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We’ve experienced some technical difficulties today that knocked the site off the air for nearly an hour this morning and then just briefly a bit later.

If you had trouble accessing the site during that period, I’d like to apologize and assure you that the monkeys and I are doing everything we can to keep the problem from happening again.

I would explain the technical details of what happened, but that might embarrass a certain poor monkey who really didn’t mean to do anything bad when he pushed the button that was labeled, “Do not push this button under any circumstances.” He won’t be getting any extra bananas for dessert tonight, though.

When former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke launched an organization 30 years ago called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, everyone loudly said that it was racist for such an organization to exist.

I had been raised with very liberal attitudes about race, so Duke’s group held no appeal for me, but I was quietly puzzled anyway. Why was it racist for whites to have an organization that pursued things they perceived to be in their best interests, but it was noble and right for blacks to have the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to advance their interests?

I didn’t say anything at the time, partly because I didn’t want to support an admitted racist and partly because I didn’t want to ask a question that polite people clearly didn’t ask. But it was my first realization that standards of what was acceptable are very different depending on what your skin color is.

I was reminded of that again Sunday when I saw some video from Barack Obama’s campaign announcing the launch of African Americans for Obama. (See video below.) Can you imagine the formation of White People for Ron Paul or European Americans for Mitt Romney? Representatives of the black “civil rights industry” would be frothing at the mouth to denounce them. People in the media would be apoplectic with righteous rage. Everybody would denounce such groups for white people as racist. So why is it acceptable when a black politician does it?

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Let’s pretend that I’m the violent type and I don’t like a guy named Fred. Let’s say that I punch Fred and break his nose as I yell, “I don’t want to see your ugly self around here any more!” I don’t know what the penalty is for assault and battery, but let’s assume it’s a year.

Now let’s assume that the facts are identical, but we just change one word. I punch Fred and break his nose, but I yell, “I don’t want to see your gay self around here anymore!”

If I did that, the law in this country in most places would say that I’ve committed a “hate crime,” so the same offense might get me up to 10 years in jail. In other words, the only difference in the two scenarios is the word I use, so I’m spending far more time in prison because of my speech and what some prosecutor decides was in my thoughts when I committed the crime.

The absurdity of this insane idea is even more on display in Boston right now, where three young women have been accused of beating up a 43-year-old man. (That’s one of the women above.) The only thing we know for sure is that the guy was beaten up. (See a video report from local cable news at the bottom of this article.)

The two sides have different stories. But prosecutors are calling it a “hate crime” because the victim says the women shouted a slur about his sexual orientation. The kicker? The women are lesbians and they say they didn’t know he was gay. So how do prosecutors figure that the guy was attacked because the women hated gay people?

Under this Orwellian law, it doesn’t matter whether the attackers were also gay. They don’t have to actually have hate toward gays to be charged with a hate crime. Their alleged language was enough. The law allows the charge because the victim was in a “protected class”:

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