OK, perhaps the headline is a slight exaggeration. But look at the lead items at Memeorandum right now. They all concern this story:
The Family Research Council shooter, who pleaded guilty today to a terrorism charge, picked his target off a "hate map" on the website of the ultra-liberal Southern Poverty Law Center which is upset with the conservative group's opposition to gay rights.Nearly all the blog respondents to this (and other versions are the same story) are right-wingers who are fully in agreement with the notion that the Southern Poverty Law Center has blood on its hands for posting its maps.
Floyd Lee Corkins II pleaded guilty to three charges including a charge of committing an act of terrorism related to the August 15, 2012 injuring of FRC's guard. He told the FBI that he wanted to kill anti-gay targets and went to the law center's website for ideas....
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said that the Southern Poverty Law Center should take responsibility for the shooting and take down their hate map....
Many of these bloggers, however, were horrified when the 2011 Tucson mass shooting that critically wounded Gabby Giffords was initially blamed on a "crosshairs" map posted by Sarah Palin's SarahPAC.
Back then, the right-wingers' position tracked that of Slate's Jack Shafer. He wrote:
... Only the tiniest handful of people -- most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds -- can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.****
The call ... to take our political conversation down a few notches might make sense if anybody had been calling for the assassination in the first place, which they hadn't. And if they had, there are effective laws to prosecute those who move language outside of the metaphorical....
Any call to cool "inflammatory" speech is a call to police all speech, and I can't think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power. As Jonathan Rauch wrote brilliantly in Harper's in 1995, "The vocabulary of hate is potentially as rich as your dictionary, and all you do by banning language used by cretins is to let them decide what the rest of us may say." Rauch added, "Trap the racists and anti-Semites, and you lay a trap for me too. Hunt for them with eradication in your mind, and you have brought dissent itself within your sights."
Our spirited political discourse, complete with name-calling, vilification -- and, yes, violent imagery -- is a good thing. Better that angry people unload their fury in public than let it fester and turn septic in private....
What's an incitement to violence? When a right-wing blogger writes, "Break their windows. Break them NOW," with specific references to offices of Democratic officials and candidates, I'd say that's an incitement. Sarah Palin's "Don't repeat, reload" rhetoric is pushing it -- though at least after being criticized, she's tended to throw in rhetorical qualifications ("And we reload with reality by giving facts and numbers to the American public..."). Her "crosshairs map" seemed too stylized to be an incitement (though I never blamed it for the Tucson shootings because it was clear from the earliest news reports that Jared Loughner was profoundly mentally ill, more obsessed with paranoid theories about letters and numbers than with politics).
The SPLC hate map? Well, go look. There's no incitement to violence. There are symbols on the individual state maps, but they're symbols representing the groups' ideologies. Is it painting a target on a neo-Nazi group to map it with a swastika, a symbol the group itself is likely to brandish proudly? (There are a lot of clenched fists on the maps, by the way, representing black separatism. The symbol for "anti-gay" is, um, a triangle. Inciting!) Names and cities appear on the maps, but no addresses, phone numbers, or e-mail addresses.
What Shafer wrote two years ago is correct regarding these maps -- if you use them to plot crimes, you have the problem. And hey, aren't right-wingers the folks who are always yammering about personal responsibility, and not blaming society for the actions of individuals?
