Category Archives: Civil Rights

I’m grateful to those with the courage to tell their stories.

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We recently went to trial against a fast-food chain for lack of wheelchair access.  In trial, three of the chain’s customers who use wheelchairs and the son of a fourth, now deceased, took the stand and described their experiences.  They described these experiences as a practical matter — a door that closed on an ankle, a queue line that was too narrow, employees who ignored them or told them they could not even wait off to the side of the line — and as an emotional matter — what it felt like to encounter these barriers, to be ignored, to be told to wait somewhere else. They talked about their own lives, too:  a lay pastor who counseled people with disabilities; an advocate who is working with the Smithsonian on a disability history project; a woman whose parents took her to see Martin Luther King, Jr. and taught her to stand up for her rights; a man whose mother had worked to integrate people with disabilities into her chorus.

The fast-food chain’s response was:  you’re lying.  You’re lying and you’re greedy.  The chain’s lawyers called the restaurant’s assistant manager to the stand to testify that she didn’t recognize any of them.  The lawyers pointed out — in cross-examining the customers — that they might recover damages, that they had filed other lawsuits to challenge other inaccessible conditions, that this wasn’t the closest restaurant to their homes.  The chain’s hired expert — who uses a wheelchair — took the stand to say he didn’t mind the barriers, that he didn’t consider it discrimination.

Four people who took time out of their day, their days, to be deposed, to take the stand in trial.  Work hours missed, long rides on public transportation.  Just to be accused of greed and dishonesty.  To be challenged on the fact that they had a life that took them farther afield than the restaurant closest to their homes.  To be accused — rather than celebrated — for standing up to other facilities and other defendants who had excluded them.

We defended them in the language permitted us by the law, by the rules of civil procedure and evidence.  Objections to relevance.  Quotes from the governing appellate court:  “[f]or the ADA to yield its promise of equal access for the disabled, it may indeed be necessary and desirable for committed individuals to bring serial litigation advancing the time when public accommodations will be compliant with the [ADA].”*

But as always, the late poet Laura Hershey says it best:

Telling**

What you risk telling your story:

You will bore them.

Your voice will break, your ink

spill and stain your coat.

No one will understand, their eyes

become fences.

You will park yourself forever

on the outside, your differentness once

and for all revealed, dangerous.

The names you give to yourself

will become epithets.

 

Your happiness will be called

bravery, denial.

Your sadness will justify their pity.

Your fear will magnify their fears.

Everything you say will prove something about

their god, or their economic system.

Your feelings, that change day

to day, kaleidoscopic,

will freeze in place,

brand you forever,

justify anything they decide to do

with you.

 

Those with power can afford

to tell their story

or not.

 

Those without power

risk everything to tell their story

and must.

 

Someone, somewhere

will hear your story and decide to fight,

to live and refuse compromise.

Someone else will tell

her own story,

risking everything.

A brilliant call to arms — to words? — for those who risk so much in speaking up.  It feels mundane to quote it in the context of a fast food restaurant.  But that’s the point:  in simply describing a visit to a restaurant, ordering food, interacting with staff, you risk being called a liar and having your motives and experiences questioned and belittled.

I devote my professional energies to disability rights law, but mostly I do that sitting at a computer researching or writing.  From that sheltered vantage point, it’s easy to lose sight of the courage it takes to tell your story in a courtroom and to be challenged, belittled, and accused of lying.  I am deeply grateful for those who are willing to tell their stories.

***************************

*  Antoninetti v. Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc., — F. 3d —, 2010 WL 3665525, at *7, slip op. at 16016 (9th Cir. Sept. 22, 2010).

** Quoted with permission. Thanks, Robin!

What would you do for serrano-wrapped dates?

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UPDATE (August 19, 2012):

Tim and I went  back to the 9th Door today and had a great time.   The seating had been improved significantly.  All of the low benches and sofas were gone, replaced by very accessible four-tops.  Spanish music had replaced the techno.  Everyone’s attitude was fabulous.  And of course the food remains spectacular.

ORIGINAL POST (May 22, 2011):

Turns out, Tim and I would put up with a fairly annoying level of discrimination and techno music for this tasty treat.  We went to our favorite tapas joint last night — Denver’s 9th Door.  We’ve always known that an evening at 9th Door is a trade-off between amazing food and a deeply annoying hipster-and-techno-music ambiance.  But we’ve been there many times and always been seated politely.  Last night, the manager decided we were a fire hazard.

You know how there are phrases that just signal discrimination, that members of minority groups hear often — each time from someone thinking he is original — demonstrating conclusively that you are different, outside, etc.  For example, saying an African-American is “articulate,” or an Asian is a “model minority,” or a Jewish name is “delightful.”*  Well, nothing says “other” better than calling you a fire hazard.

We got there at our usual old-fogie, early-bird-special hour and the manager showed us to a two-top — one we had occupied on a number of previous occasions — and then started vocally fretting about how she could arrange us so that neither Tim nor I would be a fire hazard.  In one arrangement, I would have been sitting in the aisle.  She rejected this, causing Tim to tell the rather chubby manager, “she’s only 105** pounds, she won’t take up the whole aisle.”  Oh snap!  Following much dramatic table-dragging and eye-rolling, we were seated, after which, of course, the entire length of the aisle she was worried about immediately filled up with annoying hipsters, posing a far more serious, non-wheelchair-related, fire hazard.

A word about techno music.  Does. Anyone. Like. That. Shit?  OK, 5 words.  It seems to me to have been composed by lab rats seeking revenge for whatever we’ve done to them in the name of science.  Hey, Rats – here’s your data:  techno music makes me want to rip my own ears off.  Now make it stop.

But I swear to God it was all worth it.

Dátiles: Crispy Serrano ham-wrapped dates stuffed with almonds and drunken goat cheese

Pimientos del Piquillo Rellenos: Fire-roasted piquillo peppers stuffed with fresh goat cheese and rosemary

Aged Manchego cheese with membrillo Cabrales blue cheese with almonds and honey Cabra cheese with dried fig chutney

Alcachofas a la Plancha: Crispy pan-fried artichoke hearts with lemon-thyme aioli

Croquetas de Hongos: Mushroom and rice croquette with sherry wine and mushroom sauce

Albóndigas: Traditional lamb meatballs served in a delicate Moorish mint almond sauce

Extra-bonus sexism.  See if you can spot it in their menu blather:

On Spain’s Costa del Sol, located between Malaga and Marbella, sits a quiet little mountain village called Mijas.

During the summer of 1969, after having been made famous by James Michener’s novel The Drifters, Mijas had become an expatriate community of writers and poets. On lazy afternoons, these expats would gather at their favorite bar – one without a name, recognizable only by the number nine that was carved into the door.

Behind the 9th door, they would imbibe on the local wine and brandy and share the tapas of the house, trading stories and reciting poetry to the local women until the early hours of the morning.

Raise your hands if the first time you read the words “expatriate community of writers and poets” you pictured a mixed group of men and women.  Ha!  Fooled you!  Or maybe I’m just being heteronormative:  male and female expat writers and poets could all have been seducing the local women.  Of this I’m confident:  no techno music was involved.

***************

* OK, this one might not make sense out of context.  Here’s the context:  I’m half Jewish, half, well, WASP.  When discussing a friend of mine with one of my older WASPy cousins, he responded to hearing the guy’s name by laughing out loud, repeating it over and over, saying “how delightful!”  Not an anti-Semetic bone in his body, but almost nothing could have made me feel more “other” at that moment.

** This reflects the historically accurate weight stated on my driver’s license.  Let’s just say:  it’s up for renewal this year.

Profiling Muslims at airport security is stupid and unAmerican

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For the past few days, I’ve been a bystander in a ridiculous email discussion about airport security and decided that, once I’d spent the entire drive up University Boulevard from County Line to Evans composing a rant in my head, that rant needed to be freed from my head and posted on the blog.

Airport security is a pain in the ass.  But that’s all it is.  Buck up, folks.  I always choose the pat-down because the nude photo thingy creeps me out.  It’s not fun, but it’s not, say, dental surgery.  Hell, it’s not even flossing.  Yup, I’d rather go through airport security than floss.  Life is full of annoying things.  Get over it.

And the thought that — to avoid this mild pain in the ass — we would sacrifice core American values is just beyond me.  I am constantly baffled by what it is conservatives love when they say they love America. It was the question addressed at fabulous verbose length by this guy.

What I really wanted to ask is this: Proud American? Really? What is it exactly that you’re proud of?  You say you love your country? You say you love the United States? Really? Which part? What is it that you love about it? Specifically, what exactly do you love about America?

Because, see, so far as I can tell, people like you seem to hate just about everything that makes the United States what it is.

And so on for like 45 paragraphs or so.  It really is hilarious, but I recommend skimming.

I’ll tell you what I love:  I love the Constitution.  I love the 14th Amendment, the one that promises equal protection of the laws.  Do we really want to violate one of the most fundamental American principles to save 15 minutes at the airport?  Really?

Oh and another thing:  it doesn’t work.  If we start profiling, we would be sacrificing our values for nothing.

[P]rofiling creates two paths through security: one with less scrutiny and one with more. And once you do that, you invite the terrorists to take the path with less scrutiny. That is, a terrorist group can safely probe any profiling system and figure out how to beat the profile. And once they do, they’re going to get through airport security with the minimum level of screening every time.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, we’re all more secure when we randomly select people for secondary screening — even if it means occasionally screening wheelchair-bound grandmothers and innocent looking children. And, as an added bonus, it doesn’t needlessly anger the ethnic groups we need on our side if we’re going to be more secure against terrorism.

But more than that, how would it work?  As another security expert noted,

But what do we go by? Name? Appearance? The vast majority of Arab Americans, for instance, are not only innocent of sympathy for terrorism, they’re actually Christian. To profile Muslims you’d have to target blacks, Asians, whites and Hispanics (remember Jose Padilla?). How could that work, and would it really help identify those who are intending harm or would it simply divert resources that could be better used on investigations?

So we set out to profile Muslims, but we can’t use name or appearance. What then?  Seriously, profiling advocates, if you want to target Muslims, you have to figure out a way to do it.  Religious identity cards?  A quick religious catechism with the TSA dudes?  I’m loving the idea of small-government conservatives authorizing the Federales to investigate individual religious beliefs to determine whether you get groped in the security line.

But ultimately, of course, it’s not just Muslims who commit terrorism:

The biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history prior to 9/11—the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing—was carried out by a white ex-Marine with a crew cut. The only major WMD attack of the “war on terror” era—the 2001 anthrax mailings—was apparently the handiwork of a white, Christian microbiologist angry that prominent Catholic politicians were pro-choice. And who stormed the Holocaust Museum last year, killing a security guard? Ayman-al Zawahiri? No, neo-Nazi octogenarian nutcase James Wenneker von Brunn.

I have to wait in line to take off my shoes, start up my computer, and step through a metal detector every time I go to court because Christians like to shoot at, blow up, and threaten federal buildings and officials.  That’s right, Christians.  Oh, right, of course, not Christians like you.  Bad Christians.  Maybe people calling themselves Christians who do not remotely have the values you would call Christian.

Exactly my point.

Stupid Lawyer Tricks: ADA Defense Stupidity

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An animated response to all the invective-filled, garment-rending articles about lawsuits against businesses that violate the ADA.  As with my earlier attempt, I think I succeeded only in cracking myself up.   Call it Animation Therapy.   Try it:  http://www.xtranormal.com

Couple of notes.  I love how the animated gestures are almost as awkward as the gestures I generate naturally.  On the other hand, I’m very disappointed that I could not make the automated voice render the word “law-nerd.”  This is a significant gap in the Xtranormal program.  And because I can overthink anything, I feel a tiny bit odd that my alter ego is African-American.  (Of COURSE she’s my alter-ego.  What did you think?)  Felt odd as in “in a post about civil rights what right do I have to speak from an African-American perspective?”  Truth is, of the characters available from Xtranormal in this set, I identified strongly with the obviously coffee-related superpower and did not think a minor difference in skin color should stop me.  In addition, my Caucasian choices were rather limited.  This one was not alter enough of an alter-ego:

This one perhaps TOO alter:

We’ve previously established that I’m no superhero in the kitchen.

And I basically didn’t know wtf this was:

So Super Coffee Woman it is!   Superpowers include:  high caffeine tolerance; overthinking; snark; wasting time she should be working playing with online animation programs.

Litigation animation, or, I crack myself up!

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I don’t know if any of you caught the hilarious animation ridiculing the iphone, but the tag line at the end was “Xtranormal.  If you can type, you can make movies.”  Well, I’ve always thought that I’d be a great animator, but for my total and complete inability to draw, so Xtranormal seemed like a great service:  my deathless prose; their artistic renderings.

Here is my first attempt.   Possibly not funny outside our case team, but importantly, I totally cracked myself up.

I pondered whether it was a good idea to post this and concluded that it was OK:  I don’t name the defendant, and every last bit of it is in the public record.  True,  as a technical matter, no giant saw blade was involved, and I don’t generally wear my Coffee Woman superhero outfit to court.  But it is otherwise completely accurate.

Beezus, Ramona, and Sharia

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One of my favorite characters in fiction  is Ramona Quimby.  And one of my favorite things that Ramona did was to announce “I”m going to throw up!” when she wanted to get out of a crowd and go home.  “Instantly everyone standing near her managed to move a few inches away.”*  I’ve often thought of that when I’m stuck in a crowded situation:  perhaps if I just announced that I was about to throw up, others would move away and give me the space my misanthropic, claustrophobic self needed.  But I think conservatives have given me even more effective and up-to-date tools:   I just have to wear a turban or invoke Sharia and I’ll have the place — any place — to myself.

I came up with this plan initially in response to an article I read about a passenger asking to be moved out of an airplane seat next to a guy in a turban.  Put aside the fact that,  if the turban-wearing dude is going to blow up the plane, being in a different row won’t really save your narrow-minded ass.  This is true but secondary.  Most important:  I now have an excellent device for getting an airplane row to myself.

More recently, we have the excellent spectacle of conservatives calling for a boycott of Campbells products because they are manufacturing a line of halal soups.  Now this is the type of political hypocrisy I just love:  free-enterprise-loving conservatives boycotting a company for making a rational cost-benefit decision to manufacture a product that people will buy.  But more than that, it suggests an excellent way to clear out the riff-raff.  And, as GOP senate candidate Sharron Angle has demonstrated, if it’s useful, you can assert that Sharia law governs almost anywhere without actually being — as a technical matter — correct.

In that spirit, conservatives, please note the following:

  1. The Safeway will be selling only Halal foods this morning, and all other weekend mornings, as well as any time within two hours before and after Bronco games.
  2. The DMV will be implementing Sharia during the month of November when I have to renew my driver’s license.
  3. Our flights to and from San Francisco this week will be known as “turban days” on Frontier.
  4. I-25 will be governed by Sharia, but only between the hours of 7 and 9 a.m. (northbound) and 4 and 6 p.m. (southbound).

Let this system work for you!  Don’t like the annoying fans in the opposing team’s stadium?  Make it know that the stadium is halal!  Find yourself in a slow-moving line?  Put on your turban and get served immediately!  And if the country ever drifts back toward rationality, you can always just announce that you’re going to throw up.

*********
* Note that I was able to recite these lines from memory but cannot remember the plot of the grown-up novel I read last week.

“Not pretty . . .”: a follow up

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I’ve gotten some feedback on the former post that I should name the stylist or at least the salon.  After thinking about it, I’ve concluded that that makes sense.  God knows I don’t have the readership to affect his business, but I don’t think he gets to make statements like that anonymously.

It was a guy named Marvin at the Matthew Morris salon.*

If I had had my wits about me — and the ability to freeze time for 18 hours while I composed my response — this is what I would have said to Marvin instead of just waving my civil rights lawyer cred at him.

Marvin, I wish I’d said, I’m guessing you said that because the people in the group home make you uncomfortable.  It’s very clear — since you told me this — that the recovering alcoholics scare you, and make you concerned that the fears of any family to whom you might want to sell your gorgeous house would drive down the sales price.  As you thought those things through, and came to conclusions about how you viewed the developmentally disabled and recovering people who wanted to live in your neighborhood, did you ever stop to think that discomfort and fear are exactly precisely what cause many people to discriminate against gay men and lesbians?  Change the setting and characters, and we can both easily imagine a group of homeowners in a conservative community talking about their gay neighbors in exactly the tones and words you used.

Don’t just “take them food at Christmas.”  Knock on the door.  Introduce yourself.  Get to know your neighbors.  Try to include them in your community as you would hope gay men and lesbians would be included in any community in which they chose to live.

**********************
* One of the reasons I hesitated to name the salon was because its owner just won some sort of reality show contest.  Don’t know which way that cuts.  (Sorry!).

Civ Pro Gone Evil

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This week I’m being Carrie’s associate.  She gave me a fascinating topic to research:  Can the doctor who involuntarily sterilized her client, a woman with developmental disabilities, argue that the statute he violated is unconstitutional because it infringes the privacy rights of … women with developmental disabilities.  I believe this is covered by the con law doctrine of chutzpah.

Anyway, in researching this, I have had more WTF moments than in most projects.   For example, I came across these two stunning examples of Civ Pro Gone Evil and thought I’d share.  (Squibs are from Westlaw; don’t blame me for the retro language.)

Lake v. Arnold, 232 F.3d 360 (3d Cir. 2000): Mentally retarded woman’s Pennsylvania claims challenging allegedly nonconsensual sterilization accrued under Pennsylvania’s two-year statute of limitations for personal injury suits when she was sterilized in 1977, notwithstanding that she was 16 years old and mentally retarded when sterilization occurred, and that any suit that could have been brought at that time would have been brought by her father and step-mother, who had arranged for sterilization to be performed.

Stump v. Sparkman, 435 U.S. 349 (1978): Woman, who had been sterilized by order of Indiana circuit court when she was 15 years old, and her husband brought civil rights action against her mother, her mother’s attorney, the medical practitioners who performed the sterilization and judge who ordered it. … The Supreme Court, Mr. Justice White, held that: … (2) neither the procedural errors the judge may have committed nor the lack of a specific statute authorizing his approval of the petition in question rendered him liable in damages, and (3) because the judge who performed the type of act normally performed only by judges and because he did so in his capacity as a circuit court judge, the informality with which he proceeded did not render his action “nonjudicial” for purposes of depriving him of his absolute immunity.

*****

Update:  Susan Greene’s excellent column about the case here.

More on the Islamic Community Center – a response to a conservative friend

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A friend who is also a lawyer wrote this challenging question:  do I think that everyone who is uncomfortable with the mosque/community center is racist or Islamophobic.  Since my draft answer ended up being sort of long-winded, I figured I’d just post it.

Dear Friend –

Thanks for challenging me.  I like that — our views are meant to be challenged.  The answer is:  I think folks may be uncomfortable with the community center for a large variety of reasons, many deeply personal, many non-racist.  As I mentioned in a previous post, my father died in an ICU in Orlando and I haven’t been willing to visit Florida in the 13 years since.  It’s painful and it’s irrational, but I get it.

While there are many personal reasons for differing reactions to the proposed community center, I think the people who are getting loud about it are largely political opportunists, with a smattering of bigots and Islamophobes.

We’re both trained as lawyers, which means we know how to cross examine and impeach a witness.  Does an answer make sense?  Is it consistent with the witness’s other answers?  Here is what I see with respect to this current manufactured controversy:

  • The Imam we are now supposed to suspect was sent by the Bush administration to promote religious tolerance around the world.
  • The area near but not in Ground Zero has never before been hallowed.  There is an existing mosque almost as close, as well as a large number of random, un-holy uses:  a strip club; stores; restaurants; etc.
  • The other 9/11 site — the Pentagon — contains a mosque.  No one cares.
  • No one has previously had much respect for the feelings of victims of tragedies.  When the NRA hosted its convention in Denver after the Columbine massacre, it was the right wingers standing up for their constitutional right to do that, and explaining that the depraved actions of two boys could not be blamed on a larger group with whom they claimed affinity, that the pain of the Columbine families should not dictate where they held their convention.  No one cares that there is still a gun store a mile from the high school.   No one cares that there are Christian churches near the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
  • Those who question the presence of Saudi money do not seem to have a problem that the same Saudi guy owns a big chunk of News Corp, Fox’s parent company.  If it’s bad for the Saudis to hurt our feelings architecturally, isn’t it worse for them to have the power to blast propaganda into our living rooms?  And the people who are now complaining about the mosque never raised their voices about the Bush family’s close ties to these same people, and the fact that they were all secretly flown out of the country when the non-Saudi Americans were grounded and grieving.

None of the reasons we are hearing for the anger being directed at the community center holds up to cross-examination.  That doesn’t make the objectors racists; it makes them opportunists.  When the political identities were different (the Bush administration; NRA; Christian churches) there was no objection.  When Sarah Palin hadn’t yet tweeted about it, there was no objection.  That’s not racist, it’s political.

But another thing we lawyers are trained to do is to work with hypotheticals.  So let’s take the hypothetical that you’re right, that this building is being built with evil intent and dirty money.  I think by protesting we are missing an enormous opportunity, the opportunity that is being seized so eloquently by Michael Bloomberg, the opportunity that your examples of European bigotry cry out for.  WE’RE BETTER THAN THEY ARE.  This is our chance to say to the world:   We can choose tolerance.  We can embrace this community center.  We can DEFINE this community center.  It will become part of OUR message,  not some intuited message of Moorish victory.  And note, we have not heard from Al Qaeda that this is a “memorial to victory.”  The only people saying that are Americans!  We are shouting from the rooftops the precise message we profess to fear.

What if, from the beginning, we had all embraced the community center in the name of American patriotism.  It would crush any alternative meaning.  (Candidly, I keep imaging America as the Whos Down in Whoville, holding hands and singing songs, with the evil terrorist Grinch looking down from his perch, disappointed that he could not steal the true spirit of Christmas.)

When the world looks at us, do you want them to see the whiners on Fox and the screamers at Ground Zero?  Or do you want them to see Michael Bloomberg saying:

Just as we fought communism by showing the world the power of free markets and free elections, so must we fight terrorism by showing the world the power of religious freedom and cultural tolerance. Freedom and tolerance will always defeat tyranny and terrorism – and that’s the great lesson of the 20th century, and we must not abandon it here in the 21st.

I encourage you to read his whole speech. And I challenge you not to burst with pride and patriotism when you do.  But you also ask that moderate Muslims denounce terrorism.  Many have, over and over.  Here is what Imam Rauf had to say at a memorial to Daniel Pearl, who died at the hands of terrorists.  It is generally a very moving tribute to religious harmony.  But specifically, he said:

We are here especially to seek your forgiveness and of your family for what has been done in the name of Islam.

My views on how we should respond to this come from a deep pride in our country and a conviction that we are better than the rest of the world.  We are a nation of immigrants.  It’s our strength.  We are a nation of people who can disagree with each other and live side by side. There’s no synagogue in Mecca because WE’RE BETTER THAN THEY ARE.  Do the people making that comparison really want to measure our religious tolerance against that of the Saudis?

The common ground I hope we can find is that, while some people regard the community center as benign and others as suspicious, we all agree that “Freedom and tolerance will always defeat tyranny and terrorism – and that’s the great lesson of the 20th century, and we must not abandon it here in the 21st.”

I hope you don’t mind that I blogged in response to your question.  Please feel free to use the comments to tell me how full of shit I am!

Your Friend,

Amy

We Did Not Build this Country on Sensitivities

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I’m becoming a huge fan of Michael Bloomberg. He has the brains to understand our constitution, the balls to support it even when it’s complicated or hurtful, and the words to explain to the rest of us that

if we say that a mosque or a community center should not be built near the perimeter of the World Trade Center site, we would compromise our commitment to fighting terror with freedom. We would undercut the values and principles that so many heroes died protecting.

Amen. Read the whole thing.

The Muslim-community-center-somewhere-in-lower-Manhattan-just-around-the-corner-from-the strip-club-and-BBQ-joint controversy is quickly becoming one of my favorites of all time, and not only because I’m having so much fun reading Bloomberg’s latest rhetorical demolition of the chickenshits who would enshrine fear and prejudice so close to the site where our enemies tried send the very same message.

No, this one rocks — with apologies to the unfortunate African-American construction worker who got heckled for simply being Black in the vicinity of Ground Zero — because it is so rife with right-wing hypocrisy.

For example, one of the righties’ new talking points is that they’re not prejudiced (no! no!), they’re just questioning the source of the money. You know, it comes from that Arab guy, the one who, oops, owns a large chunk of News Corp, and hangs out with the Bush family.

OK, yes, I get my news from the Daily Show. Laughing at the news is the only way it’s bearable these days. But I challenge any mosque-fearing righties to explain why Saudi money is scary when it’s funding a community center but not when it owns a big piece of a major right-wing propaganda machine.

I’m also loving the fact that my gun-shop-near-Columbine example turned out to to be not only snarky but (almost) TRUE!! The NRA was asked to move its convention from Denver the year after Columbine based on (wait for it) sensitivities. Charlton Heston explained, correctly, that “American must stop this predictable pattern of reaction.”  (It’s at the 7:24ish mark, though Jon Stewart is pretty funny, t0o.)  We can’t blame the NRA for the acts of two disturbed kids, and we can’t blame an entire religion for the acts of thugs who profess its beliefs. And most of all, we can’t compromise our laws and values in the name of sensitivities.  We are tougher than that. We did not become a beacon to the rest of the world by whining every time someone did something that hurt someone’s feelings.

Update: No longer funny. “A city cab driver is in the hospital after being stabbed by a passenger who allegedly asked if he was Muslim, police tell NY1.” It’s a pogrom. Suck on that, Abe Fucking Foxman.

Update 2:  This appeared on the Facebook page of someone I don’t even know, but I thought it was cool.  After subjecting the question to quantitative analysis, the clear conclusion is:  Get A Grip!