Midland School District Vice President Clint McCance in Arkansas has shocked the school district by responding to a campaign to end bullying of gay students with a hateful (if not gleeful) Facebook commentary on gay teen suicides. Using the terms “queer” and “fag,” McCance promised to disown his own children if they are gay and refused to mourn the death of “sinners.”
McCance appeared to relish “the fact that [gay people] often give each other AIDS and die.” His diatribe was in response to the “Spirit Day” campaign that recognizes the problem of bullying of gay students and encourages students to wear purple to remember young people who committed suicide because of such bullying. McCance would have nothing of it, writing “Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers committed suicide. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed therselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE.”
He then later wrote this little loving note for his children: ““I would disown my kids they were gay. They will not be welcome at my home or in my vicinity. I will absolutely run them off. Of course my kids will know better. My kids will have solid christian beliefs. See it infects everyone.” Would not be welcomed “in his vicinity”? What does that mean? He actually does not have the authority to “run off” gay people from his vicinity.
Then he shared his personal celebration of the death of gay people:
No because being a fag doesnt give you the right to ruin the rest of our lives. If you get easily offended by being called a fag then dont tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself. I dont care how people decide to live their lives. They dont bother me if they keep it to thereselves. It pisses me off though that we make a special purple fag day for them. I like that fags cant procreate. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die. If you arent against it, you might as well be for it.”
Of course, “enjoying” the fact that some people have a long suffering illness and die is an admission of mental illness. Of course, what is most striking is how McCance uses religion to justify such hate. His pride in his instilling his beliefs in his children is a chilling thought of prejudice being passed down as a prized family legacy.
Source: CNN
Jonathan Turley
As it turns out, the time stamp of my falling upon this particular thread is July, 2012; almost two years since the conversation ended.
And yet, in knowing what led me to this particular thread in the first place, perhaps opening with a point or two surrounding the issue of time travel and the limitations of such an engineering theory.
Let me fast forward this thread to a short time ago to where one single outburst of behavior created far more devastation than the death toll suggests. One glance at any number of keyword-driven matrixes will be almost certain to display some form of a specific set of keywords pertaining to the hostile and horrifying taking of human lives.
Now I have none of the alphabet combinations Dr. Harris possesses and I don’t even have a driver’s license (too expensive for my current lifestyle), but I found reassurance in his articulation of struggling to discern what text-based combination will generate a response at least close to what it is he seeks from publishing his own thoughts for others to read.
It isn’t always easy or simply to write to a broad-based audience, even when a writer believes they understand their audience and what kind of audience they are hoping to entertain with their works, such as myself. Dr. Harris already mentioned he was on a path searching for something from the Greater Good class – protect youth from the actions of all human beings seeking only to harm. Despite the extreme example I cited towards my opening thougth, perhaps every individual taking pause prior to speaking would be of welcome contribution to the Greater Good class as a whole is as worth an ideal as any other option being present and not always accounted for by the outside world – nor the inside of the person existing in this world.
I find it important to assert a quirk to my even discovering this particular page, let alone this article. I had been spending the past few days searching for information regarding a very specific mental health facility and was being comfounded and dumbfounded with my keyword combinations, so today I decided to go outright radical and switched search engines.
Perhaps it is only my cynicism that colored my intent to weave the term “radical” into a sarcastic swipe at just how hard-core dedicated so many online users seem to be with at least some of their research habits, but there is some truth to the risks vs. rewards of changing up one’s search index habits every now and again.
So here I am with a pretty high-charged headline attached to a story in which a school official stated his rule (perhaps his policy) in a public forum, especially one carrying as much socio/pol/psy weight as Facebook.
At first, my own pessimistic tendencies reflected on the possibility that someone hacked into this school official’s account and without any further research, perhaps such a truth has transpired, thereby invalidating such powerful charges of…
Hold on. Let me go check…yep. The only citation of any rule being broken by anyone’s actions turns up within Dr. Harris’ commentary.
Damn! At this point, I’m certainly the one with the problem, not because I have to ask myself I really care enough about whether or not this guys account was hacked or not, but the fact that I have to fall upon some form of conclusion, even if such a conclusion is but a mere placeholder able and available for alteration should new information be presented. Do I really want to spend another minute on this particular Saturday night studying a topic that has absolutely nothing to my original objective of logging online to begin with?
As it turns out, kinda sorta. At least the current length of my text suggests it.
For anyone to reveal joy over the news of any human being making the choice to take their own life, the ingredients that went into such an act tend to remain irrelevant in conversations rolling towards grasping more insight into what possible events went into the mental accounting of the person concluding that death is the only escape – the only vent, if I may – from whatever haunts them, really worries me. It confuses me. There have been exceptions to this claim of mine, but more often than not, there is at least one person’s thoughts that can represent a starting point for such a conclusion driven by a self. Could it not be possible that our ability to view such types of commentary in such an over-saturated manner, we still don’t have a set of numbers in our law books to apply to these types of situations.
Does society begin to form a mechanism and method to begin mass branding of people so that someone is demanded to carry a visible “I was once a bully” badge irrelevant of the facts of the circumstance that came to the numeric conclusion that yes, someone put forth an act designed to teach fear of a biological trait through their publication of such a statement in the first place?
What if my current opinion was relying solely on reading the summaries displayed by any number of search engines? Math provides possibility for summary assignment of two unrelated subjects, namely the school official and Dr. Harris, and the topic was pretty self-explanatory once I read the article.
As I worked my way through the comments, I found myself forcing myself to slow down when presented with Dr. Harris’ materials, which was far less confusing to me than some of the spark-filled critiisms about issues such as the length of his content, let alone some sort of punctuation issue with his dissertation. Slicing and dicing credentials certainly plays a role in our interpretation of someone’s “true” intent behind their message, and my lack of a college degree does not mean I lack in control over my length. On the contrary. I write the length I feel is necessary to temporarily satisfy my soul and then take step 1 of deciding whether or not I want to publish it or maybe keep it to myself as a set of notes for my own use only.
With rumors swirling around notebooks being composed and mailed reflecting imagry of the event, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to argue the avoidability logic he was requesting from others, however my own epiphany struck when I fell upon his presentation reflecting his search for a credible answer to the simple question, “How many laws are there?”
If he really asked it that way, in some ways it is a trick question since there is no real qualifier as to what reflects the scope of what he is envisioning as laws. I also admire the structure as an artist, since I myself have spent significant time reflecting on the absence of local laws being readily available upon command and demand, both in real life and online. For example, the State of Illinois recently set up a commission to explore and then submit recommendations as to what Illinois needs to do to instill a measure of credibility into the word Justice as it stands defined in the minds of those here in this state. How can they properly evaluate the Illinois Justice System absent of the entire library of municipal code books and unless something changed in the last few hours, less than 50% of the local municipalities have their law books posted online in an accessible manner.
This ties into Dr. Harris’ assertion surrounding the illogic nature of demanding people to follow rules that even the enforcers cannot identify by number. For example, the State of Illinois mandates all people in a vehicle wear seat belts. Exclusions aside, it is within the need for local municipalities to make the decision to either adopt a set of codes in an “as-it-happens” structure or build their own set of codes to address an issue. Therefore, when the municipality adopts an Illinois Statute as-is, unless there is some citation as to what Statute is being applied, there can be no starting point for the judicial process to begin. Without the presence of the rule book(s) being applied to the demand for punishment to be performed for payment in the form of employment, is it any wonder why there are those that will sit even tonight wondering where their next meal will be coming from tomorrow while being judged and juried to be that of a nuisance to the Greater Good since they can’t report they know for sure what they will be eating and when.
The fact that Dr. Harris brought neuroscience into the conversation helps me to highlight a need for these types of more extensive and extended thought contribution irrelevant of the timeline, and definitely irrelevant of punctuation or linguistics. With even the Pentagon recently repealing a demand for reports to be 10 pages or less “or else” juxtiposed against a large group of people demanding all conversations be 300 characters or less “or else you shall be scored as such,” issues pertaining to faith in the odds and evens of the proposition Dr. Harris offers as to whether or not something claimed to be avoidable cannot be labeled as such due to a proposition that for something to be classified as avoidable, it had to first be avoided, otherwise it wasn’t avoidable. It was encountered…?
I guess this is where I quick apologize for my inability to quickly connect what is considered to be of logic, but I am a very abstract kind of chick…I loved gazing at the millions of tree leaves against a blue backdrop complete with feathering clouds slowly floating onto their next destination…perhaps some of the reason why I have also received abrasive criticism pertaining to the length of my own commentary I choose to publish (the Mark Twain quote is old, worn and not the whole truth otherwise no one would be buying 200-300 page books at its currently sluggish pace in paper format, let alone the digital sales contributing to a ka-ching or two in favor of the crafter of content of length worth at least flipping through – or in this particular case, scrolling through.
The lack of municipal code books being present in an online format is a powerful and profound reflection of something, but what imagry someone walks away with is not guaranteed to carry with it the same level of disgust I harbor, nor the same level of intellect Dr. Harris was able to piece together and post. Some are simply afraid of the reaction of the public if people were to become more intimately familiar with rules holding power and authority to generate an income from judging people guilty or innocent – or perhaps more fair and flat would be towards terms such as in compliance – as Dr. Harris pointed out through his explanation using the act of moving from location to location and no one being able to say for sure what exact behaviors are guaranteed to ensure not only safe passage, but perhaps a peaceful interaction with the community. The sales pitch for seat belt laws is that seat belts save lives and yet it is not a mandatory law across the nation. Neither are laws governing wearing a helmet while riding a motorcycle, which is bound to a similar Greater Good purpose, preserve far more lives than would otherwise be lost without the application of the law at the individual person level.
So why should an individual believe in a judicial system unable to produce its rule books not only upon demand, but that they have been codified sufficiently enough to provide fairly simple commentary designed to address issues ranging from the simple to the complex, such as how tall a lawn can grow, let alone whether or not a lightning rod must be installed in some form on all structures to prevent not only damage to others.
Therefore, I don’t know if I prove or disprove anything with my own contemplations surrounding a lack of mandates involving lightning rods, but lightning is frequently being cited as the source of damage of some kind. Laws are sold to be designed to be as non-invasive as possible while providing for the public well-being and yet there is not one mention of this device in any code books here in this nation.
So here’s the example and it’s relevance to whether or not an event can be avoidable. Recently a church steeple was recently struck by lightning and a scaffold was knocked to the ground by bricks from the steeple – was the event avoidable?
And welcome to semantics and the risks built into text-based only communications. It is my understanding that lightning strikes can be re-directed relatively safely into the ground via data produced by Benjamin Franklin. Therefore, if a lightning strike can cause a cascade of actions that would have otherwise been avoided if a lightning rod had been in a position to re-direct the energy prior to the lightning strike, doesn’t that suggest that hind-sight can certainly reflect upon observable data observed and recorded so that a conclusion of avoidability can be achieved by implying through statistics that although the likelihood of a house enduring significant damage from a lightning strike may only be somewhere around 6% of all property/casualty insurance claims, the health care trails are but one of many additional trails of fiscal accountability for having possession of such types of statistics.
In the case of the church steeple story I read, someone was actually pinned underneath the scaffolding and later died. Lightning rod issue aside, I cannot understand how the question of whether or not this particular portion of the event was avoidable or not cannot be concluded one way or another. Certainly there can be a quick connect as to whether or not the steeple itself acted a conductor, in which the assertion of the question as to why some form of a lightning rod was not installed onto the structure is certainly one point, but what of the scaffolding? As another example, why should I look at footage from situations such as Katrina and remember moments I felt were avoidable if only certain steps were taken. Would not a window be preserved if it had been boarded up? What of the decision to stay in the city? Am I really to believe there are absolutely no circumstances in which an acsertation of an act having been avoidable despite the results of the point of theoretical avoidance of one set of circumstances for another.
So even though its been two years since this particular article was published, obviously I could not resist placing an add-on to this particular open commentary section…no matter how much truth or fiction went into the original story. School officials aren’t the only ones who appear to be openly celebrating moments of harm that befall those that they fear any particular set of behaviors humans choose to adopt as a part and parcel of their lifestyle as they pursue happiness.
Sure there are no guarantees in being able to actually achieve this mythical state of mind called happiness, just how is someone supposed to react to such kinds of public displays of opinion…?
I chose to write something. Right or not, I chose to leave it behind.
And now I’m going to chose to return to my original research that started this whole darn post!
P.S. Adult Dreams and Desires may represent Oppositional Defiance, but when odds are disproprortionately stacked against one individual being classified as a nuisance…a waste…absolutely nothing but trouble for wearing their hair long while possessing male body parts, let alone what comes with a regular bleeding schedule women have to endure, perhaps it is most vital to note the number of failed psychiatric facilities and ponder just how much of the failures were of iatrogenic nature? Psychiatric facilities tend to first create a powerful additional layer of depression through this prescribed oppression of movement with the stated intent of maneuvering the mind side of life towards something less “ill” and something more “acceptable” with the hopes that outward behaviours will eventually sculpt around the “new mind.” Stiffling as a hospital setting can come across, has anyone ever taken into consideration the kinds of people who are staffing the facilities…? There are numerous reports of abuse on the side of authority…Time to get back to work!
Well I suppose he does have a core audience someplace…..where again?
A Paradox
There is a town with one and only one man named Ralph. Ralph shaves every man in town who does not shave himself. Every man in town is shaved. Who shaves Ralph?
Cada loco con su tema…
Didn’t have time to get on the Internet yesterday, Oct. 31, 2010, due to working with a political organization on GOTV phone calls. And I came across some upset people, people not only upset because I called them…
I have no difficulty with the fact that the idea some people on this comment sequence refuted the argument they understand I was making. Alas, those who successfully refuted that they understood I was making did not refute the argument I was, within my own awareness, actually making, and this is not their fault. I simply have not learned how to use words alone to communicate accurately with more than a fraction of a percent of people, except when I am in the immediate presence of someone and can have full access to the non-verbal aspects of communication, particularly the overt expression(s) of the cerebellum and limbic system.
I find that my concern was lurking in the shadows 150 years ago, for an aspect of it was put in writing in the October, 1860 Scientific American — See page 102 of the October, 2010 Scientific American for a reference to the writing of 1860.
Observe, if you will, the term, “wild beasts” a few words before the end of “Against Homework” on page 102 of the October 2010 Scientific American. Imagine the possibility of wild beasts. My research is into the nature of such a “wild beast” as may be the most clever, the most subtil, of all the wild beasts… Were there an “evil one,” what would it be; what would be evil?
I want to thank everyone who responded here to what I wrote, the nature of the problem I need to overcome to be effective in sharing what I find I may have learned is profoundly clearer to me in some ways than it was before this back and forth sequence of comments.