Free-Speech Ghettos
June 15th, 2009The horrific murder of late-term abortion doctor George Tiller shocked America. So much so that perhaps the people will finally be willing to take the drastic steps necessary to prevent such a tragedy from occurring again. For this tawdry act of violence against a man who never hurt anyone except defenseless little babies was surely incited by hate speech — speech that perhaps cannot be outlawed but can certainly be quarantined in the ghettos it belongs.
In the aftermath of Tiller’s slaughter, a bereaved nation asked why. Why would anyone hate this man so much as to kill him? It certainly can’t be because he made a fortune sticking catheter tubes into the heads of living, breathing babies — in order to suck out their brains, so that their skulls would collapse. Certainly no one of a sound and rationale mind could possibly object to this activity. Therefore, someone must’ve driven the killer to act. It must’ve been Bill O’Reilly and others of his ilk, who constantly referred to the great doctor as “Tiller the Killer” and other ugly ad hominems. They are as guilty as the shooter himself, if not more so.
But what can we do? That ever-irritating First Amendment protects these hatemongers just as much as it protects our deified speech.
Fortunately, that paragon of goodness Keith Olbermann stumbled upon the solution to our problem when he said that we should “quarantine” such ugly speech. And we can. We can quarantine this type of filth to where it belongs: in ghettos — ghettos like the ones where we quarantined the Japanese during World War II — ghettos like the ones where the Nazis quarantined their undesirables.
We can create confinements in the few remaining red states, where these reactionaries and revanchists can congregate to freely spew their hate — where they can also have access to all forms of media: print, Internet, and television. However, such access will be limited to these backward regions that none of us would ever visit anyway.
Perhaps at the gates of these new ghettos — because there is always hope that these waifs will one day see the truth and the light of our way — we can even put up a sign that states:
Good Thoughts Will Set You Free.
Of course, these restrictions will not apply to those of us on the Left who have been falsely accused of inspiring violence, such as the murder of military recruiter William Long. For, as we all know, only conservatives are stupid enough to be incited to violence by speech. And where George Tiller’s murder was unjustified on all levels, Long’s murder was the necessary and justifiable consequence of the previous administration’s foreign policy.
For years now the conservative media has been a metaphorical ghetto of slime, hate, and intolerance. It’s about time we turned it into a literal one.
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© Copyright 2009 by Colin Cohen. All Rights Reserved.
