and conservatives are connoisseurs of hate
Yeah, American rhetoric is whack. American rhetoric is all about “testing the limits of free speech.”
Let me tell you something. Despite rumours about Canada being the wellspring of woke, we’re only that way compared to the US.
It’s a very low bar.
In the US, where it’s illegal to be poor, education means twelve years of learning about how white people are perfect, happy, and perfectly happy, and where it’s considered reasonable to want Jesus on your football team, Canada is deemed just a whoopie cushion for Kim Jong-Il, as if he even needs one.
So it might surprise you to learn that there is no such thing as a “hate crime” in the criminal code of Canada. Here are some facts, for example, from Durham Police (east of Toronto, and where I ‘grew up’, matter of opinion, but whatever):
Hate crimes and hate-motivated incidents are serious community concerns that the Durham Regional Police Service (DRPS) actively investigates and combats. Hate crime itself is not a standalone charge under the Criminal Code of Canada; rather, certain offenses motivated by hate can be considered aggravating factors during sentencing, potentially increasing penalties. The Code identifies four hate-related offenses: Advocating Genocide, Public Incitement of Hatred, Wilful Promotion of Hatred, and Wilful Acts of Hatred.
Hate-motivated incidents investigated by the police typically involve things like graffiti targeting Muslims (hate-motivated incidents up 1250% in the past year), defacing synogogues, or advocating hatred towards 2SLGBTQI+ individuals. It’s uncommon, but not unheard of, for more violent acts like arson or shootings to occur.
We don’t tie ourselves in knots defining what is “speech” and what is “action”. We speak of “freedom of expression”, meaning any type of speech, action, writing that is expressed publicly.
“The private form of a right is more protected than the public form.”
This is simple to understand. You can say whatever nonsense you want to your troglodyte family, but once you enter the public space you are in society and we have agreed that we need, as a society, to feel, and ensure others feel, safe, included, respected; we expect to be treated equally.
So, even in cases of graffiti, we close than shit down as fast as possible. What’s to think about?
This brings us to the equal time nonsense. You always hear “It’s just a matter of respecting the other’s opinion”, from those who have nothing to fear from the other’s opinion.
Here’s the thing: We are not talking about civilized exchanges of views.
This is because old hetero white guys — here I go — don’t have to worry about discrimination, racism, or hate incidents, because they have never experienced hearing, “Old white guys should be put to death when they reach 60!” or whatever, from the mouth of someone who has the power to make that hate become reality.
Old hetero white guys — also young hetero white guys — are the dominant group. Gay people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, women, Black people, have, every one of them, experienced some form of threat from dominant white guys. Hetero white guys in positions of power can potentially realize the goals, explicit or implicit, of their hateful speech.
They seem to believe that vulnerable people — that is, people that they have made vulnerable — experiencing public expressions of hatred, should just engage with the offender in a polite exchange of opposing views. They fail to understand that the vulnerable may very well be afraid to do so, and justifiably.
The problem is less with the person (though they must be held accountable) but with the public expression that, without correction or pushback from society (the police, the judiciary, a generally respected leader), infects the atmosphere and becomes normalized.
When the offender is a powerful and contentious leader, for example, the President, he sets the tone; he normalizes hate, but worse, his bigotry effectively becomes policy, backed by the intimidating and irresistible force of the state.
Hatred can’t be reined in after its public expression. The horses have stampeded out of the barn. This galloping juggernaut of hatred becomes a permission structure for any bigot who decides to follow through on the hateful premise.
“Leviticus says gays should be executed, as part of God’s law? I guess it’s all right to finish the job!”
The death of Charlie Kirk
My first thing is, I’m not going to tie myself into a big gay pretzel, and I wish that didn’t sound the way it sounds, getting all performative and apologetic and making sure you ALL KNOW that I abhor violence.
Dudes and dudettes, I am a lifelong liberal / progressive. We ALL abhor violence, despite what POS American Republicans / Xtian Nationalists / and, yes, Nazis, say. It is not necessary for me to emphasize this.
ANY truly progressive person, any person who believes in the rule of law, a justice system, imperfect as it may be, and in society as a different beast than the individual, abhors violence.
On abhorring violence, the US is, to be polite, inconsistent. Many states still impose the death penalty — state-sanctioned murder; and American Republicans (this is not a Democrat issue) refuse to pass reasonable gun laws, laws that, contrary to the Second Amendment, acknowledge that owning firearms is a privilege, not a right, and moreover, a privilege that must be earned.
“Oh, we abhor the killing of Charlie Kirk. We’re gonna ask for the death penalty!”
Seriously? No system is perfectly logical, but this approaches black comedy. So already you’ve trained society to believe that SOME kinds of murder are OK. You just have to decide who deserves to be murdered, and who deserves to be spared and who gets to decide.
Here’s a radical idea: Maybe no one (including Charlie Kirk) deserves to be murdered, and no one (including me) gets to decide. Smoke on your pipe and put that in, as the lady sang in every remake by Spielberg.
Regarding ownership of firearms, it should be obvious that individual rights take a back seat to the need for society to be safe. That parents agonize over sending their child to school each day, worrying that s/he could be a victim of gun violence, that the US is a nation where there are more guns than people, and where the leading cause of death for young people is gun violence, are all signs of a society in disarray.
I lack words to express my confusion. Republicans privilege owning guns, and worse, the kind of automatic weapons that no one outside the armed forces has any business owning, over the safety of society, including the nation’s children.
Kirk was killed literally moments after making a flippant remark about “trans mass shooters”, a statement meant to vilify trans people, pile on the hatred, continue the open season on the trans community. He died spewing casual hate.
“Oh, Charlie loved to debate! Anyone could have just gone up to him and said I disagree!”
No, Virginia, he couldn’t, because that would be like saying, “I disagree that the moon is made of Mountain Dew!” Unless you believe the moon is actually made of Coca-Cola, in which case you have bigger problems than I can help you with, you don’t disagree with a phantasmic falsehood.
It’s not a matter of nuance, there’s no opinion involved. There is no rash of trans mass shooters. There is no debate possible when the spewers of hate live in a competing reality which is entirely based on malicious disinformation.
I’m not even convinced that Kirk himself “believed” half his lies. You will note from his history that he became a hardliner, you might say, conveniently, only after the rise of MAGA; previously he advocated, for example, for a secular worldview, libertarian principles. His lies were tools. He lied to manipulate, to demonize, to divide, to gain and maintain dominant power.
When Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer, Republicans could not contain their amusement. Remember? Charlie Kirk started a bail collection for his attacker. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Republicans abhor violence against one of their own, but have no problem encouraging at minimum the arrest and silencing of those who disagree with them.
You may have noticed a relatively new, let-your-hair-down, devil-may-care attitude towards quashing dissent, openly modeled and encouraged by the President. You can sense how relieved conservatives are to be able finally to voice what they’ve been thinking all along. There’s a newly energized, unmistakable glee driving their accusations and threats.
Everyone right winger from the Fox Newsroom to the Oval Office was quick to blame Democrats for Kirk’s death. Why? Because Dems have lowered the tone, throwing around words like “fascist” and “Nazi”.
But this is no incitement to violence (even if that were generally a Democrat thing, which it’s not, they’ve been too busy cowering in the shadows and wringing their hands to gin up that kind of negative energy). These statements are by way of a warning; they give historical context to those who still refuse to bear witness to the sea change that is occurring.
When the Supreme Court no longer protects US citizens or the rule of law and the AG threatens dissenters with prosecution — even the most hobbled Democrat is duty bound to cry “fascism”. Someone has to state the obvious to those few remaining who are still gobsmacked with disbelief.
The White House, on the other hand… has used this shooting to ramp up the rhetoric, with Stephen Miller declaring there is a “vast domestic terror movement” behind Kirk’s murder, referring to the Democratic Party as “a domestic extremist organization”, and vowing to “…use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks”.
(Yikes! I have it on good authority, by the way, that Stephen Miller can only survive twenty-four hours out of his coffin before he has to drink a vial of tears from underage rape victims denied abortions, then suck the last, fear-poisoned breath from at least one transgender teenager. He makes your average Dementor look like Peter Pan.)
In case you were wondering: there is no evidence of any conspiracy behind Kirk’s killing, and it is by now well established that the killer acted alone. (He also comes from a family of die-hard MAGA Republicans, but don’t get me started.)
Oh, yeah, and, of course, Charlie Kirk advocated for the execution of queers. He “didn’t approve of my lifestyle” — though why he’d disapprove of my sitting at home alone, in my egg-yolk-stained bathrobe, binge-watching Nicolle Wallace while I crochet bespoke codpieces, is, frankly, a mystery to me. As suggested earlier, he thought Leviticus was an excellent guide.
What would it take to believe this? In some countries, prehistoric-style executions for gay men is the law; sometimes this involves death by stoning. I invite you to research this appalling procedure. At the risk of seeming callous, instantaneous death via bullet would seem like clemency in comparison.
Whether or not gay men should be executed according to the Bible — a two-thousand-year-old world’s best jokes collection written by goatherds whose familial relations might have given Epstein his perviest ideas — is not a subject that modern humans should be discussing.
We have had the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by a Canadian, I might add, since 1948, and yet the alt-right still clings to its murderous mythology like one big closet-case.
Charlie Kirk argued without hesitation or regret against equality; he denounced the Civil Rights Act; he had no problem stripping the humanity from those of us who dare to love whom we choose and be unapologetically who we are. He stood for the proposition that white Christian men deserve all the power and should continue to wield that power to enrich themselves and annihilate anyone who stands in their way.
So while I, yes, abhor violence, don’t expect me, a gay male, to argue that his opinions mattered, because they didn’t. They were reprehensible opinions that put others at risk. Inasmuch as he was, to me, no more than his opinions, he was a reckless, shallow, and, yes, hateful billboard of a man.
And now I have to be honest, because I felt hatred rising in me. I felt myself becoming what I say I abhor. I thought I wanted at least quiet satisfaction at his passing. I’m not proud of that, but there you are. I thought I wanted to be glad at Charlie Kirk’s death — but I’m not. I couldn’t do it. It felt indecent, unseemly. My status as elder was becoming more like eldritch, which I had hoped to avoid, though the varicose veins probably make it unavoidable.
I can’t do it, Virginia. I cannot celebrate the death of another human being. I can’t. Kirk’s death was shocking, as shocking as his rhetoric; as shocking as his smug certainty.
It is a terrible irony that Kirk once said that it was “worth some gun deaths each year” in order to have the “protection” of the Second Amendment. I wonder if he ever considered that he might be — no. Enough.
No one deserves to be murdered. No one gets to decide.
Let me try to understand. Death is our completion, when the yarn is gathered up, when the life is seen, at last, in its full scope. Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward.
Let me try to understand that, despite the harm Charlie Kirk undoubtedly caused, he was more than that harm; he was a father, a son, a husband. Some were his friends; some loved him. To try to understand that might be the best I can do.
Forgive me if the best I can muster is to close my eyes, bow my head and pray silently, desperately, for Charlie Kirk, and for us all.
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