Rights Come with Responsibilities; the Right Shirks Theirs

[FourScore]

Rights Come with Responsibilities; the Right Shirks Theirs
Posted by Leo Gerard on @ 8:53 am

Five years ago, a 47-year-old Missouri woman began a duplicitous on-line courtship through MySpace with a 13-year-old neighbor who once had been friends with the woman’s daughter.

The adult, Lori Drew, flirted with the 13-year-old, Megan Meier, through the guise of a fictitious, 16-year-old character named Josh Evans. Suddenly, “Josh” broke up with Miss Meier, writing to her, “the world would be a better place without you.” Just hours later, Miss Meier hung herself in her bedroom.

Words have consequences.

Drew wasn’t charged with the child’s death. In fact, a judge reversed her conviction on computer fraud charges, saying the law was intended to deal with hacking, not murder. But for most Americans, there is something deeply disturbing, something morally, if not criminally, wrong with deliberate torment, with predatory viciousness. Drew eluded accountability the same way conservatives are seeking to evade culpability after their irresponsible speech has provoked the delusional to violence...

SNIP

...Conservatives are yammering that they’re not the only ones who engage in brutal rhetoric. That’s true. But in a contest for production of violent words and images, Republicans would, to use their words, “kill” the Democrats.

The Department of Homeland Security concluded in an April 2009 internal report that right-wing extremism, with a growing potential for violence, was on the rise. That was followed last spring by Capitol security officials reporting a tripling of threats against members of Congress – almost all from opponents of health care reform – in other words, from Republicans, right-wingers or people influenced by GOP TV and radio front men like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, who personally profit from the hostile climate they generate.

They didn’t stop though they had fair warning about the consequences. Consider the case of Byron Williams. He launched a 12-minute shoot out with California Highway Patrol officers last July after they stopped him for erratic driving. A police affidavit filed the following day said Williams intended to “start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at The Tides Foundation and the ACLU.”

The Right has for decades slammed the ACLU, whose sole purpose is to protect constitutional rights, but Glenn Beck had made the Tides Foundation, once an obscure progressive organization, famous by attacking it repeatedly – at least 29 times between January and the July shoot out last year, including two tirades the week before Williams began his assassination mission.

Williams, who was armed during the shootout with a handgun, shotgun, rifle and body armor, said he watched FOX News to see Beck, who blew his mind, and who he viewed as a “schoolteacher.”

Still Beck, expressed no remorse and tried to squirm out of any responsibility for inciting Williams, saying on his show:

“I am the only one that has mentioned the Tides Foundation. . . So that’s what they’re using. This guy couldn’t have found this out on his own; it had to come from me. . .America, if you don’t think that they will use anything, they will. They absolutely will.”

Words do have consequences, Mr. Beck, no matter how many times you cravenly shout denials...

MORE AT: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/01/12/rights-come-with-responsibilities-the-right-shirks-theirs/

[patrice]

1. There is confusion that amounts to thinking that if you are a free person there are no consequences

for your actions and anyone who says there are is an oppressor.

Above that organizationally, there is a major assumption that some kind of higher, even divine, claim to truth excuses one or one's collective from the precept that the ends do not justify the means.

........................

People need to be helped to understand that freedom does not mean there are no consequences for one's behaviors, but that one's behavior is not limited by its consequences. Behavior that requires "no consequences" is dependent, not free, dependent upon whatever it is that makes it consequence-less, the weakness and vulnerability of others in most cases.