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Another Mass Shooting, but GOP Makes it Clear Some Lives Don’t Matter

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More Americans dead from gun violence, and Republicans have made it clear that some lives don’t matter. The trick, you see, is to be a white male, as has been noticed in the wake of a shooting in Lafayette, Louisiana:

Another mass shooting. But don’t hold your breath. After all, the killer was neither Muslim nor black, nor Hispanic. He was a white guy. He had Second Amendment rights. And anyway, neither he nor his gun killed anybody, we will be told. Liberal politics did.

Conservatives rightly decry the murder of Kathryn Steinle by an undocumented Mexican immigrant, but they don’t care that Sandra Bland died under mysterious circumstances while in police custody, or that Eric Garner was killed by New York police using a chokehold, or that Michael Brown was gunned down by a policeman in the middle of the street, in Ferguson, Missouri.

In Brown’s case, far from condemning police, Fox News’ Keith Ablow wanted Brown’s father charged in his death, not the policeman who gunned him down, and Bryan Fischer claimed Brown was demonically possessed (apparently we gun such people down in the street now without trial).

And of course, former NYPD detective Harry Houck, who works as a CNN contributor, told a panel there that Sandra Bland died because she was “arrogant from the very beginning.” So if you are deemed demonically possessed (read big black male), police will gun you down. And if you are arrogant, and die in custody, you only got what you deserved.

Even in the 16th century, when they were burning witches, you got a trial first, not summary execution.

It is a fact that on June 16, The Washington Post reported, “There have only been 9 days this year when the police have not killed somebody.”

Some news outlets put the number as high as 500 dead in the past six months, according to both The Guardian and Killed by the Police.Net. The Washington Post‘s own investigation showed nearly 400 dead as of the end of May.

The tally of killings – judicial murder, really – are, a month later, clearly worse.

Yet while Bill O’Reilly responds to Steinle’s death with a call for the creation of what he calls “Kate’s Law,” which demands “a mandatory five year sentence in a federal penitentiary upon conviction” simply for being deported and then returning to the United States, the murder of citizens by police gets only crickets.

Nor, you can be sure, will Bill O’Reilly call for a law to protect movie-goers from white men carrying handguns in theaters. Because Second Amendment rights. O’Reilly blamed anything but guns for people being shot – by guns – regardless of the fact you can’t shoot people with your finger. Or a spoon.

We are doubtless all aware by now that armed white militiamen have begun showing up at military recruiting centers to “protect” the military personnel inside. The military has told them to go home.

Can you imagine if it had been black men with guns, standing outside? They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. After all, a black man with a pizza gets beaten without warning by police. Miranda rights? Nah, we have fists and batons. We’ll just beat you and then charge you.

But black men with guns? It’s best America begin to think about that.

It is amazing that 500 American citizens could be killed already this year by police without a hue and cry, that young black girls can be body slammed to the sidewalk at pool parties and children beaten, black female motorists pulled over and punched in the head multiple times; yet Red State’s Eric Erickson can call on companies to stop donating to Planned Parenthood because that organization does abortions.

Shouldn’t the people we stop funding perhaps be police departments? After all, if they are not protecting us, they are not serving us. They’re supposed to stop murderers, not be murderers. All Planned Parenthood is doing is providing reproductive health services to people who want it. They’re not pulling the unwilling off the street and forcibly aborting their fetuses.

It is okay to kill young black people, but you can’t abort a fetus – even if it means the mother will die. Kill black people. Kill women. That’s a strange species of “pro-life” conservatives hold to.

Equally offensive is Erickson’s portrayal of pregnant women seeking reproductive health services as “pregnant female animals,” which paradoxically renders an unborn fetus a person, but the woman an animal.

For conservative America, only some among “We the People” are actually people. Others of us are animals. We scarce need to detail who fits into that category. Republicans have made it perfectly clear.

A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” must include all the people or it is nothing of the sort.
Republicans decry abortion as human sacrifice to Baal or Moloch, but I put it to you: what else is the murder of innocent blacks but human sacrifice to the God of Bigotry: White Republican Jesus and his Holy AR-15?

Photo: CNN screen capture

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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