There’s no shortage of hate in Pennsylvania
I was raked over the coals – rather gently – by a couple of readers for mentioning the anti-fas along with the other counter marchers in Charlottesville last week.
They were right. I don’t care for the anti-fas’ tactics and am sorry I mentioned them.
I’ve seen them at other marches, with their bandanas, local attorneys’ numbers magicmarkered onto their arms and their backpacks full of milk to wash the tear gas out of their eyes.
When one side comes with flagpoles, shields, torches, helmets and guns and the other comes with bandanas, lawyers’ phone numbers, sticks and the intention to shout out the opposition, that is not non-violence, that is surefire asking to be attacked and threatening to attack.
We had drum lines and pink hats, not guns, at the Women’s March and the Climate Change March and the Science March. No one felt the need to arm themselves and there was no violence.
Still marches are meant to demand attention in a way that letters to the editor cannot and it can make onlookers uncomfortable and sometimes even disrupt traffic.
Legislatures in several southern states had already introduced bills to protect people who “accidentally” run over a demonstrator from criminal charges when James Alex Fields Jr. plowed into a group of counter-marchers, killing Heather Heyer two weeks ago.
Maybe publicity about that legislation inspired him.
And isn’t idea?
Southern legislatures have become very adept at skirting the edges of the law, most particularly when it comes to abortion and voter suppression, so I guess bills making it OK to use your car as a lethal weapon against marchers should come as no surprise.
But shouting down the other side and disrupting traffic does not make the anti-fas and other counter-marchers “just as bad” as neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s definition of a hate group is one organized that a charming by like-minded people whose purpose is to hate an entire class of people for their largely immutable – unchangeable – characteristics, such as the color of their skin, their religion, their language, their citizenship status.
Check out the SPLC’s interactive map of hate groups in the United States at www. splcenter.org.
Look at Montana, a state with a population 1 million: 90 percent white, 6.5 percent American Indian and 0.6 percent (that six tenths of 1 percent) black.
According to the SPLC, there are seven hate groups in Montana and five of them reserve their hatred specifically for Muslims, even though it is highly doubtful that more than a handful have ever met a Muslim.
The other two groups are white nationalist groups, which undoubtedly also hate Muslims but are defined as people who want to maintain white political and economic dominance in majority white countries.
The threat seems minimal in the “Big Sky Country.“
Hawaii, on the other hand with a population of 1.5 million is (surprise!) only 26 percent white, 37 percent Asian, 10 percent native Hawaiian, 2.6 percent black and 23 percent mixed ethnic heritage.
And how many hate groups does the SPLC say Hawaii has? Zero. Isn’t that remarkable? Nobody there seems to be sweating to keep the white “race” dominant.
The SPLC says Pennsylvania has 40 hate groups, making us the state with the fifth largest number after California (79), Florida (63), Texas (55) and Virginia (42). So proud.
Our state harbors the Ku Klux Klan (6 groups), racist skinheads (7), Black separatists (6), white nationalists (5) and Neo-Nazis (3), according to the SPLC.
In some cases, the SPLC laughably applies the “hate” label to tiny groups of crazies, though they fit the definition. Acorn to oak, though, I suppose.
A couple of very small renegade “radical traditionalist” Catholic organizations, Catholic Counterpoint in Broomall and the followers of Robert Sungenis (who?) on the Maryland border, are listed as hate groups because they want to return the Catholic Church to a time before Vatican II when the church doctrinairely hated Jews for killing Jesus.
Catholic Counterpoint is free to sell its video “Synagogue of Satan” on the Internet because of free speech. You’re free not to buy it.
The Reformation Bible Puritan Baptist Church/ Vatican Assassins (hey, I don’t name these outfits) is basically a guy named Eric Phelps who wants to secede and establish Lebanon County as an all-white, allProtestant “country.”
The H.L. Mencken Club in Elizabethtown, named after the cynical early 20th century newspaper columnist, has an annual conference of white nationalists at an airport hotel near Baltimore.
These are the fringiest of the fringe and can be ignored.
As for the rest, I agree with the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who said the way to treat hateful speech is with more speech.
That appears to have worked with the white nationalist group Act for America, which on Wednesday cancelled 67 “America First” rallies across 36 states that the group was planning to hold Sept. 9.
Apparently, nobody was signing up.
Maybe its followers realize that they are never going to move into the mainstream of American public opinion no matter how loudly our president dogwhistles to them.
Or maybe it really doesn’t have any followers.