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conulyWestboro Baptist protests Jews in NYC. New Yorkers collectively decide not to feed the trolls. Go us!
Messages of Hate Met by Scorn and Shrugs
By A.G. SULZBERGER and COLIN MOYNIHAN
They were only seven protesters barricaded on a small fringe of sidewalk on Central Park West, but their anti-gay, anti-Semitic signs and slogans were earning them plenty of attention. A dozen police officers kept watch. Passers-by stopped and gawked in curiosity, disbelief and outrage.
“What is wrong with you?” yelled a woman from the window of a white Mercedes paused at a stoplight next to the group. One man raised his hand in a rude gesture as he strode by; another mimicked a Nazi salute. A young jogger turned to the protesters and declared, “I feel sorry for you.”
The protesters were members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a fundamentalist splinter group in Topeka, Kan., that travels around the country staging protests that reflect a long list of intolerances and a talent for offending.
The members arrived in New York on Friday, spending the weekend holding tiny protests at prominent Jewish institutions around the city, bearing signs like “Jews killed Christ” and “God hates Israel.” And, for the most part, the city shrugged it off.
“It wasn’t really a real demonstration,” said Sherry Kirschenbaum, a spokeswoman for the Jewish Theological Seminary, where five adults and one child protested for less than two hours on Saturday. “There were very few people and nobody really for them to engage with.”
The group’s leader, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr., who is also the father or grandfather of much of its membership, is known for his vitriolic anti-gay views. He has picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the gay man beaten and left to die in 1998 in Wyoming, as well as the funerals of soldiers, arguing that American combat deaths are God’s punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.
Since April, Mr. Phelps has made Jews his primary target, protesting at Jewish institutions around the country, according to Marilyn Mayo, a director of the Center on Extremism of the Anti-Defamation League, which has tracked the group for many years. One of those institutions was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where a security guard was fatally shot this month; a white supremacist has been charged in the murder.
“The fact that this organization targeted New York City for a weekend where they could go synagogue to synagogue spewing anti-Semitism and also homophobia is just the height of ignorance and hatred,” said the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who was one of more than 100 counterprotesters gathered Sunday morning at the Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a gay synagogue in Greenwich Village.
Rebekah Phelps-Davis, 48, said that her group had come to New York to take on the large Jewish population for its support of “the homosexual agenda.” To that end, around noon on Sunday, she stood near the entrance to Central Park at 72nd Street, cordoned off by blue wooden police sawhorses. The group was out of sight of its intended target — a celebration inside the park marking the centennial of Tel Aviv — but its members did their best to provoke those who happened by. (“We do not intend to convert the devil,” she explained.)
One woman tried to pull an Israeli flag from under the feet of one protester before the police warned her that the group was acting within its rights. Suzanne Rockman, a retired teacher who lives in the neighborhood, said that while she did not like the message, “I believe in freedom of speech.”
At 1 p.m., the protesters packed up, tucking their placards into oversize portfolio cases. The crowd clapped and jeered as they left.
In Missouri, a Neo-Nazi group has decided to adopt a stretch of highway, and the state has responded by renaming the highway after a rabbi. I support their right to clean litter from the highway - at least SOME good can come out of that group of degenerate rejects - but must laugh at the fact that their goal is to "send all non-whites in the US back to where they came from". Even if you accept the premise that this would somehow be a good thing, I see a glaring problem with this. Plus I can't help thinking it'd be a lot cheaper and easier for them to just go back to where THEY ostensibly came from (they can pick any of their ancestors they please!) except I don't want to inflict them on Europe.
In Missouri, a Fight Over a Highway Adoption
By MICHAEL COOPER
When a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement volunteered last year to clean a Missouri highway, and get official recognition for it in the form of an Adopt-a-Highway sign, state officials felt powerless to refuse. So they took a rather clever tack.
Several years before, the Missouri Department of Transportation had lost a long legal battle to try and prevent the Ku Klux Klan from adopting a highway on freedom-of-speech grounds. So the state decided to counter the Nazi group’s speech with more speech, in the form of another roadside sign.
Officials are renaming the stretch of highway near Springfield that the organization cleans after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled Nazi Germany and became a prominent Jewish theologian and civil rights advocate in the United States.
The renaming, which would take effect this summer, was approved by the legislature as part of a large transportation bill. The governor has not yet signed the bill but supports the concept of renaming the road, an aide said. The measure is not popular, though, with some members of the National Socialist Movement, who clean a half-mile stretch four times a year.
“I think it’s childish,” said Cynthia Keene, 38, a sergeant in the group’s Springfield unit. “If they want to have Nazis out there stomping on a Jewish-named highway, that’s their choice.”
The episode highlights some of the complications that can ensue as states increasingly turn to private groups to keep their ever-growing networks of roads clean.
In some Adopt-a-Highway programs, sponsors clean up the roads themselves, while in others they hire contractors. Either way, the programs free up millions of dollars in pinched state transportation budgets for more vital maintenance projects.
The vast majority of highways are adopted by civic groups and businesses. But states have little leeway when it comes to signing off on the adoption papers for their roads, and several have found themselves compelled to put up signs recognizing groups with long histories of racism or anti-Semitism or associations or businesses that have engendered controversy.
Kentucky officials were surprised to learn from reporters this year that the National Alliance, a white separatist group, had adopted a highway. The group’s sign honored its late founder, William Pierce, whose novel “The Turner Diaries” inspired Timothy J. McVeigh to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.
Chuck Wolfe, a spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, said officials initially hoped they could terminate the contract, but determined that doing so would open them to costly litigation that might fail.
Some states are grappling with how to administer the programs, which have become widespread in the past two decades.
California’s Adopt-a-Highway program stopped accepting new applicants about a year ago to re-evaluate its program. The state has been tangled in litigation over the program since it tried to remove an Adopt-a-Highway sign it had awarded to the San Diego Minutemen, a self-appointed border patrol group, on a stretch of road near an official Border Patrol checkpoint in Southern California.
Latino lawmakers and immigrants’ rights groups had objected to the sign and accused the Minutemen of promoting discrimination. A federal judge later ordered the sign back up.
Earlier this year, several cities allowed the fast-food chain KFC to fill potholes and stencil “Re-Freshed by KFC” in temporary lettering on them. In response, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offered to pave potholes if they could write “KFC Tortures Animals” on them. The group was refused.
And after Connecticut officials worried aloud about “suggestive” billboard advertisements on one of their highways, a store that sells pornography adopted parts of the highway.
In Missouri, members of the National Socialist Movement spent last Saturday cleaning up their bit of road and last Sunday protesting homosexuality. The group’s Web site calls for a nation where “only those of pure White blood” who are not Jewish or gay can be citizens, and demanding that “all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force.”
Ms. Keene said members of the group, who sometimes wear swastikas, wanted to do community service. “We decided about a year ago we wanted to get more involved,” she said.
But their Adopt-a-Highway sign, which says “Litter Cleanup 0.5 Miles National Socialist Movement Springfield Unit,” upset people in the area, particularly Jews. The Jewish Community Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee in Kansas City hit on the idea of renaming the road.
“It was not an original thought,” confessed Michael Abrams, the group’s chairman, who recalled how a stretch of road near downtown St. Louis that had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan was renamed in 2000 for Rosa Parks. The group chose Rabbi Heschel as an appropriate person to honor, noting that he marched in Alabama with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
State Representative Sara Lampe, a Springfield Democrat who introduced the renaming bill, said a memorial sign approved by the legislature sent a stronger signal than an Adopt-a-Highway sign.
“Memorial highways are about people we honor and we value,” she said. “Adopt-a-Highway signs are self-requested. Any business can request a sign.”
And finally, just to round this out - hunger is a great motivator MY ASS! I know, I know, "having children is a choice" (assuming your abortion clinic isn't bombed when you're in there). But BEING a child isn't.
Oh, no, wait, one more. Repeat after me: When we find out that the "22 year old" we hired to strip is actually a 14 year old who was kidnapped and forced to perform (statistical low end, I know) we do NOT sue HER! (And? BS they didn't know how old she was. She's a damn kid! K I D. No WAY she looked 22.
This world sucks sometimes.
Messages of Hate Met by Scorn and Shrugs
By A.G. SULZBERGER and COLIN MOYNIHAN
They were only seven protesters barricaded on a small fringe of sidewalk on Central Park West, but their anti-gay, anti-Semitic signs and slogans were earning them plenty of attention. A dozen police officers kept watch. Passers-by stopped and gawked in curiosity, disbelief and outrage.
“What is wrong with you?” yelled a woman from the window of a white Mercedes paused at a stoplight next to the group. One man raised his hand in a rude gesture as he strode by; another mimicked a Nazi salute. A young jogger turned to the protesters and declared, “I feel sorry for you.”
The protesters were members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a fundamentalist splinter group in Topeka, Kan., that travels around the country staging protests that reflect a long list of intolerances and a talent for offending.
The members arrived in New York on Friday, spending the weekend holding tiny protests at prominent Jewish institutions around the city, bearing signs like “Jews killed Christ” and “God hates Israel.” And, for the most part, the city shrugged it off.
“It wasn’t really a real demonstration,” said Sherry Kirschenbaum, a spokeswoman for the Jewish Theological Seminary, where five adults and one child protested for less than two hours on Saturday. “There were very few people and nobody really for them to engage with.”
The group’s leader, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr., who is also the father or grandfather of much of its membership, is known for his vitriolic anti-gay views. He has picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the gay man beaten and left to die in 1998 in Wyoming, as well as the funerals of soldiers, arguing that American combat deaths are God’s punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.
Since April, Mr. Phelps has made Jews his primary target, protesting at Jewish institutions around the country, according to Marilyn Mayo, a director of the Center on Extremism of the Anti-Defamation League, which has tracked the group for many years. One of those institutions was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where a security guard was fatally shot this month; a white supremacist has been charged in the murder.
“The fact that this organization targeted New York City for a weekend where they could go synagogue to synagogue spewing anti-Semitism and also homophobia is just the height of ignorance and hatred,” said the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who was one of more than 100 counterprotesters gathered Sunday morning at the Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a gay synagogue in Greenwich Village.
Rebekah Phelps-Davis, 48, said that her group had come to New York to take on the large Jewish population for its support of “the homosexual agenda.” To that end, around noon on Sunday, she stood near the entrance to Central Park at 72nd Street, cordoned off by blue wooden police sawhorses. The group was out of sight of its intended target — a celebration inside the park marking the centennial of Tel Aviv — but its members did their best to provoke those who happened by. (“We do not intend to convert the devil,” she explained.)
One woman tried to pull an Israeli flag from under the feet of one protester before the police warned her that the group was acting within its rights. Suzanne Rockman, a retired teacher who lives in the neighborhood, said that while she did not like the message, “I believe in freedom of speech.”
At 1 p.m., the protesters packed up, tucking their placards into oversize portfolio cases. The crowd clapped and jeered as they left.
In Missouri, a Neo-Nazi group has decided to adopt a stretch of highway, and the state has responded by renaming the highway after a rabbi. I support their right to clean litter from the highway - at least SOME good can come out of that group of degenerate rejects - but must laugh at the fact that their goal is to "send all non-whites in the US back to where they came from". Even if you accept the premise that this would somehow be a good thing, I see a glaring problem with this. Plus I can't help thinking it'd be a lot cheaper and easier for them to just go back to where THEY ostensibly came from (they can pick any of their ancestors they please!) except I don't want to inflict them on Europe.
In Missouri, a Fight Over a Highway Adoption
By MICHAEL COOPER
When a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement volunteered last year to clean a Missouri highway, and get official recognition for it in the form of an Adopt-a-Highway sign, state officials felt powerless to refuse. So they took a rather clever tack.
Several years before, the Missouri Department of Transportation had lost a long legal battle to try and prevent the Ku Klux Klan from adopting a highway on freedom-of-speech grounds. So the state decided to counter the Nazi group’s speech with more speech, in the form of another roadside sign.
Officials are renaming the stretch of highway near Springfield that the organization cleans after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled Nazi Germany and became a prominent Jewish theologian and civil rights advocate in the United States.
The renaming, which would take effect this summer, was approved by the legislature as part of a large transportation bill. The governor has not yet signed the bill but supports the concept of renaming the road, an aide said. The measure is not popular, though, with some members of the National Socialist Movement, who clean a half-mile stretch four times a year.
“I think it’s childish,” said Cynthia Keene, 38, a sergeant in the group’s Springfield unit. “If they want to have Nazis out there stomping on a Jewish-named highway, that’s their choice.”
The episode highlights some of the complications that can ensue as states increasingly turn to private groups to keep their ever-growing networks of roads clean.
In some Adopt-a-Highway programs, sponsors clean up the roads themselves, while in others they hire contractors. Either way, the programs free up millions of dollars in pinched state transportation budgets for more vital maintenance projects.
The vast majority of highways are adopted by civic groups and businesses. But states have little leeway when it comes to signing off on the adoption papers for their roads, and several have found themselves compelled to put up signs recognizing groups with long histories of racism or anti-Semitism or associations or businesses that have engendered controversy.
Kentucky officials were surprised to learn from reporters this year that the National Alliance, a white separatist group, had adopted a highway. The group’s sign honored its late founder, William Pierce, whose novel “The Turner Diaries” inspired Timothy J. McVeigh to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.
Chuck Wolfe, a spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, said officials initially hoped they could terminate the contract, but determined that doing so would open them to costly litigation that might fail.
Some states are grappling with how to administer the programs, which have become widespread in the past two decades.
California’s Adopt-a-Highway program stopped accepting new applicants about a year ago to re-evaluate its program. The state has been tangled in litigation over the program since it tried to remove an Adopt-a-Highway sign it had awarded to the San Diego Minutemen, a self-appointed border patrol group, on a stretch of road near an official Border Patrol checkpoint in Southern California.
Latino lawmakers and immigrants’ rights groups had objected to the sign and accused the Minutemen of promoting discrimination. A federal judge later ordered the sign back up.
Earlier this year, several cities allowed the fast-food chain KFC to fill potholes and stencil “Re-Freshed by KFC” in temporary lettering on them. In response, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offered to pave potholes if they could write “KFC Tortures Animals” on them. The group was refused.
And after Connecticut officials worried aloud about “suggestive” billboard advertisements on one of their highways, a store that sells pornography adopted parts of the highway.
In Missouri, members of the National Socialist Movement spent last Saturday cleaning up their bit of road and last Sunday protesting homosexuality. The group’s Web site calls for a nation where “only those of pure White blood” who are not Jewish or gay can be citizens, and demanding that “all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force.”
Ms. Keene said members of the group, who sometimes wear swastikas, wanted to do community service. “We decided about a year ago we wanted to get more involved,” she said.
But their Adopt-a-Highway sign, which says “Litter Cleanup 0.5 Miles National Socialist Movement Springfield Unit,” upset people in the area, particularly Jews. The Jewish Community Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee in Kansas City hit on the idea of renaming the road.
“It was not an original thought,” confessed Michael Abrams, the group’s chairman, who recalled how a stretch of road near downtown St. Louis that had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan was renamed in 2000 for Rosa Parks. The group chose Rabbi Heschel as an appropriate person to honor, noting that he marched in Alabama with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
State Representative Sara Lampe, a Springfield Democrat who introduced the renaming bill, said a memorial sign approved by the legislature sent a stronger signal than an Adopt-a-Highway sign.
“Memorial highways are about people we honor and we value,” she said. “Adopt-a-Highway signs are self-requested. Any business can request a sign.”
And finally, just to round this out - hunger is a great motivator MY ASS! I know, I know, "having children is a choice" (assuming your abortion clinic isn't bombed when you're in there). But BEING a child isn't.
Oh, no, wait, one more. Repeat after me: When we find out that the "22 year old" we hired to strip is actually a 14 year old who was kidnapped and forced to perform (statistical low end, I know) we do NOT sue HER! (And? BS they didn't know how old she was. She's a damn kid! K I D. No WAY she looked 22.
This world sucks sometimes.
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-22 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-23 06:14 pm (UTC)I know a kid who, when she was 12, was always getting hit on. SHE thought it was because most adult men are pervs. I spent a lot of time trying to convince her it was because she was tall and had breasts.
Hunger=motivator?
Date: 2009-06-22 08:11 pm (UTC)Yes, children are helpless to feed themselves, by and large. Someone who's 17? Not so much.
Re: Hunger=motivator?
Date: 2009-06-23 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-23 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-23 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-23 10:49 am (UTC)Although, as a counter argument against myself here, I have to admit that ever since my body stopped producing testosterone and I've become asexual, apparent age is really something that I've stopped noticing as much.
But as a counter argument against my counter argument, this might be part of the bigger problem where I've all but stopped noticing race (and in some cases sex).
I'm starting to think more and more that perhaps I should have just not made this comment at all, as I've invalidated myself repeatedly.
I like cats.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-24 12:10 am (UTC)So do I.