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What do Gates’s defenders want?
What we’ve learned over the last three days is that there is a very sizable number of people in this country, white and black, including the president, who believe that being black means that you have the right to yell and scream at a police officer who is acting in the line of duty, to keep demanding that he tell you his name when he’s already told you his name, to call him a racist over and over, to keep accusing him of targeting you because you’re black, to threaten him repeatedly by telling him “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” to carry on this behavior in public in front of a group of police officers and neighbors, and to continue this behavior even after the officer has warned you twice that you are becoming disorderly and must calm down.
Obviously the problem is that the laws against disorderly conduct are discriminatory against blacks, because they get charged with disorderly conduct much more often than whites, and also, given America’s history of racial discrimination, blacks ought to get a break. So what we will do is repeal the disorderly conduct laws when it comes to blacks. Henceforth, blacks shall have complete license to refuse to cooperate with police, to yell at police officers, to call them racist, and to threaten them by telling them they don’t know who they’re messing with, and to continue such yelling in public places where officers are performing their duties, until the police quietly leave the area. Such is the society that Obama, Gates, and all of Gates’s supporters would like America to become. Email entry |