enthalpy

Sunday, May 09, 2004


Finally, Santa Fe is taking an appropriate stance to the Klan: ignoring them.
The Ku Klux Klan may no longer have a sympathetic audience in this small community with a long history of racial strife.

Saturday, a group of 10 Klansmen, a few dressed in the traditional white robes and hoods, were in town to promote their group. But while nearly 2,000 people, mostly protestors, came out when the group visited last year, this time around they were pretty much left alone.

Santa Fe police officers were under orders to ignore the Klan with the hope the group would eventually pack up and leave, the Texas City Sun reported today.
Only ten Klan guys showed up? That doesn't sound like much of a rally to me. Hell, it's barely even a softball team.

The First Amendment protects people's right to speak their minds, and the cornerstone of that freedom lies in protecting unpopular opinions. Popular opinions, by their very nature, don't need to be protected. But it seems like it's a lot less likely that the guys in dunce hats will show up if they know they won't make the paper and the 6 o'clock news. If the community is really that opposed to them and they ignore them, they'll eventually crawl back under the rock they came from.

I guess this really crystallizes why Santa Fe is still on their whistle-stop tour:
Last year a black student received threatening letters complete with a drawing of a hangman's noose and a misspelled racial slur.
If you're going to go to the trouble to make a racial slur, maybe you should invest in a proofreader.



Home