanity has a Small Win in Maine

In Brunswik, Maine, a local firemen's organization wanted to put up a memorial to the past sacrifices of their colleagues. But they wanted to put on the memorial an inscription of a poem that refers to God! Horrors!

And the poem does not refer to women in the "right" way either. It ends: ""And if according to my fate, I am to lose my life, Please bless with your protecting hand, My children and my wife."

Which inspired one local councillor to say: "To put a monument in 2005 on a public piece of property which completely cuts women out of the equation is wrong"

Rushdie Redux

Danish television reports that an extremist Islamic party in Pakistan has put a 50,000-kroner bounty on the heads of artists who had the gall to draw images of Mohammed and allow them to be published in a Copenhagen newspaper.

The Danish ambassador in Islamabad, Bent Wigotski, says the extremist Jamaaat-e-Islami party and it youth organization have also demanded that Denmark's ambassador leave Pakistan. The embassy has told all Danish citizens in Pakistan to lay low.

The wackos are irked because the daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a dozen images of Mohammed a couple of months ago.

Utah Atheists?

A group of Utah atheists is says it is suing to block the state from erecting crosses in honor of highway patrol officers who have died in the line of duty, reports ABC 4.

The atheists, backed by a group in Texas, want the state to put up non-denominational symbols instead of crosses.

"I feel the same way a Jew might feel if you put a state symbol on a swastika," said one of the petitioners, Richard Andrews.

The Best and the Brightest

The Harvard Crimson reports that those wacky kids at the $40,000-a-year institution are upset about a parody ad for The Salient that featured a Muslim Barbie-like doll programmed to say things like "Yes, Husband" and "Human Rights? That's silly."

The school's Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations organized a hasty discussion in response to complaints from some Muslim students that the ad misrepresented Muslim views and was ethnically and multiculturally insensitive.

"Islamic values are misunderstood," said Nura Hossainzadeh. "As an American-born Muslim, my personal values are not so different from Western values."

Mamma Mia!

A Connecticut resident is angry that an Italian-themed festival was held on public property in his town, according to the North Haven Courier, because it exhibited a "bias for a single culture."

Morris Pederson complained to the town selectmen of North Haven, Ct. that the Italian Festival of Angels should not have been hosted on public property. The annual event provides food and crafts vendors to the hundreds of local residents who attend.

Pederson suggested instead an international festival with food from all over the world so no nation or culture feels discriminated against.

It's All About Rosa

Civil rights and anti-war marchers are calling the Boston school district's decision not to close today so students can attend a rally in honor of Rosa Parks a racist one that will "create a level of anger, confusion, and sadness that will cast a shadow over a celebration that should be a high point of the year," according to the Boston Globe.

Organizers of the protest to honor Parks' decision 50 years ago to sit at the front of a Montgomery city bus have demanded that all city offices, including schools, be closed tomorrow so that employees can participate in the march. School Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant, however, rejected the request.

Councilor Chuck Turner of Roxbury blasted the decision, which he said would be "characterized as racist, based on the definition of institutional racism -- disparate treatment of people of color."

Disablism

A UK charity has accused actress Cameron Diaz of disabilism for referring to her physique when she was younger as "spastic," Reuters reports.

Scope, a group that represents people with cerebral palsy, called on Diaz to watch her language in the future.

"Likening her 'wild days' to acting like a 'spastic' is extremely offensive to people with cerebral palsy and perpetuates negative assumptions about disabled people," a Scope spokesman said.

PC P-town

A selectman, er ... woman, in the town of Provincetown, Mass. wants to remove an oil painting of the Pilgrims voting on the Mayflower Compact in the 1600s from city hall because it doesn't have any women or American Indians participating in the process.

Columnist Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe says Selectwoman Sarah Peake described herself as "disturbed" by the image and called for a vote to have it removed. Three of the four town selectmen supported removing the oversized painting by local artist Max Bohm.

Izzat So?

Officials at the University of Missouri in St. Louis have rejected complaints about the content of an on-campus show put on by a gay group because they say controversial and potentially innapropriate material is a First Amendment issue, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The Log Cabin Republicans of Greater St. Louis complained about an October drag show on campus sponsored by several organizations for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning (GLBTQ) students. The Republicans said the show mocked heterosexual people, contained inappropriate language and simulated sexual acts.

But university spokesman Bob Samples rejected the complaint. "On a university campus, you have hundreds of events each year, and not everyone is going to find every one appropriate," he said.

Those Agitatin' Religious Folk

A swedish paster jailed for "agitating against minority groups" by preaching against homosexuality in a sermon has been cleared of the charges by that country's highest court, reports The Local.

�ke Green, a pentecostal minister from the Baltic Sea island of �land, spent a month in jail after condemning homosexuality in a sermon to his congregation. Critics said his words amounted to hate speech. The court disagreed.

"It is extremely serious when the church is turned into a free zone for agitation," said S�ren Andersson, chairman of gay rights group RFSL. "We are now going to face increased religious agitation from extreme right-wing Christian groups that use the church as a forum to spread their message of hatred."

Disrespectful Visual Representations

Officials at the University of Michigan will be moving two 50-year-old sculptures from a new arts building because they are sexist, according to the Michigan Daily.

The two sculptures by Michigan sculptor Marshall Fredericks are among 39 placed on the Literature, Science and Arts building when it was built in 1948. Entitled Dream of the Young Man and Dream of the Young Girl, they depict, respectively, a boy dreaming about a ship with wind-filled sails and a muscular man flanked by oxen taking the hand of a woman.

When construction of a new building is completed next year, only 37 of the 39 sculptures will be making the move.

Critics have longed bitched about the last two, calling them sexist because they portray finding a suitable husband as a woman's central preoccupation.

"The visual representation doesn't seem to hold the same respect for women as it does men," said Fran Blouin, director of the Bentley Historical Library on North Campus.

Tit for Tat

A California couple is suing the University of California, reports the San Jose Mercury News, claiming that a website it produces intended to help teach evolution unfairly delves into religious topics.

Jeanne and Larry Caldwell of Granite Bay say that because Understanding Evolution web site receives funding through the National Science Foundation it shouldn't be endorsing certain religious groups over others.

The Caldwells contend the site is an effort "to modify the beliefs of public school science students so they will be more willing to accept evolutionary theory as true."

More on the Confiscated Student Newspaper

According to a reader, the confiscation might even be illegal. He writes as follows:

As a 2005 graduate of ORHS, I'm pleased you brought attention to the school administrations' censorship of the most recent edition of their newspaper. The school administration last year was not, to put it lightly, a proponent of students' rights to free expression and I hear from my friends who are still there that the new principal is even worse.

For the record, the Oak Leaf is not funded or published by Oak Ridge High School. Unless something has changed since last year, all the paper's funding comes from advertisements - part of the students' grade in the course is whether or not they did a good job finding companies who would advertise in the paper. The paper is published by the Oak Ridger (Oak Ridge's local paper). Legally, and I believe this has stood up in court, the school can only have a say in the paper's content if they fund it or if the article is wildly inappropriate ("How to Kill Your Parents Without Anyone Knowing"). Neither of the articles were on that level.

I know the girl who wrote the article about birth control, and she's an idiot who probably wrote the article more to get attention than to inform. I also think it was not appropriate, however if she has a right to publish it, she should be allowed to.

As for the article abour piercings and tattoos, the school's rationale for removing it was that the photos violated school dress code. Why the hundreds of photos they publish showing scantily-clad painted up fans at football games - some of them with fairly rude things written on them - don't violate the dress code is beyond me. Again, if the paper has a right to publish it, no one should stop them. Especially if there are enough students with piercings and tattoos for the article to be of interest to the student body.

Feel the Wrath of the Bernese Mountain Dog Club!

The North County Times reports that a California mayor who had the gall to rename his town's annual parade from 'Holiday Parade' to 'Christmas Parade" is now catching flak from some of the usual suspects.

Mayor Dan Dalager, a lifelong resident of Encinitas, Calif., says he merely restored a title that existed when he was younger. Somewhere along the way, he says, someone changed it. So he changed it back.

But now three local groups -- a girl scout troop, the Leucadia Town Council and the Bernese Mountain Dog Club of Southern California -- have told the city they won't play in Dalager's parade because of the change.

Dalager said he changed the name of the city's Spring Egg Hunt to the Easter Egg Hunt last year without anyone kicking up a fuss.

Painful Truths

Human rights activists and NGOs in France are threatening to sue a French commentator who pointed out that most of the rioters in that country in recent weeks have been Muslim, according to Islamonline.

Alain Finkielkraut is accused of inciting racial hatred in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published last week.

"In France there are also other immigrants whose situation is difficult - Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese - and they're not taking part in the riots. Therefore, it is clear that this is a revolt with an ethno-religious character," he was quoted as saying.

France's Audio-Visual Council urged authorities at France Culture radio to fire Finkielkraut for such comments, and the The Jewish Union for Peace issued what was described as a "strongly-worded statement" blasting Finkielkraut's blatant racism.

Maybe They Don't Want Government 'Support and Understanding?'

A local council in England is in a pickle because they can't find any gays in the areas to lavish government-funded support and understanding on, according to the Daily Mail.

The Teignbridge District Council now risks losing grants from the national government because the prevailing theory in London is that authorities who say there are no signficant minority groups in their areas are not doing enough to fight discrimination.

The Teignbridge council, which serves a district with a population of 120,000 in Cornwall, even went to the trouble of spending �3,000 to hire a market research firm to help in its hunt for homosexuals, but it still drew a blank.

Utterly Childish Censorship

What earthly point is there in all that? Quite aside from issues of free speech, the kids can (and probably do) find all that stuff on the internet anyway. And there is certainly nothing illegal in what the paper was discussing.

I support Khushboo!

Khushboo is a filmstar in the Southern Indian State of Tamil Nadu, which has its own language and culture. Like a lot of Indian ladies, however, she is pretty feisty. As we see from this press excerpt:

Khushboo is obviously much more assimilated to Western culture than are most Tamils but I do sympathize with Tamil families who feel that they have been defamed and insulted. Perhaps she could have been more diplomatic.

A Hate-filled Would-be Censor Loses for Once

Warren County Community College in Virginia had a professor of English, John Daly, who is as far-Left as such types usually are these days:

A charming example of the "tolerance" that Leftists are always saying that they stand for, of course. Anyway, for once he got into hot water over his intolerance and was forced to resign. Best of all, though, was this:

Rather amusing, actually. I think, however, that we will wait a long time for such fairness to extend to the Ivy League.

A reader advises: It probably doesn't make any difference to the story, but (this particular) Warren County Community College is located in New Jersey, not Virginia