David McElroy

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”:

Keep Reading

What does “the American Dream” mean to you? When I was growing up, I saw it as the opportunity that everyone had to build a better life for himself. We defined it as having a comfortable, affluent life and a happy family, but it was very definitely an opportunity — a chance to create a Horatio Alger story in real life.

Today, the idea that poor people can raise themselves out of poverty and into middle-class security and comfort through their own work and determination is considered a myth by many, especially those on the progressive left. They believe that those born into poverty can’t do anything about it. They believe that someone has to give something to those people or they’ll never have anything. The people who believe this have spent most of the last hundred years slowly getting that idea into the public consciousness.

Jack Chambless is an economics professor at Valencia College in Orlando. On the first day of class last fall, he asked 180 students to take 10 minutes to write an essay about what the American Dream was to them and what they expected the federal government to do to help them achieve what they wanted. The results were frustrating, but not surprising.

They all pretty much wanted families, good jobs, houses and money to have comfortable lives. There was nothing surprising there. But when it came to what they expected from the government, the vast majority wanted something for nothing. Among the samples Chambless quotes in his article about the experiment:

Keep Reading

If you’re allergic to bad grammar and poor word usage, you have to be very careful who you hang out with, because it can be dangerous. (In fairness, though, I should point out that there’s a missing comma in the last frame, but maybe the victim is too sick to realize it.)

Keep Reading