Someone threw out a question today on an internet forum where I participate regularly about whether laws that allow motorists to run over demonstrators at, for example, a BLM protest would ever be enacted to give the same leeway to pro-choice people who're harassed and threatened at Abortion Clinic protests.
Let me say at the beginning here that no one should ever feel free to run people over on the street. There are a number of reasons why I say that. For one, it would make way too easy for people with grudges or extreme views to plough through a crowd at just about any event and take out people they don’t like. This would be especially true at protests. The vast majority of which are totally peaceful.
Now that I’ve make that clear, the other issue that popped into my mind when I read this question is that it—once again—lays bare the rank hypocrisy of Reich-Wingers who have two completely different ways of passing judgement about whether it’s okay to do a thing based who’s doing it.
I think it’s absolutely true that most Americans feel that, in the abstract, one law or one standard should apply equally to everyone regardless of the particulars. But Reich-Wingers don’t see it that way. So they’d have no problem with giving a pass to their fellow extremists who use a law like that—and such laws are on the books in more than one state right now—to mow down people at a BLM protest but howl in indignation if any of those “dangerous” lefties or Antifa types or supporters of a woman’s right to choose had a legal right to limit their behavior in any way at a demonstration or protest. Much less had a green light to use their vehicles as weapons the way that one of their Neo-Nazi buddies did at Charlottesville.
So it’s all about using our laws and our Justice system to tilt the game in their favor. It’s fine for them because they’re upstanding American patriots and those child-molesting commies were so bad, so threatening! My God, there were even lots of those horrible, violent Antifa infiltrators in the crowd! I felt that my life was in danger, for realz! So, of course, I had to floor it to escape certain death!
You get the idea. Situations like that have played out in America many times.
But if anyone on their team ever did anything threatening—even while armed to the teeth—those child-killing Commies should just let us engage in our Constitutionally-protected speech, they'd say. Yeah, we’ve got the 1st and 2nd Amendment rights to say what we want and do whatever we want and you’ve got to stand there calmly and do nothing. And Law Enforcement will back them up 95% of the time.
And so, they’d go on to say, that anyone who’s got a problem with that should know that we’re armed to the teeth and we have vehicles, weapons and regressive laws in many states to make sure that we get all the rules of the game, so to speak, stacked in our favor. But you guys can be arrested, thrown in jail or beaten or shot if you do any of the things that we have a legal right to do and do all the time.
That’s how the game works. And they’ve got the laws and the cops who enforce those laws on their side. And this obvious double standard works perfectly well for them in most places, most of the time.
“Bulldog Ben” Basile
© 2023 Ben Lawrence Basile
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