Out here in the Bay Area of California, one of the recent bones of contention is a display of grave-markers set up on a privately owned hillside in the town of Lafayette, along with a hanging sign giving the number of U.S. soldiers who have died (through enemy action or otherwise, including suicide) in Iraq to date. There has been much discussion of the meaning of the site (is it a way of demonstrating support for our troops? or is it an anti-war protest by the left?), and it has even been vandalized at least once, an act well enough advertised to turn out the television cameras but, strangely, not the police, who might and should have had something to say about such an act on private property.
In today's (Christmas) edition of the Contra Costa Times, area resident Michael Taft writes, mainly:
... I do find it ironic that if these crosses were instead intended as a Christmas display, or to memorialize the million-plus babies who are aborted every year in the United States, the liberals (led by the ACLU) would have already sued the owner of the property to have them removed. Hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Reading this, I suddenly realized the fact that almost all arguments I see supporting the right-wing point of view in the end turn out to be misstatements of fact or simple unsupportable hypotheses. Taft's letter is no exception. Let's take a look at a couple of things wrong with it.
(1) "...these crosses..." Oops. Though the large majority of the grave markers in Lafayette are crosses, there are several Stars of David (representing Jewish servicemen) and at least one Crescent (representing, believe it or not, an Islamic serviceman).
(2) "...to memorialize the million-plus babies who are aborted every year..." As far as I know, of all the people who have expressed their outrage over this "new holocaust," not one has been outraged enough to establish an exhibit like this one. So any discussion starting from this point has to be considered purely hypothetical.
(3) "...intended as a Christmas display..." Again as far as I know, not one of the suits entered to force removal of strictly Christian emblems from public view related to such emblems on private land; they have had to do with such items displayed on publicly owned (including by people who are not Christians) property.
(4) "...the liberals (led by the ACLU) would have already sued the owner of the property to have them removed." Aside from the above, the reference to the ACLU shows that the letter's author knows nothing about the American Civil Liberties Union, which, as Michael Douglas's character in The American President points out, exists strictly and solely to defend the Bill of Rights, including "freedom of speech," which pretty obviously includes the right of a property owner to display Christmas emblems (1) or the grave markers of aborted fetuses on private land. Heck, the ACLU has even (probably over the preferences of most of its members) defended the right of self-styled Nazis to march in public places.
But on one thing I can (with a qualification) agree wholeheartedly with Taft. When it comes to arguments from the right, hypocrisy knows no bounds.
(1) For many years a gentleman with a large house and large front yard in largely liberal Kensington, in the hills north of Berkeley and in the area served by the Times, maintained a huge lighted Christmas display in his front yard during the month of December; the display disappeared with the man, but I understand that recently his successors have revived the custom. At no time were he or they ever sued by "the liberals" (led by the ACLU) to have the display removed. Nor, so far as I know, did the evil liberals (no doubt with the connivance of the ACLU) ever take matters into their own hands and vandalize the display, as happened, apparently from The Other Side, in Lafayette.